Listening In

Gareth Reeves

ISBN 10: 1857540115 / ISBN 13: 9781857540116

Published by Carcanet Press Ltd, 1993

About this Item

52 pages. This collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as "The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree", "High Life" and "Gaps" (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression. (SL#43).

Seller Inventory # SL3071

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Listening In
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857540115
• ISBN 13: 9781857540116
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

This collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as "The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree", "High Life" and "Gaps" (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression.