Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. In his fifth collection of poems, David Wheatley twins his birthplace and his current home, Ireland and Scotland, to engage issues of globalism, identity, and language. He takes inspiration from the Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, self-nominated President of Planet Earth, who in a state of apocalyptic rapture envisioned a new world culture, its rise and its dramatic undoing. In The President of Planet Earth Wheatley brings an experimental sensibility to bear on questions of land and territory, channelling the messianic aspirations of modernism into subversive comedy. We move between Pictish pre-history, the imaginary South American nation ofaA A aA A `Oblivia', aA A and post-independence referendum Scotland. Wheatley marries classical, Gaelic, Scots and continental traditions. He deploys several styles - prose poetry; concrete poetry; translations from Middle Irish, Latin and French; sestinas and sonnets in Scots - to heady effect. The President of Planet Earth refashions language and the world it shapes, devising a transformative poetics.
Trade Review'Wheatley's is a poetry of displacement, uncertainty and sheer possibility'. - Guardian; 'This is a book I've been looking forward to for a long time, and it does not disappoint. Wheatley is one of our most original poet-critics, and the serious range of his enthusiasms is evident in the many forms, voices, histories and horizons here, from Lucretian couplets and Irish lament to the tragi-comic decadence of Baudelaire and the witty 'avant-gardening' of Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Like an 'idling docker's flourish on the spoons', Wheatley makes music from the throwaway moment, and in this big, rich, satirical, lyrical volume draws it all into a virtuoso performance.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod; 'Gracefully meditative...a Chatterton-esque literary discovery of old, albeit with references to Bob Geldof and Alka-Seltzer.' - Literary Review
