Kelvin Corcoran: New and Selected Poems
Published March 2004
Paperback, 196pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9780907562399
Kelvin Corcoran's first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, appeared in 1985 and he has published eight subsequent collections with a range of British small presses. This volume presents a complete new collection, Against Purity, together with a previously unpublished shorter sequence, My Life With Byron, plus selections from each of his previous nine volumes of poetry, to give an overview of the work of one of the finest British poets of his generation.
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"Kelvin Corcoran's recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition which the self occupies at its most impassioned and sincere.
Since the early 1990s Corcoran has built the world of this poetry from the most unlikely seeming materials for a modernist poet, by adopting Greece with its history and mythology as his focus and ultimate home. ... It is not a separate issue, like a travelogue, but a great expansion of resource for a spirit still unmistakably inhabiting the here and now, an escape only from negativity." (Peter Riley, P.N. Review)
"Kelvin Corcoran has been publishing books of poetry since the mid-1980s. His style has slowly evolved over the years, opening out from youthful asperities to something gentler and more hopeful. Now Shearsman has published his New And Selected Poems and it proves a stirring read." (Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian)
"...this work is vital and necessary today, not least for its continual striving to reach the New through negotiations with the Old; to strive for innovation by problematising tradition; in his own words to 'make the ordinary language good or die.' I would say that here is a book you really can't afford to be without." (Andy Brown, Stride magazine).
"This is a poetry, then, that in its engagement with the modern Western social world opens itself not only to the immediate dimensions of experience of such a world but to those longer and fuller vistas where the nature of such a world, its matrix, is laid down. It is, therefore, a poetry where past and present exist easily together, where archaic and modern flow into and through each other. It is a poetry, above all, where, as Andrew Duncan observes in his stimulating examination of its formal strategies in Poetry Salzburg, "It is hard to see a firm border between the books". Finally, because of this scope of its engagement, it is a poetry which matters and which, in its refusal to descend to the purely personal frame of reference of so much contemporary Anglo-American poetry, demands to be read, the challenging nature of its formal procedures notwithstanding. If you do not already possess a copy of this book it is suggested that you acquire one without delay." (Martin Anderson, Jacket) [See complete Jacket review here]
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