Peter Abbs

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Biographical note:  Peter Abbs was born and grew up on the North Norfolk coast in England. He has written and lectured widely on the nature of creativity and the poetics of culture. He is the Poetry Editor of Resurgence and editor of Earth Songs, the first Anglo-American anthology of contemporary ecoverse. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Icons of Time, Viva la Vida and The Flowering of Flint. Most recently in The Greater Journey (2008) he has worked with the photographer John Pack to explore the relationship between image and word. He is Research Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sussex.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715121
ISBN:  9781844715121
Author:  Peter Abbs
Title:  Voyaging Out
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Apr-09
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:  Voyaging Out is the tenth volume of Peter Abbs’ poetry.

His new book divides into two parts. The first half, Peregrinations, offers an anthology of poems which range from the experience of love to memories of childhood, from philosophical reflections on art and poetry to the dramatic re-telling of other lives. There are poems here about Nietzsche as a schoolboy, the public death of Pope John Paul the Second and of the painter Pierre Bonnard’s erotic obsession with Martha.

One of the new themes is travel: an affirmation of the place of voyaging, both further out into the world and further inwards into the distracted soul. In these poems, celebrating a movement south, ‘peregrine flights’ become metaphors for a deep inner pilgrimage.

The second part, Transformations, offers three sequences from three great poets in the tradition: Rumi, Dante and Rilke. These poems are not literal translations but work in the manner of metamorphoses.

Transformations is a new departure in the poet’s work. The aim is to convert the original poems into contemporary English and, in the case of the Dante sequence, into contemporary political and ecological contexts. Their purpose is to keep faith with the encompassing spirit of these seminal writers, to bring them forcibly into the modern imagination and, in so doing, to keep alive a conversation with the past.

It’s hard for us to grasp transcendence —
even Orpheus shrinks from the hour
when he moves swiftly beyond us.
Yet when his hand slips from the familiar lyre

there’s no subterfuge and nothing’s superfluous.
Imagination vaults to its freedom.

Table of contents:
Peregrinations
Self Portrait
A Dream of Arcadia
Shifting Landscapes
Above the River’s Tidal Water
Climate Change
Man in a Trance
Morning at the Oak Woods
Woman with Leukemia
Off all the Maps
Pope John Paul the Second
Nowhere
The Kingdom
The Silver Cross
Zimzum
The Memory of White
Facing November
To Say Goodbye
Curriculum Vitae
Going Well
Beginnings
Love’s Landscapes
Touch
When I Think of Language
Nietzsche at Play
From my University Room
A Brief Lesson on Poetry
Vocation
Bonnard’s Gift
Hopper’s House by the Railroad
On a Train Journey to Falmer
Peregrinations
Paros
Unending Journey
Transformations
The Glass Blower’s Breath
Through the Inferno
Poems to Orpheus

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Excerpt from book:  

Self Portrait

The images cut to the core. Orpheus limping from the hole
of hell to sing. Or Christ slumped on a cross

screaming at the silence of his god. Or a red fox running
through bent bracken

as night drops. Or my own birth sign: two antinomian fish
locked in a jagged tidal stream —

that geometric counterpoint. These are my icons where endings
are beginnings, where the country of despair

borders the frontier of possibility. But above all,
one image from my childhood:

the water lily at the centre of the kitchen-garden pond,
its long stem slowly winding down

and down into a bed of slime — and what moves me
is its mauve bud opening out into the sun,

disclosing its many petals one by one, hieratic and exact:
forgotten chakra in the skull.

Previous review quote:  His latest collection, distilled from seven previous volumes as well as more recent work, displays Mr Abbs as the brave and considerable poet he is; a seeker of the truth behind things, a metaphysician, and perhaps above all an alchemist.

Review of Selected Poems
The Economist