John Siddique

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718245
ISBN:  9781844718245
Author:  John Siddique
Title:  Full Blood
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:  128pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  192 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:  Full Blood is John Siddique’s fourth full-length collection of poems for adults. Erotic, physical, completely open and fully engaged with the moral urgency of life, Siddique tackles his themes robustly and yet with great sensitivity, constantly defining and reimagining what it is to be a man in today’s world, living fully in the moment. Marking a serious development in the writer’s work (as well as the mind of this significant British poet) this is Siddique’s most emotionally-charged work to date.

Main description:  Intelligent, sensual, highly erotic, manly and beautifully mortal – Full Blood is the result of a fifteen-year labour of love. This is literature in its most empowered state, and poetry at its most radical, lyrical and affecting. Full Blood invites you in easily, and then turns into one of those books that you can’t put down because it has become your close friend.

John Siddique was born in 1964. His discovery of his local library when young began his life-long love affair with what words mean and how they sit together. He is the bestselling author of Recital — An Almanac, Poems From A Northern Soul, The Prize and now Full Blood. He is the co-author of the story/memoir Four Fathers.

He has contributed poems, stories, essays and articles to many publications, including Granta, The Guardian, Poetry Review, and The Rialto.

The Prize, published to wide acclaim in 2005, was nominated for the Forward Prize. His children’s book Don’t Wear It On Your Head was shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry Award in 2007. On publication in 2009, Recital was described as “one of the most important British poetry books of the last twenty years” by Lauri Ramey of CSULA. Jackie Kay describes Siddique’s writing as “A brilliant balancing act.”

Siddique is admired for his captivating readings and his infectious love of literature. He teaches poetry and creative writing in the UK and abroad, and has worked with The British Council, The Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and The Poetry Society. He has a website at www.johnsiddique.co.uk

Table of contents:
Contents
Prologue
Every Atom
Via Negativa
Thirst
The Knife
Love Poem
Memorial Day
Mary
One Monday Afternoon in Mytholmroyd
Rachel Last Springtime
Coffee Mornings
The Learning Skin
The Last Poem
Kabul
One Hundred
One Hundred
Afghanistan 1970, Stopped
Filey
Blue
I Think of You
Parenthesis
Blackbird, Silence Your Shrill Song
My Beautiful Fantasist
Pig
There Were Birds
True Roses of England
Reclaiming the Body
Name
Between the Words
Adultery
Most of the Things That Need to be Seen
are Seen with the Eyes Closed
Lightly
Green Dogs
For Our Final Fuck of the Afternoon
Sunday
Love Poem
Via Negativa
The Tree of Life
Making
Detail
Unwritten
Circumnavigations
Trial One — The Root of the Root
Circumnavigations
Trial Two — Ritual of the Sun
Circumnavigations
Trial Three — Action
Circumnavigations
Trial Four — Sin Eating
Circumnavigations
Trial Five — A Gospel of Silence
(Pygmalionism)
Circumnavigations
Trial Six — Shadows
Circumnavigations
Trial Seven — Love and the Body
Tree of Life
Xibulba
Lustre
Xibulba
Why?
Full Blood
Gauntlets
We Will Wake at Dawn
Mary
Blackpool Rock
Rain Song
How to Sleep
How to Become a Moth
On Becoming a Writer
Bailero
The Road
Become
Eagle
Love Poem
Jali
Kitying
Abha
Maria
Junmo
Flowing
Sky Burial
A Place of Silence

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Excerpt from book:  

Thirst

Imagine thirst without knowing water.
And you ask me what freedom means.
Imagine love without love.

Some things are unthinkable,
until one day the unthinkable is here.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.

Some things we assume just are as they are,
no action is taken to make or sustain them.
Imagine love without love.

It is fear that eats the heart: fear and
endless talk, and not risking a step.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.

Fold away your beautiful thoughts.
Talk away curiosity, chatter away truth.
Imagine love without love.

Imagine believing in the whispers,
the screams and the gossip. Dancing to a tune
with no song to sing inside you.
Imagine love without love.

Unpublished endorsement:  John Siddique's new collection takes the reader down the street and round the world. This is a brave and a bold book of linked poems whose subjects range widely from love to hate, from war to peace, from childhood to adulthood, from the real world to the world of myth. Siddique is interested in everything. Tender and open-hearted, these poems are full of wonder at the power of love. Dreamy and yet direct, this is Siddique's most powerful collection yet.

Jackie Kay

Unpublished endorsement:  In this beautiful new collection John Siddique seduces the reader with his life-affirming reflections on our mortality and a profoundly moving poetic interplay of tenderness, love and eroticism.

Dr. Claire Chambers