Quennets E-Book

Philip Terry

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the 'quennet' is reworked and refigured in response to three perimeter landscapes. The first sequence, 'Elementary Estuaries', is inspired by a series of walks along the Essex estuary, the poems' appearance on the page suggesting the landscape's expansive estuarine vistas, its pink sail lofts and windswept gorse, beach huts and distant steeples. In the second sequence, written after a series of walks around the Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, the form changes to reflect the physical, almost bodily tension of the wall as an architectural and social obstruction. The final sequence, 'Waterlog', retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, and here the quennet's newly elongated shape and ragged margin evoke the region's eroding coastline, its deserted piers and power stations, electric fences and waterlogged fields. Terry's project is bold in scope, his poems subtle in effect, a mix of sign and song, concrete and lyric, Oulipo and psychogeography. It is a work about boundaries, political, social, and natural, and about the walk as a critical apparatus through which these fields are shown to connect.

Leseprobe

QUENNETS

Philip Terry was born in Belfast and has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth, and Essex, where he is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing. His books include the anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (2000), the poetry collections Oulipoems (2006), Oulipoems 2 (2009) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2010), and the novel tapestry (2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality (2007), and Georges Perec’s I Remember (2014). Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s poem to present-day Essex, was published in 2014 and was an Independent poetry title of the year.

Also by Philip Terry from Carcanet Press

Dante’s Inferno, 2014

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2010

Elementary Morality (tr.), 2008

QUENNETS

Philip Terry

CONTENTS

Elementary Estuaries

Mauerweg

Waterlog

Author’s Note

ELEMENTARY ESTUARIES

Blue buoy

Untampered simileGrey water

Black buoy

Still creek

White knightRed rubble

Cold stream

Grey sky

Yellow contaminationLight breeze

Blue sheep

Birdssilhouettedon themudflatslightson theColne

Still buoy

Outstretched branchesIcy pool

Cold sheep

Deserted paddock

Crunching gravelAzure sky

Distant beach-huts

Retreating sheep

Anchored vesselFlapping page

Sharpening wind

Uncertain seagull

Chiaroscuro cloudsFlapping crow

Withering rosehip

A shadowpointsacrossoyster bedsA lone steeplemarksthe opposite shore

Retreating clouds

Crunching sheepAzure sky

Chiaroscuro beach-huts

Lone redshank

Lean sparrowhawkVandalised sign

Lone duck

White horse

Green armadilloDancing teasels