BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
Publication Date: 10-Feb-10 | ISBN: 9781844717743 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 80pp | Format: Paperback
UK Distribution: 
| USA Distribution: 
| Publishing Status: Active
SYNOPSIS
Throughout this collection, opposites collide – reality and delusion, political activism and apathy, friend and enemy, life and death. Messiahs parachute themselves to disused northern fairgrounds, a woman diets until practically invisible, trained apes teach a colony of drunks how to dance, a bingo night fuels familial despair and love, and an airborne cabbage blasts a cyclist into orbit. With precision of language and a colourful, anarchic spirit, Mackenzie’s poems focus on their subjects with humanity and hard-won compassion. They have a light touch, but are never trivial. They are for readers who trust that questions are rarely simple and answers never final. Ironic and humorous, complex and engaging, you can’t do without The Opposite of Cabbage.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Light Storms from a Dark Country; Voices; The Listeners; White Noise; Scottish Sonnet Ending in American; Fallen Villages of the North; Moving On; Scotlands; Nuclear Submarines; Everyone Will Go Crazy; The Loser; While the Moonies are Taking Over Uruguay; Berlusconi and the National Grid; Shopping List; Patenting The; Bananas; Scotland; How New York You Are; The Look; Hot Shit; Slimming; Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen; Homes of the Future Exhibition; In the Last Few Seconds; Benediction; Hospital; Visiting Hour; Advice from the Lion Tamer to the Poetry Critic; A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses his Star Pupil; The Kingdom; Married Life in the Nineties; The Deconstruction Industry; Hangover Hotel; Edinburgh in Summer; Jacko Holed Up In Blackfriars Street B and B??; My Dentist, Aniela; Breaking the Hoodoo; Sevenling (Elizabeth had II); Plastic Cork; Sky Blue; The Preacher’s Ear; Holiday at the New Butlins; Glory Box; The Scuffle
PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK
“Restrained, intelligent, quietly ironic poems, so precise and assured in their craft that they sometimes sail into liquid light.” —Helena Nelson
“The sluice of news, the creative writing biz and grimly comic crowd-behaviour: Mackenzie is appalled, amused and attracted all at the same time. But it isn’t all Desolation Row and the poems here of loss and love pierce through and touch.” —Richard Price
“Rob A. Mackenzie’s vibrant, kaleidoscopic poetry displays a playful, witty and fertile imagination. But sometimes, just sometimes, it dips into a deep reflection on the frailty of our mortality such as in the exquisite poem, ‘In the Last Few Seconds', which took my breath away.” —Bernardine Evaristo
“Rob Mackenzie’s Happenstance pamphlet The Clown of Natural Sorrow combined a precise eye with deftness and a good-natured voice which controlled its subject-matter to considerable effect. Those same qualities are present in his collection The Opposite of Cabbage; but these poems are also tougher, often bleaker. Mackenzie is equally unafraid of both Idea and Sentiment, and manages to handle both in poetry which is tight in its formal elements and wide-ranging in its scope. The sense throughout of a life being lived, examined and framed intelligently is enormously satisfying.” —James Sheard
PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS
“Nudging at the curious in the everyday is typical of Mackenzie’s work … These are honest poems with a humane touch that takes them beyond their surface familiarities. A small book but it’s consistently interesting.” —Jim Burns Ambit
“As they say, you can't break the rules unless you know them, and Mackenzie's clearly qualified to break them.” —Tim Love Literary Reviews
“Intelligent, well-crafted poems. Witty and humane, with a quiet quirkiness.” —Hamish Whyte
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow and lives in Edinburgh. His previous work includes The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt 2009) and two pamphlets: Fleck and the Bank (Salt 2012), which dramatized a bank employee’s life during the financial crisis, and The Clown of Natural Sorrow, (HappenStance Press 2005). Carrie Etter, in the TLS, wrote that his first collection impressed “with its distinctive style and energetic exploration of the way we live now.” He is reviews editor for Magma Poetry magazine.
