Search results for ""Author John Barnie""

Ambitious and prophetic, this new edition of John Barnie's verse novel, Ice, is increasingly urgent as scientist's debate the possible catastrophe that global warming and human intransigence threaten to unleash. Ice asks what it means to be human and how or whether we can retain humanity in the most extreme of circumstances.

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Afterlives sees John Barnie engaging with images once again, as he did in his book A Year of Flowers. Here, Barnie deploys his skills of perception to respond to a group of paintings in Peter Lord’s art collection. These are images that have been familiar to Barnie for years, yet he approaches them with characteristic freshness and humanity. There are no mere descriptions here. Rather, Barnie inhabits the images, speaking from within or engaging with their subjects as a persona just outside the frame. And as he does so, we are taken on a narrative journey, gaining insight into not only how poetry and art interrogate one another, but how each image, peered at ‘through thick cracking varnish’, reveals layers of history and the mores that accrete into hierarchies, prejudices, injustices and the inability to read one another across cultural gaps. The poems in Afterlives reverberate with the ghosts from the pictures, whose roles are still being played out in the divisive echo-chambers of today’s insiders and outsiders. Rich with social commentary, delivered with wit, and sometimes a hint of mischief, there is a serious intent at work here: the voice of those who know ‘whose tragedy they are in’—‘their own’. And who know also that they: ‘will defy anything / that gets in their way’.

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“We need more writers with bite. We have lived in the flatlands too long,” writes John Barnie in one of his ‘observations’ (‘Art in the Flatlands’). And bite he delivers. Ranging across politics, history, culture, ecological disaster, the meaning of truth, poetry, what we mean by identity and more… Barnie shares a window onto the world that is both erudite and particular. Leaning towards pessimism in a darkening world, these observations are often provocative, not from any bullish desire to antagonise, but as the result of mining a rationalist line of thought with an honesty and consistency that is applied as much to the author as to his subjects. There is a clarity here that some may find uncomfortable, but the aim is always dialogue above agreement; intellectual engagement above cheap solutions and sentimentality. Barnie asks us to think, consider and dig deeper, but most of all he asks that we “…live richly among our secondary self-created meanings, while recognising them for what they are. To face without flinching the nullity of the great void.” (‘Varieties of Meaning’) Tsunami Days is a vital collection of essays for those prepared to engage with its unflinching observations.

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The sense of awe. not only at the grandeur of the universe but also the insignificance of our species is centre-stage in A Report to Alpha Centauri. And John Barnie sets out his stall early, warning, in the poem ‘To the Reader’, that you may want to walk away since, ‘...these poems are out there with the chilly wind / and the absence of yellowhammers, with drills and wrecking balls,...’ But anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should surely stay, not to be comforted but to face the challenging questions, the unflinching honesty and the blazing anger at the hubris that is destroying so much life; life that even in what Conrad calls ‘a soulless universe’ still matters. Barnie calls us to ‘just look’, knowing that like all prophets he is ’... the stranger, the one / walking in the wrong direction.’ ('Lock-step') Serious and sometimes tinged with despair at humanity’s perverse race into self-destruction, captured in striking imagery that lingers, there is also a large and intelligent wit at play here that pours out in wry comments and melancholic humour. Like Kierkegaard’s father shaking a fist at the universe, Barnie raises his voice against the insanities that we all too easily take for granted, refusing to bow to the gods of consumerism. At heart, A Report to Alpha Centauri is a eulogy, written in the heart-rending voice of a visitor from Alpha Centauri, 10 million years after the last humans have left, ‘a world of shadows, a world— though I know this sounds strange, even as I write it down—of ghosts.’ ('A Report to Alpha Centauri') Sharp, urgent and ultimately humane, this is not poetry that any of us should turn away from.

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Walking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time's abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more..., these urgent poems carry our collective grief for all that is lost-'there was no one to grieve / so I walked beside them, taking it on.' ('Dead Swans on a Winter Coast') And alongside the losses, cultural and ecological, there is also vision, searing and politically acute. Prophetic in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, but with the lyric compression of William Carlos Williams, whose words provide the epigraph for this collection, Barnie imagines his quiet rural homeland occupied and brutalised in the central sequence, 'Occupied': 'the safety net / so full of holes you couldn't catch a whale in it [...]/ I knew the days of iridescence were lost for ever.' ('Iridescence') While in 'M.A.D.: The Sequel' rhymes skip along with an irony reminiscent of William Blake's use of nursery rhyme metre to convey horror. As the world is incinerated we hear: 'cry if you must / there was no one to gather / the heart's dust.' Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true. Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.

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Poetry about politics and society

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