Simon Barraclough

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Biographical note:  Simon Barraclough is originally from Yorkshire but has lived in London for 12 years. He won the poetry section of the London Writers’ Prize in 2000 and his 2008 debut ‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the Forward Prizes. His work has been published in the likes of Poetry Review, The Guardian, The FT and Magma and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717866
ISBN:  9781844717866
Author:  Simon Barraclough
Title:  Los Alamos Mon Amour
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION FORWARD POETRY PRIZES 2008 ‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ unleashes a chain reaction of intense, moving, erotic and often darkly comical poems that veer from the terrifying to the tender, the comic to the apocalyptic, the lustful to the philosophical, and the cosmic to the domestic.

Main description:  SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION FORWARD POETRY PRIZES 2008

‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ explodes in the heart of the desert and unleashes a chain reaction of intense, moving, erotic and often darkly comical poems. Marlon Brando, Saddam Hussein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Queen Mother, Hannibal Lecter, and Yuri Gagarin wander through the blasted landscape encountering Italian wolves, Desert Orchid and the London Whale along the way.

Around a core of searing love poems, ‘Los Alamos Mon Amour’ embraces passion, nostalgia, fear and wonder. A lost parent inspires terror and compassion by turns; madness intrudes upon the mundane; and St. Paul’s Cathedral mutates in a sequence of bizarre love letters to Wren’s iconic masterpiece.

From traditional sonnets to a narrative constructed entirely from film poster taglines, the poems are formally and aesthetically restless, nosing around London, New York, Italy, and Yorkshire, watched over by the spirits of Lowell, Berryman, Hughes, Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

The poems veer from the terrifying to the tender, the comic to the apocalyptic, the lustful to the philosophical, and the cosmic to the domestic – often within the same line. An energetic and entertaining new voice in contemporary poetry: profound and playful by turns.

Table of contents:
Los Alamos Mon Amour
Saturn on Seventh
Psycho
A Tall Story about a Pushover
Fusing the Braids
The Open Road
Contacts
Unleashed
Pike
At Least
Frigidaire
Seroxat (R)
Celestial Navigation
Modern & Obsolete
Slippers and Spoons
Giallo
The Death of Vito Corleone
For Sale
The X-ray Room
Retuning St Paul’s
Abductees
The York Realist
Long Haul
The Dream Song of Saddam Hussein
Son
Awake Again
Goodbye Radio City
Protecting St Paul’s
Buffy is Leaving Tuscan House
The Approach
London Whale
Converting St Paul’s
In Bocca al Lupo
Italian Verb Drills
Titanica
Wearing St Paul’s
Exploratory
Apologia
Withdrawal Method
Brighton Restored
Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine
Soloist
The Discovery of Fire
Corrie Sonnet
Paper Not Loaded
Scattered
Yuri Gagarin’s Three Homecomings
Desert Orchid
Bath Time
Fitting
Immuring St Paul’s
My Best Friend
The Hands
Gyroscope
Nato e Morto
Outlook Good

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Excerpt from book:  

Pike

Teriyaki tigering the golden
deep-fried flesh and a flask of hot sake
fuming like a factory chimney.

This china smoke stack takes me back
to failing mills and Warcar Reservoir:
the stagnant pond that used to juice them

before profit migrated East to the land
of synthetics, cheap worsted, cheaper labour.
The summer of Jaws and tucked-up legs,

invented verrucas, sliding Sunday nights
down the gullet of the weekend bath:
feeling like Quint kicking at teeth, puking blood.

Pike were our local great whites but we had
no pike nets, pike repellent, strychnine jabs,
no Police Chief or ichthyologist.

We had hunks of drystone wall, giant bobbins,
window gaffs, rafts of unhinged doors,
to protect us from the monstrous fish

that Ted Hughes himself might have reared
and delivered overnight on the back
of a flat-bed lorry.

We knew the tale of the kid who dived
onto a rusting Cortina,
swam to the cobbles and bound up

his intestines in a pinkening towel
and almost made it home. But we knew
the pike had done it, though we watched

the council land the dribbling chassis
with a crane. We dared ourselves
back into the green water,

rafting down the overflow when it rained,
stooping under child-sized Niagaras,
leaping from the millstone-gritty walls.

I never saw a pike in the res
or in a keepnet and now I have one
in a dish, spit-roasted on a skewer,

I’m sorry for its cooked-blind eyes,
seared-off fins, flaking muscle.
I take it apart with chopsticks.

Unpublished endorsement :  Simon Barraclough offers up a poetry of contrasts: he is a relaxed formalist, a hands-off sensualist, a subtle polemicist and a humorist you can take seriously. All these strands are brought together by a deft hand under the watch of a filmic eye.

Roddy Lumsden

Unpublished endorsement :  Barraclough can turn a world-weary hangover into a zoetrope of colour and shadow. He can move you with the precision of his imagery and rhyme and shock you with a sudden correlation. Throughout this marvellously unsettling noirish collection, Barraclough never succumbs to introspection: even in the bleakest of storms, his poetry remains determined to look outwards, to engage and entrance.

Luke Kennard

Unpublished endorsement :  Simon Barraclough’s versatile imagination explores diverse subjects in a linguistically inventive style that varies in tone from sardonic to compassionate. A moving and at times painfully funny first collection.

Daljit Nagra

Unpublished endorsement :  Sharing with other admirers of the late Michael Donaghy a winning propensity for using mythical America as a lexical paint-box, Simon Barraclough stands out even among the stand-outs in his readiness to make a knowing reference to the popular arts twice per line. But the best proof is here: poems with the unmistakeable stamp of a vision asserting itself through vocabulary.

Clive James

Review quote:  Barraclough may see himself as travelling lightly through the world, but he catches the sense of what it's like to live in the modern city more astutely and more often than most other poets. Salt is to be congratulated on investing in publishing his first collection in hardback.

Laurie Smith
Magma

Review quote:  This is a collection which deals openly and unsentimentally with bereavements and betrayals, childhood abuses and disappointments, all territory generally understood to be difficult both for poets and readers. Barraclough handles it well… This debut from Simon Barraclough, shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, demonstrates a poet’s eye for detail and provides a vehicle for a laconic and totally contemporary voice whose dramatic talents could easily move him into theatre and radio as well as poetry.

Jane Holland
Under the Radar

Review quote:  Any poet from Huddersfield must be within earshot of Simon Armitage and there are familiar elements (not least a torrential energy) in Simon Barraclough’s first collection … London Whale shows how it should be done, with fluidity, delicacy, and tonal variety … There are several shorter (often sonnet-length) poems which balance everything successfully … and ingenious miniatures. This is very good writing … a beautifully produced highly readable collection.

John Greening
TLS

Review quote:  ['Los Alamos Mon Amour'] simultaneously assaults and seduces the senses with an understated charm … If it is Barraclough's broad palette of subject matter that draws the reader in, it is his attention to the craft of poetry that will endure. Like Simon Armitage, Barraclough grew up in Huddersfield and although in many ways he is a very different writer, there is something about this collection that brings to mind that first rush of excitement brought on by Armitage's early work.

Chris Horton
London Magazine