Simon Barraclough

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Biographical note:  Simon Barraclough was born in Huddersfield but has lived in London since 1996. He won the poetry section of the London Writers’ Prize in 2000 and Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt, 2008) was nominated for Best First Collection in the Forward Poetry Prizes. Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins), a ‘mini-book’ of commissions, followed in 2010. His work appears in Identity Parade (Bloodaxe 2010) and Poems for Love (Penguin 2009).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717644
ISBN:  9781844717644
Author:  Simon Barraclough
Title:  Neptune Blue
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-11
Extent:  72pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  108 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:  ‘Neptune Blue’ fizzes with wit and invention, opening beyond the galaxy and zooming into the mind and heart, dancing past the planets as it goes. Simon Barraclough’s new collection bursts with crazy hearts and boisterous planets and sees the author at his most playful and musical.

Main description:  ‘Neptune Blue’ opens outside the galaxy and quickly zooms into a computer-generated Paris, dancing past the planets as it goes. With poems that fizz with wit and invention, Simon Barraclough’s new collection bursts with crazy hearts and boisterous planets. What’s a Celeriac Heart? or a Hindenburg Heart for that matter? What do Neptune, Derek Jarman and Edwin Morgan have in common and is Saturn really the undisputed supermodel of the solar system? And with over sixty moons, do its werewolves ever get a night off? If you based a whole new meteorological season on a slippery pool hustler from ‘The Color of Money’, how would such a season feel? Is there money to be made in privatising snow? From the Sun to Pluto; from baby sharks in Miami to the forlorn dogs of Sri Lanka and the unlucky settlers of the imaginary Island of Schalansky; ‘Neptune Blue’ sees Barraclough at his most playful and musical, dishing up a feast for the eyes, the ears, the heart and the mind.

Table of contents:
Contents
We'll Always Have CGI Paris
Being a Woman You Will
Incorrigibly Plural
Hare of the Dog
The Dogs of Trieste
Starfish Heart
Jurassic Coast
Flashbacks of a Fool
Due Cinghiali
St. Francis of the Boston Hilton
Pizza Heart
SoBe It
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Plut
The Dogs of Sri Lanka
Mr. English at Home
Celeriac Heart
Soldier of Fortune
Examination at Doom's Door
Roman Heart
Owl Creek Bridge
Tapestry Heart
Spotted Flycatcher
Braille Bird
Magpie Heart
Jumper
In Memoriam Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916-2010)
Logos
Hindenburg Heart
The Remote Island of Schalansky
Old Henry's Advice
Easter Saturday, Hyde Park
Christmas Vixen
Wiki Heart
DMZ
Anti-personnel Heart
Daimon
Everything Must Go
Braille Encore
Yuri Norstein Heart
Grady Seasons
Havisham Heart
Zabriskie Point
Wrigley's Heart
Sol
Notes
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Mr. English at Home

‘Plenty, Mr English? Plenty?’
The ceiling fan wobbles through clouds
of mosquito-coil formaldehyde
as eager knuckles batter the door
at dawn and scatter the geckoes.

Nets, creams, coils: nothing stops them
refining my gushing red oil
and though the scores I’ve slaughtered stud the walls
and crust the cover of Dombey and Son,
their numbers are great, they can suck up the cost.

‘One minute Piumli!’ The housekeeper’s girl
can’t leave me alone and brings me ‘plain tea’
on the hour, to spend time with the strange white man
who moves like a mountain of sweet milk rice,
dotted with jam and jaggery bites.

They mostly come at night, the beasts
that feed on human sleep. Last night a boar
got in among the dogs and uproar roared
from Kandy to Trincomalee. First week,
I had the macaques round for tea and off they took
with showerhead and toilet seat. The python
sometimes spooks the cat but in the main he sleeps:
the only coil that keeps the madhura at bay.
‘You want hoppers?’ There’s nothing else to eat.
‘Hoppers would be perfect, thanks.’ Hoppers and plain tea,

while Piumli watches with cautious eyes like tamarind.
She doodles Sinhalese circles on napkins,
I work my way through MR James. Long days
of garden cricket and language lessons will come
but for now we coil into ourselves, wary, waiting.

Unpublished endorsement:  Simon Barraclough dazzles with his luscious iconography, his intriguing observations, obsessions and predilections. These poems are complex, acrobatic, inventive, intelligent, exuberant, funny, tender and … bloody marvellous.

Annie Freud

Unpublished endorsement:  I read it as though I’m reading a phrase book from a new country called Barraclough, a country we should all discover. An excellent book.

Ian McMillan

Unpublished endorsement:  In Neptune Blue, his second collection, Simon Barraclough dazzles with his luscious iconography, his intriguing observations, obsessions and predilections. These poems are complex, acrobatic, inventive, intelligent, exuberant, funny, tender and … bloody marvellous. This is a collection that will ‘rage on in the minds of many’.

Annie Freud

Unpublished endorsement:  Simon Barraclough's new collection offers a rich poetry. The sleuthing bloodhound who detects "the scars and trinkets of our trials, / the circuits, cogs and souvenirs of dance, / millennia of courtship in our glance," could be Barraclough himself.

Richard Price

Previous review quote:  A torrential energy.

John Greening
Times Literary Supplement