Kirjahaku

Iain Sinclair has a growing reputation as a novelist and writer of documentary non­-fiction. This study covers his major works, but also seeks to trace the connections between the writings and his earlier books of poetry. Indeed, it traces the intertextual curve of Sinclair’s entire oeuvre, and demonstrates that its unity lies in the very desire to make connections between disparate cultural experience, for example between the context of avant garde poetry that Sinclair emerged from, and the world of pulp fiction that he has negotiated as a book dealer and an editor.

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a long network of interrelated texts that the author wrote and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. Many of the texts have appeared before, in both pamphlets and in critically acclaimed full-length volumes, but this edition has been revised throughout. It also includes a previously unpublished book-length text on the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, as well as a number of shorter pieces. All now appear in their intended order, and with their connections to other poems made apparent via an index. At the centre of the book is the sequence The Lores, written according to a strict word count and introducing the politics and poetics of ‘creative linkage’ demonstrated throughout. It focuses upon fascism and resistances to it. Running through the volume are the ‘Empty Diaires’ which offer an alternative history of the twentieth century, told through a series of female narrators. Woven between these are poems on blues music, the first Gulf War, Stalin’s poems, failed utopias, the Earl of Rochester, a sci-fi elegy for the human, a translation from Horace, the ideology of Thatcherism, atheist hymns, a hilarious romp with a very rude Robinson Crusoe, homages to various other artists, and an elegy to Frank Sinatra. The hilarious Wayne Pratt spoofs find their final resting place here too. The prose-poem essay, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’, brings the project to rest with a celebration of the complexity of our powers of human connection.

Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. Some of these look hard at the rhetoric of the war on terror and the one of terror, and, via pun, ferocious word-play and reversal, effect an interrogative unpacking more urgent even than in Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues. Some poems focus upon single times and places-the field of vision as well as the field of battle-with an imagistic precision that suggests that perception is the birth of clear thinking. Others offer counter-music to the global in the local, by focussing on the domestic world of fluid selves, small objects and minor incidents, with a tender and personal tone new to Sheppard's work. Against this, possible worlds and fantastic scenarios are offered to ask, in a speculative but often humorous way, how we got the way we are.As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories-real, fantastic, or both-are only our stories so far. To be continued. This is not so much about finding beliefs to endure (into) this dangerous century, but about presenting as poems a shifting ground upon which they will find themselves at war or peace.

These new poems use tense couplets and other 'centrifugal' forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act: "You'll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes."

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. In the episodes which cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; and the cultural poetics of Iain Sinclair in the 1990s and since; the focus is upon poetic community rather than individuals.

Robert Sheppard has given this book over to his own invention, the fictional Belgian poet Rene Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure - one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, Sheppard is extending his formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, he is exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it.

Robert Sheppard's selection draws on every book of his poetry since Returns (1985) through to Words Out of Time (2015), and is designed to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and their restlessly changing forms. Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues 'a major poem of serious intent'. Of his recent Shearsman collections, Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error, 'political poetry of the first order'; Ben Hickman, in PN Review, wrote 'Berlin Bursts perhaps makes one of the biggest claims for the inherent politics of language and art in recent British poetry.' A Translated Man, a sequence of 'fictional poems', was described by Tom Jenks in Tears in the Fence, as 'a compendious work, a vademecum for innovative writing' and as 'a book which, whilst in keeping stylistically and thematically with Sheppard's other work, exhibits a degree of playfulness not always so obvious there...It is, above all, a deeply pleasurable work.' Kelvin Corcoran wrote about Words Out of Time: 'There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve and it increases the sum of what can be written about, I think. And it's funny.'

'Enraptured by the versioning bug,' Robert Sheppard confesses of his virtuosic variations of Petrarch's third sonnet, 'I was off on one.' With comic verve, he deftly refunctions some of the finest sonneteers, Petrarch himself, and those of 'The English Strain': Wyatt and Surrey, 'the first reformers' of English poetry, and John Milton, exemplary political poet. None is safe from Sheppard's comedic appropriations of their works and days. Wyatt spies for a British foreign office that fluxes between the Henrician court and Tory high command. Surrey is a chinless wonder of aristocratic chivalry, the marvel of the French killing fields (and Norfolk dogging sites). Mordant humour and irony continue in Sheppard's 'trans translations': of Charlotte Smith, the Petrarch of Petworth, witnessing strange happenings on the Downs, and Barrett Browning, Mistress Elizabeth of her Wimpole Street penthouse and the clued-up 'mistress' of a clownish politician. The dominant satirical theme, the national strain surrounding that once novel word 'Brexit', is almost picked up casually in the sequence 'It's Nothing', where Sheppard delicately and deliberately fails the attempt to speak in his own voice. He's more at home in his homemade 100-word sonnets, as he nails Brexit in a neat couplet: 'they've got our country back for us/ and now they want it for themselves'. As you read this book, be warned: between poetic worlds, between sonnet and transposition, big laughs and little truths are lying in wait for you. Tom Jenks wrote of some of the sequences in this book: 'Sheppard here expands further the boundaries of translation, the transposition of historical events to contemporary circumstances being not just incidental to the translation process, but an act of translation itself.' Geraldine Monk in The Robert Sheppard Companion informs us: 'Sheppard's writing is rough, rude, quirky, serious, learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is as irreverent as it is relevant.'

