Search results for ""author tony connor""

Tony Connor's tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor's abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman.

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"Things Unsaid" is the author's own choice of poems from a writing career that spans nearly half a century. It draws on seven published collections and includes many uncollected and new poems. Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. His poems - often, as he terms it, quasi-autobiographical - combine memory, experience and imagination with firm craftsmanship. The results are remarkable for their precision, their wry humour and broad human sympathies.

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