FREE VERSE EDITIONS SERIES EDITOR: JON THOMPSON THE BOOK OF ISAAC is a sequence of 56 "distressed," or damaged, sonnets in which Aidan Semmens endeavors to distil something of the Russian-Jewish experience from the history of his own family, in particular that of his great-grandfather, the economist, lawyer, journalist and socialist Isaac Hourwich. Drawing material from the apocryphal Book of Esdras, from FBI files and other historical sources as well as from Hourwich's private and public writings, Semmens produces a fractured narrative running from the pogroms of the late nineteenth century...
FREE VERSE EDITIONS SERIES EDITOR: JON THOMPSON THE BOOK OF ISAAC is a sequence of 56 "distressed," or damaged, sonnets in which Aidan Semmens endeavo...
'Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea' - the eminent Victorian A.C. Swinburne, from whose long work about the lost city of Dunwich this collection takes its title, was not the first or last poet to be struck by the landscape, and history, of Suffolk. Until almost within living memory Suffolk was a farming-fishing place, not all that far from London, yet strangely remote. Perhaps for this reason its coast was already something of a haven for writers and artists before Benjamin Britten made Aldeburgh the base for his annual music festival. The county's climate appeared to make artists and...
'Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea' - the eminent Victorian A.C. Swinburne, from whose long work about the lost city of Dunwich this collecti...
'A Ritual Landscape' sets out Aidan Semmens' stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that 'have legs'-that continue the journey outward begun in A Stone Dog and The Book of Isaac, and elaborate the argument and project of one of our most ambitious and accomplished poets. What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined...
'A Ritual Landscape' sets out Aidan Semmens' stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that 'have legs'-that con...
Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways. The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come.
Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways. The mordantly titled Life Has Bec...
