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These are poems which welcome distraction and which seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, chart a lazy form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century.
List of contents
- Section One 1969-1979
- Poem
- The Elegy for Spring
- Kara Chach
- Quiet Arriving
- Summing It Up One of These Days
- A Happy New Year
- Waking Up: 2.10 pm
- Politics
- Night Ministry
- Lullaby
- Ritual Slips
- Polly Fortune
- Red Breath
- Hold the Child, Father Sunlight
- A Thing of Reason
- Pencil
- Fatal Congeries
- As We Run Out of the Wet
- Man
- Bound to a Time
- Japan is Sad
- Sentinel
- Requiem for a Brain
- Notes
- Sparkling Fruit Salts
- Kino
- Lino
- Nino
- Rhino
- Vino
- The Yurt: Day One
- Tatlin's Dream
- Curiously Strong
- Cover Design After the Event
- Any Old Iron
- Why Motoring Costs Have Soared
- Some Comfort
- "the audience"
- 'Life Dreamed is now Life Lived' (David Gascoyne)
- Derry
- The Political Economy of Art
- Underground
- Looking at Henry
- Endless Demands
- Intro
- Talking 'Bout Things
- Things Reply
- Apprehension
- Hardly Yippee
- We Must Tighten Our Belts
- Nothing in my head . . .
- Light Determines a State of Absolute Rest
- Out of Date
- It Was a Long Lane
- I Felt a Hand Grip My Elbow
- In Your Face
- Endless Demands
- In 1938
- Section Two Roughly SpeakingPoems from the 1980s
- All Our Ends
- Still Life
- Without Rhyme or Reason
- It Had to Be You
- The Origins of Love and Hate
- Late Capital
- Irreducible Blue
- So to Speak
- Speaking of Life
- After Breakfast
- Prattle
- You Never Said
- Time How Short
- Red Priest
- Interference
- Matter and Memory
- A Propos
- Time How Short
- Far and Away
- No Resolution
- The Night The
- Postcards to Spain 1986
- 1. A Note on Air and Motives
- 2. Coda
- 3. Point Blank Future
- 4. Wish You Were Here
- Postcard to Italy
- A Reading
- L'Histoire
- Small Changes
- Guinea on China
- High Time
- The First Intervention
- Solo
- Wherever a Head
- The Name of Day
- Say Nothing
- Section Three 1991-2002
- Sestina
- Tense Fodder
- The Garden Party
- No Contact
- These Days
- The Wire
- Less and Less
- Sleep
- This and That
- Lino Cut
- A Bit Apart
- Look Back
- Facing Page
- Drying Out
- New York
- Some Title
- Much More Pronounced
- Oh Snooty
- Oh, To Be in England
- Pastoral
- After Pope
- Laugh Like a Piano
- Basic White
- Hardihood
- Quite Right
- A World of Love
- Death of Dance
- In the Train
- North
- Living Here Now
- Mulch Tumult
About the author
Ian Patterson taught English for almost twenty years at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. His academic writing includes Guernica and Total War (Profile, 2007) and numerous essays on twentieth-century writers; his translations include Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Proust, Finding Time Again (Penguin, 2004). He has published over a dozen works of poetry, including Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969-2002 (Salt, 2003) and Marsh Air (Equipage, 2019). His poem 'The Plenty of Nothing' was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017. He lives in Suffolk.
