Simon Perril

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Biographical note:  Simon Perril was born in 1968 and lives in Oakham, Rutland, with his wife Gabrielle and their daughters Erin and Holly. His poetry collections include Nitrate (Salt) and A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher Press). He has written widely on contemporary poetry and poetics, and edited The Salt Companion to John James (Salt). He teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, and loves silent movies, and noisy music. And cats. Visit www.simonperril.com

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717774
ISBN:  9781844717774
Author:  Simon Perril
Title:  Nitrate
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-10
Extent:  88pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  132 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:  Nitrate is a book of poems about cinema, named after the infamously flammable early film stock. It is meditation upon the birth of the moving picture, the allure of the film still, the aesthetics of the early horror film, and the contemporary ‘intermission’ that moors us out of time.

Main description:  Cellulose nitrate was introduced in 1889, and used until the 1950s as the — frighteningly flammable — basis of film stock. Simon Perril’s new book of poems is a meditation upon the birth of the moving picture, the allure of the film still, the aesthetics of the early horror film, and the contemporary ‘intermission’ that moors us out of time. Its touchstones are the chronophotographs of E.J. Marey and the cinematic ‘essays’ of film-maker Chris Marker. Marey’s experiments in understanding motion inadvertently contributed to the origins of film, but also, more darkly, to the industrial management of work and time. In a book of three markedly different sections, Perril explores these connections in poems as luminous and flammable as the films to which they pay homage.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
Nitratean essay on cinema
Thoughts on Vivisection
Varieties of Cinematic Experience
Everything is Subject to Motion, and Everything is Motion’s Subject
“to transpose life . . .”
A Halo around Here
The End of Portraiture
Stations across Shape
The Islands of Dr Marey
Succession
Dead Pan
Patent Graft
The Shuffling Deck
The first Audiences Reported Feelings of Sea-Sickness
Cenatograph
Melomania
Possessive Apostrophe
Monochrome
Marey’s Revolver
Ovid on Nitrate
Cursed Hands
On Looking Into a Still From Murnau’s Nosferatu
Fear’s Franchise
Ode on Universal Horror
Masque
Still Lifetime
Death by Snowflake
Reported Sighting
Fatalities of the Silent Image
Eye’s Pupil
The Intermission
Preamble
Venture
The Intermission
Destroy all Monsters
Standard Life Crisis
On Being Turbulent
Untitled
The Disposition of Objects in Early Parenthood
Amplifier Worship
Lines on Verlaine
In Gorky’s The Artist and his Mother, three of the four hands are gloved
The Case of the Haunted Chill Cabinet
Ode to Quandary
Grazing
Daylight Robbery
No Valuables Left Overnight
Personal Possessions
Interior Design
Death by Snowflake
Lycantrope
forward
Blue Profile
Possibilis Salutis: a Prologue
The Afterlife of the New Werther
Afterward
Credits

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Excerpt from book:  

Destroy all Monsters
I.M. Douglas Oliver

The absurd latenight horror film is oracular
—Iain Sinclair

more alien than the past
tense of the verb ‘to breathe’
the occurrence of ‘a man’
in the utterance
neither drowning nor waving.

Pockets of redress
line the midst of doing;
tendrils of harm
coil in the spring of each movement
dextrous roots of arms.

The nuclear truth in Japanese monster movies
is moral mutation, magnification;
something of the octopus genus
in all our kind
the snatching of goods
the hidden parrot-beak of blame
gnawing the body-image.

Years later the recognition:
Kong’s glower through the high-rise tower
my parents’ far-reaching anger to theirs
peering through a Hoddesdon flat window
my brother and I glued to King Kong
Versus Godzilla; oblivious
to the silver in the screen.

Living in the cloud of our own nuclear explosion,
our own perilous chapel;
how do we appease our monsters
navigate bad vortices
having destroyed all the oxygen in the sea?
The radioactive weaponry of the poem
comes to life; the fructification of nothing.

Unpublished endorsement:  The booming Odeons are converted, the vast screens allowed to sit in the palm of the reader’s hand so we can finally see or feel through Perril’s words the luminous gnosis of the space between the frames. The light haloes around all the actions and narratives where the syntax of cinema lives, bright as salt and twice as sharp.

Brian Catling

Unpublished endorsement:  Simon Perril listens to what movement is: syllable to rhyme, image to ear, caesura to dream. In Nitrate the paradox of earliest cinema, that death and the representation of motion share a material history, becomes, with Perril's intelligent craft, a contingent prosody that brings the gratefully suspended reader not to the object but to its light, not to knowing but to hazardous magnetism. These poems, in the tradition of critical utopianism, where time itself is the plastic resource, locate themselves "upstream" where "the source of the now / awaits glad invention", and in this way exhilaratingly overleap the dystopian conflict between reality and value.

Lisa Robertson

Unpublished endorsement:  Though the dead can still wave to us in films, the stress of keeping it so proves too much for nitrate film stock — it remembers it’s an organ like any other and rots or burns, as they do. Simon Perril’s Nitrate traces the path from moment to movement, from still to still, through the dark, silent gap imposed by the shutter of E.J. Marey’s chronophotographic gun — the gun’s name is death but its work is reanimation.

Peter Manson