Search results for ""Author Ned Denny""

"It was dusk, when the dark earth stains the blueing air and soothes bird in tall tree and beast in silent lair; I alone amidst all that hush of soil and leaf prepared for the war of the way and the way's great grief, of which an undistracted heart may speak or sing..." Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Ned Denny's baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet's version – in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope – is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime.

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Winner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Ned Denny's Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a `rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about' (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy). The collection opens on a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which - to quote Twin Peaks, a recurrent leitmotif - `the woods are wondrous ... but strange'. Interspersed with original poems in a variety of complex forms is a series of illuminated and darkly erotic `remakes' of other poets' work, from the Old English classic The Wanderer to late Baudelaire via Goethe, Cavalcanti, Li Po, enigmatic troubadour lyrics, and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Politics are never far away: modern man's severance from the earth, the sacred, and his own inner self has grave consequences.

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And deeper still than this, my eyes penetrate far into the earth as if it was an agate: foundations, dungeons, subterranean cities where thwarted joyance wages its atrocities... (from 'Dusk: An Antique Song') Ned Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says - in his essay on Hoelderlin - about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night," consist? In the fact that the gods have departed, and in the rootless, heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods' traces, and there are glimpses here "through a veil of names" of nature's saving radiance, of the indestructible delicacy of Claude's last landscape, of a "wild grin of insect glee" just beyond the confines of sleep. As Denny's adept voice 'throws' itself into and through other texts, forms, places, things and times - including works by Heine, classical Chinese poets, Pindar, Ronsard, Hoelderlin, Mallarme, Victor Hugo and Lorca - it becomes clear that the fathoming of our iron age is inseparable from the coming dawn.

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