Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 11/07/2002
ISBN: 9780224062367
Length: 96 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 9mm x 133mm
Weight: 120g
RRP: £8.00
This collection marks a fascinating point in the poetic career of the late Peter Redgrove, when - at the age of seventy - he decided to strike out in a thrilling new direction.
Using a liberating stepped verse form, he opens up new paths in fresh territory, while consolidating his position as one of the finest poets of the natural world. The questing eye of his imagination is in constant motion: the book is full of doors and stairs and wheels, the movement of light and water, the world's daily transformations. Even his characters are shape-changers - the doctors, dentists, chemists and undertakers are all, in their way, magicians. And, evident throughout the collection, is an undertow of mortality - notably in the extraordinarily moving poems about Redgrove's late father: 'his knowledge went, and mine followed,/ Catch it before/ It leaves like a ghost,/ on these stepped verses'.
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 11/07/2002
ISBN: 9780224062367
Length: 96 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 9mm x 133mm
Weight: 120g
RRP: £8.00
"Redgrove's strengths are a clairvoyant creativity, glittering images and glittering risk...wonderful imaginative leaps of seeing, glancing epiphanies...or sustained surrealities which etch the surprisingness of the world"
"The verbal alchemy with which he transforms his observations and dreams is as assured as ever here. His talent for the erotic is equally undimmed - this book is a pleasure to surrender to"
"He is recognised today as one of the few poets capable of sustained rapture, a hierophant of alchemical mysteries, chronicler of sexual ecstasies, witness to sensual, synaesthetic delights beyond the reach of most of us"
"Redgrove is thunderously, exhilaratingly good"
"I would use the old-fashioned term 'genius' of Redgrove"