Will Stone

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717965
ISBN:  9781844717965
Author:  Will Stone
Title:  Drawing in Ash
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Apr-11
Extent:  112pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  168 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:  Will Stone’s powerful second collection Drawing in Ash extends the remarkable imagery and visionary capacity he displayed in his first collection from Salt Publishing, Glaciation, which went on to win the prestigious international Glen Dimplex prize in 2008. Stone’s poems stand apart and are as Sarah Crown stated in the Guardian…’rawly compelling’. He is as poet Matthew Sweeney remarked in a recent poll of the most promising new voices , ‘up there with the best’.

Main description:  Drawing in Ash, is prize-winning poet Will Stone’s second collection from Salt. These compelling poems are divided into three parts, dealing with subjects such as war and genocide, and the Roman ruins of Provence – historic realities which are unpalatable and to which our current society, despite the indulgence of drawing on a vast intellectual and historical warehouse, is unable to properly determine or clarify. The poems of Provence, in particular, deal with the nature of the plethora of ancient ruins that emerge from the earth in that region, like the stubborn backbones of some pre-historic creature, and their peculiar poetic significance for us today.

These poems come from a real existential engagement and follow the old dictum that a poet must respond to his time, how things are now, whilst not letting history off the hook…

Table of contents:
Contents
I
Guided Tour Of The Ruins
The Extinction Plan
Christ On The Cross—Delacroix
Nietzsche At The End
Sometimes This Genius Grows Dark
Ice Warning
Walser’s Last Walk
Secret Of The Picpus Cemetery, Paris
The Lonely Ones
Harrowing
The Clearing
Montaigne’s Flight
Fatal Thrust
Loss Of Habitat
Condolence Packet
In A Lonely Place
Lenz
Checkpoint
I Am Charles Meryon
After Shingle Street
Chopin In Scotland
Horse Cure
Hawkridge
Young Lions With Their Kill
I Am The Reader
The Silence
In Culbone
In The Ancient Cemetery Of Ukkel
The Fears Of Charles Baudelaire
Darkness On Darkness
Fate of the Juvenile Gull
Repeat Offenders
The Antwerp Mannequins
Faces In An Orchestra
Advance Of A Rain Storm
II
Drawing In Ash
The Survivors
The Shriek
Spy Hole
Last Hours In The Flak Tower
Closer
The Clip
History Lesson
Dead Heading
Note Scribbled To The Unsaved
III
Inside an Amphitheatre
Before The Roman Remains
Mistral’s Folly
The Rock Tombs Of Montmajour
Fallen Aqueduct
The Tower Of St Trophime
The Rock Necropolis
Crossing The Camargue
The Towers Of Castillon
Author’s Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

The Extinction Plan

Moments of pain, progress driven,
the unwelcome clarity of time’s incision
enhanced by the new drug day,
where late crimes roll and bask
and suddenly woken eyes, lepers
peer in on hastening apocalypse.

The drone of no return, the settling
of old scores, of charcoal petals,
the cinder path of all that is predicted.
She who never arrived one step ahead
and all around you the embalmed
the catacombed, erect in their niches.

The extinction plan in motion,
as cut price flights steeply climb,
over Ensor’s cornered skeleton.

In order to go on, Schubert pens,
Munch paints Death and the Maiden.
Strindberg runs through the Latin Quarter
brandishing his hands, black and burned
from experiments with sulphur.

Each repeats what has gone before.
The earth can take another sack of fear,
a single life’s strict toiling,
embittered aging, the dead weight of loss,
a case of cherished photographs
and a few last sprigs of joy.


No one wants to be dust.
No one wants their love left out,
but nearly every wheel finds the rail
and follows the tramline to lust.

In one dive billions of krill find God.
Ghostly, like a low gas flame
they go on a while unseen, they exist
to explain the blue whale’s darkness.

Unpublished endorsement:  Whilst shifting the lens slightly from the devastating surveillance of his first collection of poems, Glaciation, Will Stone’s vision remains constant, evolving a cerebral inclination for the sublime image. Drawing in Ash is a remarkable piece of time travel, roaming through the churchyards and back alleys of Europe where Stone frequently memorialises previously untapped biographical moments within extraordinary lives … The Poet adopts the guise of medium and historian in a powerful book of poems that never relents, never misses its targets.

James Byrne

Previous review quote:  At his best, Stone is a poet of place, but of place etherealised and clouded over by a relationship between landscape and emotion that is no less powerful for being tenuous.

Patrick McGuinness
Poetry Wales

Previous review quote:  On Glaciation:

Stone has a definite flair for the striking image and, taken one by one, his jarring visions of a profligate civilization trapped in a fatally debased environment are rawly compelling.

Sarah Crown
The Guardian

Previous review quote:  The sense of the ominous, of a threat that lies beyond pervades the volume, expressed in a vision that combines ecological awareness with a weirdly, and refreshingly, detached view of human actions and bodies (quote from ‘Restoration’)…Stone looks consistently outward to the things people have suffered and done both to themselves and to the planet… At times the poems have a tinge of that non-logical verbal scrambling which, whilst seeming slapdash, is sometimes also the mark of great verbal creativity…Stone’s work is undeniably the real thing.

GREVEL LINDROP
The Warwick Review

Previous review quote:  Stone is hard, urgent and angry: expressions of righteous indignation are rarely attractive and we may not thank Stone immediately for lifting our blinkers, but Salt are to be congratulated for recognizing this important poet… It is clear that Stone has, as poets must, thoroughly absorbed poetic tradition in order to produce a new voice that, while it owes something to what has come before, is nonetheless entirely original.

SIMON DARRAGH
The London Magazine