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Biographical note: John Wilkinson is Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches literature and creative writing, having worked in UK mental health services for three decades. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the National Humanities Center. The Guardian described his last book of poetry, Lake Shore Drive (Salt 2006), as “multiplex, visionary, ragged, and exceedingly strange because exceedingly true to reality”.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714629
ISBN: 9781844714629
Author: John Wilkinson
Title: Down to Earth
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Jul-08
Extent: 80pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight: 120 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 12.99
Price: USD 23.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: Down to Earth is at once a road poem of the American mid-West, an epic of migration and ubiquitous borders, and a meteorological model of energy transfer. This book knows no limit to poetry’s ambition, dodging every border post, down every highway, like the ocelot running through its narrative.
Main description: John Wilkinson’s Down to Earth is his darkest work to date: a disturbing road poem of the American mid-West, an epic of migration, an examination of now-ubiquitous borders, and a meteorological tour of our growing energy crises. Global and internal flows of capital, consumer products, waste, labour and body parts all shape its contorted map of the 21st century.
Narrative poems echoing traditional forms, are intercut with damaged and damaging lyrics; these various styles have their analogues in the sculpture several passages praise and deprecate. In addition, Down to Earth incorporates an extended homage to Artemis of Ephasus.
Wilkinson’s book forms one single thematically-interrelated poem, and although its materials are bleak, the book’s caesura-driven prosody honours the hopes and courage of the people involved in mass migration and local struggles. Like every book by John Wilkinson, Down to Earth knows no limit to poetry’s ambition, dodging every border post, down every highway, like the ocelot running through its narratives, and struggling to create a sheltering place in often pitiless landscapes.
Table of contents:
Like Substances
In Tempo
Intervention
Present Company Excepted
Stamp of Origin
Oversight
Next to Nothing
Number One
Excuse Me
Collaboration
Condensation
The Indiana Toll
Back of Beyond
Travel Plaza
Stopover
Rust Belt
All Those Gates
The Confronter
Crumple Zone
Like by David Smith
Harlem Air Shaft
Like Feeling
Ravenous At Noon
Hunter At Dusk
Lying In Late
Drifting Out
The Defeat of Artemis
Bound South
South Unbound
Acknowledgements View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (52 KB)
Excerpt from book:
Bound South
In light, in darkness, quarried equipment
makes a stand
etched in light, etched in darkness,
cooling after manufacture
then usage. Warmth became conciliatory,
not soon enough,
for previously the forced air’s
change of setting
cracked, crazed, dragged filigree damage.
In keeping, sharp curtains
ridge impassive, similarly clothing
holds its creases, crumples,
looking for all the world like that world’s
definite hatching, dry point:
the under-surface heat churns
behind plaster, bedposts
worm-riddled, rims of fashionable fittings
bubbling rust. As always
the ingenious world settles,
settles for its scurriers—
it’s feasible to reconstruct as if conditions
stayed constant,
glassy spheres like castors turned,
zero loss through friction,
the slick interface prevails by fits & starts.
In fact the whole economy
needs sharpened senses,
so I lie encased & restless,
hatched in mind whose pressed demands
for electricity, tax for roads,
cries rising off the flat table,
headers stacked funereal
into the in-box, charges, these reductions
pinch & shape—janitors of
skin-held intelligence, tattoo artists,
Demiurge’s sidekicks
scurry home into their nooks. So sensibly
the scurriers settle down
to score sleep, to float their cover stories
with a controlled spin
spheres waltz along to,
just so long as a blabber lap-
top won’t be discovered in the public bar,
the harmless freeway potholes
bulge & pock while SatNav rides
the camber, O its dream cadences—
anyone drives in his sleep!
but this guy jolts under his covers,
this jackass driver
scatters, shatters, flocks of goats
tussle by stone-blocked
artesian wells for the merest trickle:
I might be strapped in surgery
or strut like Giacometti manikins in ranks,
grim figures like my shaving self
get serviced by hot
glass, chalcedony or diamond, brilliantly
accentuate, pitch up
in a marble fountain’s depths: excellently
bright, perfectly pitched:
Great Artemis, you whose improved worst
skips, blots, makes errors:
Great Artemis, the pre-select who
ceaselessly restructures
matter’s elements, whose nuclei, electrons
compose by your fault.
Great Artemis. Pressure now
accrues for change of state,
heat increases concrete-capped within the
chain perimeter, the memories
of bedposts, chintzy linen
forcing thought back into line,
that murky self-regard secures the human
mask, establishes its silhouette,
the animal snarls & wastes
intersticially. Great is Artemis.
For turning in her purlieus & thrashing on
her bed, this procrustean
logic organises, here
distressed the monad stretches
& shudders, basalt stacks slot beneath the
flibbertigibbet sun.
Falling in their pattern, waves race,
the day yawns, sunny despotism
staggers in on itself.
Previous review quote: John Wilkinson’s Effigies Against the Light for its sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies made much contemporary poetry seem straightforwardly pedestrian. Adam Phillips
The Observer Previous review quote: Proud Flesh introduced us to the unexpected fluencies, the strange dramas and practicalities of John Wilkinson’s poetry. Reminding us that poetry also needs to be pitted against conventional forms of intelligibility – the finding of a ‘voice’, the satisfactions of narrative – Wilkinson was already writing a haunting, unheard of lyric poetry against the grain of the taught traditions. A startling and eerily accomplished book, Proud Flesh has become a great contemporary text. Adam Phillips Previous review quote: John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry. Patrick McGuinness Previous review quote: The speed of this writing, its kinetic movement “like a run-time virus”, derives from the extraordinary scope of its inclusions. This is not the low-risk inclusiveness of semiotic playtime, but the propagation of strings of significance among the resistant data of moment and location. Difficult of access, but no less difficult of egress, the poetry in this volume makes unflinching demands on the reader, demands that repay slowly but in abundance. Reader, I was crushed and exhilarated. Jeremy Green
Chicago Review Previous review quote: John Wilkinson’s a powerful and intent poet whose language is densely charged with energy-traces: it’s rich with verbs, the sense of happenings, deeds, potentialities, necessities, results. Roy Fisher |
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