Mark Waldron

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Biographical note:  Mark Waldron was born in New York and grew up in London. He writes adverts for a living and lives in east London with his wife and son. The Brand New Dark is his first collection.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718177
ISBN:  9781844718177
Author:  Mark Waldron
Title:  The Brand New Dark
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  10-Jun-10
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  POETRY BANK CHOICE. Mark Waldron’s debut collection The Brand New Dark is a book about sex, eyes, eggs, dogs, death and sausages. Funny, dark, disconcerting and moving, this entertaining collection of accessible poems is a book for all the people who don’t like poetry as well as for the people who do.

Main description:  POETRY BANK CHOICE. Mark Waldron’s debut collection The Brand New Dark is a book about sex, eyes, eggs, dogs, death and sausages. It is a book concerned with our loss of faith in language, a book about our place in the world, about sex and love and a pair of puppets called Dougal and Florence.

This surreal, absurd and entertaining collection mixes the formal with the colloquial, the tragic and the comic, the intensely personal and the comically detached, in a style which is startlingly original without being obscure.

Funny, dark, disconcerting and moving, often all at the same time, the poems are refreshingly direct, spoken in a way that seems to implicate the reader in their situations and discomfiting stories. The Brand New Dark is above all an entertaining collection of accessible poems. A book for all the people who don’t like poetry as well as for the people who do.

Table of contents:
Underneath the Gone Sky
For Them There's Nothing
Dog
At the Official Function, Captain Green
The Very Slow Train
Emap in Australian Review
Carrier
Carrier II
Carrier III (Peace)
Carrier IV (In port)
As a Boy
The King is in His Counting House
Welcome to Disneyworld
The Sheets and Pillowcases
Early this morning
The Well Dressed Street
My Friend Marcie is on the Insensate Beach
Without Me, You're Nothing
There is So Much Green Idling in the Trees
Poor Derek
The Run
I was Writing Recently on the Subject of Mice
Look, From Where I'm Sitting at the Bar
The Sausage Factory
Be Careful
23
The Bears are Skiing through the Trees
This is For You
Question 2
The Luxury Husbands are Working
George Said, Thinking is What the Dead Do
This is Me Speaking
From the Shore
The Sophisticated Odour of Love
Microscopic Autumn
The Barman Turned
Baghdad Lockdown as Troops Hunt for Britons
Gunter is a Medium Sized Bird
The One You See is Only a Replica
In the Space Between the Curtain
Entropy
Yes, Everything You Need is Here
We Think We See Richness, Said Dougal
He's Face Down in the Lake
Listen
In the Park
It's in Black and White
Juice
I Called the Plumber to Say, the Lavatory Does Flush
In the Garden, Birds in Feather Masks
The Dining Table
Their Lobes, Like Earrings, Hang
Would You Excuse me Madam
I Suppose You Could
Look, my Love
His Hand is in My Head
There's a Small, Blurry Dog Jumping Up and Down and Barking
It's Hard Work, Pulling the Ghost Out of a Man
The Brand New Dark is Getting In
Be Quiet,

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Excerpt from book:  

Poor Derek,

whose lukewarm brain in my hot hand I hold.
What thought did slip across this soft wet stone,
did flare in an electric net of gold,
did cling, like a butcher's bag to this throne
of man? What filth, what porn was conjured here,
was collaged from cut pieces of the world,
from stolen ghosts of girls made to appear
in skin-flicks played on silver screens unfurled
like strips of cartilage within this nut
of thinking meat? What dirty dreams were dreamt
when Derek slept, his flicking eyelids shut,
the shell against the soft, sweet pillow leant
and in the shell, this brothel lying thus.
See it, as though he dreams again for us.

Unpublished endorsement :  Mark Waldron is the most striking and unusual new voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time. His offbeat observations and surreal imaginings are set off by a precise management of tone and mordant sense of humour. There is much black comedy in these poems but at the same time it becomes evident that a deeply humane sensibility is at work. His great gift is to face two ways at once: to our received culture, traditional and popular, and towards odd new ways of imagining ourselves. He brings to bear a sharp ear for the absurd coupled with a sure footed clarity and grace of speech. This enables him to write unforeseeable wordplays and images. In this way, his work captures exactly the uncertain mix of what it is to be a person living today – I really cannot recommend it highly enough.

John Stammers

Unpublished endorsement :  The Brand New Dark is a marvel of charm and curiosity. Mark Waldron's poems are generally short, crisp and lyrical, but they are driven by a phantasmagoria of garrulous creatures, spectres and shapeshifters, alter egos and alluring women. This is one of the most original and memorable debut collections for many years.

Roddy Lumsden

Review quote:  This is urgent, thought-provoking poetry – one of the most important debuts for a long time.

Clare Pollard
Magma

Review quote:  Dreams and the body, and their interaction, perhaps the most dominant themes in this weird and wonderful debut collection with its egalitarian blending of mind and body, self and world… Waldron is particularly skilful at pushing an image through its own bizarre logic towards an unexpected and pleasing finale… this striking collection ultimately triumphs, reimagining life’s imponderables as vibrant and tangible – and delightfully kooky – the ‘world’s bright juice’ running through it all.

Emily Berry