Published by Jonathan Cape, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback
£9.00
Author:
Adam Thorpe
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780224079440
£9.00
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780224079440
Published: 17 May 2007
Adam Thorpe's fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path set against the 'insomniac' motorway; industrialised apples against wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and 'the slight bruise of doubt'.
Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend's suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves.
There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty. The book is full of such traces, delicate and fugitive: the poet's grandmother retrieved through her ninety-year-old bookmark of rose petals; the unvoiced suggestion of his mother's voice on an answerphone; the memory of a vanished native chief in a Canadian mountain's shadow...
Only registered users can recommend books. Please use the buttons below to either create a new account, or sign-in to an existing account.
[He] writes like a man in love with language, with the sheer possibilities of words. His work is musical, brimming with slant rhyme and assonance, and also subtle in its effects
- Poetry Review
The essential element about Thorpe the poet is that he is unusual among many contemporaries for possessing a superbly honed ear for the cadences of language and speech
- Guardian
Thorpe's poems are finely scored for the voice, but they go beyond the recognisable into the mystical
- Observer
A writer with exceptional gifts
- Sunday Times
There are never going to be many poets in any generation who leave you strapped for superlatives; excitingly, Thorpe is one of them
- Literary Review
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992 and reissued in Vintage Classics, and he has published two books of stories and six poetry collections – most recently Voluntary.
