Items related to Electric Light
Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.
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Review:
Seamus Heaney's 11th collection of poems, Electric Light continues his excavation of childhood, his vivifying love of nature and his quest into the meaning of poetry itself in an utterly pleasurable and satisfying way. As the poet squares up to his own mortality, many of the poems are dedicated to the memory of lost friends and poets, such as Joseph Brodsky, and yet the urgency and optimism of new birth is a lively and forceful presence in the book. "Bann Valley Eclogue" prophesises a time when "old markings / Will avail no more to keep east bank from west. / The valley will be washed like the new baby". In "Out of the Bag", the child narrator believes that the doctor brings the newborn from his lined bag. The doctor, "like a hypnotist unwinding us" is cloaked in luxury in his camel coat with its spaniel-coloured, fur-lined collar and like a god, he makes baby's bits appear "strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling--A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock / A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole". Childhood is an unfading, unfailing source in Heaney's work and is caught with a breathless vitality, that is both "earthed and heady". "The Real Names" revisits the schoolboys who played Shakespeare: Owen Kelly as "Sperrins Caliban" with "turnip fists" and "some junior-final day-boy" as Miranda. "Catatonic Bobby X" plays Feste, "With his curled-in shoulders and cabbage-water eyes / speechlessly rocking... Me in attendance, watching sorrow's elf / Bow his head and hunch and stay beyond us". This poem has the humour, exactness, scope and tenderness of Heaney at his best. His language is as muscular and inventive as ever. He subverts the verb "waver" into a noun in "Perch" and idiom meets innovation in words such as "rut-shuddery", "flood-slubs" and "adoze". His address achieves great inclusiveness, extending the local to the universal, invoking the people who first named his world, and granting them meaning and place in the wider one. He seeks to be surefooted, to reach a clarity of understanding, asking in the wonderfully satiric "Known World", "How does the real get into the made-up?" Once more, Heaney demonstrates with humility, grace and lightness how poetry can "hold / In the everything flows and steady go of the world". --Cherry Smyth
Review:
"Arguably the finest poet now writing in English."-James Shapiro, "The New York Times Book Review"
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- PublisherFaber & Faber
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0571207049
- ISBN 13 9780571207046
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages96
- Rating
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