Carcanet Press - The Magic of What's There

Description
Author
Awards
Reviews

In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. ‘Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in ‘After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

David Morley is a poet and ecologist. He won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems, the judges commenting, ‘Ted Hughes wrote about the natural magical and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor’. His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The ... read more

Awards won by David Morley Short-listed, 2020 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (FURY) Winner, 2015 Poetry Society Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (The Invisible Gift )

'Exuberant, linguistically experimental poems... his work has affinities with Hughes's attention to both the surfaces and depths of the natural world.'
Jeff Gundy, Poetry Salzburg Review
'David Morley can work in more than one mode... no subject is off limits here'
Harry Cochrane, TLS
'Morley is a master of the integrity of wholes and parts. A fabulous collection of poems...'
Dundee University Review of the Arts

Praise for David Morley 'A linguistic playground full of marvels'

D.A. Prince, Under the Radar

'A rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite... there's something magical about reading the poems first for the sheer verbal play of the language, the sparking, luminous sounds it makes in the mouth and paints on the mind... FURY has an enormous range, and handles its politics with sensitivity and power'

Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

'David Morley's FURY is published by Carcanet. Sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices, the air is full of birds, fury meets gentleness, and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us... FURY controls its furies with ever inventive craftsmanship.'

Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, The Forward Prize

'...poems which all possess such showmanship and sonic agility... Morley's poetics of mimicry and ventriloquism echo the collection's subjects of displaced peoples and species, illustrating the virtuosity of voice, in a mutually reinforcing loop.'

The Poetry Review

'Morley's mastery of poetics comes into full effect as he introduces more and more Romany words in his poems... Morley connects us simultaneously to the past and the present, to our world and the natural world. An ecologist and naturalist, David Morley's attention to the natural world is particular and more acute than most... David Morley's Fury is an exhibition of poetic prowess and skilful storytelling that extends his interests in the legacy of Gypsy people from his previous collections. Readers can expect to be treated to a force of nature in poetics, linguistic dexterity and storytelling.'

H.M. Hussain, DURA Dundee

'In FURY, Morley's concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided [...] Morley's trademark fusion of Romani and English "Angloromani" forges afresh his lyric gifts'

Sinead Morrissey, PBS Autumn Bulletin

'The poems of FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language... FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: "All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were."'

Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

'In this daring new collection, Morley holds a mirror up to the myriad of irresponsible ways that we as humans influence the natural world and how we treat one another... Threaded with Romanes - as Morley's poems often are - this is a celebration of the Roma tongue as well as the people and places gone by... To read Fury is to tread a pilgrimage along the oldest putèka. To know these paths is to be compelled to walk them again, to feel the trembling pride for our ethnicity and to sing once more of home.'

Jo Clement, Travellers Times

'Like opening a box of fireworks, something theatrical happens when you open its pages ... Ted Hughes wrote about the natural, magical, and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor.'
Ali Smith, Andrew McMillan & Jackie Kay, Ted Hughes Award judges.
'David Morley takes us on a voyage to the other half of his heritage. In a serial masterpiece of macaronic verse, he shows us a life intimate with our own...yet more deeply Other than romantic fairytales or even authentic music from Spain and Eastern Europe had suggested it might be. He holds our world up to a language mostly kept secret up to now...the refraction of the familiar is dizzying yet often moving.'
Les Murray
'T'he strange atmospherics suffuse every page while the balance struck between mystery and disclosure can be breathtaking...Such moments led me to feel that Morley had not so much created a new universe as uncovered one. Any universe is bound together by language; and Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness'
Tim Liardet, Guardian 'A rare and beautiful book.'
The Guardian on The Invisible Kings (2007) 'Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now in a brown huff, Wisdom snaring a warren with a snigger of wires. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us.'
George Szirtes 'Enchantment by David Morley is a linguistic feast...'
Jonathan Bate Sunday Telegraph Books Of The Year 2010

