Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Sarments: New and Selected Poems, Paperback / softback Book

Sarments: New and Selected Poems Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

"This collection is an essential delight; a `book resonant of a life / neither following nor in pursuit', gathering old and new work all equally fresh.

As the epigraph to the first poem attests, `one does not work out of a reaction against but rather out of affection for something.' Like Mayakovsky, John James has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness - and, like the Futurist, to weld the aesthetic to the social.

Here is that rarest poet: able to adequately respond to pleasure, and equally able to create it.

The selection spans 50 years of work in all its subtlety of tone and address - a hybrid of a Welsh `praise' tradition, playfully mannered English reserve, and New York School exuberance.

This is a poetry deftly attuned to various musics, overtly engaged with the visual arts, yet just as happy out in the streets at home and abroad - and more than partial to a walk in the countryside.

The poems of the last decade are singular in their `reach toward the poetry of kindred / where we speak in our work as we seldom do otherwise.' Embrace this New and Selected James: here is an effervescent poetry that can leave nobody indifferent." -Simon Perril"James is decidedly un-English in his love of French and German poetry, in his unembarrassed (and unembarrassing) celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and in his Marxist and republican politics - which seem to legitimate a taste for the finer things on the grounds of international solidarity against a British suppression of the capacity for joy ...

John James is one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry." -John Wilkinson

Information

£14.95

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information