Michael Glover

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.

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.

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...

The Trapper they called him, that man Joseph Tredinnick, late of Porthcothan Bay, Cornwall- and, my god, what an inhospitable spot that was in those days This is a dark, Gothic tale about a Cornish misfit by the name of Tredinnick: a rabbit trapper by trade, and a trapper of souls. It is part horror story, part phantasmagoria - you will be dragged against your will to witness his descent into madness, and start to question what is real and what is not.

Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time. Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career. A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s Spotlight Series, this book features Wylie’s newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Sheffield is yet to be discovered. Were you aware that football's first professional rule book was written in Sheffield, and that it is home to the oldest ground in professional use? Did you know that climbers the world over come to Stanage Edge for the challenges offered by one of the world's most fearsome millstone grit escarpments? Did you know that the Arctic Monkeys grew up in Sheffield, and that you can see the room at Yellow Arch Studios where they rehearsed as schoolboys and cut their first album? Did you know that the steepest hill in the entire 2012 Tour de France is in Sheffield? Did you know that Sheffield's craft breweries produce some of the finest beers in the world? Did you know that you can walk out of the centre of Sheffield, through parkland, and directly into open countryside? You need this book fast then, don't you, you soft 'aporth!

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.

The second installment of Destiny is here Episode 2, "The Pilot" dives right into the action as the cold, ESC executive Miss Arroway comes aboard the DESTINY and demands that changes be made. Captain Massey is NOT happy with her unannounced visit. Before he can threaten to throw her out of an airlock, the bridge reports a cargo shuttle being chased by an enemy Alliance ship. The shuttle is being piloted by the mysterious Kayla North who oddly refuses the Destiny's help. As the story unfolds, we learn more about why the pilot was not so willing to get help from Destiny. We also see the seeds of Commander Jackson's scientific breakthrough that promises to change space travel forever. Some feedback from our readers: "Destiny does a great job of combining classic sci-fi nostalgia with innovative story-telling." Jessica Mormon "For people who love Star Trek and outer space, this graphic novel has something that will engage your mind visually and mentally." Lioness7 at Goodreads "I think this graphic novel is going to be a favorite of a lot of readers that love the sci-fi genre because it's packed with action, suspense and scientific themes." Marty: ) (thecursedbooks) at Goodreads

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.

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 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.