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Here on Earth

  • ISBN-13: 9781800172753
  • Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
    Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
  • By Jeffrey Wainwright
  • Price: AUD $29.99
  • Stock: 8 in stock
  • Availability: Order will be despatched as soon as possible.
  • Local release date: 28/02/2023
  • Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 88 pages Weight: 120g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
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We are still here on earth, and with a troubled sense of wonder Jeffrey Wainwrights new collection acknowledges lifes sufficiency. The poems evoke Ruskin as writer and artist, his insistence on precision, the thing seen in fullness rather than the seer, the object rather than the subject in the foreground. Ruskin: the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills. The poet addresses old friends, with whom hes grown up and then old. He engages them in meditations which include their past, the worlds in which they were taking shape - a shape that is now them, old men rich in language and in heart. They have not lost direction but fare forward, eyes focused on whats there. These are not the other poem which goes too far. The sea is close by/as it says in the other poem-/but here it is really true. The poet in small things, in the indefinite article, finds a pattern; he still looks for the plan, if there is one, which he cannot quite give up believing in. Here on Earth ends with a poem on his fathers experience of growing old, and a Seascape from Hollys Photograph: Holly, his daughter, in Australia, another world to which he has entry, but only as a visitor. Time foreshortens prospects, but while theres breath, eyesight, language and imagination, there is also conscience, fear, thought, and - still - desire. We are at a beginning.

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent and educated locally and at the University of Leeds. In 1973 he moved to Manchester Polytechnic, later Manchester Metropolitan University, from where he retired as Professor of English in 2009. In 1984 he was Judith Wilson Fellow at St Johns College Cambridge. Besides poetry he has translated Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel,Pierre Corneille and Bernard-Marie Koltes for the RSC, the BBC and the Actors Touring Company. His poem An Empty Street (PN Review) was shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.

Jeffrey Wainwrights work is among the most interesting of any poet now writing - The Guardian

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