Ian Gregson

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Biographical note:  Ian Gregson was born in Manchester. He studied English at Oxford and Hull and moved to the University of Wales, Bangor in 1977. His books include Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism; The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry; and Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction. His first book of poems, Call Centre Love Song, appeared from Salt in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His most recent book is The New Poetry in Wales (UWP, 2007).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714803
ISBN:  9781844714803
Author:  Ian Gregson
Title:  How We Met
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Nov-08
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  144 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:  POETRY BANK CHOICE.The title sequence of How We Met is based on the Sunday newspaper column in which famous people describe their initial meeting and their subsequent relationship. It invents five pairs of celebrities who are interviewed in this way and whose stories then interpenetrate, and eventually draw in even the interviewer herself. By comparing their accounts, it hints at the intermingling of love and power, of sexual obsession and the drives to both submission and dominance.

Half the book comprises the long sequence ‘The William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip’ which is spoken by a veteran cartoonist who has been commissioned to draw a series of cartoons dealing with Victorian history, and focused upon Gladstone. These poems meditate upon cartoons as an art form, explore the cartoonist’s character and view of the world, and use caricature as a metaphor for expressing the distortions of memory and history, drawing upon its distinctive armoury of imagery, including its references to animals and machines, and its unusual combination of humour with uncomfortable responses such as anger, fear and contempt. It shows the impact on Victorian society, and therefore of those after it, including our own, of the British empire, industrialisation and urbanisation, and the changed sense of self that results from Victorian science, especially Darwinism.

The two sequences, and the shorter, free-standing poems at the start of the book, use a wide range of forms, including free verse, syllabics, and metrical and rhyming forms such as the ballad and the sonnet.

The book dwells upon the testing of the boundaries of the self which result, in particular, from the rise to prominence of the technological media, and, in this respect, compares and contrasts the present and the past.

Table of contents:
SIDEWAYS AT THE WAR
It could be love
Sideways at the War
The Scaremonger
Postmodernism, Or,
Grey Areas
Folie a Deux
Squawks and Speech
Fallen Women #1-7
A Paper Bag
Misconceiving
Surface Impressions
The Brownie Dress
Crab Lane From the New Flats
HOW WE MET
THE WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE COMIC STRIP
Part One: The Medium
i) Attempting a Likeness
ii) Finding Likeness in Unlikeness
iii) Exploding likeness through rebellion
The Medium: Comic Strip
The Medium: Searching for Shape
Part Two: The Strips
The Elastic Band
Young Dog, Young Cat
A Beast Fable
An Enchanted, Perverted, Topsy-Turvy World
Brother and Sister
Re-Animator
Rescue Work
An Unlikeness
An Ill Wind
Dr. Morph and Mr. Darwin
Dr. Morph and Mr. Gladstone
Traffic Island
Mid-Century Calm
Napoleon's Double
I Don't Think
Victoria Grieving for Albert
Dummies
The Boy Who Turned Into a Puppet
The Two Heads of Carlyle
Making Myself Scarce
An Irish Joke
Turkey, Plum Pudding
The Dark
The Assumption
Hatred of Gladstone
A Secret Cyborg
Gladstone Speaks from the Afterlife

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Excerpt from book:  

Grey Areas

The web of my novel broke
and wasn't a web any more
but fog thickening.

I took a walk. The road was white
as a margin: lights
levitated from the valley.

Lucy drinks some full-fat milk, but then
it leaves a sticky cloud
in Michael's throat —

the colours of my characters
kept running
one into the other.

The council estate was hidden, but from there
dreams billowed through me like dissolving
walls on a foggy motorway

while baas rebounded
down the wooly corridor.
The road was blank as a mind

with sudden entrances — a black-leather
seated creature with a bright
speeding navel, for example —

all my wishes and fears
went walking and talking
like people blurring into one

and I remembered I was
swallowed by a shadow
pursuing me once, or

slowly enveloped
like the willowherb
invaded from their roots,

their bottom halves all fog —
so fertile
they pale into ghosts.

And then I found a field
humming with the fog's edges:
tufts of wool on barbs
and on the gorse and thistles
grey areas like corners
closing on the flies.

Unpublished endorsement:  Acute and assured, Gregson more than fulfils the promise of his impressive first collection as he leads us into his ‘glinting labyrinth’ of startling narratives, always told in carefully-crafted language. He keeps the reader on their toes with unpredictable turns of phrase and his energetic pace. A book to savour.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Unpublished endorsement:  Gregson is as post modern as it gets. Like Zen his work finds the future by coming back at it through the intricate formality of the past. How We Met is three books in one. Sideways At The War, flashing and smoking, glimpsed from the corner of an eye looking elsewhere. The relationship war. The being alive war. Then the centrality of How We Met. Fake persona, other faces, other lives. And finally the mind-stoppingly titled William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip where England's history nudges poetic geography. Master of form and range, approachable, readable, enjoyable, Ian Gregson is one of those poets whose work you carry with you. Delve and be lifted, read and be transformed.

Peter Finch

Unpublished endorsement:  Gregson’s impressive range of talents is fully on display in this new collection. A sure-handed way with complex narratives and conceits is well deployed in all three sections of the book: Sideways at the War, with its chilly high-rise plate-glass vistas of contemporary Britain; the twitchy bitchy personal relationships in How we Met; and, to my mind most enjoyable of all, The William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip, in which a history-can-be-fun commission concentrates a cartoonist’s mind most wonderfully. If you’re reading this and wondering whether to buy, have a look at ‘Squawks and Speech’, ‘The Elastic Band’ and ‘An Irish Joke’ — and then get your money out.

Unpublished endorsement:  Gregson’s work is characterised by a belief that poetry should include and incorporate modern experience and not simply cordon off a special lyric arena where the world stops and ‘poetry’ begins. But he is also committed to a poetry that communicates, and whose relationship with popular culture is neither self-conscious nor arm’s-length. These poems may be playful or they may be serious, but they are always formally inventive, resourceful, various in their voices and wide-ranging in their concerns.

Patrick McGuinness

Unpublished endorsement:  Gregson’s impressive range of talents is fully on display in this new collection. A sure-handed way with complex narratives and conceits is well deployed in all three sections of the book: Sideways at the War, with its chilly high-rise plate-glass vistas of contemporary Britain; the twitchy bitchy personal relationships in How we Met; and, to my mind most enjoyable of all, The William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip, in which a history-can-be-fun commission concentrates a cartoonist’s mind most wonderfully. If you’re reading this and wondering whether to buy, have a look at ‘Squawks and Speech’, ‘The Elastic Band’ and ‘An Irish Joke’ — and then get your money out.

Peter Didsbury