Grotesque Tenderness : Volume 48 Paperback / softback

by Daniel Cowper

Part of the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another.

More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people.

In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous.

A tsunami smashes a harbour city into â€œtide-rows of burning debrisâ€; children chase snakes in summer meadows.

The primordial past spins off â€œrogue by-products and flawed replicas,â€ while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering.

But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that â€œthe lit / world goes on livingâ€ and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.