Tim Cumming

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Biographical note:  Tim Cumming was born in Solihull and was brought up in the West Country. His poetry collections include The Miniature Estate (1991), Apocalypso (1992, 1999), Contact Print (2002) and The Rumour (2004). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Forward’s Poems of the Decade, and Bloodaxe Books’ major 2010 anthology of poetry from Ireland and the British Isles, Identity Parade. He made the acclaimed Hawkwind: Do Not Panic documentary for the BBC in 2007, shown his film poems at cinemas and festivals in the UK and writes regularly about music and the arts for the British and international press.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717385
ISBN:  9781844717385
Author:  Tim Cumming
Title:  The Rapture
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  09-Nov-11
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Rapture is the most visceral poetry collection of the year, from one of Britain’s leading cult writers, an acclaimed music journalist, filmmaker and a star of the small press scene for more than twenty years. His first collection since 2004, and drawing on a decade’s work — from the metaphorical delights of the Improvisations via the intimate, confessional poetry of Dark Matter to the rich loam of landscape and memory fuelling First Music’s evocation of Dartmoor’s wild landscape — The Rapture is his strongest and most captivating book to date.

Main description:  We live in an age of terror, literally and metaphorically. Old dependables have been shaken loose and to free us from the terror comes the poetry of The Rapture — poetry with a tangible exultance and joy tinged with the dark matter of End Times and the pinching fear of what’s up ahead wrestling with the pleasures and shelter of the moment — our internal clocks striking the hours of the age of anxiety in us all.

The Rumour is divided into three parts, each exploring sensation, identity, immersion and memory in its own way. Dark Matter includes love poems, lyrics, outrageous metaphors and narratives alongside wide-screen, more open-field works that probe at our very sense of self and perception.

The central Improvisations section tests language and meaning’s outer reaches and its most intimate fumblings. These are poems that tear down the fences and break open the windows and doors. This is not the hand-me-down formalism of the writing workshop, but in the power and sudden impact in the work’s vivid mosaic of image, character, narrative and metaphor conspiring together to make you seriously question assumptions of what form and meaning actually are.

The final First Music is the most autobiographical of Cumming’s published work, an exploration of the matter of memory, and the act of remembering as well as the experience of returning to the landscape of one’s past. It evokes the way of life and of imagination on a remote Dartmoor farm in the 60s and 70s, a study of memory and the process of remembering and perception as well as of capturing the landscape and aura of England’s wildest landscape, littered with ghosts and strange tokens, stranger tales and prehistoric artefacts.

Table of contents:
I. CHAPEL OF CARBON
For the Record
Impact
Pigment
Two Part Harmony
Following the Bloom
The Knowledge
Cairo Sonnets
Yield
Late Picasso
Flicker
Time Piece
Storm
The Bath
Penthouse Sonnet
Second Sky
Danebury Ring
Thin Air
The New Distance
Erratic Transmissions from Oklahoma
The Dolls’ House
His Visitor
Blue
II. IMPROVISATIONS
Brighton Improvisation
Tarot Improvisation
Glass Improvisation
Fever Improvisation
Running Improvisation
White City Improvisation
Solstice Improvisation
Belgrade Tram
Surveillance Improvisation
Slow Motion
White Border
Low Tide
III. FIRST MUSIC
Bird Music
B3212
Familiars
Water Crossing
Crossing Water
Cherry Brook
Powdermills
Drinking at The East Dart Hotel
Alder
Cupole
Father's Day
The Blue Cottage
Three Dartmoor Tales
Ruins
Impasto
Underlay
Sheep Shearing
Ghost Fox
Nocturne
The Ripe Charge
Nocturne II
Red Flags
A Dartmoor Ghost Story

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Excerpt from book:  

Surveillance Improvisation

The cops and their familiars
in the two way mirror
on the down escalator
ears pressed to the hard drive
the party line, voice signals
hissing like gas from power
cells in the underground
network, men of good faith,
the prophets of the tourniquet,
boiled mouths of bombers
pushing through the letter box
and shouting the names
of hairy gods. Holy Moses,
we're too far from the future to
carry the weight of these old prophets.
The clock's running on empty,
you're looking for a pattern,
the sky folded with nebulae
hidden from the naked eye
like plotters met in crowded
places, lemon starlight, seeds
in his hair, end-timers gathering
like a sudden flurry of tongues
at the mouths of great rivers,
hidden corners floodlit by
the biometric eye, cross hairs
in the holy books, music from
the accessible coast, fires
in the dunes, boats in the swell.
In your dreams you see a face
bigger than any other face
pulling itself apart, the watery
firmament of the faithful eye
fixed on the figure behind the curtain,
the world out there, hand on its
haunches, taking its measure.
Not the heart but the beat,
not the beat but the speed
of the drummer's hands, not the
speed so much as the distances
the incredible distances.

Unpublished endorsement:  Tim Cumming's The Rapture is a feast of juxtapositions. Through this most painterly of lenses, the reader finds vast panoramas and wonderfully observed detail, turbulences and stillnessness, pasts and present, the ordinary and the magnificent. In these poems, all five senses are engaged; no constellation escapes their ambitious sweep. These poems convince and delight by their extraordinary naturalness, inventiveness, cadence and intimacy.

Annie Freud

Unpublished endorsement:  Tim Cumming is a brilliant poet in many senses of the word: his poems are urbane, intimately well-observed, and evince a true wit in the sense that would have been understood by Swift or Pope: for instance with as his celebrated one-liners. The poems in The Rapture shine with an aesthetic that is pure in itself and pure satisfaction for the reader. But his work is nearly unique amongst contemporary poets in that, within this artistry, his subject matters, as they consider how a person may deal with a range of experience, are sensitive and profoundly humane. His is a perfect voice of the new times where art meets the heart.

John Stammers

Unpublished endorsement:  Tim Cumming’s urban landscapes are original, dreamy, surefooted with an intense filmic narrative. An acute sense of time and nature burns through these inspired poems.

Martina Evans