Richard Deming: Let's Not Call It Consequence
Published 15 January 2008
Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700714
In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."
"If only/this thinking thing thought thoughts only." Richard Deming restlessly calculates the split between promised and actual experience. The poems in his impressive new collection balance at an edge of danger syntax can only shadow. Urgency of the day. Argument of the ordinary. "Each/comma ticks like sleet against/a windowpane. In the cold dawn." — Susan Howe
Deming's beautiful, intelligent, linguistically-inventive poems relentlessly question the everyday mysteries behind everyday events. "Then, what and is/any ever/ever enough?" he asks, probing the roots of Lyric in unremitting, unquestioning tragedy. Deming's originality of vision can only be born of a true poet's long maturing in Nietzsche's "profound speechlessness of pregnancy." This is a brilliant first book. — Nathaniel Tarn
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