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In 2008, Shearsman Books published Elisabeth Bletsoe's long-awaited collection, Landscape from a Dream. We now offer a volume that collects all of her earlier work, previously published in small-press editions that have long been out of print.
This book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre’s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem’s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.
Landscape from a Dream is Elisabeth Bletsoe's first collection in ten years and offers startling evidence of a powerful voice that should be better known. Very much a poet of place, Elisabeth Bletsoe fuses elements of folklore, botany, literature, myth and narrative into a poetry that is at once feminist in spirit, forthright, and - to a certain extent - at odds with the prevailing British poetic styles, whether conservative or radical. Rooted in the landscape of her native Dorset, this is poetry of deep observation, but within that she also gives voice to some of Thomas Hardy's heroines - not just Tess Durbeyfield, but lesser-known female characters such as Marty South in The Woodlanders - characters who are much a part of this Dorset landscape as Bletsoe's poetry is. And the voices they gain are not the voices in Hardy's narratives, but strong, independent voices who have thrown off their creator.
Does what is true depend on where you are? or, can we speak of a British culture which varies gradually over the 600 miles from one end of the island to the other, with currents gradually mutating and turning into their opposites as they cross such a distance? In Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry Andrew Duncan (a published poet himself) identifies distinctive traditions in three regions of the Britsh Isles providing a polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England while revealing the struggle for ‘cultural assets’. The book exposes the possibility that the finest poets of the last 50 years have lived in the outlands, not networking and neglecting to acquire linguistic signs of status. Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry provides insightful accounts of major poets such as Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam.
This genealogical study focuses on the work of five contemporary British poets in order to locate them in a counter cultural tradition that is informed by strategic responses to ‘state terrorism.’ It identifies some historical moments of ruptures, such as the persecution of the Celtic druids by the Romans, the killing of the Welsh bards by Edward I, the appropriation of bardic materials by Romantic poets writing in a post-French Revolution era, and the beatnik response to a post-World War bipolar world in order to contextualise and discuss the poets of British Poetry Revival writing under Thatcherism. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s notion of shamanism as ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy,â€...
This study presents the history and current state of women's experimental poetry in Britain and places it within wider social and political contexts. Ranging from Geraldine Monk's ventriloquising of the Pendle witches to Denise Riley's highly self-critical lyric poems, from the multimedia experiments of Maggie O'Sullivan to the globally aware, politicised sequences of Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke, this book theorises women's alternative poetry in terms of Julia Kristeva's idea of 'women's time' and of the female poetic voice constantly negotiating with dominant systems of representation.
Three Piece Bathing Suit - MJ Weller's blarting visual performance score & close reading of both pop & complex textual poetries & playful sounding in feminized streams of constant warm ellipsis fide et fiducia ...
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In this poem-cycle, each bird was observed in its native habitat within the boundaries of the diocese and then linked back to the Sherborne missal through religious iconography, ... methods of illumination as well as bird mythology.
Collected critical essays examine contemporary poetry in terms of cultural geography. Key themes are place and identity; literary cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice; the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries; landscape, language, and form.