BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Apr-03 | ISBN: 1876857927 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 200pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

‘There is always a history to the shape of the mind’, wrote Jacqueline Rose recently, and one of the continuing preoccupations of these poems has been both to create a sense of the many forms of that shape and to register the history of the worlds which shape it and to which it responds with pleasure, guilt, anger, irony, hatred or love. These are poems which welcome distraction, in various forms, and which seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, the poems chart a lazy form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century and their phenomena.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Section One 1969–1979; Poem; The Elegy for Spring; Kara Chach; Quiet Arriving; Summing It Up One of These Days; A Happy New Year; Waking Up: 2.10 pm; Politics; Night Ministry; Lullaby; Ritual Slips; Polly Fortune; Red Breath; Hold the Child, Father Sunlight; A Thing of Reason ; Pencil; Fatal Congeries; As We Run Out of the Wet; Man; Bound to a Time; Japan is Sad; Sentinel; Requiem for a Brain ; Notes; Sparkling Fruit Salts; Kino; Lino; Nino; Rhino; Vino; The Yurt: Day One; Tatlin’s Dream ; Curiously Strong; Cover Design After the Event; Any Old Iron; Why Motoring Costs Have Soared; Some Comfort; “the audience”; ‘Life Dreamed is now Life Lived’ (David Gascoyne); Derry; The Political Economy of Art; Underground; Looking at Henry; Endless Demands; Intro; Talking ’Bout Things; Things Reply; Apprehension; Hardly Yippee; We Must Tighten Our Belts; Nothing in my head . . .; Light Determines a State of Absolute Rest ; Out of Date; It Was a Long Lane; I Felt a Hand Grip My Elbow; In Your Face; Endless Demands; In 1938; Section Two Roughly SpeakingPoems from the 1980s; All Our Ends; Still Life; Without Rhyme or Reason; It Had to Be You; The Origins of Love and Hate; Late Capital; Irreducible Blue; So to Speak; Speaking of Life; After Breakfast; Prattle; You Never Said; Time How Short; Red Priest; Interference; Matter and Memory; A Propos; Time How Short; Far and Away; No Resolution; The Night The; Postcards to Spain 1986; 1. A Note on Air and Motives; 2. Coda; 3. Point Blank Future; 4. Wish You Were Here; Postcard to Italy; A Reading; L’Histoire; Small Changes; Guinea on China; High Time; The First Intervention; Solo; Wherever a Head; The Name of Day; Say Nothing; Section Three 1991–2002; Sestina; Tense Fodder; The Garden Party; No Contact; These Days; The Wire; Less and Less; Sleep; This and That; Lino Cut; A Bit Apart; Look Back; Facing Page; Drying Out; New York; Some Title; Much More Pronounced ; Oh Snooty; Oh, To Be in England; Pastoral; After Pope; Laugh Like a Piano; Basic White; Hardihood; Quite Right; A World of Love; Death of Dance; In the Train; North; Living Here Now; Mulch Tumult

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“The questions of war, civic space, and the surreal quality of everyday life command the view in this singular and eloquent work. Moreover the keen intonation of each poem via the handled delicacies of accent and stress deploys language to work some ethical discernment which is far from inconsequential.” —D.S. Marriott

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Ian Patterson was born in 1948 and grew up in Cheshire and London. After a variety of jobs, he now teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published numerous translations, most recently Finding Time Again, the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time from Penguin. He lives in Cambridge with the writer Jenny Diski.