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.
by Mick Imlah
by Kathryn Simmonds
by Stephanie Norgate
by Simon Barraclough
by Isobel Dixon
