Shearsman Books

Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610583

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"Somewhere among the manifestos of the century just past, there is a line which reads there is nothing more marvelous than a plate on a table, and on that plate a loaf of bread. Earth air fire and water, made and remade and made again, by and not by human hands. Is it true? Will '[t]his town / ... simply become somewhere [we] used to live'? Don't believe that simply for a moment. The 'heartbeat is a bell / that chimes on the hour.' We 'shiver in the imaginary wind.' Imaginary? 'In Guinness terms it's all fluid dynamics / and computer hum, the chaotic crackle ... The CD skips in the jukebox to make / the best dance loop [we] ever heard.' His 'I' is a 'we', as well as an 'I', if you hadn't noticed. It's an interesting place, Loydell's marvelous quotidian. Somewhere worth living while we can. You can eat these poems. You don't even have to put butter on them." —John Bloomberg-Rissman

"There's something about [these] poems ... that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. [H]e can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena."—Brando's Hat

"This is a substantial collection [and] we are in no doubt that this is a writer at home in a variety of media. That experimentation and playfulness are central aspects of Loydell's oeuvre is also made clear by the variety of formal devices and improvised techniques embraced. [M]uch of the material here seems to be work montaged from a variety of sources... This use of existing materials is a way of combating the information overload and responding critically to the saturation of advertising materials we are continually bombarded with".—Tears in the Fence

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