Forget tales of 2012 & the Mayan control calendar...
...It's time for The Rapture
the new poetry book from Tim Cumming
Please support independent publishing by ordering direct from Salt and get a 20% discount off the £9.99 price
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844717385.htm
Synopsis
We live in an age of terror, literally and metaphorically. Old dependables
have been shaken loose and to free us from the terror comes the poetry of "The
Rapture" - poetry with a tangible exultance and joy tinged with the dark matter
of End Times and the pinching fear of what's up ahead wrestling with the
pleasures and shelter of the moment - our internal clocks striking the hours of
the age of anxiety in us all.
The Rapture is divided into three parts, each exploring sensation,
identity, immersion and memory in its own way. Chapel of Carbon includes love
poems, lyrics, outrageous metaphors and narratives alongside wide-screen, more
open-field works that probe at our very sense of self and perception.
The central Improvisations section tests language and meaning's outer
reaches and its most intimate fumblings. These are poems that tear down the
fences and break open the windows and doors. This is not the hand-me-down
formalism of the writing workshop, but in the power and sudden impact in the
work's vivid mosaic of image, character, narrative and metaphor conspiring
together to make you seriously question assumptions of what form and meaning
actually are.
The final First Music is the most autobiographical of Cumming's published
work, an exploration of the matter of memory, and the act of remembering as well
as the experience of returning to the landscape of one's past. It evokes the way
of life and of imagination on a remote Dartmoor farm in the 60s and 70s, a study
of memory and the process of remembering and perception as well as of capturing
the landscape and aura of England's wildest landscape, littered with ghosts and
strange tokens, stranger tales and prehistoric artefacts.
The Rapture by Tim Cumming
Salt Modern Poets 84 pages, £9.99
Order direct from: www.saltpublishing.com
Sample poem:
For the Record
So they got there before us,
climbing over the furniture,
diving gear stashed in cavities
in the ancestral record.
There are swifts in the eaves
debating theology. We have seen
dead kings set before us, Aztecs
on the bouncy castle, prophecies
and portents in the wiring,
our view of the world blown
out with the storm, glass
underfoot, unstable elements,
the song of the tribe crowded
into its millennia, timer set
in calendar stone, trapped air
blown into music, rituals of the
solstice. The new god sweeps
through with his architects
and lingering looks, huge hands
counting down to zero at the
launch pad, the air burns like paper,
diaries of unimpeded progress
bedding into the geological record,
crowds jostling at the curtains
of the long count.
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