Living Here - Softcover

Rattenbury, Arnold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0904872262 ISBN 13: 9780904872262

Publisher: Katabasis, 1996

Synopsis

Arnold Rattenbury has lived for some 35 years in the slate country of North Wales, where almost all his poems have been written. Images of a mountainous, deep-valleyed terrain, its dead industries, living traditions, legends and history abound therefore; but the present book's title 'Living Here', also refers to existence under a pall of capitalism's greed. No passive existence, however. Often bitter, his poetry here, as in five previous volumes, is always socialist, thrusting ahead out of a long history. So too his poems inhabit traditional forms -- but informally.

About this title

Review

'A wonderful, incomparable, dissident kind of post-Georgian poetry, unyielding in its intellectual rigour, its craft or its politics.' -- Scratch

'Despite the relentlessness of these poems, each is tightly written in a mixture of free verse and rhyme, a bitterness tamed into poetry.' -- PQR

'Passionately attentive to the metaphoric and analogical implications of the natural and human worlds... a very fine collection.' -- Stand

'The poems, often dark and bitter... his voice vacillates between anger and regret, but is always precise and focused.' -- Chapman's

About the Author

Born in China and aged 80 in 2001, Arnold Rattenbury has lived for some 35 years in the slate country of North Wales, where almost all his poems have been written. His five previous poetry collections are: 'Second Causes' (Chatto and Windus, 1969); 'Man Thinking' (The Byron Press, 1972); 'Dull Weather Dance' (Peterloo, 1981); 'The Frigger Makers' (Shoestring Press,1994); 'Morris Papers' (Shoestring Press, 1996).

Edition details

• Publisher: Katabasis
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0904872262
• ISBN 13: 9780904872262
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80