Camper Van Blues

home > books > smp > 9781844714674



Jane Holland Camper Van Blues
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist and critic, born in Essex in 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her first collection, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. A first novel, Kissing the Pink, followed from Sceptre in 1999. Her second collection of poetry Boudicca & Co. was published by Salt in 2006. She lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children, where she is Warwick Poet Laureate for 2007-08. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844714674 ISBN: 9781844714674 Author: Jane Holland Title: Camper Van Blues Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BB Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Oct-08 Extent: 80pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 5 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	See larger image HARDBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£12.99~~ £10.39	Short description/annotation: Jane Holland’s third collection, Camper Van Blues, is a book of journeys, both real and imaginary. The title sequence is a British road movie told through poems, one woman alone in a camper van, the tale of an addictive, self-destructive personality. With gritty humour, her poems explore relationships, loss, folkore, and ecology. Main description: Jane Holland’s third collection, Camper Van Blues, is a book of journeys, both real and imaginary. The title sequence is a British road movie told through poems, one woman and her dog alone in a camper van, each jump-cut taking the reader further into the interior of an addictive, self-destructive personality. In a sequence of brief and highly visual poems, Holland explores a midnight landscape of motorways, truck stops and laybys, touching by turns on the issues of loneliness, drug abuse and living with depression. Taut and spare, a note of gritty humour pervades this tale of life on the road for the single woman. The central poem in this new collection is a bold and political reworking of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, which is both a personal elegy and a lament for fallen soldiers by an unnamed ‘solitary drifter’. Other poems here link into that sense of loss and bereavement, and the aftermath of relationship breakdown which can lead to social isolation. Later in the collection, Holland returns to a lighter, more lyrical note, handling poems about love, relationships and sexual attraction with confidence. There’s a return to personal mythologies too, following on from her two earlier collections, with a number of pieces based around English folklore and Celtic symbolism. Holland also explores the growing threat of climate change in several powerful ecopoems, two of which deal with the dramatic events surrounding the floods at Boscastle in 2004, where she was once a resident. Table of contents: Part I Camper Van Blues Day Tripping Troika Recharging the Battery Hair of the Dog Wend Tailgating Dover Cliff Ultima Thule Welsh Lay-by Flash Bang Truck Stop Neighbours Metamorphosis Tintagel in November Giants of the Motorway Don't Tell Me About the Fire Saga Severed Ghost in the Machine Whilst I hunt Notes Towards the M6 by Night Aubade in Winter In a Layby off the A30 Wash Day In Praise of Speed Bone Flute The Knife Part II The Lament of the Wanderer Part III The Tower The Man who Became a Tree War Goddess English Rose Flood at Boscastle Last Oak The Language of Desire St. John's Chapel Pond Evening's Shuttle Rain Almost Vingt Ans Apres At the Lighthouse Love like Forensics Love Like Stars Oneiromancy The Sound of Guitars The Girl with Flowers in Her Hair Safe Love, Really After Bluebeard Celtic Love Knot Abstinence Grand Master Opening the Ephemeris Fire Burst Through the Ceiling Pont Du Gard On a Recent Find of Horse Bones in a House at Ballaugh, Isle of Man Fallen Among Nettles Builders Daddy-Long-Legs The Engine View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample ( KB) Excerpt from book: Flood at Boscastle Ten steps down, through Sargasso weeds green as the felt walls of a fish tank, is a door through which only haruspices may pass, bearded and with credit cards, to buy sacred books and strange instruments for scrying so they might peer inside the living heart and say which house survives, which doesn’t. Portal invulnerable, they cry, to the left-hand of the rising river, thy charmed walls shall not be blowholes for the unclenched well of the waters, no spiraculum mirabile breathing mud into the underworld. Later, stripped to the waist, men dig blackened books from the whale ribs of a cottage, then stamp up through mud to The Cobweb for a finger or two of whisky, predicting more rain on the print of a wetted thumb. Previous review quote: ‘Extremely powerful and varied … Holland has both the clarity for the reader and the mastery of language to say what she means in a way that makes the brain tingle with both shock and pleasure … This collection is outstanding.’ Angela Topping Stride Magazine Previous review quote: I reached the fourth section of the book, the Boudicca sequence, and everything went electric … There’s a touch of Vicki Feaver about the violence and the cool delight in blood and innards, but the work is quite distinctive. I didn’t for one moment think about feminist directions — only the inner rage of the emotion, the amazing sweep of the imagery and the way I was dashing from poem to poem, completely compelled. Helena Nelson Ambit Previous review quote: Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior – of both country and psyche – in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It’s a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition. Fiona Sampson Poetry Review Previous review quote: ‘… we need only compare Holland’s work with the anti-war ‘poetry’ of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is – by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the ‘Boudicca’ sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent’s Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets. Simon Turner Gists and Piths