David Briggs

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Biographical note:  David Briggs was born in 1972, and grew up in the New Forest. He lives in Bristol, where he is Head of English at the Grammar School. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and his poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. The Method Men is his first collection.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717286
ISBN:  9781844717286
Author:  David Briggs
Title:  The Method Men
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-May-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 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

Short description/annotation:  The Method Men is the first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs. Briggs is widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Review and Identity Parade. Lyrical, ludic and literary, these poems explore the ‘style our lives bring with them’ – what we are, and how that came to be.

Main description:  The Method Men is the much anticipated first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs: a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010).

Briggs’s work doffs its cap to a wide range of influences, from the Graveyard School to Miroslav Holub, from John Ash to Ted Hughes, from Marianne Moore to Charles Boyle; yet, retains its own distinctive sensibility — a concern with the idiosyncratic strategies we employ in attempting to navigate an ineffable and dangerous, yet quotidian, world. Pylons, the blank pages at the end of a book, an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, bathrooms, public parks, clowns and teacups are all lit at the edges with a gunsmoke-blue glow by a transform imagination.

The Method Men explores, in a sometimes disarmingly personal way, what Larkin referred to as ‘a style our lives bring with them’ — what we are, and how that came to be.

Table of contents:
The Method Men
Twenty Below Zero
Woodland, with Two Figures
Historia Occultica
The Method Men
Rural Push, Urban Push
Closed Systems
Drought
What to Burn When You’ve Burnt Your Bridges
The Dispossessed Lion Tamer, with Sprung Padlock
What Happened to Clowns
Pere Lachaise
The Ghosts of Highgate Cemetery
On the Banks of Acheron
Asking the Difficult Questions
Attic Clearance
High Summer, 1979
Testicular Torsion
High Summer, 1989
‘They Miss Him Most Who Loved Him Best’
Required Reading
A Portrait of the English Technician
The Library of Missed Ripostes
In the Senior Common Room
Bee’s Nocturne
Exemplum
Waves
Eleven Ante-Meridian
Accident
Self-Portrait in a Rear-View Mirror
Seven Stations of a Record Collection
Seafaring
Winter Music
Snow
Cultural Static
Conjugation in C Minor
The Woodlander
The Philosophical Bowling Shoe Counter Attendant
My Year of Culture
Reflection
Bloomsday
Pulse

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Excerpt from book:  

What Happened to Clowns
i.m. Miroslav Holub

when nobody laughed any more?
When even the act of pouring
hot custard down Pantalone’s
hoop-waisted trews
failed to simmer even a snigger?
Clowns took to the streets.
Hyperbolic, red and yellow boots
flip-flopped uptown; the afternoon so hot,
buckets of confetti couldn’t cool them off.
And they congregated at the railings
of the offices of the Minister for Circus.
Years of inadequate investment
had whittled their craft to politics
they didn’t have the heart for.
Perhaps, they ought to have become
taxi drivers? Writing had been on walls —
or had been, before Scaramouche blacked
the writing over with arches of paint
to connote railway tunnels,
against which they had squandered
engine-red and canary-yellow striped,
plywood locomotives.
While they disputed for spokespersons
through mime, Pierrot posed forlornly
at the Doric-framed doorstep
of the offices of the Minister for Circus,
only to pirouette abjectly back
to mutinous crowds when the bell-push
streamed water that smudged his mascara,
tickled the wrinkles of his face.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum took
to beating each other’s craniums
with styrofoam crowbars, blundering
about pavements in elaborate plays
of faux semi-consciousness.
No one so much as smiled.
It was merely tragic — two ageing clowns
resorting to cliched slapstick.
Even those veterans who claimed
to have trained with Aristophenes
failed to find euphemisms
by which to allude to the shifting paradigm
of their times. In the distance,
four pantomime horsemen came
careering and whinnying toward them.

Unpublished endorsement:  The Briggsian mode herein firmly established: worldly and unworldly flights, wryly delivered; quiddity of thing and place; Middle Age and Space Age detritus excavated; ‘damsel-tupping goatswains’ and David Sylvian; method and magic; lyricism and deft use of the down-stroke. This poet delivers. Elegance and snarls. Damn, another talented b_______to contend with.

Matthew Caley

Unpublished endorsement:  David Briggs is brilliant at pointing out the absurd contradictions of being human — our struggles with romance and reason, superstition and cynicism. These poems, alert to the history of folklore — witchcraft, scrying, entrails laid out on stone ‘like a book’ — also wittily expose our own, twenty-first century irrationality. In Briggs’s world, the ghosts of Highgate Cemetery dress: ‘in frowsy, mutton-sleeved grave clothes’ and ‘Rain is either hearsay or heresy’. The religious imagination and deadpan realism hang in constant tension. This is seriously good, intelligent poetry for those who like method in their madness.

Clare Pollard

Unpublished endorsement:  An interest in the forms and the musicality of lyric verse is a strong feature in David Briggs’s attention-grabbing poems, as is the inscrutable relationship between landscape and the mind. Although broadly traditional in style, there are subtle influences from more experimental work, such as the poetry of John Ashbery and his near namesake John Ash. Briggs’s personal narratives are imbued with ludic conceits, often played out in quirkily historical settings. This is a striking and varied debut collection.

Roddy Lumsden