Overview

Hotel Petroleum is Mark Fiddes's fourth collection, structured as a journey in three movements, Arrival, Occupancy, and Departure, through a world of expat dislocation, geopolitical emergency, and the absurdist textures of late-capitalist life in the Middle East and beyond. Fiddes works with considerable formal range, from the mock-corporate address of the title poem to the controlled rage of 'Beige', where the bureaucratic language of conflict reportage is set against the actual substance of what it effaces. Throughout, the political and the personal are held in an uneasy suspension: poems about illness, fatherhood, and loss occupy the same moral space as those addressing drone warfare and ecological collapse. Fiddes's wit is sharp and occasionally dark, drawing on reggae, Turner, Hammershøi, Deleuze, and an old Andalucian's olé with equal ease, but the comedy never insulates against consequence. Hotel Petroleum pays persistent attention to the problem of living well, or even living coherently, in a world whose crises are both everywhere and systematically obscured.

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9781917617901

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Reviews

This collection is a rousing hymn to simultaneity - the quantum entanglement of things in our connected world. Poems strike sparks of presence as they touch particular ground in any continent, in many registers, with patterns of global economics showing up immediate as forces of nature, observed with a naturalist's attention to detail. This is a sensibility that is conversant with it all - deft, fiercely well-informed, humane, appalled, amused, satirical and rightly unwilling to let urgent matters rest. - Philip Gross It is very welcome to see so many award-winning poems brought together in this new collection by Mark Fiddes. Adeptly fusing reportage with lyric, Hotel Petroleum offers an intelligent, moving and human insight to lives lived during conflict, captured in a series of memorable encounters, each weighted with meaning and reflection. - Dr Rebecca Goss Mark Fiddes is a poet of rare composure and accomplishment. Here are poems alive to the strange theatre of contemporary life: its politics and technologies, its dislocations and sudden beauty. - The Madrid Review

Author Information

Mark Fiddes lives in the Middle East and Catalonia. He has written three other books of poetry and a libretto 'Threadlands' with composer Joanna Marsh. His work has won the Ledbury Prize, the Oxford Brookes University Prize and the Ruskin Prize with awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Poetry Prize and many more.

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