Book description
Adam Thorpe's fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the
secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and
grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path
set against the 'insomniac' motorway; industrialised apples against
wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and 'the slight
bruise of doubt'.
Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend's suicide,
his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships
with nature, with history, with ourselves.
There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories
and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty. The book is full of
such traces, delicate and fugitive: the poet's grandmother retrieved
through her ninety-year-old bookmark of rose petals; the unvoiced
suggestion of his mother's voice on an answerphone; the memory of a
vanished native chief in a Canadian mountain's shadow...
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel,
Ulverton
, was published in 1992 and reissued in Vintage Classics, and he has
published two books of stories and six poetry collections - most
recently
Voluntary.
