John Wilkinson

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Biographical note:  John Wilkinson is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English, Committee on Creative Writing and the College at the University of Chicago. He was born in England and lives in Chicago and Cambridge.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718146
ISBN:  9781844718146
Author:  John Wilkinson
Title:  Flung Clear
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  25-Nov-10
Extent:  240pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  360 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  These poems of the 1980s and 1990s form a volume of yearning for volume in the numbed and set self – a yearning to which the response is felt too often in sexual and political pain and the infliction of pain on others; but where what surfaces nonetheless is song, out of these poems’ strange embodiment of the times. Now Flung Clear looks troublingly prescient, and therefore much more readable than when first published in 1994.

Main description:  First published in 1994, Flung Clear collects John Wilkinson’s poems of the late 1980s and early 1990s, written in Birmingham and Cairo. Now recognised as a central English work of the period extending from the Miners’ Strike to the first Gulf War, Flung Clear combines political urgency, self-invention and poetical scope. The collection includes the pamphlets Hid Lip, Bones of Contention, The Speaking Twins, Stages along the Lichway and The Nile.

Table of contents:
Contents
Hid Lip
A Thread
Gallery
Round
Cajoling
Second Home
Head First
The Outing
In Rowheath Fields
If I Had a Hammer
The Cold Day of Light
Bones of Contention
The Day’s Residues
Your Editor Responds
This Correspondence Must Now Cease
Drumming From Afar
Strand
Swamp Rock
The Overground
Take This Down
The Night’s Conclusions
Putting The Otherworld In Its Place
Key Grip
Precinct
A Chinese Protest
The Programme’s Dream
Actual Time
Sequel
Narrative
The Speaking Twins
The Speaking Twins
The Interior Planets
Boot Sale
Red Letter Day
Shoulder High In Croydon
Varnishing
A Falling Dream
Staff Of Life
Revisiting The Bedside
Channel Crossings
The Inner Turn
Laboratory Test Report
Clash Of Tongues
Where Were You?
Hard Times At The Health Farm
Lines On The Pergamon Museum
Corporation Street
From A Smoking Mirror
Cast-Off
The World Series
Making His Point For Him
Harmolodics
Enter The Neat
The Den Of Thieves
For Keeps
Digging Further Down
False Finish
The Greenhouse Effect
Home At The Range
No Mess Self Seal
The Nursery Slopes
The Upstairs Room (Gospel Version)
The Dream Of The Wise Baby
Stages Along The Lichway
Envoy
Dicing With Death
Desert Varnish
A Moses Basket
Spread-Eagle
Mood Music
Minicab
Another Call On Your Time
Exchange Mechanism
Demo Release
Greet, In East Birmingham
Report On The Sector
Rallying
Silver Bromide
In Care
Steps To Be Taken
Love’s Shadow
Only Visible Elsewhere
Whatever You Say
New Methods
Inherited Fractals
An Acceptable Level
The Nile

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Excerpt from book:  

Boot Sale

On hold at the end of a line
you who’ve had it coming,
Stave it on offer. In all
directions hope held out
adheres like milk threads,

sucking for juice, heartfelt,
spider & fly both.
It’s so positive.
Another nest you hollow draws
its string to deliver,

adds to the great convention
seen close in a gun-grey
steel chair next to you,
Rocking smug, glossing
lenten weightlessness,

the officer on duty bound
to slake the mournful
drainage with least pressure,
fattens you for new trade
For tender, tender, tender.

Previous review quote:  “John Wilkinson’s Effigies Against the Light for its sheer verbal inventiveness and unheard-of melodies made much contemporary poetry seem straightforwardly pedestrian”

Adam Phillips

Previous review quote:  “John Wilkinson’s taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry.”

Patrick McGuinness

Previous review quote:  “John Wilkinson’s a powerful and intent poet whose language is densely charged with energy-traces: it’s rich with verbs, the sense of happenings, deeds, potentialities, necessities, results.”

Roy Fisher