Andrew Duncan

Broschiertes Buch

Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry

Beschreibung

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? Any account of the matter must rapidly disclose the fact that where group A proclaims idea X, group B swiftly proclaims X to be untrue. Assimilation and dissimilation are the exuberant flows which make the mill of culture turn. The unbalanced local energies which gave birth to the central horror of possessive individualism, the Empire, and the State as war-machine, do not sound their triumphalist self-praises without conjuring up a reaction in favour of collective values, pacifism, equity, and the languages of the periphery. Poetry has to offer more than the illusion of being in the few rooms where a metropolitan elite solemnly engages in the circularity of authentication. A polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England 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. We contemplate the sublime through the works of Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam. But a second look at poetry in the South jettisons the shallow tricks favoured by High Street cultural managers to reveal a hidden stratum of intellectually sophisticated poets, even in Babylon.

Autor

Andrew Duncan was born in 1956 and brought up in the Midlands. He worked as a labourer in England and Germany after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecoms manufacturer (1978-87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988-91). He has been publishing poetry since his Cambridge days in the late 70s, including Threads of Iron, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, Savage Survivals and, in 2018, a selected poems titled On the Margins of Great Empires. A new collection, With Feathers on Glass, appeared in 2023. He is one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated a lot of modern German poetry. Over the past sixteen years he has also published a substantial amount of literary criticism: The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2006, rev. ed. 2016); Origins of the Underground: The Occlusion of British Poetry, 1932-77, Centre and Periphery (2005, rev. ed. 2016), The Council of Heresy (2009), The Long 1950s (2012), A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 (2015), Fulfilling the Silent Rules (2018) and Nothing is being suppressed (2022).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Shearsman Books
• 2nd edition, revised and expanded
• Seitenzahl: 318
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. September 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 518g
• ISBN-13: 9781848614994
• ISBN-10: 1848614993
• Artikelnr.: 45809874