Review
The strange atmospherics suffuse every page while the balance struck between mystery and disclosure can be breathtaking...Such moments led me to feel that Morley had not so much created a new universe as uncovered one. Any universe is bound together by language; and Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness' --Tim Liardet, Guardian
Product Description
A blacksmith creates a girl from fire. A hedgehog conquers a kingdom. How do you ride a Camargue horse through time? How do circus people live, when the glitterball has stopped turning? In these poem-stories David Morley reinvents the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel and making. Opening with a celebration of friendship, the poems tell the world into being. In myths of origin and the natural world, the terrible chronicles of history and the saving power of folk wisdom, the poet weaves spells of Romany and circus language, invents forms and shapes, drawing his readers into a 'lit circle' magical and true. Enchantment concludes a cycle of poems that began with David Morley's celebrated Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings.
About the Author
David Morley read Zoology at Bristol University and pursued research on acid rain. With Jeremy Treglown he founded the Writing Programme in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, where he develops and teaches new practices in scientific as well as creative writing and theatre writing. His collection Scientific Papers appeared from Carcanet in 2002. He has received a major Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Award from Northern Arts, a Hawthornden Fellowship, an Arts Council Writers Award, a Creative Ambitions Award, and an Arts Council Fellowship in Writing at Warwick University. He has received several awards for his teaching, including a National Teaching Fellowship. His other publications include an anthology of new Romanian writing, No Longer Poetry, and The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. He reviews poetry for the Guardian. His second collection of poems, The Invisible Kings, was published by Carcanet in August 2007, and explores his Romany heritage.
