Description
Book Synopsis"After Francis Amunategui": The appearance of a hot sausage with its salad of potatoes in oil can leave nobody indifferent ...it is pure, it precludes all sentimentality, it is the Truth.
Trade ReviewImpossibly romantic and optimistic, miraculously avoiding gloom and didacticism to achieve a continuously surprising and euphoric surface … related to … classic simplicity of line.
-- Andrew Duncan
This is ‘out and about’ poetry, inhabiting Cambridge pubs and Eastern European streets, embracing non-sequiturs and apparently-random thoughts into the smooth thought-flow of event and image and speculation. There’s a libidinal energy which resists gloom (hatred of the meagre portion/even the bars are closed when we leave the cinema) and the occasional break into what could almost be song lyric.
-- Steve Spence * Terrible work *
John James is an extremely enjoyable and charismatic poet. His work is like a vigorous breath of fresh air, full of variety, humour and surprise. It has a strong sense of lyricism and energy, a striking mixture of the experimental and the immediate that brings to mind the work of Mayakovsky or the New York poets of the 1950s and 60s.
-- Charles Bainbridge * The Guardian *
Table of Contents
- Mmm … Ah Yes (1967)
- Shades in a Conversation
- Cool Evening
- Plane Tree
- On the Way Home
- Chi è Questa Che Vien …
- 6:00 p.m.
- While Listening to ‘Ah-leu-cha’
- Hengrove
- An Open Letter to Jim Workman, Landlord, at the Rose & Crown, Withy Mills, North Somerset
- What Can You Do With a Bird Like That?
- Walking on the Downs Near Avon Gorge
- Flowering Shrub
- To Allen Ginsberg
- The Lovers
- To a Young Art Student in London
- Danny’s Plaque
- Bathampton Morrismen at the Rose & Crown
- The Welsh Poems (1967)
- Exultation
- Second Exultation
- Heredity
- Trägheit (1968)
- Blues & Reverie
- Runic
- A Dream
- Variations from the Same Cramped Postcard
- Days Passing
- Inventory
- The Small Henderson Room (1969)
- ‘… or as we wheel’
- With Regard the Matter of Falling
- On Leaving the Footpath
- Written on Beginning Georg Büchner’s Lenz & While Waiting a Return
- Poem of Inevitable September, or, I’m a City Boy at Heart
- ‘Whatever You’ve Got, Someone Somewhere Needs it’ – W.M.
- Waiting
- Coda to the Immediately Preceding Poems
- Side Window
- ‘There is a very slight relief in’
- ‘Forsythia spatters the faint loops &’
- A Public Self-address System
- ‘This to be done’
- Talking in Bed
- The Postcard Sonata
- In the Grass
- Letters from Sarah (1973)
- Striking the Pavilion of Zero (1975)
- ‘for the snow’
- Talking in Bed
- ‘pointless …’
- ‘uuhhh? …’
- ‘a complete innocence …’
- Rough
- ‘the day writhes in an immense crater’
- ‘drawing my chair closer to the speaker’
- 27 October 1969
- The Dragon House
- Good Old Harry
- The Grace
- ‘the trees are pliant to the wind’
- ‘from the earth quite gratefully transmuted’
- Going Back to Sleep 2:12 p.m.
- ‘a dangerous wind & temptress to exalted nihilism …’
- Proleptic
- May Day Greetings 1971
- A Theory of Poetry (1977)
- War (1978)
- A Former Boiling (1979)
- Toasting (1979)
- Inaugural Address (1979)
- Berlin Return (1983)
- Craven Images
- Variations on ‘Today Backwards’
- Two Sonnets
- After Satie, a Concert, 13 June 1972, on the Beach, Aldeburgh
- A Page
- Karol in Tunisia
- After Francis Amunatégui
- Bye Bye Blackbird
- Song
- Wearing My Little Blue T-Shirt Again
- One for Rolf
- Narrative Graffiti
- After Christopher Wood
- Cambridge
- Chute de Pierres
- Sister Midnight
- Shakin All Over
- Poem for Bruce McLean (1983)
- Lines for Richard Long (1988)
- The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle (1988)
- Local (1990)
- Dreaming Flesh (1991)
- For the Safety of Lovers
- The Conversation
- From Pass to Pass
- Song
- After Rilke: December
- A Letter to Paul
- After Picasso
- Polka
- Nocturnal
- On Romsey Rec
- Eugène Boudin
- Nijinsky
- Sleep
- Stacking
- Song
- Kinderlieder (1992)
- After Thomas Hood
- Sketches of a Day
- Song
- Israel
- Anglo-Irish Relations
- Anglo-Irish Relations (Slight Return)
- Confession
- That Old Piano
- The Consciousness Raisers
- From the Welsh
- Colonial Medley
- Gnome
- Skip
- Skip
- Gender
- The American President Addresses West Berlin
- January 1983
- The Sandwich
- The Bee Code of Hywel Dda
- Schlegel Eats a Bagel (1996)
- February
- Retro
- Poem
- Blue Scar Watch
- Rune
- Idyl
