Anthony Caleshu

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Biographical note:  Anthony Caleshu is the author of two books of poetry and a novella. His poems and stories have appeared in anthologies and journals such as The Forward Book of Poetry, Poetry Review, Times Literary Supplement, and The Dublin Review. Originally from the US, he moved to Ireland in 1997 and now lives in South West England where he teaches at the University of Plymouth and edits the literary journal Short FICTION.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715022
ISBN:  9781844715022
Author:  Anthony Caleshu
Title:  Of Whales
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-10
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Melville’s Moby-Dick has had its share of writers and artists use it as a source for their own work. Caleshu re-imagines the novel (word for word in one poem) as he casts himself and others between home and sea, the present and Melville’s world. Central to the collection are poems where a father speaks of whales (in print, in paint, in sea, in stars, in coin, in house, in margins) to his colicky newborn son in the darkest hours of the night.

Main description:  OF WHALES is Anthony Caleshu’s second book of poems. Melville and Moby-Dick provide a starting point for Caleshu, who uses the author and his most famous book to push the boundaries of the imagination and language. Like Melville himself, Caleshu is a ‘skald, who knows how to appropriate the work of others. Highborn stealth’ (as Charles Olson wrote of Melville). Taking episodes from Melville’s life and work, Caleshu rewrites them to personal and dramatic effect in poems which move between the sea and family home. Some of the most ambitious poems take as their spring board Melville’s own source books for MOBY-DICK; works like Owen Chase’s ‘Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex’ and JN Reynolds’ ‘Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific’ are treated to new ‘appropriation’. Melville’s MOBY-DICK has had its share of artist’s using it as a source for their own work, and here Caleshu extends the tradition as he manages to not only rewrite Moby-Dick (word for word, as we find out in one poem) but to venture in the realm of familial relations. Central to the book are poems where a father speaks of Whales (in print; in paint; in tooth, in stone, in coin; in house, in surf, in song, in stars) to his colicky newborn son in the darkest hours of the night. A lucid book which dives deep and away from its sources.

Table of contents:
Extracts
Of Whales
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
First Voyage
Portrait: Riding Whale-Back
Seamen’s Bethel
In Order to Write the Great American Novel …
A Visit to the Berkshires at Melville’s Invitation
Mocha Dick
Some Whale Research at the Gin Factory
Whale Watching
Writers’ Rooms, Anthony Caleshu,
Photograph by Eamonn Mccabe for The Guardian
Everything I Know I Owe to Moby-Dick
There’s More to Whaling Than Whales
How I Met Your Mother (with the Help of Melville’s)
There Once Was a Man from Nantucket
A Very-Large Oil-Painting, Thoroughly Besmoked
The Affidavit
Witness: Melville and Hawthorne’s Ontological Heroics
A Plea in Behalf of the Sabbath for Whalemen
The Chase and Capture
No Whales Were Harmed in Making This House
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
‘Know ye, now, Bulkington?’
Wonderfullest Thing
The Only Begat Poem in a Book of Begat Poems
Moby-Dick — How We Came to Write the Musical
Chapter 82, ‘The Honor and Glory of Whaling’
Pitching Moby-Dick
Recovered
(Ex [ — ? — ])
The Making of Ahab
Night Watch
Thanksgiving in Arrowhead, 1850
Augusta Melville’s Fair Hand
The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti
Navigation by Constellation Cetus?—?The Whale
Neither Your Mother’s Nor Mine
Moby-Dick?: The Film
Early Morning, Forecastle
‘What makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?’
Post-Whale
Augury
Whale’s Breath
The Last Chapter
Inappropriate Use of an Arts Council Grant
Still Song
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Witness : Melville and Hawthorne’s Ontological Heroics

An inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy … we overhear.
But even Melville’s not listening to himself.

