Wow! eBook
Collected Contraptions
Author(s): Peter McCarey (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 27 Jan. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 120 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847770738
- ISBN-13: 9781847770738
Book Description
Collected Contraptions, comprising work from Peter McCarey’s five pamphlet collections, is an exhilarating journey on the U-bahns and runways of language: ‘In a matter of hours / they can take you anywhere’. The book opens with water, rain and shadows; the ‘singer’s mark’ from the lost language of the Indus Valley civilisation speaks from a Shakespeare sonnet; we are caught in a sci-fi spaghetti Western; a shady Czech smuggles a golem and a robot into pre-massacre Rwanda. Language shape-shifts, reinvents itself, before going on another road trip where stories are recited backwards and fast forward. Last is ‘Tantris’, an epic of intricate narrative whose message couldn’t be more simple: ‘Don’t go: don’t let the morning / Turn your head with her shivering, thin grace.’
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Peter McCarey, from Glasgow, studied modern languages at Oxford, took a PhD in Scottish and Russian literature and philosophy at Glasgow, met his wife in Leningrad (she is Italian) then trained as a translator and interpreter at Bradford. He has worked for many international organizations, and now manages language services for one of them, in Geneva. He has studied and worked throughout Europe, Subsaharan Africa and Asia. His poetry is language before it is literature, and rhythm before language. His printed work has given rise to an audiovisual installation called The Syllabary, which receives up to half a million hits per month at www.knot.ch.
