Great Housing Estates

My new book, On the Margins of Great Housing Estates, is now out from Shearsman. Blurb:

In central place is the long poem ‘Calendar Rite’. The speaker is faced with a cold river and has to shed every possession to get across it without being swept under. He remembers everything which must be lost, which stored heat and which generated heat. He recalls past performances along with past poems, their chains of compulsive images, and the noise burying them. Scenes of unresolved conflict play out in a dream landscape, strung out along two banks of a river; where along each arm images repeat each other in an altered or defective symmetry. The rival journeys of several hundred poets are recounted as a race between so many ships, in which almost all are wrecked, their anatomies altered by terminal stresses, their fallen spars making snags or niches on the riverbed. Irrational motives for symbolic action are re-voiced as the mineralisation of cherished objects, a personal museum of models for verbal objects. The choices leading to rejection of imposed ideas make for a history of dissidence, symbolised in a tiny 5th century papyrus codex, written at millimetric scale to be easily hidden during police raids, and read with the help of a convex lens. The hidden is boundless and space vanishes into the cracks.
“A history of shopping” was started around 2003, and following a 12-year stage of not writing, was completed around 2018. That series deals with exchange and retailing, after a prolonged interest in manufacturing and production. “The Goths as inventors of tourism”, deals with the legend of wealth and culture as the voice which leads barbarians from the world-periphery to surge towards the Mediterranean as if to a shopping mall. The flow of goods lifts people off their feet, is like a river of dreams. ‘One absolutely perfect cultural object’ describes perfection as what you can't have and which still motivates the life cultural. A local poem deals with William Hallam Pegg, a Nottingham lace designer and communist who, during the Depression, produced a monumental design for an allegory of Want and Plenty, as a pattern to be realised in Jacquard lace.
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I live on the edge of the Plains Estate in Nottingham. The reference is of course to a previous book, "On the margins of great empires". The contents list is:
Contents The history of shopping
• Llyn Cerrig Bach
• The Goths as inventors of tourism
• Equidistant
• Shopping for Books
• One absolutely perfect cultural object
William Hallam Pegg
The Brig at Torthorwald
Who owns the river
Leabhar Balbh
Fragment 355M/636k/12
CCTV Underground
The Geology of Islands
Nottingham Alabaster (and some gypsum)
Low-Resolution
Capistranus Triumphans
Under Controlled Conditions
Calendar Rite:
X1 the cold river
X2 thematic
X3 coloured dust
X4 Performance Fear
X5 Banal Poem About Fallen Leaves
X6 Performance High: Skeleton
X7 Performance High 2: A romance of the docks
X8 Gnosis
X9 Carrion Crows
X10 A Route March in the Cultural Field
X11 The Cologne Mani Codex
X12 The Origin of His Body
X13 Inside and Out
X14 Dissident
A cold river 2
AA Calendar Rite
Y14 Poem of gofyn and diolch, being of request and thanks for a gift
Y13 Outside and In
Y12 Gnarls and Snibs
Y11 The Origin of Space
Y10 The Catalogue of Ships
Y9 Carrion Crows Stay Up Late
Y8 In a River
Y7 Performance High 3: Alien Skies
Y6 Performance High 4: Altyn-Dagh
Y5 jealousy
Y4 The North Circular Motorway at Silver Street
Y3 coloured dust 2
Y2 Theme with loss of variation
Y1 cold river 3