Raymond Friel

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Biographical note:  Raymond Friel was born in Greenock in 1963. After graduatin g from Glasgow University he moved to England and qualified as a teacher. His poems have been widely published in reviews and magazines. His collections include Bel-Air (1993), Seeing the River (1995), Renfrewshire in Old Photographs (2000) and A World Fit to Live In (2005). He co-edited the review Southfields and ran Southfields Press for a number of years. He lives with his wife and three sons in Somerset. He is the headteacher of a secondary school in Bath.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714681
ISBN:  9781844714681
Author:  Raymond Friel
Title:  Stations of the Heart
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-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

Main description:  Powerful and evocative poems of love, loss, and memory which range from contemporary England to a Scottish childhood, from the State of England to the pieties and pressures of growing up in a religious culture in which expression and pleasure were highly problematic. The poems are technically accomplished, using traditional forms such as the sonnet, the villanelle, as well as free verse, but coming back again and again to the base line, the industry standard, of the ten-syllable line. The influences of Heaney, Larkin, W.S. Graham and the Romantic tradition are evident, as well as the more recent influences of the richly gifted younger generation of Scottish poets born around the early 1960s. Other aesthetic co-ordinates are provided by Vermeer, Stanley Spencer and Alfred Wallis, with a visit to the grave of John Keats in Rome providing one of the collection’s defining moments. A strong theme in the collection is the intimacies of family life, with tender and at times anguished recollections of parents, moving celebrations of fatherhood, and often humorous and down to earth poems about relationships in the context of modern professional life. In the spirit of the Romantic tradition, different places often provide the settings for moments of insight or resolution with nature acting as a constant backdrop of reassurance that whatever darkness there may be, it is not the darkness of the abyss, but the darkness before dawn.

Table of contents:
Under the White Horse
A World Fit to Live In
Unplugged
The Halt
The Show
Cley Hill
Songs of the Plough
Southfields
A Short Life of W. S. Graham
Stanley Spencer in Port Glasgow
Parachutes
Dominie
At Newark Castle, Firth of Clyde
Dream Calendar
Clyde Square
Elegy for my Grandmother
Paterfamilias
Two Photographs of my Father
The Flask
The Golf Years
My Parents’ Bed
Entrances
Ave
Sunday Nights
Sunday Morning in Coronation Gardens
Work
Bonfire
At Stourhead in my Fortieth Year
The Lacemaker
On Chesil Beach
Surfers at Freshwater West
Alfred Wallis, Painter
Autumn Notebook
First Signs of Spring
House Warming
Les Arrivistes
The Prodigal
The Singer
The Old Bathers
n.
Stations of the Heart
Early Morning on the Lake

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Excerpt from book:  

The Flask

Its emergence from some scullery depth
was a harbinger of short-lived summer.
At the beach it was lifted out and set down
replete with strong brew, a sigh from the heart
as the cap came off in my mother's hand.
My father lit up, cupping the flame
for them both like a grown-up secret,
shooed us boys away to the water's edge.

When the high tide had toppled our towers,
the dregs were poured into sandy ground.
Then, the allurement of the interior:
all foil and reflection, fantastic light,
no trace at all of its turbid contents,
like looking into a soul, shriven and free.

Unpublished endorsement :  How relationships refer to each other, a constant source of fascination, meshing over time, space, generations. Complex emotions subtly, and fully sensually, rendered.

Janice Galloway

Unpublished endorsement :  Reading Raymond Friel’s poetry there’s the recognition of his acute observation, of his visual lucidity, and the kind of spiritual play he has with figures within a real but heightened landscape.

Richard Price

Unpublished endorsement :  Raymond Friel is the kind of energetic poet who can find subject matter in anything, and with some audacity he turns it into poems for us.

Rennie Parker

Unpublished endorsement :  Friel has been recognised early in his poetic career as a significant writer in the younger generation of Scottish poets.

Douglas Lipton

Unpublished endorsement :  His strengths are a haiku clarity of vision, a refusal to go beyond what is perceived, and above all an ear for speech-rhythms which is firmly to the ground.

Harry Clifton