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The Magic of What's There David Morley 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: 21st Century, British Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (88 pages) (Pub. Nov 2017) 9781784104948 £9.99 £8.99 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Nov 2017) 9781784104955 £7.99 £7.19 Digital access available through Exact Editions To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Author Awards Reviews In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. ‘Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in ‘After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy. David Morley is a poet and ecologist. He won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems, the judges commenting, ‘Ted Hughes wrote about the natural magical and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor’. His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The ... read more Awards won by David Morley Short-listed, 2020 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (FURY) Winner, 2015 Poetry Society Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (The Invisible Gift ) 'Exuberant, linguistically experimental poems... his work has affinities with Hughes's attention to both the surfaces and depths of the natural world.' Jeff Gundy, Poetry Salzburg Review 'David Morley can work in more than one mode... no subject is off limits here' Harry Cochrane, TLS 'Morley is a master of the integrity of wholes and parts. A fabulous collection of poems...' Dundee University Review of the Arts Praise for David Morley 'A linguistic playground full of marvels' D.A. Prince, Under the Radar 'A rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite... there's something magical about reading the poems first for the sheer verbal play of the language, the sparking, luminous sounds it makes in the mouth and paints on the mind... FURY has an enormous range, and handles its politics with sensitivity and power' Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times 'David Morley's FURY is published by Carcanet. Sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices, the air is full of birds, fury meets gentleness, and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us... FURY controls its furies with ever inventive craftsmanship.' Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, The Forward Prize '...poems which all possess such showmanship and sonic agility... Morley's poetics of mimicry and ventriloquism echo the collection's subjects of displaced peoples and species, illustrating the virtuosity of voice, in a mutually reinforcing loop.' *The Poetry Review* 'Morley's mastery of poetics comes into full effect as he introduces more and more Romany words in his poems... Morley connects us simultaneously to the past and the present, to our world and the natural world. An ecologist and naturalist, David Morley's attention to the natural world is particular and more acute than most... David Morley's Fury is an exhibition of poetic prowess and skilful storytelling that extends his interests in the legacy of Gypsy people from his previous collections. Readers can expect to be treated to a force of nature in poetics, linguistic dexterity and storytelling.' H.M. Hussain, DURA Dundee 'In FURY, Morley's concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided [...] Morley's trademark fusion of Romani and English "Angloromani" forges afresh his lyric gifts' Sinead Morrissey, PBS Autumn Bulletin 'The poems of FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language... FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: "All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were."' Aingeal Clare, The Guardian 'In this daring new collection, Morley holds a mirror up to the myriad of irresponsible ways that we as humans influence the natural world and how we treat one another... Threaded with Romanes - as Morley's poems often are - this is a celebration of the Roma tongue as well as the people and places gone by... To read Fury is to tread a pilgrimage along the oldest putèka. To know these paths is to be compelled to walk them again, to feel the trembling pride for our ethnicity and to sing once more of home.' Jo Clement, Travellers Times 'Like opening a box of fireworks, something theatrical happens when you open its pages ... Ted Hughes wrote about the natural, magical, and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor.' Ali Smith, Andrew McMillan & Jackie Kay, Ted Hughes Award judges. 'David Morley takes us on a voyage to the other half of his heritage. In a serial masterpiece of macaronic verse, he shows us a life intimate with our own...yet more deeply Other than romantic fairytales or even authentic music from Spain and Eastern Europe had suggested it might be. He holds our world up to a language mostly kept secret up to now...the refraction of the familiar is dizzying yet often moving.' Les Murray 'T'he strange atmospherics suffuse every page while the balance struck between mystery and disclosure can be breathtaking...Such moments led me to feel that Morley had not so much created a new universe as uncovered one. Any universe is bound together by language; and Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness' Tim Liardet, Guardian 'A rare and beautiful book.' The Guardian on The Invisible Kings (2007) 'Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now in a brown huff, Wisdom snaring a warren with a snigger of wires. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us.' George Szirtes 'Enchantment by David Morley is a linguistic feast...' Jonathan Bate Sunday Telegraph Books Of The Year 2010	Share this... 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