J.T. Welsch

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Biographical note:  JT Welsch grew up in Waterloo, Illinois, a small farm town across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. After studying music in Boston, he immigrated further east to study screenwriting and poetry at Royal Holloway in London. Earlier this year, he completed a PhD in Manchester, where he currently lives, writes, and teaches at various universities. Orchids is his first book of poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718023
ISBN:  9781844718023
Author:  J.T. Welsch
Title:  Orchids
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Dec-10
Extent:  48pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  3 mm
Weight:  72 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Orchids springs from the margins of contemporary masculinity. A rich undercurrent of melancholy and desire seethes beneath the cool rhetorical playfulness of these monologues, as anguished speakers face the unfeasibility of confession. Beyond their fantastic flights and metamorphoses, these poems remain most troubled by the everydayness of their melodramas.

Main description:  The poems of Orchids spring from the margins of contemporary masculinity. A rich undercurrent of melancholy and desire seethes beneath the cool rhetorical playfulness of these lyrical monologues, as anguished speakers face the unfeasibility of confession.
The ghosts of a shared cultural imagination also haunt these “stifling” and skewed domestic spaces: Caravaggio’s castrated head of Goliath confronts existential crisis in an airport hotel shower. Dead gay film icons explain themselves by invoking Superman comics and Dostoevsky. A love poem beginning with familiar sentiments takes refuge among phantom victims of the Reign of Terror.
Beyond such fantastic flights and metamorphoses, Orchids remains most troubled by the everydayness of its melodramas, so that the physical act of washing up inspires a set of meditations on the self and body, a creeping weed and the man from the phone company each pose some unspeakable threat, and an innocent bit of teenage cross-dressing gives way to an irreconcilable sense of loss.

Table of contents:
Orchids
The Mirror Stage
Dún Laoghaire Postcard
Meditation on Washing Up
A Rejection of Marriage
La Grande Guerre Façades (1964)
The Man from the Phone Company
Baseball
A Late Cary Grant as Sherlock Holmes
Screen Tests
The Artist as the Head of Goliath (c. 1610)
Rievaulx Abbey
The Virgin in Prayer
The Pelagian Heresy
Coppice
Formby
Resurrection Man
He Do Star Wars In Different Voices
Bed
The Vine
Echo
Marriage
Heimath (Home)
Camille sur son lit de mort (1879)

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Excerpt from book:  

The Mirror Stage

There I am, Lord Leighton’s
Flaming June, blu-tacked
at the foot of the bed, a trick
of perspective in the fuzzy,

Pre-Raphaelite light of dawn.
Back from where our toes meet,
urged by the kiss in every crease
of that eponymous silk flame,

I expand into thighs drawn up
toward such a torso. More than
the obvious spill of hair, I feel
sea air moving over my arms

and my jaw from a window
not behind my dreaming head.
Nothing completely breaks the
spell. I choose to remain hopeful.

Unpublished endorsement:  Orchids is a distinguished debut: clever but emotional, ingenious but affecting. The poems are a self-sufficient pleasure, and promise very well for the future.

Andrew Motion

Unpublished endorsement:  Rapid, surprising and unlikely, JT Welsch’s poems spin brilliant variations on the recession, translation, gender studies and war. Strangely and completely convincingly, these subjects are refracted through the love poems which comprise this pamphlet. Hammered out in stanzas which show an inviting formal authority and are a pleasure to read, Orchids re-routes the work of his great St. Louis predecessors for the 21st century.

John McAuliffe