Rob A. Mackenzie

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Biographical note:  Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow. He studied law and then abandoned the possibility of significant personal wealth by switching to theology. He spent a year in Seoul, eight years in Lanarkshire, five years in Turin, and now lives in Edinburgh where he organises the Poetry at the Great Grog reading series. His pamphlet collection, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005 and he blogs at Surroundings (http://robmack.blogspot.com).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715138
ISBN:  9781844715138
Author:  Rob A. Mackenzie
Title:  The Opposite of Cabbage
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-09
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Throughout this collection, opposites collide – reality and delusion, political activism and apathy, friend and enemy, life and death. Messiahs parachute themselves to disused northern fairgrounds, a woman diets until practically invisible, trained apes teach a colony of drunks how to dance, a bingo night fuels familial despair and love, and an airborne cabbage blasts a cyclist into orbit. With precision of language and a colourful, anarchic spirit, Mackenzie’s poems focus on their subjects with humanity and hard-won compassion. They have a light touch, but are never trivial. They are for readers who trust that questions are rarely simple and answers never final. Ironic and humorous, complex and engaging, you can’t do without The Opposite of Cabbage.

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Table of contents:
Light Storms from a Dark Country
Voices
The Listeners
White Noise
Scottish Sonnet Ending in American
Fallen Villages of the North
Moving On
Scotlands
Nuclear Submarines
Everyone Will Go Crazy
The Loser
While the Moonies are Taking Over Uruguay
Berlusconi and the National Grid
Shopping List
Patenting The
Bananas
Scotland
How New York You Are
The Look
Hot Shit
Slimming
Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen
Homes of the Future Exhibition
In the Last Few Seconds
Benediction
Hospital
Visiting Hour
Advice from the Lion Tamer to the Poetry Critic
A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses his Star Pupil
The Kingdom
Married Life in the Nineties
The Deconstruction Industry
Hangover Hotel
Edinburgh in Summer
Jacko Holed Up In Blackfriars Street B and B??
My Dentist, Aniela
Breaking the Hoodoo
Sevenling (Elizabeth had II)
Plastic Cork
Sky Blue
The Preacher’s Ear
Holiday at the New Butlins
Glory Box
The Scuffle

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Excerpt from book:  

White Noise

From a third floor window, low trumpet notes
have cradled the world in blue for weeks
but today they cry like anarchic goats

pale as the sky bleached in haze overhead.
Babies keep whining in the long line of prams
from plaza to supermarket, impatient to consume.

Frank pays attention for the first time although
the queue has stood, undiminished, for years
just as the FTSE trampolining the pound

is, for some, a reason to live and, for others,
hidden as the rage of commuters on the bypass
or a life-support machine’s final squeak.

In the hospital, Frank’s baby’s breath blew out
like the cherry blossom crash-landing around
the kerbs and drains, raised briefly with every

loitering hope and passing bus. The pram babies
linger like cappuccino froth or white candles waiting
to be lit on windowsills in favour of an unclear cause

while televisions drone on regardless. The trumpet
bleats. The reason for a note remains mysterious
until the next and then the next, just as commuters

beat out progress by traffic lights. The system
functions. The operation was successful for a time.
Her eyes opened, blue, for a moment blinked

and shut. The eighth day. He hears it is good
that tills keep clinking, that each day bears
its fair share of crashes, that disappointment

and music are made possible only by love.
The trumpet croaks a flat minim and Frank says,
‘I tried I tried everything but nothing worked.’

Unpublished endorsement:  Restrained, intelligent, quietly ironic poems, so precise and assured in their craft that they sometimes sail into liquid light.

Helena Nelson

Unpublished endorsement:  The sluice of news, the creative writing biz and grimly comic crowd-behaviour: Mackenzie is appalled, amused and attracted all at the same time. But it isn’t all Desolation Row and the poems here of loss and love pierce through and touch.

Richard Price

Unpublished endorsement:  Rob A. Mackenzie’s vibrant, kaleidoscopic poetry displays a playful, witty and fertile imagination. But sometimes, just sometimes, it dips into a deep reflection on the frailty of our mortality such as in the exquisite poem, ‘In the Last Few Seconds', which took my breath away.

Bernardine Evaristo

Unpublished endorsement:  Rob Mackenzie’s Happenstance pamphlet The Clown of Natural Sorrow combined a precise eye with deftness and a good-natured voice which controlled its subject-matter to considerable effect. Those same qualities are present in his collection The Opposite of Cabbage; but these poems are also tougher, often bleaker. Mackenzie is equally unafraid of both Idea and Sentiment, and manages to handle both in poetry which is tight in its formal elements and wide-ranging in its scope. The sense throughout of a life being lived, examined and framed intelligently is enormously satisfying.'

James Sheard

Previous review quote:  Nudging at the curious in the everyday is typical of Mackenzie’s work … These are honest poems with a humane touch that takes them beyond their surface familiarities. A small book but it’s consistently interesting.

Jim Burns
Ambit

Previous review quote:  As they say, you can't break the rules unless you know them, and Mackenzie's clearly qualified to break them.

Tim Love
Literary Reviews

Previous review quote:  Intelligent, well-crafted poems. Witty and humane, with a quiet quirkiness.

Hamish Whyte