Mark Granier

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Biographical note:  Mark Granier was born in London but moved to Dublin in 1960, where he has been living ever since. He has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, Airborne (2001) and The Sky Road (2007). He was awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004 and has received two Arts Council bursaries, in 2002 and 2008.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718535
ISBN:  9781844718535
Author:  Mark Granier
Title:  Fade Street
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Feb-11
Extent:  76pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  114 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:  These sensual, compact poems work with concentrated imagery and effects of light and shade. They can be appreciated, like memorable photographs or songs thrown out on to the dark, without any ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ or effort beyond the turning of a page.

Main description:  The title poem in Mark Granier’s third collection, Fade Street, is based on a photograph taken in Dublin in 1878. Positioning itself behind the camera, it sets the photographer’s obsession, to compose and preserve, against the moment, whose vanishing act is part of its vitality. Like photographs, many of these sensual, often short poems work with concentrated imagery and effects of light and shade. The intention is that they be appreciated, like memorable photographs or songs thrown out on the dark, without any ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ or effort beyond the turning of a page.

Table of contents:
Sing, Words
A Photograph of Fade Street, Dublin, 1878
Warmer
Plain Song
False Memory
Naylor’s Cove
Skull
Bicycle Seat
Bull’s Head
Bull-Leap
Portraits of a Grouse-Beater, 1975
Found Landscape
At the Butcher’s in Colmenar
At Sea
Section
The Older Standing Army
One of the Houses
James Joyce Lived In,
Once
Ghost Story
On an Empty Can
Rolling in the Night
a Week After Your Death
The Chaos Ripple
The Doctor
Eclipse
Night, Wind, Dead Leaves
Wake
A Chest of Drawers
Outside, In
Crest
Pocket Venus
There’s Probably No God.
Now Stop Worrying
and Enjoy Your Life
Breasts
Fruit Bats in Sydney
On the Sky Road to Malaga
New Year’s
Critic
Stopwatch
Later Days
Three Riddles and a Limerick*
After Li Po
The Far Side
Dark Mutter
Dream
Lookout
The Last Wolf in Ireland
‘Don’t End with History or the Sea’
Handholds
Departures
Memo

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Excerpt from book:  

Lookout

The lowest branch a bar to help you climb
into the V, then heave through the square hole
in the floor: a nest of plywood, forgotten doors
my cousin banged together one day, for years
cradled in our tallest apple tree. That’s me

on the roof’s warped sheet of corrugated iron,
standing under the sun, staring away
over neighboring trees, roofs, fields, to make out
Howth Head’s cagy embrace, and just below it,
a stubborn flake of ultramarine. I grip

bendy branches: knuckly, sap-green cookers
(too bitter to sink your teeth in, too many to harvest)
and throw my weight from one foot to the other
till the whole shapeless vessel creaks and sways.

Unpublished endorsement:  In Mark Granier's new book, Fade Street, he continues to demonstrate the artist’s eye for the nuances of light that made his earlier work so luminously successful. A determined craftsman, he nevertheless collects the delicate and fleeting moment as surely as history’s long views. He shows the development of a true poet with the promise of more wonders to come; his is a talent to enjoy now and keep watching.

Ian Duhig

Review quote:  Mark Granier is interested in more subtle effects: he has worked as a photographer as well as a writer and these interests coincide in Fade Street, whose title poem reflects on a Victorian photograph.

John McAullife
The Irish Times