Overview

Elle: A Verse Novel by Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph Kessel's Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template. Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium. The book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a hauntological lyric, a summoning that won't let the archive lie still.

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9781917617475

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Reviews

Collapsing collage into writerly montage, Robert Sheppard's utterly unique creation inhales its smudged histories of Brighton newspaper ink until the seedy banality of crime and commerce - laced with counter-cultural artists and surrealist drama - becomes a visionary disorientation of troubling desire. Fitfully lighting a fuse for pulp alchemy, the dislocations of Sheppard's experimental verse-novel reimagines a scandalous chapter of sex and violence as a redemptive book for, and of, linguistic transformation. Writing through Joseph Kessel's novel, Belle de Jour (1928), Sheppard's mulched and dexterous composition invokes a host of guardian influences: Tom Phillips' miraculous collage-project Humument, the melting plastic frenzies of Jeff Keen's stop motion films, and the busy scrutiny of Iain Sinclair's occultations of time and place...all jostle in the shadowy streets and anachronistic absurdities of Brighton's strange vortex. However, regardless of such coordinates, it belongs only to that rare and wonderful vein of books that have no obvious antecedent; a beguiling milestone for the orphaned anti-traditions of all that wander through that curious designation: sui generis. A cheap paperback and the incriminating link of a Pontiac, a misremembered poet and washing-machine tycoon, l'amour fou and The Blue Gardenia Club...all are framed and re-framed as talismanic clues towards a mystery that's only ever resolved in the present of its reading. Unlike anything else, this is poetry as séance, trance, farce, and delirious hearsay; it is the intoxicated remembrance of a lost film that changes with each retelling and yet, beneath or beyond that telling, the propulsive dream of its significance remains - a fixed magnetism around which the patterned filings circle. Lose yourself in it and retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence. - David Spittle

Author Information

Robert Sheppard has published numerous volumes of prose and poetry, creative and critical, fiction and non-fiction, has been widely anthologised and published in dozens of magazines and journals, over 50 years. Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, he lives in Liverpool, though he was born on the South Coast, where, before university in Norwich, his adolescent surrealism was first nurtured, and he was introduced to the radical British poetry of the day, to which he remains committed.

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