For some time now, we’ve been losing interest
in how exclusive the reclusives can be,

as if neither has a home to which he could invite the other.
One stretches his long legs, the other his short until

the space under the hotel table is as awkward as the space above.
To doubt Hawthorne’s friendship is to have Melville’s faith …

in the restorative power of after-dinner drinks —
We’re taking bets on gin, champagne foam, a bottle of brandy,

because already we can see the memories fading:
of warm welcomes & cold chicken, of mulled wine

with wisdom & buttered toast. For most of the past year,
the six miles between them may as well have been

one hundred and six, and are about to be when Hawthorne leaves Lenox.
We watch Melville slide his latest book across the table,

the dedication, everybody knows, added at the last minute :
‘To Nathaniel Hawthorne, in admiration of his genius’.

Up at the bar, Melville orders ‘Brandy, to encourage the chase
of ontological heroics’, and we smile now as we smiled then,

two months back, watching him on horseback, under hat,
a surprise visit Hawthorne’s way :

‘Buenos dias amigo mio !Es mi cumpleaños, celebrémos!’
Some Montado sherry was eventually offered,

some Portuguese port … but we could see
Hawthorne didn’t understand Spanish, and we,

watching undercover in the woods,
never bothered to explain.

Unpublished endorsement:  Caleshu has accomplished a wondrous feat. He has written a book of love letters, screwy soliloquies, and inscrutable homages to Moby-Dick worthy of its recipient. By turns heaving with lightness and bright with heaviness this book helps us strike through Melville's, and thus our own, veil.

Mark Yakich

Unpublished endorsement:  Archly historical, deeply personal, wildly allusive, often hilarious and frankly obsessive, Anthony Caleshu's poems inhabit Herman Melville's mind and Moby Dick's body, and out of them, a fearsome new art is born.

Philip Hoare

Unpublished endorsement:  Only an act of tragic imagination can melt the icicles from Bulkington’s beard, evoke the pestrels and stinkhards, taste a whale’s breath and take artistic electrodes to the texts of Melville’s letters. It is precisely Caleshu’s tragic imagination that strikes such congruence between the brutal world of Nineteenth century whaling and our own protected and protective realities, ‘…the depths under our heads and under our pillows’ to which all thoughts of whales must be returned. This is an ambitious and highly achieved book. Its business is tidal antiphony, warm human currents in cold seawater, moving fast; the pathos of the incarnated whale mirroring strangely our capacity for love.'

Tim Liardet

Unpublished endorsement:  A whale in a book ate Jonah; Ahab was consumed by his lust for revenge. Melville identified a new democratic hero, his hands in a vat of sperm oil, lifted beyond common racism and fear by brotherly love. Olson recognised the American worker in an extractive industry, and the Shakespearean stage afloat on the Pacific. Here in a series of brilliant poems that tack around, over and under Moby Dick, Anthony Caleshu explores the humour and sadness of relationships that float through the gene pool. What do the Starbucks generation choose to pass on, father to son?

Tony Lopez

Review quote:  Of Whales is a remarkable work in which the author speaks to his infant son, his words given depth and timelessness by the sea that is a part of their family experience, and by the history of whaling that is the book's other theme… The language is allusive, folded in on itself, poetry that lives in the space between meanings. It intrigues, entrances, and entertains at the same time… Caleshu has taken his themes and his literary sources and made of them something new and exciting.

Don Barnard
The Warwick Review

Review quote:  No other collection of poems is quite like Of Whales — or more accurately named… Like Moby-Dick itself, this book is about much more than whales, and it has its share of serious and personal poems, such as the surprising ‘Neither Your Mother's Nor Mine'. Nevertheless it might be hard to get the most from Of Whales if you do not share at least something of Caleshu's obsession with Moby-Dick and all things to do with both whales and the nineteenth century. Which is not to say that the collection is anything less than linguistically nimble and surprisingly varied, a looking glass into a bizarre world where ‘life is more wonder than worry’ — for most of the time, at least.

Rory Waterman,
Times Literary Supplement