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Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt Modern Poets)
 
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Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt Modern Poets) (Hardcover)

by Simon Barraclough (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 67 pages
  • Publisher: Salt Publishing (15 April 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844713156
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844713158
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.2 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 521,401 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #51 in  Books > Biography > Social & Health Issues > Cultural History > Australian
  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review
Barraclough may see himself as travelling lightly through the world, but he catches the sense of what it's like to live in the modern city more astutely and more often than most other poets. Salt is to be congratulated on investing in publishing his first collection in hardback. -- Laurie Smith Magma This is a collection which deals openly and unsentimentally with bereavements and betrayals, childhood abuses and disappointments, all territory generally understood to be difficult both for poets and readers. Barraclough handles it well... This debut from Simon Barraclough, shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, demonstrates a poet's eye for detail and provides a vehicle for a laconic and totally contemporary voice whose dramatic talents could easily move him into theatre and radio as well as poetry. -- Jane Holland Under the Radar

Product Description
This title is shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for the Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2008. "Los Alamos Mon Amour" explodes in the heart of the desert and unleashes a chain reaction of intense, moving, erotic and often darkly comical poems. Marlon Brando, Saddam Hussein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Queen Mother, Hannibal Lecter, and Yuri Gagarin wander through the blasted landscape encountering Italian wolves, Desert Orchid and the London Whale along the way. Around a core of searing love poems, "Los Alamos Mon Amour" embraces passion, nostalgia, fear and wonder.A lost parent inspires terror and compassion by turns; madness intrudes upon the mundane; and St. Paul's Cathedral mutates in a sequence of bizarre love letters to Wren's iconic masterpiece. From traditional sonnets to a narrative constructed entirely from film poster taglines, the poems are formally and aesthetically restless, nosing around London, New York, Italy, and Yorkshire, watched over by the spirits of Lowell, Berryman, Hughes, Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Dario Argento. The poems veer from the terrifying to the tender, the comic to the apocalyptic, the lustful to the philosophical, and the cosmic to the domestic - often within the same line. This is an energetic and entertaining new voice in contemporary poetry: profound and playful by turns.

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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews
5 star:
 (6)
4 star:
 (2)
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Sorta okay, 21 Jul 2008
By Horace (Cambridge, England) - See all my reviews
In his only collection of poetry, Simon Barraclough introduces the gentle reader to many trials, tribulations, and flights of fancy. Although a lot of the topical material will date quickly, there was other material that has a reasonable shelf life.

The topics are gritty and eclectic: drowning cats, murdered girlfriends, nuclear disaster, peeling contact lenses from dry eyeballs, peeking under change room doors, using alcohol to gain favour from women, and so forth. However, it makes a change from that Moon, Spoon, June stuff with all the flowery happy endings. And delving into the noir, there are no happy endings in these tales.

By the end of the 67 verses I felt as though I was a personal confessor, but strangely emotionally detached which made the journey easier. But obviously there's no atonement or acts of contrition, asked for or required.

I think this is an okay book for anyone looking a broad, unrelated range of topics, plain but enthusiastic verse, and a darker view of the less savoury sides of existence.

It was sorta okay for me and might be for you.
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16 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible, 22 May 2008
This is the worst collection of contemporary British poetry I have ever read, and I've read extensively. The subject matter and writing style were equally light on appeal to me. The theme was uneven with no common mission, and odd choice of vocabulary. Like a bad film, this collection challenges you to struggle to determine what the plot and meaning is with no eventual conclusion.

By the end of this book I was entirely bored. I do not recommend it.
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16 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Tawdry verses, 1 Jun 2008
A far cry from some of the talented and exciting poetry that we've come to expect from contemporary London poets. It was not to my taste; a muddle of obscure references, mixed themes, prosaic stanzas, and unsavoury thematic elements.

Anybody who thinks they're going to get coherent memorable poetry, tasteful love poems, or a book to retain on the shelf had better look for another author. I found the material entirely inaccessible and just really not that good. A disappointment.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars a great contender
Great news that this collection has been short-listed for the prestigious Forward Prize for a first collection of poetry. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Roger M. Luckhurst

5.0 out of 5 stars Los Alamos Mon Amour
With his first collection Simon Barraclough brings us an original view on poetry, a method as daring and energetic as it is skillfully welded to the places, moods and context of... Read more
Published 13 months ago by R. De Souza

5.0 out of 5 stars I wish my Italian was a pocketful of leftover Euros
I read Los Alamos Mon Amour in the blazing sun and forgot my skin was burning while I tore through the sixty seven poems in Simon Barraclough's first collection. Read more
Published 13 months ago by M. Stevenson

5.0 out of 5 stars It Did It For Me
In my hidaway in the Pyranees 'been leafing through this book. My heart is melting. Bad idea when its so COLD up here. I LOVE this collection. Specially 'Nato e Morto'. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Speranza

5.0 out of 5 stars Passionate and vital
Like the image from the title poem of the author staring steadfastly into the atomic explosion of love's onslaught, what characterises this collection is a constant determination... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Wajih Djabri

4.0 out of 5 stars Delicate and powerful
I'm not a big reader of poetry, but a friend recommended this to me and I owe her one. Simon Barraclough packs meaty stuff into his delicate writing - losing a parent who's never... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Linsay

5.0 out of 5 stars Simon Barraclough - Los Alamos Mon Amour
In his first collection of poetry, Simon Barraclough takes us into his confidence with his personal, powerful, and often wryly amusing poems invoking pop culture references,... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Robert Matthews

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