Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Bad Machine

ebook
The body is the 'bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politi, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrosti, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of 'minimenta' after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive -and constantly reinventing -poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery. Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Expand title description text
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Kindle Book

  • Release date: March 27, 2014

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781780370651
  • Release date: March 27, 2014

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781780370651
  • File size: 588 KB
  • Release date: March 27, 2014

Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Fiction Poetry

Languages

English

The body is the 'bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politi, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrosti, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of 'minimenta' after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive -and constantly reinventing -poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery. Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Expand title description text