Cracked Skull Cinema (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Mr David Briggs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784632074 ISBN 13: 9781784632076

Publisher: Salt, 2019

Synopsis

Cracked Skull Cinema offers poems on culture and society, colonialism and its legacies, media and power. Set between these are homages and reflections on middle age, on life’s loves and losses. Writing with characteristic flair, finesse, and moral insight, Briggs examines the twin questions of how to make the right choices, how to accept their price.

About this title

Review:

Briggs turns out to be setting up a tension between the coldly analytical and the irrational, the grittily realistic and the romantic, which means you can’t help viewing the later pieces from two diametrically opposite viewpoints, too. It’s a neat trick, and all the neater for never feeling like a trick at all.

Author: Matt Merritt Source: Magma

What his new book shows is that his sense of poetic vocation has sharpened to a point at which a real kind of poetry makes its way through him, being shaped and shorn with enormous skill, but possessing its own life and duende.

Author: David Morley

There is an elegance to the construction of these poems which I can’t help but admire and there is enough humour and skewed nostalgia in the collection to keep the pages turning.

Author: Steve Spence Source: Stride

Briggs’s poems are technically accomplished; he has located and mastered all sorts of styles. His poems also describe magic; they at least discern others pursuing various methods of magic ... Briggs may well write poems that foresee, that become ‘occult and ineffable / frequencies of nature’ to guide us out of our modern labyrinth.

Author: Edward Clarke Source: Bristol Review of Books

Though the tricks and topics of Briggs’s poems are divertingly various, their standpoints are consistent – this is the work of a grown man who has got a fair bit of his life done and dusted, and has got the knocks, scrapes and stocked bookshelves to prove it.

Author: Julia Bird Source: Hand + Star

Whatever the reason, it is very new poets like Maitreyabandhu and Kim Moore, poets of light touch like Janet Sutherland, and the secular visionaries A A Marcoff, Alan Stubbs and David Briggs, whose work most distinctively exhibits the kind of scope – in theme, flexibility of image, and movement of thought – Burnside permits. Although it is too early to know whether and how their work will develop, these writers are recognisably Burnsidian in their use of the suspended grammatical phrase and ‘floating’ imagery to evoke the undetermined nature of experience.

Author: Fiona Sampson

Middle Age and Space Age detritus excavated; ‘damsel-tupping goatswains’ and David Sylvian; method and magic’ lyricism and deft use of the down-stroke. This poet delivers.

Author: Matthew Caley

An interest in the forms and musicality of lyric verse is a strong feature in David Briggs’s attention-grabbing poems, as is the inscrutable relationship between landscape and the mind ... Briggs’s personal narratives are imbued with ludic conceits, often played out in quirkily historical settings. This is a striking and varied debut collection.

Author: Roddy Lumsden

David Briggs is brilliant at pointing out the absurd contradictions of being human – our struggles with romance and reason, superstition and cynicism. These poems, alert to the history of folklore – witchcraft, scrying, entrails laid out on stone ‘like a book’ – also wittily expose our own twenty-first century irrationality ...The religious imagination and deadpan realism hang in constant tension. This is seriously good, intelligent poetry for those who like method in their madness.

Author: Clare Pollard

Briggs has learned everything necessary from Edward Thomas about the potential symbolism of everyday things and, as important, has learned when to leave it behind.

Author: Laurie Smith Source: Magma

About the Author:

David Briggs was born in 1972, and grew up in the New Forest. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and his first collection, The Method Men (Salt, 2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize. Rain Rider is his second collection. He lives, teaches and writes in Bristol.

About this edition

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1784632074
• ISBN 13: 9781784632076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80