Claire Trévien

Biographical note:  Claire Trévien was born in 1985 in Brittany. She is a poet, critic and literary translator. Her writing has been published in a wide variety of literary magazines including Under The Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Warwick Review, Nth Position, and Fuselit. Earlier this year she published an e-chapbook of poetry with Silkworms Ink called Patterns of Decay. She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and Noises Off. She was the winner of Leaf Book's 2010 Nano-Fiction Competition.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718665
ISBN:  9781844718665
Author:  Claire Trévien
Title:  Low-Tide Lottery
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  29-Jun-11
Extent:  36pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  3 mm
Weight:  54 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 4.99
Price:  USD 8.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Low-Tide Lottery is an introduction to the work of new poet Claire Trévien. This is an exuberant collection that rummages in the dirt and the rust of the everyday in search of beauty. It crackles with imagination, rubbing history together with the present to create unexpected, wild imagery.

Main description:  Low-Tide Lottery is an introduction to the work of upcoming poet Claire Trévien. This is an exuberant collection that rummages in the rust of the everyday in search of beauty. It crackles with imagination, rubbing history together with the present to create unexpected, wild imagery. Bodies become machines, Minotaurs and ancient Greek gods stalk the streets of Paris. Both theatrical and intimate, the author’s native Brittany is a backdrop to many of these poems.

Table of contents:
Sing Bird
Journee des Brouettes
The Swan
His story
Belleville
Love from
1789
The Launderette
Mere
Entrepreneurs
The Machine
Low-tide Lottery
Rusty Sea
Beg an Dorchenn
L'Air du Temps
The Naked House
Homecoming
Novella
Ties
Listening to Charles Ives

Excerpt from book:  

Homecoming

We meet again in the park: helmets on turnstiles,
fags put out against the snout of the sprung horse.
You sit on the saddle, cross your fake crocodile
boots. I hunch my back to hide my height.

No paste can hide the constellations on my nose,
your lips are the colour of a prune past its date.
You roll a joint like a tune, lit up, shift weight
— your legs open, a smile playing at your lips.

The group drops like bin bags on the swings.
I scrape the varnish off my nails and recall,
'best friend', how your teeth typewrote with
the cold our tales: you made music from strings.

I am the underlined blank in your sentences;
my eyes are blue and yours are getting browner.

Unpublished endorsement:  Whenever I read new poetry I’m looking for someone else’s delight in language and ideas; for work that commands and sustains my attention. What I never expect, but what I found in Claire Trevien’s work, is a voice already so mature and refined it reads like a previously untranslated classic rather than a debut. These are serious, visually stunning poems of nationality, history and memory, but they’re personal and generous in their wit, as formally innovative as they are endlessly engaged and engaging. Reading them is like spending an hour in the company of someone you secretly admire. The world could do with fewer blurbs and more great poetry so I’ll leave it at that.

Luke Kennard

Unpublished endorsement:  Claire Trévien conjures Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the French Revolution for the twenty-first century […] an accomplished, exhilarating and innovative debut.

Michelle McGrane

Unpublished endorsement:  Auden said that the first sign of an authentic gift in any poet was a passion for language, and she has that richly, but she possesses other vital resources too: an engagement with history, a talent for expressing the intellect through the senses, a subtle weave of intimacy and openness, and all the best things that French culture gives its children. She hears the silence after the tempest – and knows how to make us attend to it too.

Michael Hulse

Unpublished endorsement:  This is fresh, exuberant, intellectually serious poetry, enriched by a French passport and a French library; Claire Trevien draws fruitfully on her joint heritage to create poems infused with formal questioning, linguistic vivacity and local colour. History, family, personal experience express a heirarchy of memory and questioning, made sharper by its access to — and sometimes drift between – two languages, each with its own life. There is a lot happening in these poems, and it is never — as the poem 1798 almost puts it — ‘Alors qu‚il ne se passe rien'. An exciting first pamphlet.

Katy Evans-Buah