Book description
Described in the Telegraph as 'Huddersfield's Melville', Milner Place
has spent much of his life sailing the seven seas as a skipper of a
trading boat, while also writing beautifully crafted poetry. His two
pamphlet collections. The CONFUSION OF ANGELS and WHERE SMOKE IS, has
sold out and been reprinted, and this (at the age of sixty) is his first
full length collection, Simon Armitage's first acquisition for the
Chatto Poetry list. Place's poems have an international or universal
quality, influenced by Neruda and Rilke rather than Auden: they are
lyrical and wise, rather than quotidian and clever. Some of the poems
are sea-going yarns, others are set in South America and read like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez in verse. There are also a handful of characters
portraits, and a wonderful long poem, 'Lum Street', based on a row of
terraced houses, its tenants and their relationships to each other. IN A
RARE TIME OF RAIN is a powerful and assured first collection, and brings
an unusual new voice into British Poetry.
