Kirjahaku

In this poignant sequel to Headlong into Pennilessness, Sheffield-born Michael Glover, poet and art critic, re-visits the scenes of his childhood and teenage years in and around Fir Vale. He remembers the death of the Sunbeam Cinema, and how it disappeared in a pother of brick dust. He sees again the tramps from the tramps' ward, hurrying down Herries Road in pursuit of a warm sleeping spot in the Reference Room of Firth Park Library. He watches his mother at her exasperating daily ritual of putting her hair into pink curlers to the general indifference of the entire family, who all co-exist, somehow, in that hot little kitchen in Coningsby Road, site of perpetual warfare between snapping relatives, as the homework gets down, somehow, on the kitchen table covered in its slippery oil cloth. It's all here, from playing out on your bike in near trafficless streets, to spinning round and round the gas lamp at the top of Blyde Road until the whole world turns giggly-topsy-turvy.

Why should children enjoy all the picture books? Artworks by Ruth Dupr complement beautifully the verse and prose of Michael Glover in this book you will want to possess for the sheer sake of possession, as much as for the journey it will take you on. It is the story of a woman losing her grip on a life well lived, as past and present meld with real and imagined. The words convey mood like an adagio; images appear in your head as though through a fine gauze. You will feel you have learned something important by the end.

Michael Glover's writes a poetry whose surface can be lightsome and almost casually, if not beguilingly, playful and direct. But the playfulness can be a deception. Laughter dries on the tongue. There is often a terrible uncertainty about the speaking voice, and a darkness about the themes the poems are exploring. The darkness of betrayal. The darkness of death. The darkness of never quite knowing where one stands. In short, the sands are forever shifting.This eighth collection, his first in five years, draws on a variety of themes and situations. It drifts on a boat in Canada. It constructs a quinoa cake from mere words and phrases. It scrutinises the films of the great improvisatory director John Cassavetes. It even picks apart the multifarious meanings of the word book itself. The influences are as generously widespread as the poems themselves, from Jorge Luis Borges to Archy and Mehitabel, from the lyrics of Edmund Spenser to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.In the past, Michael Glover's poetry collections have largely consisted of single poems, each one self-sufficient. This volume, by contrast, is organised into several sequences. The Quinoa Cake Recipe emerges from, and is a response to, long summer stays in Canada. Notes to Harris is a series of short poems in which one North American friend addresses another with a wry casualness. Under the Influence, a homage to Cassavetes, is spoken by a male character from a typical Cassavetes film, wayward and anguished: 'I am a raging bull of a man. I pulverise everything I look at.' In short, this is the widest-ranging and most accomplished collection that Michael Glover has ever written.

In the Summer of 1940, after evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the Franco/German armistice which followed the fall of France, Britain stood alone against the armed might of Hitler's Germany, supported only by the forced of her dominions and inspired by little but the rhetoric of her newly-appointed Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It seemed inevitable at the time that Hitler's next move would be the invasion of Britain and Churchill was not slow to use this threat to unite the people of Britain behind him; for not a few people in influential circles in Britain then favoured a quick settlement with the Fuhrer. Michael Glover's penetrating analysis of the mood of British people that summer, of the German ability to mount an amphibious invasion at the time and of Britain's ability to repel such an invasion shows how ill-founded the scare was, while explaining how well it served the British cause. Hitler, as he shows, had embarked upon a course to which there were only two outcomes - either of which was bound to lead to his ultimate downfall. But in the summer of 1940 the beleaguered inhabitants of Britain were in no mood or position to relax in the comfort of such historical hindsight. Unprepared they may have been, but as the author shows, they were unflinching, unbowed - and, ultimately, undefeated. This is, however, by no means a work of chauvinistic self-congratulations; it is rather a distinguished historian's assessment of the last great invasion scare the British Isles have endured since the Martello towers were built in 1805.

A laugh-out-loud visual history of the strangest piece of men’s clothing ever created: the codpiece.The codpiece was fashioned in the Middle Ages to close a revealing gap between two separate pieces of men’s tights. By the sixteenth century, it had become an upscale must-have accessory. This light-hearted, illustrated examination of its history pulls in writers from Rabelais to Shakespeare and figures from Henry VIII to Alice Cooper. Glover’s witty and entertaining prose reveals how male vanity turned a piece of cloth into a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself. The codpiece, painted again and again by masters such as Titian, Holbein, Giorgione, and Bruegel, became a symbol of royalty, debauchery, virility, and religious seriousness—all in one. Never has a piece of clothing revealed so much about men only by hiding their private parts. Glover’s book moves from paintings to contemporary culture and back again as it charts the growing popularity of the codpiece and its eventual decline. The first history of its kind, this book is a must-read for art historians, anthropologists, fashion aficionados, and readers looking for a good, long laugh. Centuries of male self-importance and delusion are on display in this highly enjoyably new title.

