Quote of the Day
It is impossible to imagine literary life in Britain without Carcanet.
William Boyd
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas.
Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.
| |
Tooting IdyllVal Warner
Merry, our friends ramble on bitter-sweet
about `the inevitable decay of love', inevitable as love's old sweet song -- some seasonal affair, a being burnt like dead-heads at the garden end, year end. one more . . . from `Love's Old Sweet Song'
Tooting Idyll, Val Warner's first new collection in eleven years, includes two sequences, both set in London. The title poem's three monologues, each in a different form, focus on a south London terraced house in Tooting Bec inhabited by two male lovers (one a C.O., the other to become a soldier) coping with the social mores of June 1939 and the threat of war. In June 1984 the same house is lived in by a man and woman with an adopted child and another adoption fixed. The fate of the wartime lovers is implicit in the second part; the future of the 1980s couple is made explicit in the third, from the perspective of a cross-dressing female friend after the VE commemoration of 1995.
Mary Chay, the second sequence, focuses on a murder in Victoria in 1994, seen from many viewpoints (including those of the police, forensic laboratory staff, suspects, neighbours, witnesses, passers-by, a shop assistant, and a cross-dressing man who encounters the victim on her last day) and deploying a variety of poetic forms. |
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Poetry
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Lives and Letters
PN Review
Video
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
The Carcanet Blog
We've Moved!
read more
Books of the Year
read more
One Little Room: Peter McDonald
read more
Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
read more
Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn
read more
Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry
read more
|
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd
|