Information

ISBN
9781784632694
Extent
112pp
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
15-Oct-22
Publication Status
Active
Series
Salt Modern Poets
Subject
Poetry
Trim Size
198 x 129mm

The Meanwhile Sites

Synopsis

What is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The ‘meanwhile site’ is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green’s remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal – from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

Meet the author

Praise for this Book

‘I loved these poems. Each one engages with the real world, its ugliness, its beauty, its horror, in a new and fascinating way; each one represents a different way of glimpsing the world. They are all politically and philosophically ambitious and formally innovative. A wonderful collection.’ —Jonathan Taylor

‘Pete Green's poems dislike fences and I love them for that. They are feral, elegant, beautifully observed. I recommend following where they lead you.’ —Helen Mort

Praise for Previous Work

‘Pete Green's poems combine an environmental and at times pastoral sensibility with a lyrical dexterity that can include rhyme and pattern, but there's also a mischievousness and irony at play in the fragmented thoughts and the magnified imagery to prove Green is a poet alive to the challenges of the post-modernist era.’ —Simon Armitage