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