Lawrence Cottrell

Broschiertes Buch

Shieling

Beschreibung

"Half wail, half exultation," is how an Apache death song has been described. In a sense, all poetry is a kind of ritual death song-celebrating life, grieving its loss, and conjuring the courage to leave it. Cottrell's Shieling collection does all of this and more in language that is compelling in its musicality-more so than any I've read in a long time-and highly original and apt in its metaphor. Every poem offers a surprise. Cottrell's perspective is informed by such far-flung knowledge and such deep appreciation for the joys life has brought him in childhood, love, and marriage that his comparisons challenge the reader to keep up. One of the most unique features of this work is the poet's use of "obsolete" words, often of Scottish origin, suggesting the community we share with the long ago and far away. These old words offer a kind of consolation in their homeliness born out of a time when people lived closer to the natural world, less insulated from its cold and heat, seeing its ugliness and beauty up close and every day. He manages this comforting romance of words with an ironic take on objects of cliché that chides sentimentalism-sometimes with comedy, often with profundity. Whatever the key of his music in individual poems, the collection refuses easy avenues of escape from facing death, as those avenues risk fully experiencing life. -Edwina Pendarvis

Autor

Doubtless my biography appeared (to me) as a tale in progress, like some right whale breaching a sea, neither of which was there a moment earlier. I guess there was a world antedating my keeping of pieces of it. The extant photographs of neonate and toddler me seem to confirm that theory, so there are a few earliest years of my life about which I know nothing. And, truthfully, this mind's like a net made to catch cetaceans only, entire schools of, say, krill would have left scant impression. So, here's to that first recollection, some jot of time which didn't get away wholly. I'm the sum of it and others, save for the singular way I beat along the wind. Like canvas to a blow, one pouts uniquely, like his fellows but not quite so, things known and felt according to the topographical camberings and concavities of "I." Of this irreducible arrangement of neurons what's to be said, save that a kind of flesh thinks and imagines, has, oddly enough, an incipient emotive perspective, into which experience must or ought fit. One is godlet and helot, sings of paradises lost off-key.But I ramble. All you need to know of me is that I make poems nowadays. Recollect that if you please, since in an hour or an age I shan't.-Lawrence Cottrell

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Dos Madres Press
• Seitenzahl: 80
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juni 2023
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 5mm
• Gewicht: 131g
• ISBN-13: 9781953252807
• ISBN-10: 195325280X
• Artikelnr.: 72719638