Search results for ""Author Toby Martinez de las Rivas""

Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. The landscape, teetering on apocalypse, is characterised by collision and disintegration. Among fragments of memory and history are meticulously journaled observations of the natural world: the moorhen who 'with exaggerated delicacy steps / free of the reedbeds'; the dragonfly that 'pushes itself through the armour / of its body' to be born. Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable, appearing in the impression of a wedding or the recurring moments captured between a father and son, who make between them delicate balsawood constructions, which - as the poems do themselves - take flight in the turmoil, ecstatic one moment, plunged into darkness the next. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.

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Toby Martinez de las Rivas is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in recent times; to some, a modern-day William Blake. The Guardian described Terror, his first book, as 'visionary' and 'exciting', the New Statesman as 'remarkable', and all combined to praise its brave and lucid intensity. Black Sun is a sequel of poise and clarity that is, if anything, more open and accessible than its predecessor. Beginning where Terror left off, it pursues that book's fascination with history and with theology, with the physical body and the body of the State, with preservation and redemption. Black Sun confronts the dark dreams and hidden powers of this world, and, through the poet's attentive watching and wondering, offers its readers a way 'to know - & still to resist a last despair'.'A lucid and spontaneous lyricism . . . how unlike most of his contemporaries Martinez de las Rivas seems to be.' New Statesman

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In Terror, Toby Martinez de las Rivas leads us on a high-wire act of verbal dexterity and inventive syntax in pursuit of a new kind of communication. Set against landscapes fallen just short of paradise, but which retain the possibility of redemption, these poems work intimately with the reader, interrogating us and encouraging us never to settle for inadequate answers. Formally adventurous and wide-ranging, Terror examines ideas of conflict, betrayal, sexual and divine love, history and hope, and holds each up to the light of our own fate and frailty, in search of a language which might console us, a language with which we might commune in our most private and fearful moments. Terror is a thrilling and powerful debut.

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