Overview

The political events of Summer 2003 is the setting for the main sequence of poems in The Hutton Inquiry. The poems move quickly, as scraps of information, piecing together the picture of a summer gone wrong. The emphasis is on speed, association, guesswork - creating a mosaic from the fragmentation of political divide and rule. The story of the nascent war in Iraq unfolds in Progress Poems, a sequence that began as an indictment of false notions of progress, and turned into a melting-pot for harboured cynicisms: from Rupert Murdoch to Tony Blair. Jumbled in numbers from 1-2000, the poems move with the synchronicity and randomness of the internet. The book opens with A Taste of Verdigris , a series of mostly present-tense, lived-in poems. These poems differ from so much contemporary poetry in that they account for the fabric of daily existence before it reaches the point of retelling through the techniques of story. They press with the immediacy of the moment. The Smog: London Poems is a sequence for anyone who has ever experienced the sensation of the outsider, newly arrived in London. The London Migration Sequence accounts for the London rookie's attempts to make ends meet, and to begin to make sense of the metropolis. The final poems in the book are a series of love poems, lighter in touch, including a nod to the French Surrealists. These poems are the secure place from which the books broader experiments can take flight.

Full Product Details

Author:   Chris McCabe
Publisher:   Salt Publishing
Imprint:   Salt Publishing
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 1.00cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.264kg
ISBN:  

9781844710744

ISBN 10:   1844710742
Pages:   176
Publication Date:   01 September 2005
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   Awaiting stock  

Table of Contents

a taste of verdigris a taste of verdigris milton keynes modern realist keep-fit poem twilight fishing fancy an indian poems for lunch michelangelo manufactured by the murdoch empire pere lachaise cemetery interpreting flying dreams a piglet imperialism cititrix two for the zoo flossing for fishhooks sky tree wank star post-its network running poet's heart thinks in free verse when it rains case study garbagesleep the other tonight babalaas dylan's bust the garden party dance of the victorian remote control progress poems # 1,502: letter to rupert murdoch regarding his smile # 601: punk # 1,991: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in # 11: wittgenstein # 1,336: 1938 # 227: lunch-break powernap: # 902: graduating # 1,927: annual conference: # 1,394: the allies # 743: thatcher & the brighton bomb # 1,492: tHE sTAND-dOWN cOMEDIAN: # 185: search engines # 838: the class divide # 764: painting the sky: #1,291: beyond iraq # 800: ivor cutler # 1,772: a drunk man compares teenage pregnancies to a horse chestnut # 192: suburbs train # 659: cleaning habits: # 255: darwin # 666: surprise visitations # 592: theatre of war # 1,906: bonnie & clyde #374: revisonist theories # 433: the jogger # 171: mobile phone games in first class # 1,333: defining genre: # 555: george w. bush # 302: indexing blighty # 87: bakhtin's smoking habits # 21: the martyrs # 1,803: the lads # 457: a perfect imagist poem # 409: on the night bus: # 702: the union # 959: television networks #1,857: media coverage # 1,687: backseat activism # 328: management styles: # 1,531: internet death of chris mccabe #278: genetically modified # 819: barflies # 526: some propaganda # 972: pre-reading reception: # 189: vincent van gogh # 1,111: ezra pound # 911: self-referential poetics # 1,174: industrial reminder # 850: red label classification in the letter library # 1,061: sunday morning #133: the office # 50: james joyce # 471: a particularised history of cocaine # 1,002: rome; a play in ten lines # 299: thank you tony # 1,463: michael jackson # 986: winter # 1,600: in england # 701: maslow # 1,094: billy the kid retires, marries & turns to poetry # 1,744: the hippocritopotamus # 842: wittgenstein 2 # 1,231: shopping # 170: the divorce rate # 1,192: osama bin laden the smog: London poems the london weather news untitled three london poems zone jogging in the country park any normal day in dagenham london migration sequence The Hutton Inquiry so every book is a car, then? a new iraqi flag a late arrival crikey high-risk sunday league strategy some trinkets: for Sarah some trinkets a note for sarah shortwood slices the girl who cried fox a christmas poem fairy tale: the wolf & the book uttoxeter delicious

Reviews

Chris McCabe's debut is shorter than Hutton's original report, but still an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century. McCabe writes with the lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage. [...] The whole book zooms by sparking with spot-on phrases. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod The Guardian

Author Information

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry and Zeppelins. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as a Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School.

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