Owen Lowery

The Crash Wake and other poems (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021

In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer. During his months of recovery from three brain bleeds, a shattered right arm, multiple seizures and pulmonary bleeding, Lowery returned to writing poems, many of which address the strangeness, the disorientation, of his situation and that of the world in general. Lowery wrote these poems amidst reports of Government and health initiatives that suggested potential utilitarian sacrifices of 'the vulnerable'. Completed shortly before his death in May 2021, the fear and loss of the vulnerable and the voiceless haunt many of the poems.

In the 'Crash Wake' sequence, Lowery adopted a twelve-line form. Twelve lines was as long as he could manage to sustain a poem at the time, due to repercussions from his head injury. The form also allowed him to take what Keith Douglas called 'extrospective' snapshots of the new environment in which he found himself: streets empty of people, an Italian village cut off by the army, a train in India killing migrant workers in their sleep. Recovery, nature and love fill the gaps in this changed world. Lowery's final book appreciates afresh landscape and wildlife, family and marriage, the importance and fragility of life.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Northern House
• Seitenzahl: 160
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Oktober 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781800171770
• Artikelnr.: 62646300

Autorenporträt

Owen Lowery was born in 1968. A British Judo Champion while still at school, he toured the UK and Europe competing and demonstrating. Before he could go to University he suffered a spinal injury while showing his skill for charity. He has since been tetraplegic. He gained a BA from the Open University, an MA in Military History from the University of Chester, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Bolton. He completed a PhD for Bolton joining creative and scholarly work relating to his own experience of living under perpetual threat of death to the World War II poet Keith Douglas. His Examiner for the Doctorate was Keith Douglas's Editor and Biographer Desmond Graham. His poetry has appeared in Stand and PN Review. He was listed for the Bridport Prize, the Welsh Open Poetry Competition, the Virginia Warbey Prize, and the International Sonnet Competition. His first Carcanet/Northern House book was Otherwise Unchanged. The artist Paula Rego, contacted through Anthony Rudolf, judged his poems relating to her work outstanding and she allowed her paintings to be part of his Carcanet book Rego Retold. He has read at the London South Bank, at many venues round the UK, and the BBC produced a TV programme about him. He married Jayne Winstanley whose love has been integral to much of his work. He recovered sufficiently from a car crash, that they both suffered, for him to produce the poems in this book. He had a sudden illness and died in May 2021. He was at that time preparing this book for publication, and many of his personal, present tense comments have been left as he wrote them.