| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
f poetry really is the new rock-n-roll, then Samarkand is the equivalent of "the difficult second album." Clanchy has held her position, even if this new volume perhaps lacks the same freshness of tone as Slattern. Some of her similes are as lyrically acute as ever: a fallen wasp's nest is like a "burst city of the poor", a much-loved grandfather's bald scalp is as "grand and mottled as a planet." Individual poems also stand out: the sweet and affecting "Content", for instance, adroitly compares the temporary happiness of young married love to a breather grabbed on a cliff-top hike, when the two lovers "boxed in mist, conscious of just our feet and hands" pause to let the upcoming hills "reveal themselves and be veiled again / quietly, with the prevailing wind." Another poem, "The Mirror", riffs dexterously on the strange agreeableness of furnishing a home, when in a new mirror the young couple look, inexplicably, like "the Arnolfinis at a football match." But in this suburban bliss maybe lies the problem. Where Slattern's doomy romanticism afforded a certain narrative drive, Samarkand is looser, less focused, perhaps too relaxed. There's even a hint of Bridget Jones's "smug mermaids" in a line like "Adults, luckless since they are not us." It's tough to advise a poet to be less happy, to suffer more for her art and the reader's pleasure, but Clanchy should not turn away from her dark side. Reader's new to Clanchy and Samarkand will enjoy the accessible style, the wistful humour, the range and width of interests. --Sean Thomas
Product Description
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'Staying is a kind of leaving',
By lyndsaylomax@hotmail.com (Oxford / Macclesfield) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Samarkand (Paperback)
Some of the questions we might ask in reading this book are, after the debut volume 'Slattern', what has changed? what has developed? and what has been left behind? In an obvious sense, which the reviews here pick up, the poems in this volume are coming from a different place: although the focus is still often on men, these are the poems of a married woman (the sequence which ends the book concerns the setting up of a household). But rather than evaluate the book just by this criterion, we should ask whether the poems show a development as poems, eg. formal constructs made up of interesting chains of signifiers, engaging our attention as aesthetic or acoustic objects. The answer is that they do: the poems here are better than those of 'Slattern'. Although the pattern is still predominantly iambic, and the Larkinisms of the first book are still present ('Nine Months' borrows the syntactic trick of 'Mr Bleaney': 'if he stood... i don't know' / 'and if he thought... was something not discussed'; the first poem plants us straight into the train-catching, half-way world of 'the whitsun weddings') - there's a great subtlety about some of the rhythmic effects achieved here: for example, the opening lines of 'Conquest': 'Like mapping the ocean with ribbons / like sticking a flag on the moon / like finding a new range of mountains / and deciding to split them / into right-angled regions' - the way this sets up a kind of light-verse, vaudevillean rhythmical scheme but then subverts it in the fourth line; the way the half rhyme 'ribbons-mountains-regions' echoes through the lines; the way 'split' picks up but modifies 'sticking'.... this is really good verse. But Clanchy has ideas and themes too: although the book can be comfortably read in the parochial Armitage-Duffy school of contemporary poets, it excels these people in its genuine engagement with the messy business of colonialism, and gender relations, and travel versus rootedness (again, Larkin's 'The Importance of Elsewhere' seems to be a kind of subtext to the book'). The two poems at the centre of the book, 'Spell' and 'Conquest', are energetic acts of re-claiming the spaces typically occupied by the male act of writing (which is often about writing women, dictating female identity), and reveal too how this poetic act is often complicit with movements of sexual or political conquest (see also 'The Currs'). This is a very accomplished book.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Smug mermaids,
By A Customer
This review is from: Samarkand (Paperback)
Readers of Helen Fielding will know that the world is made up of singletons and smug marrieds. Readers of Clanchy's GUARDIAN column will know which category she falls into. This is competent but rarely startling poetry, which never quite succeeds in convincing us that moving in with your boyfriend is exciting to anyone except yourself. But hey, I'm just a bitter Bridget so what do I know?
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
