Kelvin Corcoran - For the Greek Spring

Paperback, 136pp. 9x6ins
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For the Greek Spring is a selection of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry about Greece, combining new work with poems from his previous collections. The poet's sustained engagement with Greece is evident at every turn. Corcoran's project is a re-imagining and rethinking of our cultural antecedents, which goes considerably beyond the ready co-option of classical values into the pockets of ambitious politicians and the familiar reaches of the academy. Corcoran has developed an artful ventriloquism in which we're not only uncertain of who may be speaking, but are ultimately persuaded that it doesn't matter. The voice is poetry itself, first and last.

"The Greek landscape has become a central ground for Kelvin Corcoran's poetry and here its presence is felt to the full, the Greece of now, its people and places but side by side with its mythology and ancient history. The two worlds, as he discovers, are bound together. These poems are immediate and convincing, and the very opposite of dry scholarship." —Lee Harwood

"Kelvin Corcoran's poetry of Greece has two sides to it, constantly engaged with each other. One is the relaxation of the northerner in the Mediterranean climate zone — heat, light, sea, stone, wine, music and all the rest of that—the Now. The other is the whole of Greek culture — mythology, poetry, ritual, religion, drama, philosophy, legend, history—the Then. The first of these is rational, the second irrational, but they get on very well together, in fact each normally implies the other. The Now is enhanced and dignified by the Then; the Then becomes visible through the Now, and the whole spectrum announces sightings of the extended real." —Peter Riley

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