Collected Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Chaloner, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1876857757 ISBN 13: 9781876857752

Publisher: Salt, 2005

Synopsis

This landmark Collected Poems from one of Britain’s major post-war poets, gathers together work from over four decades, and includes previously unpublished material that has remained outside the scope of Chaloner’s major collections.

In drawing the book together, Chaloner has updated and revised poems into a thematic whole, a decision supported by the remarkable consistency of vision, inquiry and purpose in his work. What we have is a magnum opus, a chronological sweep through Britain’s dynamic and troubled reinvention from the Sixties to the present day extending his range from the intimate and local to the social and global. Chaloner’s personal battleground is the truth, but his writing is a triumph of poise and tone. His is primarily a poetry of sensibility, and we are accompanied rather than addressed, encouraged rather than admonished.

From the early ruralist poems of wry, intimate observation to the recent critical visions of the Twenty-first Century world, Chaloner’s focus remains undaunted, locating us in the here and now, with our eyes faced forward on to the future, a future we are all responsible for and into which we must all travel.

About this title

About the Author

Born in rural Cheshire in 1944 David Chaloner spent his early years dreaming of escape. As the closest city, Manchester provided a cultural and social context for his early writing, when jazz was available in clubs created from empty cotton warehouses and Granada Television struggled with the idea of a new arts programme that included poetry. Apart from ‘Little Press’ publication, the first published work appeared in the Tandem paperback ‘Generation X’, a true sociological record of the times, and the Penguin anthology, Children of Albion. In the late sixties he founded ONE, a magazine for new writing, that existed through the transitional years of a move to London in the early seventies. A continuing sense of enquiry and curiosity informs his work and helps in pushing the possibilities of language, music and image in varying and divers ways. He died in 2010.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Perfect Language

Jets cruise in blank air

Still as ice.

Drawing thin white

Fading white broken

White lines

On clear brilliant twilight.

The perfect written language.

The perfect language

Of alien territory,

Dramatic and immense.

The eerie presence of a cry

In that perfect language.

A human cry in blank air.

In the fading language of the day,

The immense stillness of the sky,

The thin disintegrating broken lines.

The perfect alien language of the cry.

The perfect, the alien cry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1876857757
• ISBN 13: 9781876857752
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 456