Rotten Days in Late Summer

byRalf Webb

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In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity.

Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships; 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father; and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life.

The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.

It's a rare thing to come across a debut collection as cohesive and accomplished as Rotten Days in Late Summer. Whether writing on love, class, illness, the working life, death or the complex and multi-faceted nature of human desire, Ralf Webb is never less than razor-sharp. With a storyteller's flair, he evokes a world of shifting terrains in which 'anything could be an omen', and where refrains, motifs, stanza shapes and rhymes call to each other across the pages. In his extraordinary 'Treetops' sequence, Webb navigates the labyrinths of mental illness and the ambiguous prize of health . . . It all feels gloriously, anarchically new

Julia Copus

About Ralf Webb

Ralf Webb is the author of Rotten Days in Late Summer, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the nonfiction book Strange Relations, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His poems, essays, and fiction have appeared widely, including in the London Review of Books, Fantastic Man, Granta and the Guardian. This is his second collection.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780141992730
  • Length: 112 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 8mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 103g
  • Price: £9.99
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