Book description
James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed
collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic
blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new
themes and old obsessions.
At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly
registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately
domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its
way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of
social and civic drama.
Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and
silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water
and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence
while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of
intense lyrical beauty.
Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun
moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the
highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to
the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and
intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets
writing today.
James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He
has published two novels -
The Horned Man
and
Seven Lies
- three collections of short stories and three previous books of
poetry. With Michael Hofmann he co-edited the anthology
After Ovid:
New Metamorphoses
. His story 'The Siege' was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film
Besieged
. He won first prize in the 1999 TLS/Blackwells Poetry Competition and
has been shortlisted for both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. He was
also the winner of the inaugural National Short Story Competition. His
memoir,
Give Me Everything You Have
, was published in 2013.
