BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Aug-13 | ISBN: 9781907773594 | Trim Size: 198 x 129 mm | Extent: 80pp | Format: Hardback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Forthcoming

SYNOPSIS

‘Neptune Blue’ opens outside the galaxy and quickly zooms into a computer-generated Paris, dancing past the planets as it goes. With poems that fizz with wit and invention, Simon Barraclough’s new collection bursts with crazy hearts and boisterous planets. What do Neptune, Derek Jarman and Edwin Morgan have in common and is Saturn really the undisputed supermodel of the solar system? And with over sixty moons, do its werewolves ever get a night off? If you based a whole new meteorological season on a slippery pool hustler from ‘The Color of Money’, how would such a season feel? Is there money to be made in privatising snow? From the Sun to Pluto; from baby sharks in Miami to the forlorn dogs of Sri Lanka and the unlucky settlers of the imaginary Island of Schalansky; ‘Neptune Blue’ sees Barraclough at his most playful and musical, dishing up a feast for the eyes, the ears, the heart and the mind.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents; We'll Always Have CGI Paris; Being a Woman You Will; Incorrigibly Plural; Hare of the Dog; The Dogs of Trieste; Starfish Heart; Jurassic Coast; Flashbacks of a Fool; Due Cinghiali; St. Francis of the Boston Hilton; Pizza Heart; SoBe It; Mercury; Venus; Earth; Mars; Jupiter; Saturn; Uranus; Neptune; Pluto; The Dogs of Sri Lanka; Mr. English at Home; Celeriac Heart; Soldier of Fortune; Examination at Doom's Door; Roman Heart; Owl Creek Bridge; Tapestry Heart; Spotted Flycatcher; Braille Bird; Magpie Heart; Jumper; In Memoriam Tsutomu Yamaguchi (1916-2010); Logos; Hindenburg Heart; The Remote Island of Schalansky; Old Henry's Advice; Easter Saturday, Hyde Park; Christmas Vixen; Wiki Heart; DMZ; Anti-personnel Heart; Daimon; Everything Must Go; Braille Encore; Yuri Norstein Heart; Grady Seasons; Havisham Heart; Zabriskie Point; Wrigley's Heart; Sol; Notes; Acknowledgements

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“Simon Barraclough dazzles with his luscious iconography, his intriguing observations, obsessions and predilections. These poems are complex, acrobatic, inventive, intelligent, exuberant, funny, tender and … bloody marvellous.” —Annie Freud

“I read it as though I’m reading a phrase book from a new country called Barraclough, a country we should all discover. An excellent book.” —Ian McMillan

“In Neptune Blue, his second collection, Simon Barraclough dazzles with his luscious iconography, his intriguing observations, obsessions and predilections. These poems are complex, acrobatic, inventive, intelligent, exuberant, funny, tender and … bloody marvellous. This is a collection that will ‘rage on in the minds of many’.” —Annie Freud

“Simon Barraclough's new collection offers a rich poetry. The sleuthing bloodhound who detects "the scars and trinkets of our trials, / the circuits, cogs and souvenirs of dance, / millennia of courtship in our glance," could be Barraclough himself.” —Richard Price

“Terse, offbeat vignettes are where Barraclough excels but the highlight is the book's opener, "We'll Always Have CGI Paris", which blurs social commentary, romantic comedy and rhythmic intensity to unlikely effect.” —Ben Wilkinson The Guardian

“Neptune Blue is a dazzlingly inventive collection and a worthy successor to Barraclough’s critically acclaimed first collection. It is a book with a tongue in its cheek, its head way above the clouds and its feet firmly on that ‘blue-green baubled gobsmacker’ we call earth.” —The Graft Review

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS

“A torrential energy.” —John Greening Times Literary Supplement

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Simon Barraclough won the poetry section of the London Writers' Prize in 2000 and is the author of the collections Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt 2008) and Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins 2010). He is also the editor of the multi-poet homage to Hitchcock's seminal thriller, Psycho Poetica (Sidekick Books 2012) and is co-author (along with Chris McCabe and Isobel Dixon) of The Debris Field: Salvaging the Titanic in Word, Sound and Image (Sidekick Books 2013).