Telling Tales - Hardcover

Agbabi, Patience

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1782111557 ISBN 13: 9781782111559

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2014

Synopsis

Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral,

Poet pilgrims competing for free picks,

Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix

From below-the-belt base to the topnotch;

I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch

when the tales overrun, run offensive,

or run clean out of steam, they're authentic

and we're keeping it real, reminisce this:

Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business.

In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-Century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style.

Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Patience's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of poetry and gives it thrilling new life.

About this title

Review

The liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read - every page a virtuoso performance of language, character and story (SIMON ARMITAGE)

Anyone giving a poetic echo to The Canterbury Tales needs exceptional imagination, human warmth and rhythmical energy; without them, the echo is doomed to fade. But Patience Agbabi has all these things and more: a completely appropriate sense of variety, fun, seriousness and good humour. Stirred all together, they make Telling Tales a compelling collection of story-portraits, at once contemporary and time-honoured. It's a wonderful achievement (ANDREW MOTION)

Patience Agbabi has brilliantly created a Canterbury Tales for a multicultural Britain, about the oversexed and the losers, the damned and the blest, in rap, sestina, text, sonnets and rhyme royal. Responsive to their models in endlessly inventive ways, they are a treat to read, and even better if you know the originals. Chaucer would have been proud of what he has inspired (HELEN COOPER, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge)

Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales is a brilliant, virtuosic take on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as spoken by a dazzling list of contemporary characters in a variety of contemporary idioms. Her use of received and improvised form is masterly, a great entertainment in itself, her wit and sense of poise remarkable.

If Telling Tales is not one of the books of the year or in line for a major prize it will be proof the world has grown very dull indeed. This is a landmark book that extends the domain of poetry. Forget the diviison between live and page. This is live on the page

(GEORGE SZIRTES)

Telling Tales is a carefully constructed wonder tour. Agbabi is a genius. And this is her best work yet (LEMN SISSAY)

A rising star (Observer)

Her poems draw on rap, jive and disco rhythms as much as the formal subtleties of free verse. Agbabi is a fine poet, and her linguistic wit carries satirical fire (Daily Telegraph)

Thrilling. Has a multi-dimensional richness . . . A bold, brassy work (Independent on Sunday on Transformatrix) --Simon Armitage

Book Description

A brilliant re-interpretation of The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century, from one of the UK's foremost poets

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1782111557
• ISBN 13: 9781782111559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144