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In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.
Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix, McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.
About the author
Chris McCabe is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Triumph of Cancer (Penned in the Margins). Pharmapoetica, with Maria Vlotides, was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award and his plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in Liverpool and London. His non-fiction series, searching for a great lost poet in one of London's Magnificent Seven cemeteries, begins with In the Catacombs (selected as an LRB Bookshop book of the year) and Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery. He co-edited, with Victoria Bean, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015). Dedalus (Henningham Family Press) was LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019. The anthology Poems From The Edge of Extinction (Chambers, 2019) was Gold Medal Winner for Poetry and Special Honours Award for Best of Anthology at the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards.
Summary
In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.
