Chance of a storm / Rod Mengham.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Mengham, Rod, 1953- author.

Language:

English

Genre:

• Poetry.

Physical Description:

92 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Carcanet, 2015.

Summary:

In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. While the lyric is central to Mengham's work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these poems, prose-poems and modernist fables. There are echoes of Homer, Dante, Eliot, Pound, but also the deadpan of public tannoy announcements, the white-noise of urban soap-box oration, and the strange syntax and mannerisms of shampoo bottle blurbs. Cast through these contemporary styles, Mengham's historically-aware poems become something unrecognisable: like Rilke's description of a sculpture that 'sees you from every angle', his word-sculptures see across time with an eerie plasticity, surfing literatures and cultures over millennia, even within a single sentence. Mengham is a master of the micro-paragraph, a condensed, supercharged poetry bristling with alien clarity like, to borrow a phrase from the poems, 'angelic cattle-prods'. Book jacket.

Contents:

• After Archilochus 9
• Batavia 10
• The Westralipede 12
• Delivering the Device 13
• Terra Infirma 14
• 9/11 is the date when the CIA-funded coup removed the Allende government from power In Chile 15
• Lady with Vermin 16
• Five Year Plan in Four Years 18
• Suffixes 20
• Bend the Bow 22
• The Debauchery of Nuances 24
• Engineering Works 25
• Ad Nauseam 26
• Repeat This 27
• Coal Train Still Life 28
• At the Furthest Point from Land 29
• The Voice Left Me the Opening and Closing Word 30
• Icarus Alight 31
• Five Portraits 34
• Nature and Costumes 37
• Lo-st 39
• Carmagnole 41
• Paris by Helen
• To Repeal the Spoils 43
• On the Formation of Splinter Groups 44
• Fears before Bedtime 45
• Assange Militia 46
• Love in Avarice 47
• Canticle of the Rivets 48
• Tweeze That 49
• Someone Just Walked Over My 50
• Translation 51
• One is Not a Number 52
• Through a Blow-Pipe 53
• A Communication-Cord Touched by the Unknown 55
• A Crate of Empties 56
• Diary of an Imperial Surgeon 57
• Klangfarbenmelodie 60
• Will O' the Wisp 62
• Mayo Mayo 65
• Herne 67
• Occasional limit 69
• Prairie Rose 70
• The Cloak 71
• Turned to Tongue 74
• The Commission 76
• A Turn around Agnes Thurnauer 77
• Storm Songs 85.

Notes:

Poems.

ISBN:

• 1784100838
• 9781784100834

OCLC:

915120770