A.M - Softcover

Ayres, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1876857285 ISBN 13: 9781876857288

Publisher: Salt Pub, 2003

Synopsis

a.m. achieves something quite remarkable: a state of calm that is a sublimated urgency, a meditation on distance that is a prerequisite for human relations. One of the many joys of this artful construction is that it is a public building. Mandelstam claimed 'To read Pasternak's poetry ... is to ... fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs; surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis'. In a.m., Ayres has set his sights on the common cold.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Ayres was born in Chilwell, Nottingham on November 3 1958, and lived in Dorset, Leicestershire and Cleveland. He gained a degree in English from the University of Hull in 1982, and has lived in Cambridge since 1986. He is the author of Poems 1987-1992 (Odyssey Poets, 1994), and of two pamphlets in the Poetical Histories series - no. 44, 1976 Streets (1998), and no. 51, The Sky That Was Your Guide (2000).

Review

The poetry of Michael Ayres occupies that space where the world and language collide, and it illuminates both. -- Tony Frazer Human breadth and scope, surging long-term rhythm, like a Russian novel, not like British poetry. An ordinary self fighting through image-fields: personal and lyrical without any of the diminution those adjectives normally imply, rather balladic: muckle sangs, hymns to the imagination. It is a shock - we do not in Britain expect our poets to be such heroes, or the life of the powerless to be so full of genuinely grand substance. -- Peter Riley

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Pub
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1876857285
• ISBN 13: 9781876857288
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288