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Ryan Van WinkleTomorrow, We Will Live Here |
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Biographical note: Ryan Van Winkle is Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library. He runs a monthly “Literary Cabaret” called The Golden Hour and is an Editor at Forest Publications. He lives in Edinburgh but was born and spent most of his life in America. His work has appeared in New Writing Scotland, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Northwords Now and The Oxford Poet series. He has won Salt's Crashaw Prize and been shortlisted for the Bridport and Ver Poetry Prizes.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844717897
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Short description/annotation: Plain spoken narrators as diverse as the America they inhabit – a pastor's son, the lonely night nurse and fat boy – are all ill at ease. Through road kill, September 11th and death row characters address their own bitter faults with noir-like melancholy, seeking redemption and absolution. What you will find here is the grist of life – death, love, sex, departure – honed by a poet focused on the gravity, fear and humour of living.
Main description: This is a terse, tough début by an award-winning American poet with punch in the language. What you find here is the grist of life – death, love, sex, departure – honed by a voice obsessed with the gravity, fear and the humour of being human. Van Winkle's understated, plain spoken, narrators are as diverse as the America they live in – the lonely night nurse, the conflicted son of a preacher, and the cross-country runner – are all ill at ease in the world. Through road kill, September 11th, and death row they address their own bitter faults with noir-like melancholy, seeking redemption and absolution.
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Excerpt from book: They Will Go On
Unpublished endorsement: These are thrilling poems in a confident and rich collection. Tom Pow, author of Dear Alice (Salt 2008)
Unpublished endorsement: RVW's poems are rooted in the detail of daily lives and personal histories, yet their richly sensual physical reality is like ice, glittering beautifully over a void. Jane Griffiths, author of Another Country (Bloodaxe, 2008)
Unpublished endorsement: This luminous collection begins with the workings of the author’s ghost and ends on a bar stool contemplation of days lived and quietly lost. In between is all the richness and wonder of things. John Glenday, author of Grain (Picador, 2009)
Unpublished endorsement: Tensions and exchanges between the generations, together with a fearless scrutiny of the self, distinguish this driven and forceful collection, where almost every poem happens in the immediacy of the present tense. Penelope Shuttle, author of Redgrove's Wife (Bloodaxe, 2006)
Unpublished endorsement: Ryan Van Winkle's poems are not for the faint-hearted. I like his long lines and vivid descriptions, crammed yet terse, making rough, tough, sad, spirited word-life. His style suits the subject-matter. This poet is indeed ‘Orion tightening his belt'. Tessa Ransford
Unpublished endorsement: RVW's poems are rooted in the detail of daily lives and personal histories, yet their richly sensual physical reality is like ice, glittering beautifully over a void. His speakers are distinctly ill at ease in the world, questioning the sense of it all in voices that combinean elegiac tone with off-beat humour. VW's first collection marks him as a confident and compelling new voice. Jane Griffiths
Unpublished endorsement: There is a bracing tension at the heart Ryan van Winkle's first full collection, Tomorrow, We will Live Here. On the one hand, there are often ironic and self-aware poems whose focus is on geographical and personal fluidity – born in the USA (a Springsteen fan!), Van Winkle now lives in Edinburgh – and, on the other, those which explore, in a number of first person narratives, those whose lives are determined by inheritance and circumstance in the land he has left behind. In poems, like They Tore the Bridge Down a Year Later (about a childhood rape) and Everybody Always Talking About Jesus, speakers recount memories that haunt them, as they seek forgetfulness or redemption. The filmic clarity of van Winkle's narrative shows they will be granted neither. These are thrilling poems in a confident and rich collection. Tom Pow
Unpublished endorsement: Tensions and exchanges between the generations, together with a fearless scrutiny of the self, distinguish this driven and forceful collection, where almost every poem happens in the immediacy of the present tense. Here is a new and authentic voice with a punch in the language. Penelope Shuttle, author of Redgrove's Wife (Bloodaxe, 2006)
Unpublished endorsement: Ryan Van Winkle is one of the best of the new poets. His wry humour deepens the sensitivity and compassion of his work. But be warned – there's often a sting in the tail! A fine collection. Ron Butlin
Unpublished endorsement: The experience of exile haunts these poems, as speakers reach helplessly towards forever-lost pasts and glimpsed, impossible futures. The wide and empty landscapes of America are stalked by ghosts and silences, suicides and roadkill. Words go unsaid; the old family life is unreachable because "They do not know the time in my zone". Even death is ambivalent: is it a longed-for escape, or yet another numbing failure of intimacy? Kona Macphee
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