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Biographical note: Victor Tapner was born in Watford and grew up in Bedfordshire. He has won several major poetry awards, including first prize in the Academi Cardiff International Competition and Scotland’s Wigtown. A series of his dramatic monologues won The New Writer 2008 poetry collection prize, and he is included in the Bloodaxe anthology The Honey Gatherers. A former Financial Times journalist, he has also written a political thriller Cold Rain (Grafton Books, 1988). Now a freelance writer, he lives in Essex.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844715565
ISBN: 9781844715565
Author: Victor Tapner
Title: Flatlands
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: DCF
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 08-Sep-10
Extent: 80pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight: 120 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 8.99
Price: USD 14.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the East Anglian Book Awards. An ambitious sequence of prize-winning poems, Flatlands unearths a living world from Britain’s prehistory. The poems’ stark forms evoke the voices of flint miners, tribal warriors and Boudica rebelling against Roman rule. Exploring universal themes – love and infidelity, bereavement and sometimes murderous hatreds – Flatlands holds a mirror to ourselves.
Main description: Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the East Anglian Book Awards. Steeped in the imagery of windswept fenland and the smoke of the roundhouse, Flatlands unearths a living world from a time before Britain’s recorded history.
Set in what is now East Anglia, this sequence of prize-winning poems takes us on a panoramic journey from the flint miners and hunters of four thousand years ago to the harsh existence of Bronze Age villagers, Celtic tribal warriors and Boudica’s army rebelling against Roman rule.
Written in a stripped language with stark, sculpted forms, the poems evoke voices whose haunting rhythms and echoes arise in a landscape where a wooden idol, buried in river mud for millennia, tells us: ‘Find me in your own face’.
In this deep past, we see a reflection of ourselves. Through their often bleak symbolism and metaphorical associations, the poems explore universal themes: love and infidelity, ageing and bereavement, tenderness, political suppression and, ultimately, the eruption of murderous hatreds.
As eastern England becomes an early cultural crossing point with the European mainland, sea-trade develops, but Rome’s influence destabilises the local population. Regional kings mint currencies to reinforce their power, villagers are captured by neighbours and sold as slaves to foreign masters, tribes fight for territory and resources, and refugees from Gaul flee across the Channel as the legions’ grip tightens.
The narrative thread that runs through Flatlands, reminiscent of the ancient trackways where early farmers drove their animals, leads to a bloody climax, until the ancestral voices fade back into the sacred streams and pastures.
Table of contents:
Trackways
Beaker Burial
Thames Idol
Day Graves
Stone Cutters
Breaking Blades
Arrow Maker
Flatlands
Aurochs
Shrill Water
Trackways
Hill Bed
Herdsmen
Light Days
Gods of Fire and Metal
In the Circle of the White Moon
Villagers
Greenstones
Marsh Bride
Nightshade
Witchman
Head Fever
Nene
Hard Crop
Cold Shadows
Tidal Dwellers
Flag Fen
Shale Bracelet
Saltern
Villagers
Round House
Sayer
Furrow
Eel Trap
Bees’ Nest
Altar
Witchman's Song
After the Harvest
Bakestone
Seed Pit
Iceni
War Crowns
Slow Marsh
War Crown
Ash Rings
Crossing
Slave Chain
Addedomaros
Forest Path
Traders
Council of Cunobelin
Castings
On the Street of Tombs
Citadel of Eternal Tyranny
Boudica's Brooch
Blackwater View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (64 KB)
Excerpt from book:
Citadel of Eternal Tyranny
From the wall they're watching us
yoked to these buckets
hauling mortar for trenches
crushing flint
Like crows they strut
in their pretty helmets
brown cloaks flapping
their gleaming breasts
fat with pride
How well we work
how straight we lay stones
for their temple
hang plumb lines for their gods
How sweet at night
our wives and daughters serve them
trimming their lamps
oiling their chapped hands
dousing their coughs
with wine and horehound
On the road by the gate
the heads of our better men
are pegged on spikes
They too are watching
their dead eyes
turning
mouths too fixed
to speak
Unpublished endorsement: These poems are laid out like a hoard of archaeological finds. They are glinting slivers of our ancient past in the East of England. Subject to the threats of starvation and pillage, these voices of the indigenous tribes and then of the conquering Romans have an entirely convincing timbre and compel our engagement. Flatlands is an impressive and mature first collection. Tony Curtis Unpublished endorsement: Find me in your own time
find me in your own face
says the centuries-old "Thames Idol", and so say the others who people East Anglia's prehistory in these spare, telling poems. The arrow-maker's methods are arcane, his tension as he awaits his prey is instantly recognisable. An old person nowadays might use a bottled version of nettle balm, but the rheumatic twinge is the same. These traders, lovers, refugees are part of us, and even the way the "Tidal Dwellers" live at the mercy of the elements strikes an alarmingly contemporary note:
slowly
our houses
drown.
There is nothing distant about these people, nor the poems they inhabit: they are immediate, compelling, alive. Sheenagh Pugh |
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