Shed
Poems 1980-2001
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published:31st Jul '02
Should be back in stock very soon
Shed, as in the shed at the end of the garden where the ?rst scribblings that begat many of these poems took place, Shed as in the shedding of skins in these poems, the shedding of lives and identities, from the lost President Perdu and the night on the town enjoyed by Smith’s wandering landsman, Charlie Delta, and the seafarer, Abel Baker, to the restless other lives of Eddie in America and the marooned sailor in Medellin. Shed houses poems from all the poetry books by Ken Smith published by Bloodaxe in the last twenty years. It is a journal of two decades of journeys East and West, a deliberation between the longing for home and the longing to keep going through the babble of languages in a world that is all of it borderland and all of it dangerous. Along with The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980, it was superseded by Ken Smith's Collected Poems (2018).
Smith’s writing exists in permanent disagreement with English fashion. He gives at least as much emphasis to speech as to image, often essaying an eloquent bareness that links his work with ballads and anonymous song. A huge cast of overheard characters, wanderers, losers and remembrancers passes through his writing, bound by a common sense of loss and endurance…One of the signs of an important poet is that he or she leaves with an expanded sense of imaginative possibility. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times *
His poems are squeezed out from under the unrelenting pressures of history, politics and the natural elements…some of his poems read like translations from war-ravaged Eastern Europe. -- Charles Boyle * London Magazine *
ISBN: 9781852245719
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 617g
352 pages