Other Rooms - Softcover

Curry, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904634443 ISBN 13: 9781904634447

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2007

Synopsis

There is a powerfully dramatic and narrative quality to the new poems which preface Neil Curry's Other Rooms, and we hear in them a wide variety of voices speaking to us from different times and different places, but speaking to us of things which nevertheless concern us deeply today.  Whatever form Curry adopts is handled with flexibility and skill, and wherever the poems are set there is a geographical and linguistic exactness which makes them as compelling as his acclaimed translations of the classics.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Curry has lived for many years in the Lake District. Among his poetry collections are Ships in Bottles, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Walking to Santiago, in which he recounts his 500-mile walk along the medieval pilgrim route, and Other Rooms: New & Selected Poems. He has also published The Fable of the World, translations from the French poet Jules Supervielle. He edited the Collected Poems of Norman Nicholson and has published studies of Christopher Smart, Alexander Pope and George Herbert. He has recently completed a book on William Cowper.

Reviews

Besides generous samplings from Ships in Bottles (1988), Walking to Santiago (1992), and The Road to the Gunpowder House (2003), Curry’s self-selection of his work includes 16 new poems and two sections from his versions of the last books of the Odyssey, published with drawings by the American pop artist Jim Dine as The Bending of the Bow (1993). There are no drawings herein, but they’re strictly unnecessary, and not only to the scenes from Homer, which are powerfully dramatic as well as descriptive. The latter quality, refined to any almost visibly colorful vividness, is perhaps Curry’s greatest strength, still serving him well in the new poems, poignantly in “Shutting Down,” which portrays an old man looking out a nursing-home window; pregnant with humor in “The Weather House,” the nine irregular lines of which show what the poet observes and wishes to observe of the neighbors. As before, history, art, literature, and religion are topics, each of them personalized by the poem’s personae, universalized by its events. Brilliant yet sturdy work of the highest order. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1904634443
• ISBN 13: 9781904634447
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168