Martin Anderson - Obsequy for Lost Things

Published 2014. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, 90pp.

ISBN 978-1-84861-350-8. [Download a sample PDF from this volume here.]

Obsequy for Lost Things consists of three prose-poetry sequences. The first two share the setting of the Thames estuary. They all share, however, like the author’s previous collection of prose-poetry sequences Interlocutors of Paradise (from Skylight Press), and his The Hoplite Journals , a concern with history and the psychology of colonialism. As such they also confront, in the defeat of colonialism, what Martin Jacques called “the most important event of the 20thC”. An event, involving the attempt to violently suppress it, which coming-of-age British poets in the 1960s didn’t confront, and which A. Alvarez in his essay in his influential anthology The New Poetry (1962) didn’t deem worthy of inclusion alongside other manifestations of “Evil”: nuclear war and the Nazi holocaust. If British poets today, however, are to acquire what he termed “a new seriousness, a willingness to face the full range of [their] experience with [their] full intelligence” then they need to avoid what Alvarez called “easy exits” and to redress such an omission.

Of Anderson’s recent Snow. Selected Poems 1981-2011 , it was said:

‘Inner space is what Anderson’s poems were made for. Astonishing. Far and away the best collection of poems published in 2012’

—George Messo

‘A very beautiful book. A classic of the great nostalgia of exile.’

—Nathaniel Tarn

‘Will serve as new territory to many Western readers… The intensity of many of these poems grows out of silence, and the expectation of sound, often minute, but within the context of its space, huge in importance… [They are] poems which reward concentrated reading… evok[ing] a gentle power, treading a path that is counter to much modern writing, and welcome for that.’

—Sean Street

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