20/09/2022
๐ตcollected & selected poems ๐ต
Leslie Scalapinoโs itโs go horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 surveys the career of one of the English languageโs most groundbreaking and experimental poets. ๐ต Sampling from her early work, filled with fractured narratives and abject sexuality, towards her later offerings, which orbit around a deep spiritualism and refutation of any singular temporal frame of reference, itโs go in horizontal offers an effective means of entering Scalapinoโs oeuvre.
Thomas Bernhard typifies estrangement to oneโs homeland, his work continually haunted by Austriaโs various fascisms, be they pre- or post-war. Thereโs everything you would expect there to be in his collected poems โ lots of talk of distant fathers, sickly landscapes, the miseries of the pastoral, su***de, and all manners of dying. ๐ต An essential volume for any Bernhard fan.
Perhaps more known for his essays, John Berger was an accomplished poet in his own right. Across assonant rhyme, rhythmic verses, and mirrored stanzas, Bergerโs poetry reflects on language, dispossession, and death, accompanied by motherly figures, animal invocations, and lost loves. ๐ต
Published by , Poems 1972-1982, compiles three of Denise Levertovโs strongest works โ The Freeing of the Dust, Life in the Forest, and Candles in Babylon. ๐ต Across, one is confronted by death psalms, proustian memories, and phantasms colored by natural images, anaphoric structures, and rich historical references.
