Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins
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Threads of Iron is Duncan's lost book — not because it was never published, but because it never appeared as it was intended. Instead, the original was split into two and was published in two parts by Reality Street (in 1991) and by Shearsman Books (in 2000). Another part of the manuscript was cut and became Sound Surface (now part of the volume, In Five Eyes , also available here).

" Threads of Iron may have been the great unpublished book of the 80s, the recipient of more agonized and extensive debate than many published collections of poetry. […] these poems invoke the most massive tragedies of the 20th century not merely to deconstruct the rhetorics of power, but to rouse what Wyndham Lewis called the 'the noble pessimism of the speculative mind' into a new political practice and a reformed subjectivity. Duncan’s is a poetry of laudable ambition and sometimes extraordinary achievement." —Geoffrey Ward, PN Review

"Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly. It is strong and active with the questions of power which underly the strength; the instrumentalism of language is put under sustained pressure, both of invention and of expression, and the outcome is negotiated closely across a wide range of historical predicament and moral passion. […] I am surprised to find how steadily I admire this work and how compelling I find the force which it claims; I do think that it is very good, holding its place in the altogether fraught intersections of history and personality." —J.H. Prynne, from 'A Letter to Andrew Duncan' in Grosseteste Review 15.

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