Wow! eBook
To Hell with Paradise: New and Selected Poems
Author(s): Gareth Reeves (Author)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 30 Aug. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 144 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847771440
- ISBN-13: 9781847771445
Book Description
To Hell with Paradise draws on Gareth Reeves’s Carcanet collections Real Stories (1984) and Listening In (1993) to which he has added new work. Distance occasioned many of the poems in Real Stories: in California, where Reeves lived in the 1970s, he wrote of England, in England of California. But distance is not solely geographical: mortality and loss find expression in the new poems, and in the sequence from Listening In recalling the author’s father, poet and critic James Reeves. Most intensely, they are explored in the selection from ‘Nuncle Music’, a vivid psycho-drama in the voice of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Poems full of sharp but discreet observation that mounts like evidence. –George Szirtes, Critical Quarterly
Distinguished by economy, quiet wit and resolute affection. –Charles Boyle, London Magazine
The new poems […] are a bravura performance spare, powerful, contained and witty […] The poet’s ear has perfect pitch […] His emotional reach into the realms of pain, loss, ageing and associated existential vertigo is all the more impressive for its formal minimalism and restraint. ‘Is there life after poetry?’ he asks at one point: not without poems like this, the reader may feel […] It is a heady experience. –John Weston, London Magazine
About the Author
Gareth Reeves studied at the University of Oxford and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship. He is currently part-time Reader in English at Durham University, where he runs an MA creative writing course in poetry. Carcanet Press have published two previous collections of his poetry, Real Stories (1984) and Listening In (1993). He is also the author of two books on T.S. Eliot, a book on poetry of the 1930s (with Michael O’Neill), and many essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, American and Irish poetry.
