Kirjahaku

John Skelton and Poetic Authority is the first book-length study of Skelton for almost twenty years, and the first to trace the roots of his poetic theory to his practice as a writer and translator. It demonstrates that much of what has been found challenging in his work may be attributed to his attempt to reconcile existing views of the poet's role in society with discoveries about the writing process itself. The result is a highly idiosyncratic poetics that locates the poet's authority decisively within his own person, yet at the same time predicates his 'liberty to speak' upon the existence of an engaged, imaginative audience. Skelton is frequently treated as a maverick, but this book places his theory and practice firmly in the context of later sixteenth as well as fifteenth-century traditions. Focusing on his relations with both past and present readers, it reassess his place in the English literary canon.

Diverting Authorities examines the glossing of a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts by authors including Lydgate, Douglas, Chaloner, Baldwin, Bullein, Harington, and Nashe. It is concerned particularly with the use of glosses as a means for authors to reflect on the process of shaping a text, and with the emergence of the gloss as a self-consciously literary form. One of the main questions it addresses is to what extent the advent of print affects glossing practices. To this end, it traces the transmission of a number of glossed texts in both manuscript and print, but also examines glossing that is integral to texts written with print production in mind. With the latter, it focuses particularly on a little-remarked but surprisingly common category of gloss: glossing that is ostentatiously playful, diverting rather than directing its readers. Setting this in the context of emerging print conventions and concerns about the stability of print, Jane Griffiths argues that---like self-glossing in manuscript---such diverting glosses shape as well as reflect contemporary ideas of authorship and authority, and are thus genuinely experimental. The book reads across medieval-renaissance and manuscript-print boundaries in order to trace the emergence of the gloss as a genre and the way in which theories of authorship are affected by the material processes of writing and transmission.

The houses and landscapes of childhood exert a strong presence in Silent in Finisterre. Recalled by name, in incantation, or described in ways that recapture their irreducible reality to a child for whom they are the totality of the world, they become a kind of memory theatre: for Jane Griffiths physical things are remembered both for their own sake and to explore how they continue to shape the self. Style impresses as much as content in her resonantly evocative poems, with sentences played against line breaks to create constant small disruptions of the expected sense, while predictable phrases and forms of words are summoned only to be rewritten. Here language is not a transparent means of conveying a message but a medium that - no less than charcoal or oil paint - materially affects what is expressed through it. Form and subject are as inextricably entwined as 'the echo of port in the night's starboard, / the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre'. Jane Griffiths' Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008, and followed by Terrestrial Variations in 2012. Silent in Finisterre shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

The recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time. The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing. Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.

Jane Griffiths writes mysteriously resonant poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers in classically precise language. "Another Country" presents a selection from her first two collections, "A Grip on Thin Air" and "Icarus on Earth", as well as a whole collection of new work. Where the earlier books are shot through with a migrant's sense of estrangement, her new poems explore what it might mean to settle in a place. The central sequence 'Eclogue Over Merlin Street' highlights this changing perspective through a dialogue between two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement. Many other poems echo this tension, caught between love of a place and the fear of losing it. Jane Griffiths celebrates the landscapes she lives in by observing and recording them, yet with a strong awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation. Hers are poems that delight in being in the world, despite the threat of loss.

The poems in "Terrestrial Variations" respond to the sheer chanciness of life. They are elegies for friends, relations, dead selves, and unrealised lives, but - like Jane Griffiths' previous poems - they are also full of things, both real and remembered, whose importance is as much literal as it is symbolic. Linguistically playful and sometimes ironically impatient with their own attention to detail, they record repeated attempts to make sense of the world and the strange business of getting on from day to day. Their slant perspective invites the reader too to realise: 'You'll never again say this is where I stand, and mean it.' Jane Griffiths' previous book "Another Country: New & Selected Poems" was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. "Terrestrial Variations" shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss.