Green 532

Synopsis

‘If poetry can sometimes be the right thing for the right reason, then Green 532 has all les mots justes – just notes – to shake the tale loose from the tribe and dance with it. Lurking, like a lark, somewhere between ‘reflection and shadow’, these poems are cosmological forays into the uncertainty that underlies our ability to respond.’

Reviews of this Book

‘When I encountered Randolph Healy’s poetry twenty years ago, I was struck by the way his syntax was evidently a way of exploring and controlling the world. The same qualities of intellectual elegance and inventiveness drive a range of surprising forms in his subsequent writing, where they mingle a wide range of commitments evoking compassion and protest with delicate humour. Healy’s first ambition is always to write a constructed poem, instruction and delight being the natural consequence. I read everything he writes with pleasure and excitement.’ —Jim Mays

‘If poetry can sometimes be the right thing for the right reason, then Randolph Healy’s Green 532 has all les mots justes – just notes – to shake the tale loose from the tribe and dance with it. Lurking, like a lark, somewhere between “reflection and shadow”, these poems are cosmological forays into the “fragile, transitory, precarious” uncertainty that underlies our ability to respond.’ —Charles Bernstein

‘One of the things I like about Randolph Healy’s writing is language’s freedom to remain in its own country, to be all the things it has been wherever it is found. He makes wild and tender constructs of language instances, he shapes and scatters them, he grabs them from far fields and under his nose, but whatever their distances he presses them home, he brings them to the real, and it feels that each moment of this poetical process is arrived at by nothing less than careful thought. So he assembles all his fond language children into a perfect team, the orderliness without which there is no possibility of beauty.’ —Peter Riley

‘Healy’s is a richly social and humorous poetry. A science teacher by profession, he rifles mathematics, biology, neuroscience and linguistics for his themes, and fills his poems with anagrams and acrostics in a spirit of Oulipian joy in the structural possibilities of language.’ —David Wheatley, The Times Literary Supplement