Olivia Cole

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Biographical note:  Olivia Cole is an award-winning poet and journalist, writing for the Spectator and the London Evening Standard. She specialises in the arts, literature and London’s party scene. Olivia was born in 1981 in Kent, and read English at Christ Church, Oxford. Restricted View is her first poetry collection. In 2003 she won an Eric Gregory award, the Society of Authors’ awards for poets under the age of 30.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715695
ISBN:  9781844715695
Author:  Olivia Cole
Title:  Restricted View
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCD1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-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 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Restricted View is the colourful and highly anticipated debut collection from the award winning young poet and journalist Olivia Cole. From London to New York and Italy, she takes readers on a journey as public as it is private. Like Mr Chatterbox, the gossip columnist who makes things up, it’s impossible to know where the poet’s true feelings lie: in her poems about herself, or in the cast of intriguing characters that she brings to life. The view, encompassing art and history as well as the vivid chaos and cluttered beauty of city life, is as vivid and tantalizing as it is restricted.

Main description:  Like craning your neck from a seat in a theatre, looking at the glittering night city from a skyscraper, or watching Woody Allen filming across the street, Restricted View, sees every glimpse of a life as partial, as though the reader has just stumbled on a diary entry still being written, or a lovers’ scene, mid-conversation. In the messy chaos and tantalizing beauty of the city from London to Russia, Italy and New York, emotionally charged encounters replay, held in poetry’s present tense, or turned over and examined as closely as cheap jewels: the ‘remembered strings of amber beads/glinting from long passed market stalls.’

The poet picks her way around a tightrope temptation to use poetry like a diary (as she hints in the Writer’s Dairy) but the intensity of memories is matched, too, in the empathy found for vividly realised couplings in history, whether it be the child bride of a Medici tyrant in Florence, Mussolini’s long suffering mistress, Bernini’s angel statues in Rome or the Venetian art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

Always the ‘view’, like the tricksy cover portrait by contemporary artist Natasha Archdale constructed entirely of words, remains ‘restricted’. If at times, Cole seems far more figuratively naked than in her portrait, the book’s epigraph, about Evelyn Waugh’s famous gossip columnist Mr Chatterbox (who invented people to write about) hints too at the element of fiction there even in journalist Cole’s most seemingly autobiographical writing.

From Grazia to tell-all interviews and autobiographies of politicians and stars, in an age obsessed with candid details, Restricted View maintains the impossibility of knowing anyone’s ‘true’ story. The past and the present are improvised and improved, the moment that the poet picks up her pen, or, as in ‘The Writer’, is drawn back to her computer, its stand-by lights blinking in the night, like waiting land across the bay.

Table of contents:
Breaking the Ice
Between Some Acts
Balcony Scene
Common Ground
Restricted View
Bathers At Asnieres
Flight Paths
Matinee Idol
Persistence
A to Z
The Cure for Love
Ponte Sant’Angelo
The Bridal Suite
Il Duce’s Match
Gossip Column
I Can Wait
Children’s Hour
If Winter Comes
An Arrival
Winter Palace
Arabesque
The Understudy
Casablanca
The Writer’s Dairy
In the British Museum
The Deep End
Thanksgiving
Moon Man
Matins
Five Elements
The Writer
The Bedhead
The Fall Project
Dress Not Taken
Cuba Libre
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Restricted View
For Martin Amis

Cast yourself into a chair, excuse your limbs,
feet, shoes, as they find a path around and over
the legs of those who sit in a row,

gathered to wait for the writer who takes
the stage with assured caution, tiny, nervous,
practised steps, to speak, between thought

and the lighting of a cigarette, unconsciously
of the writer’s unconscious fear — unable to do
anything but let slip through the blue, a flitter

of anxiety, as he tells of how, ‘the life’s not the
romantic cutting off of one’s ear’ and tenderly
strokes his own — still there — visible through

the pauses that load the swirling air.

Unpublished endorsement:  Olivia Cole’s poems overflow with likable qualities: exuberance, candour, brightness — of both spirit and intelligence — and curiosity. The auspices are excellent for this new poet.

Christopher Reid

Review quote:  Still in her early twenties at the time of writing, Olivia Cole was born and raised in Kent, educated at Oxford, and now works as a journalist in London. A winner of the Eric Gregory Award, she quickly made her mark as a poet through the unforced romanticism of her conversational rhythms, as if she had found the most disarming possible way of going public with her diary. But there was an additional element that promised something else: an engagement with a history beyond her own. Figures from politics and the arts get into her poetry as characters, populating it with unexpected drama. This combination of a buttonholing personal voice and a curious engagement with a wider world gives her more recent poetry an unusually rich play of tone, a reportorial lyricism that many older poets would find it hard to match. Although the subtle shifts of register are all hers, however, her strategic approach to poetic narrative almost certainly owed something to the late Michael Donaghy, the American grey eminence behind so many of the more startling young poets in London now. His is the instructor’s voice to be heard echoing at the parade of talents in the little anthology Ask For It By Name, featuring, among other products of his boot-camp, Olivia Cole as the youngest in the squad.

Clive James

Review quote:  Olivia Cole's is an intense, haunting voice, perfectly capturing psychical and physical states in some astonishing imagery; breaking the ice, taking a shower, blood seeping through a black and white world.

Anita Sethi
The Guardian

Review quote:  Open the anthology Tower Poets, edited by Peter McDonald (Tower Poetry, £5 from towerpoetry.org.uk), and there again, in Olivia Cole’s poems, the resolutely strong note rings straight out:

I stood in your shower, how many times?
Well, so many times …

Olivia Cole is one of seven poets here, all associated with Tower Poetry, which emanates from Christ Church, Oxford, with the help of a legacy to the college. Everyday spoken rhythms, deftly used, are characteristic of most of these poets.

Derwent May
The Times