Search results for ""Author Annie Freud""

Annie Freud's new book The Remains was inspired by a visit to an exhibition of Sung Dynasty works on paper, and their unselfconscious blending of illustration and poetry. However the book has its imaginative origins in a huge collection of broken household china amassed by the author while digging her garden. Stranger items also came to light: a minute horseshoe, a fossilised scallop shell, a rusted metal silhouette of a hound. These worn shards and talismans soon began work on Freud's singular imagination, and this extraordinary collection of poetry and art is the result. The Remains is concerned with what is left when everything seems broken or lost - and the new and unexpected things that happen when they are found again. Beautifully illustrated in full colour by the poet herself, The Remains is a powerful book of consolation and surprise from one of our most original literary voices.

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A powerful collection from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Annie Freud. Hiddensee represents Annie Freud’s most ambitious work to date, not least because it is a book about ambition and its necessity, the need to go beyond oneself, and to do what one cannot: Freud dives into other ways of thinking, other art forms, the taboos of illness and desire, and – spectacularly – other languages. This ambition has also emboldened Freud to pursue and confront the complex truth of herself: her German Jewish inheritance, her teachers, the remarkable minds of the exiled individuals who raised her – and the exiles she herself then pursued. The book also celebrates the work of the French-language Swiss poet Jacques Tornay, whom Freud identifies as a spiritual brother – and a route back into her own French and symbolist influences. These astonishing and generous versions of Tornay remind us that our voices should not and cannot be uncomplicatedly our own. Hiddensee is named for the Baltic island where Annie Freud’s grandmother spent her summers before the war (and its famous artistic community, whose members included George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz). In its unselfconscious internationalism and breathtaking cultural range, Hiddensee offers a radically European and multilingual perspective to counter the cultural narrowness and closing borders of the current age, and again confirms Freud as one of our most essential poets.

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Annie Freud’s award-winning first collection, The Best Man That Ever Was, introduced readers to a remarkably versatile new voice; The Mirabelles delivers a similarly exhilarating cornucopia – the Mask of Temporary Madness, Marc Almond, mini-novels a sonnet long, Carottes Vichy, and the most gripping account of a billiard game you’ll ever read. However, in a new sequence derived from family letters, Freud has invented almost a new kind of writing: neither ‘found’ nor ‘made’ in the conventional sense, these poems are profoundly moving, and startling in their boldly unfashionable lack of irony. Elsewhere The Mirabelles is full of the world-stuff – the clothes and food, the art and social intrigues – with which we dress and conceal our deeper emotions and appetites. In the end, this is a book about reality and its representations, and the truth and lies we tell about ourselves.

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Given its imaginative risk and experimental daring, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Annie Freud’s poetry is its effortless success: these wise, funny, sly, erotic and lightning-witted poems all find their marks with unerring accuracy. From the disturbing dramatic monologue of the title poem, through love poems of great worldly tenderness, to a soliloquy from the inventor of the individual fruit pie – the reader is both challenged and entertained from first to last. The Best Man That Ever Was announces one of the most startlingly original poets to have emerged in recent years.

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