Pretty
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published:27th Jun '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutece, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure. Elsewhere, London 'licks and laps'; an anonymous man 'works his bones with a micro-plane' and translations of Baudelaire and Kojeve rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and 'Little Lord Tory-Tit'. More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pese-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end.
Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy. -- John Burnside * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *
Witty and wide-ranging… Ahren Warner has a claim to be the "poet's poet" of his generation. Even in apparently domestic and personal guise, he's a writer whose work conveys voluptuous but intelligent delight in language and technique. -- Carol Rumens * Guardian *
ISBN: 9781852249779
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 6mm
Weight: unknown
80 pages