Blood/Sugar - Softcover

James Byrne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906570280 ISBN 13: 9781906570286

Publisher: Arc Publications, 2009

James Byrne's second collection is both consolidation and innovation. His poems have the liberating strangeness of a true original alongside the essential recognitions we perceive only in the realm of active and serious poetics. These are exhilarating passionate crafted and intellectually-rich poems which inhabit and interpret the paradoxes of experience and imagination with masterly insight, wit and metaphoric agility. This poet operates without a safety net, walking the tightrope of language between heart and mind, understanding, with Gaston Bachelard, that 'the imagination is a form of human boldness' - Penelope Shuttle. 'James Byrne is a phenomenon and "Blood / Sugar" is astonishing. Here is a unique mytho-poetic in which the self moves in and out of focus. This is smart poetry. But one should not for a moment think that the intellectual rigour diminishes the vitality of the work. It does not. It sparkles with wit and irony. It is alive. Byrne already maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, and can move between 'traditional' and 'innovative' modes with ease. He has the tools in the toolbox, so to speak. With razor-sharp wit, an acute intellect and a superb facility with language, these poems are both culturally and intellectually 'learned', but also rhetorically and lyrically confident. Byrne is a complete original' - John Kinsella.

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About the Author:

James Byrne is the Editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine (www.wolfmagazine.co.uk). His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published by Flipped Eye in 2003. Blood / Sugar,is his second collection. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, an anthology of British and Irish poets under 35, to be published by Bloodaxe in 2009, and the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees, forthcoming from Carcanet in 2010. He helped to organize the 'World Poets' Tour' for the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS, London, in 2004 and has translated the Yemeni national anthem. In 2008 he won the Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. As a result his Selected Poems is to be published (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade in 2009. Since 2006 James has taught regular Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications. He was born in 1977 and lives in London.

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