Folklore (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Atkins, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844718980 ISBN 13: 9781844718986

Publisher: Salt, 2011

Synopsis

Stretching from Anglo-Saxon fragments, through the Shakespeare of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ecstatic lyrics of John Clare, elegiac minimalism of AE Houseman, and contemporary work of Geoffrey Hill Folklore is a poetic sequence which extends, challenges, and continues the tradition of writing about the English countryside.

In this ecstatic, dreamlike, and starkly realist poem sequence set in and around the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, the poet is discovered through the voices of all that surround him; giving truth to the French poet Rimbaud’s claim that “I is an other”.

In Folklore the poet is made by love of language as much as by the external world, and it is by singing through the unknown self and the unfamiliar world that identity – always fleeting, always peculiar, always ecstatic – is born: these poems are far from simple and bucolic. They echo the language and concerns of the aforementioned writers while at the same time playing with the innovative and modern poetic breakthroughs of the likes of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. They are poems of living language, which are constantly in a state of becoming and redefining the possibilities of both word and Worcestershire world order.

Folklore speaks of a world that is both global and local. It is the world of the imagination and the world of the evolving English countryside. It is a work where the geography of the imagination is as vibrant as the one before the author’s eyes; and the one beneath his feet.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Atkins is the author of Folklore 1-25, To Repel Ghosts, 25 Sonnets, and Horace. Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UEL, editor of the online poetry magazine onedit, and translator of Petrarch, Horace, and Buddhist texts, he is a Buddhist, husband, poet, and father. He is a happy man.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

14.

Sees raindrops in the air and flies between them. Bees and all. Women. Or. The insides of gilly-flowers. The chestnut’s white cone. Jasmines. Card side. Climbs down the neck and takes her pollen takes it. Flies in a straight line & hides her insides. Covered in honey, pollen, comb. Is a language if.

This mouth built her. All the teeth frames its paper. Talking swarms – you were – Holding your breasts in your hands for the stings. How they swarm in all. Bleeding. Gone dark with or poison. As all falls to the floor.

Liquids lost in the body (sleeping) creatures dream of you. Dream of you.

Your black pins.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844718980
• ISBN 13: 9781844718986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84