Sign-In
Cart
Collected Poems, Volume 2: 2004-2020
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781848618121
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: May 10 2022
Pages: 464
Weight: 1.49
Height: 1.03 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The second volume of Frances Presley's Collected Poems, 2004 to 2020, brings together a distinctive body of work, representing a major achievement in modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen. There is also a new sequence, Channels, on shorelines and parallel coasts.
'Welcome to this comprehensive, collected poems from one of our most impressive contemporary poets. Here we can trace how, from her earliest poems, with their intense and tense engagement with her modernist forbears, Frances Presley has maintained an uncompromising integrity and invention. Her use of the page as a space of experimentation and of language as a multiple-stranded thread of living letters and sounds is dazzling, and these volumes allow us to see the shifts in this practice over decades. Each collection has built on the last, yet remained open to the world as she sees it at the moment of writing, as she greets it with an eye and voice both tender and sardonic. We see this in the wit with which she incorporates diverse found materials into her work and in her engagement with her fellow poets and artists through allusion, conversation and collaboration. In these carefully woven webs, her sense of place and the politics of landscape and her astute feminism remain constant.' -Harriet Tarlo
'As these volumes attest, Frances Presley's is the poetry of the artisan, authentic in the sharpest sense of the word: rare, inventive, its original beauties edged and tempered by the traditional skills in which they germinated. Nomadic in theme, sinewy of thought, filigree in habit, this oeuvre rummages with discriminating care among the cultural-linguistic currents and debris complicating the experiencing of place, distant or proximal, prehistoric or contemporary, empty or inhabited.' -Alice Entwhistle
'Presley combines deliberate poetry and environmental engagement to compel us to think and act. She sews together language, time, and space; and shows us that the creative act itself inspires a vivid ecopoetics of the imagination.' -Chad Weidner
Also from
Presley, Frances
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover