The Method Men (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Briggs, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844717283 ISBN 13: 9781844717286

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2010

Synopsis

The Method Men is the much anticipated first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs: a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010).

Briggs’s work doffs its cap to a wide range of influences, from the Graveyard School to Miroslav Holub, from John Ash to Ted Hughes, from Marianne Moore to Charles Boyle; yet, retains its own distinctive sensibility – a concern with the idiosyncratic strategies we employ in attempting to navigate an ineffable and dangerous, yet quotidian, world. Pylons, the blank pages at the end of a book, an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, bathrooms, public parks, clowns and teacups are all lit at the edges with a gunsmoke-blue glow by a transform imagination.

The Method Men explores, in a sometimes disarmingly personal way, what Larkin referred to as ‘a style our lives bring with them’ – what we are, and how that came to be.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What Happened to Clowns
i.m. Miroslav Holub

when nobody laughed any more?
When even the act of pouring
hot custard down Pantalone’s
hoop-waisted trews
failed to simmer even a snigger?
Clowns took to the streets.
Hyperbolic, red and yellow boots
flip-flopped uptown; the afternoon so hot,
buckets of confetti couldn’t cool them off.
And they congregated at the railings
of the offices of the Minister for Circus.
Years of inadequate investment
had whittled their craft to politics
they didn’t have the heart for.
Perhaps, they ought to have become
taxi drivers? Writing had been on walls –
or had been, before Scaramouche blacked
the writing over with arches of paint
to connote railway tunnels,
against which they had squandered
engine-red and canary-yellow striped,
plywood locomotives.
While they disputed for spokespersons
through mime, Pierrot posed forlornly
at the Doric-framed doorstep
of the offices of the Minister for Circus,
only to pirouette abjectly back
to mutinous crowds when the bell-push
streamed water that smudged his mascara,
tickled the wrinkles of his face.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum took
to beating each other’s craniums
with styrofoam crowbars, blundering
about pavements in elaborate plays
of faux semi-consciousness.
No one so much as smiled.
It was merely tragic – two ageing clowns
resorting to cliched slapstick.
Even those veterans who claimed
to have trained with Aristophenes
failed to find euphemisms
by which to allude to the shifting paradigm
of their times. In the distance,
four pantomime horsemen came
careering and whinnying toward them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844717283
• ISBN 13: 9781844717286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80