At one level, the poems in British Standards are transpositions of Romantic era sonnets that pay homage to the exuberance and variety of that tradition, whether through examples of well-known poets, from Wordsworth to Clare, or through those of lesser-known practitioners, Mary Robinson to Hartley Coleridge. At another level, these transpositions chart the recent national banana-skin slippage from the hubris of Brexit to the mismanagement of Covid (including the privations and solitudes of lockdown). At both levels, they are satirical and funny, whether British Standard dogging sites are introduced as the sole Brexit benefit, or 'our' hapless prime minister stumbles from indiscretion to disgrace. Between the levels, they vibrate with implication, rock with savage laughter. Comments on earlier parts of 'The English Strain' project:'Among contemporary poets, only Sheppard could have achieved this unlikely synthesis; his poetry is learned, scholarly, satirical, outrageous and innovative as well as - most importantly - political.' Alan Baker, Litter'This book is the sound a man of enlightenment and renaissance makes as he sees the long rich curve of knowledge - our real 'heritage' - being flushed clean down a political shitter...It is utterly brilliant.' Steve Hanson, Manchester Review of Books'Sheppard is able to form activist responses to the times through which we live without sacrificing his linguistic range.' James Byrne, The Robert Sheppard Companion'Sheppard posits ... a translational mode that is open, fluid, permissive, voracious and, above all, creative.' Tom Jenks, The Robert Sheppard Companion

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves Robert Sheppard has made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and his own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but offers them to fellow poets, critics, and even to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own.Also contained here is Sheppard's experimental essay on poetic rhythm. Addressing the contemporary lack of discussion of the subject, 'Pulse' presents a new way of conceiving of metrical and non-metrical shape, rhythm as a form of consciousness, bringing together suggestive theory and the experiences of poets themselves. Abruptly changing gear from critic to poet, via poetics, Sheppard's poetic thinking is alive to the notion that poetic form is cognitive, that form knows something.There are insights into the poetry and poetics of Christopher Middleton, Adrian Clarke, Pierre Joris, Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. He also digs into the processes of his own poems to come up with generalized truths about poetics and poesis, experimenting with new modes of creative-critical writing, as a seasoned practitioner and pedagogue of Creative Writing, in quite personal practice-led research. From a 'radio-talk with no station to transmit it' about radio as an analogy for poetry, to an 'undelivered talk' on photographic ekphrasis; from recent takes on his recent 'English Strain' sonnet project to rare documents that take the reader back to the emerging linguistically innovative practices of the late 1980s, this rich volume presents a relentless and repeated advocacy for poetics as a genuine mode of thinking and writing. And poetics as an object of study in its own right.

Taking only the sonnets Wyatt 'translated' from Petrarch, but adding a few of his own, Robert Sheppard merges the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration. His world fluxes between Henrician terror, administered by Cromwell, and something like our own reality. These sonnets are from a larger grouping called The English Strain.

There are two ways of seeing this book. One: it is a homage to Michael Drayton's 1619 sonnet sequence, Idea, skilful transpositions into contemporary forms. Two: it tells the story of Brexit, as it passes through the body politic, the undigested cake and eat it of daily life. We read of the peccadillos and pet projects of the Brexiteers, the ineptitude of resistance. Expect comedy and chaos rather than analysis, 'how not to get the blues while singing the blues'. Drayton is both Renaissance man and man of resentment. His worshipped muse Idea is a tragic Scouse idealist caught in a satire nobody can quite control. 'The English Strain' of the sonnet tradition meets the dogging sites of post-Brexit Britain. You've got to laugh. Steve Spence wrote of an earlier part of Sheppard's sonnet project: 'These are sharp, spiky, satirical poems, full of scatological verve and menacing bite, meat to Sheppard's scathing pen, great fun to read, fully appropriate to the dark-age we now seem to be on the brink of living through.'Geraldine Monk in The Robert Sheppard Companion informs us: 'Sheppard's writing is rough, rude, quirky, serious, learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is as irreverent as it is relevant.'

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard’s axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard’s axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.