This comprehensive monograph offers a detailed examination of the paintings of the acclaimed German painter Neo Rauch (b.1960).Rauch’s paintings deftly blend the iconography of Socialist Realism from his upbringing and art-school training in GDR-era Leipzig with the stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque and Romantic past, conjuring heavily populated sites of great commotion and complexity, remarkably without recourse to preliminary drawing. His compositions and their enigmatic figures are rich with reference and allusion, but the stories they tell are indistinct and somehow out of time. They have an ancient modernity – or the freshness of renewed antiquity.Michael Glover discloses Rauch’s working methods, revealing how the artist approaches the making of his work, how his images come into being, and the importance of words and their etymology to the creation or disruption of an artwork. These are works that interrogate the very meaning of the artistic impulse; ruminations in the guise of history painting that in fact question what a painter could and should be creating at this particular historical moment.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Stirling Prize, Cambridge Central Mosque is a truly innovative building, and one that is sustainable and socially and architecturally integrated into – and respectful of – its neighbourhood. As well as discussing its design and construction, this book focuses on the creation of a unique place of worship for a community. Setting out historic precedents and influences, it highlights how the mosque breaks new ground in terms of Islamic and English religious architectural traditions and how it reflects the ongoing debates on Islam and Britishness, as well as Islam and tradition. The book first sets out how the site and the architects, Marks Barfield Architects, were selected, then goes on to discuss the development of the mosque’s concept, structure and key design aspects, including the significance of geometry to Islam and the defining feature of the building: its timber structure evoking the English fan vaulting used nearby at King’s College. There is also a useful technical section on the many sustainable features of the building and its low carbon design and the book concludes with a discussion of the day-to-day life of the mosque, including interviews with the imam and members of the local community who come from all over the world, highlighting the impact the mosque has had for the wider Cambridge community and beyond.

On holiday in France, during a particularly warm spell, the exotic bugs descend. Many would reach for the citronella candles, or worse - the fly-swat and toxic aerosols to go on a killing spree like some insecticidal maniac. Not so an artist like Ruth Dupr . Instead she recorded their characters, their quirks, their oddities, in ink onto delicate Japanese paper.Coming to these pictures later, Michael Glover was taken back to those heady summer days, and this collection of poems - of artfully chosen words about those wingers, leapers and creepers - was the result. Each poem is accompanied by one of the original monoprints.Wingers and Leapers and Creepers is a homage to all bug-life: the true rulers of the world, upon which we, and all life on Earth, depend. Perhaps we can learn to love them a little more...

Old words never come easy. In his new collection of poetry, Michael Glover celebrates the unexpected arrival in his life of a fabulous Harlequin-Fish, plays fast and loose with the dyspeptic ghost of the poet Thomas Gray (author of 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard') spars and spats with an absent god called Gottlieb, meanders through the aftermath of an old man's sad encounter with Cupid, and wonders what a stone might say if it ever encountered Amelia in all her ferocity.

What has the loss of a pair old trousers to do with the inflammatory politics of Ireland? Did Nellie accept that invitation to share a bed with a nest of devils? Why must the disappearance of a mere purse hang over Anna like the shadow of a betrayal? And where is the best place for any head to settle?Michael Glover's first published collection of short stories, several of which were first broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Radio Four (Brian Cox, star of the award-winning Netflix series Succession, was the reader of Morrison's Trousers) is by turns tender, perplexing and horrifying.

There are many more words than you could ever wish to use I taunt you with those words. I bellow them out into the air within your hearing in order to humiliate you. That is why you avoid me, because I burden you with so many words, heaping them upon your head, or flinging them after you as you hurry away from me, fine, well-turned, latinate, polysyllabic, Miltonic words of the kind faithfully and carefully stowed away only in dictionaries. That is where I live my rich and fulfilling life, within the pages of many dictionaries, with my torch and my eyeglass, digging ever deeper into dictionaries, preferably the old ones. I spend whole days together down there, a deep-cast miner of words. Clothes mean nothing to me. Abluting this body means nothing to me - let it stink to high heaven I have no time for such irrelevancies. There is too much steady accumulation to be done, and each day offers me twenty-four hours only in which to do it. What am I to do with these words now that you have refused to listen to me, now that you have left me here to my own devices? The question is an irrelevance. I do not need to justify this pursuit. When they are all present in front of - and behind and beside - me, I need do nothing but admire their magnificence as they stretch away and away from me. These words speak for themselves.Can you describe these seven hundred and ninety-four paragraphs as a collection of stories each of that length? Or are they more glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of other people: fleeting moments in complicated, or simple, lives? In modern jargon, might they be called prose poems?No two readers will interpret them the same, and probably not as the author envisaged - but isn't that the point? Doesn't fiction take on a life of its own once you set it free?It is perhaps a book more for dipping in and out of than one to read end-to-end, and depending on your mood, the weather, the day of the week, you will see something different, something new, and something outside of the story itself.

The best poetry takes your mind to unexpected places. But is it the poet's quirkiness that carries you there, or your own?These poems are too good to be just for children - grown-ups will enjoy reading them aloud to children for their own sake, as well as for the reaction they provoke. Or why not just read them to yourself? They will challenge and stimulate, make you laugh and make you wonder.Come along with us: who's fastest, you or the wind? Or can you keep up with how fast life runs? What is the symbolism of that chocolate house? Did the poet even know, or is that for the inner child to decide? Ruth Dupre's marvellous paintings make it a visual feast too.