Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakanyova, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.
Trade Review'Fully alive to our financialized, precarious situation, this poet is also alive to the human sensorium and the revels of language, its permutations, transmutations. Moon for Sale announces in its very title this poet's mordant wit but also his romanticism. A formidable intelligence powers this work, its whiplashing jingles and ditties, its visual poems, its sonic brilliances, its micro-shifts and micro-tones, its ominous deadpans, dry diagnoses. Yet for all Price's severities, we also encounter "intimate risks,/a whispered promise." He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.' Maureen N. McLane; 'Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation.' Carol Ann Duffy; 'Reading the poems you become aware you are in the presence of a mind working much more quickly and sharply than your own.' The Poetry School
