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Parrish

Parrish Lantern's Casebook

Malt Whisky Drinking, Single Speed Bike Racing, Poetry Loving, Book-Fiend, & If This Makes Me Seem Cool, It's All In The Edit.

 

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The Ideal Library Symbolizes Everything a Society stands for. A Society Depends On Its Libraries To Know Who it Is, Because Libraries Are Societies Memory (A. Manguel). This Is My Attempt To Construct My Ideal library.

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 - W.G. Sebald, Iain Galbraith Unlike a lot of people whose introduction to the writing of W.G. Sebald was through books such as Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, or Vertigo, mine was through the Micropoems in Unrecounted, a slim volume of thirty three poems, with accompanying lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp. So when I saw this Selected poems at NetGalley my curiosity was piqued and I requested it wondering whether without the pictures the poetry featured would be as hermetic or whether the act of trying to match the image with the poem was the lock that forbade admittance.Published a decade after his death, this anthology pulls together poetry from various periods of his life. Stretching over 37 years it contains poems from two early collections Poemtrees and School Latin, these are followed by his later writing Across the Land and the Water and The Year Before Last ending with the appendix containing two poems Sebald wrote in English, making this a wonderful addition to any Sebald completist’s library.If, on the rare occasion, I get to interview someone who writes novels & poetry, one of my default questions is how they perceive themselves, a poet who turned to fiction, or as a novelist first. This question seems to me relevant when dealing with the work of this writer & better still seems to have been answered by Iain Galbraith (translator notes), who writes - Sebald once stated that “My medium is prose”, a statement that is easily misconstrued, if it wasn’t for the subtle distinction added by this writer “Not the Novel”, in fact Galbraith goes on to say that “ far from disavowing his fondness for the poetic form, it is through it that we can begin to sense the poetic consistency that permeates his literary prose and also of his writing as a whole.” This makes sense as many of the themes ( borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend etc.), that would be recognised in his later acclaimed work feature in those early poems.Epitaph.On dutyon a stretch in the alpine foothillsthe railway clerk considers the essenceof the tear-off calendar. with bowed backRosary Hour waits outsidefor admittance to the houseThe clerk knows:he must take homethis intervalwithout delay.(from Poemtrees) That’s not to say, that this collection doesn’t stand up on its own, anyone without knowledge of this writers oeuvre, will still find this a fascinating read, will like myself try to prise understanding from the words written, unlike the epic quality of his later prose work, a lot of the poems are sparse and compressed, they allude to places and by association events, things, people, although the later ones seem to loosen up, unwind slightly, it’s merely by degrees. As I said in “Unrecounted” you're making connections, trying to find routes into its dialogue, but this is ideolectic, the patterns here are those of an individual, there are probably reference points, but like all reference points, they act as signposts to something - not the thing itself.http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/across-land-and-waterwg-sebald.html