John Welch: The Eastern Boroughs
Published April 2004
Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562436
The author's fifth major collection, following And Ada Ann, Out Walking, Blood and Dreams & Greeting Want, containing work written over the past six years. A number of the poems in The Eastern Boroughs express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing.
John Welch was born in London in 1942. This is his fifth collection of poetry, containing work written over the last six years. As well as editing an anthology of South Asian literature, Stories from South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1988), he has contributed articles reflecting his personal experience of breakdown and psychoanalysis to Poets on Writing (Macmillan, 1992) and more recently to various journals, including the London Review of Books, fragmente, Scintilla and others.
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"These are poems about the inner life with the external concreteness and economy of Imagism . . . his three previous volumes have won high praise from critics who trust their noses." (Herbert Lomas, Ambit)
"Welch’s explorations of personal inner-space and the outer-spaces of the urban (especially a multicultural London) are inextricably mixed, in poetry which, while often sparsely textured in particular passages, is dense in its larger accumulation of significance. A book that will repay repeated readings." (Glyn Pursglove, Swansea Review)
"[The] solitary turning away is part of what makes the poems in The Eastern Boroughs so sad, the split from the beauty of the world that writing and self-consciousness enforce, without which poetry would not exist. Pleasure and melancholy tend to be seeded one within the other, and their intertwining is well-mapped in the ache and beauty of this collection. (James Wilkes, in Terrible Work online)
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