Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This Fatal Looking Glass
Poetry. Fiction. "A man in his forties is walking along the embankment of the river Thames. He has recently abandoned his marriage and has thus imperilled his care and responsibility for his son whom he loves. He now does not know if he is experiencing freedom, or a condition of being irrevocably lost. Or are these the same? His brain, or so he has read, is a contorted maze of surfaces (he must look this up). But then what was the reality of the so called outside world? One so seldom saw or touched anything except a surface that of the glittering river, for instance, which was like a looking glass, or like love. Unless one jumped in and drowned, that is. But then, might not life and death seem the same? Especially if one were a poet or a painter. Which he was. Both, I mean." Nicholas Mosley"
The Melancholy of Anatomy
In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic at times nihilistic at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived. Praise for The Fool and The Bee: "Corless-Smith has an extraordinary eye for detail and this meticu...
The Poet's Tomb
Every poem an epitaph, every poem a ticket to ride, from Sappho’s “bittersweet” eroticism to the “wild civility” of Robert Herrick. Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, painter, and translator of canonical poems, and each of these vocations is on view in this memorable defense of poetry as he reads from Virgil to Notley in sight of the impossible blue of Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan and Piranesi’s otherworldly Pyramid of Cestius while contemplating the paradoxes of the finite body of the poet dreaming immortal poetry. —Keith Tuma Querying the embodiment of poetry, Corless-Smith begins in the body of the poet—living and/or dead—and passes from there through the body of the reader in order to argue the mutual construction of the body of a poem as a shared body and a new commons, which, like all things vital to survival—air, water, hope—must be maintained as open and available to all. These succinct, elegant essays perform this maintenance and, in the process, return us to all poetry charged with the energy and insight necessary to continue that maintenance ourselves. —Cole Swensen
Of Piscator
This is a collection of poems by Martin Corless-Smith. Populated by snakes, birds, vines, insects and mysterious lovers, Of Piscator is a dreamscape of natural and manmade jungles.
Swallows
Swallows draws on the various metaphorical implications of the House in its exploration of the uncanny presence and absence of self and world in poetry. From poems concerned with the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of Horace's Sabine Villa--a search determined to locate an actual physical site behind Horace's celebrated verse--to poems in the final section transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while understanding the necessary distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.
Nota
Nota is part travelogue and part philosophical examination. Corless-Smith here makes a compendium: layers of reference, of history, of text over text over text. Invented and real figures watch over a Self who admits to a history beyond the moment of simple consumption. The setting is an England in its Golden Age, a homesick construction to be consumed, with pleasure, in the discomfiting knowledge of its artificiality.
English Fragments
The final volume in a trilogy of alternate selves and alternate literary histories
The Fool & the Bee
Poetry. "A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the 'organic'...British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints)...A stunning, pleasurable book."--Alice Notley "Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout--we are only made richer by this tender work. THE FOOL AND THE BEE is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination."--Peter Gizzi
Bitter Green
The corporeal yet spiritually inclined poems of Bitter Green speak of art and lost love with an epigrammatic defenselessness.
Golden Satellite Debris
The author's 13 collection, one which proves that there is nothing that poetry can't say, and that a book of poems can breathe and walk around in the world and face what is, after all, not the first 'low dishonest decade.'
