Keston Sutherland Livres

"A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose"--from publisher.

Over the years the author has gained the reputation of being at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry. This book collects his work and includes his recent The Odes to TL61P.

This collection of essays does not seek to fashion a bespoke 21st-century Albion from the remnants of Britain's various poetic traditions. The poetry considered here, and its criticism too, is by and large critical of the "new imperial suitings" beneath which the old and new networks of power run. The work gathered in these pages knows language and culture to be profoundly complicit across the board in the extension of acts of domination, from the preparation for and execution of war, to the composition of the suicide note, from the overt corrupting of the democratic franchise, to cold calling's interpellation of the human subject as consumer-in-waiting. "... an excellent, timely set of essays ..." --Peter Middleton Contributors to this volume include: Thomas Day, Keston Sutherland, Alizon Brunning, Robin Purves, J.H. Prynne, Bruce Stewart, D.S. Marriott, Stephen Thomson, Craig Dworkin, Sophie Read, Sara Crangle, Malcolm Phillips, Tom Jones, Josh Robinson, Sam Ladkin, Jennifer Cooke, Ian Patterson. Robin Purves is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. Sam Ladkin is a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author's sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically extend and reimagine the very possibility of the ode form; a monstrous accumulation of techniques and mimeses, from the strictest and most perfected metrical verse to the most delirious and cacophonous noise music; and a devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer, "TL61P". It is the longest poetical work yet written by Keston Sutherland and his most comprehensive effort yet to transform the grammar of human existence.