Description
Book SynopsisA fantastic new chapbook from a poet much celebrated for his tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful. Poems here are at once funny and melancholy; the style is inimitable: Stannard takes his readers through a range of emotions via a witty and wonderful tight-rope walking act with language
Trade Review"There's an air of luxurious melancholy about these poems, a languid play of feelings and associations, that sets them wholly against the uptight, earnest strain in British writing and that appeals to me warmly. They can be very funny, too." - Christopher Reid "Never have near-death experiences been rendered with such baffled detachment. Julian Stannard is unique, and I go to his poems for pleasures of indirection, appetite, curiosity and a sort of beleaguered fun that I can find nowhere else." - Charles Boyle "The poetry of Julian Stannard is a fresh and delectable pleasure because he is a flaneur without alienation a wit whose sharpness comes at nobody else's expense, and a gourmand with a gleeful sense of mortality. These are poems to devour." - Don Share "Like Frank O'Hara, Stannard can shift from breathless joy to heartbreak without warning. As in 'La Douceur de la Nuit' this new collection performs a 'dance with melancholy', and is a welcome addition to one of the most unabashedly entertaining bodies of work in contemporary British poetry." - Declan Ryan THE STREET OF PERFECT LOVE
Table of ContentsChastity 1 Thigh-Slapping on the Riviera 3 Dickens Discovers His Italian Babylon 5 Lorsica 8 Winston and Candy 9 Stations of the Cross 10 Via Monte Bello 12 La Baia di Silenzio 13 Minestrone 14 Via Antonio Burlando 15 Napoli 17 The Necropolis 18 Buddhism 19 King's Cross 21 Hampshire 22 Jerry Hall Meets Salvador Dali 23 Burlington Arcade 24 Aldgate East 25 September 1939 26 The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest 28 Miss Pinkerton 30 La Douceur de la Nuit 31
