Full Description
Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre Prize This sharp and unpredictable collection opens in the Cold War. Berkeley's father was a V-bomber navigator, a conflicted inheritance of pride and guilt which informs the opening poems. While parents struggle to keep life normal, the secrecies and occluded horrors of the period play out in vividly imagined children's games. One locus of memory is a ruined mansion, sliced into many apartments, through which the adult narrator looks back on the past unsure of what really happened, only that the child did not understand.
The second part of the book develops the theme of shared humanity from the Warsaw fishermen of the title poem to a hi-tech dystopia of the near future, by way of a dissolute Norwegian, a traduced Baudelaire, a contemporary woodwose, and a petrolhead on the A1M.
The array of voices - boastful, baffled, sardonic - employs Berkeley's experience as a poetry performer with The Joy of Six. In poems that frequently wrongfoot the reader, the Empire shrinks to an opera audience, the Royal Family is reduced to waxworks, and Cambridge finally gets its ecological mass transportation system. Obliquely political, this debut collection takes a sideways look at modern England.
Contents
I Co-ordinates
Hold-all (Aircrew)
Vapour Trail
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Flat 9
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
The Old Arboretum
My Mother's Migraines
Small Arms
Russkis
The Americans
The Balcony
Downstairs
Olympus Mk 301
Night Sky in October
Bunker
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
II Trajectories
The Men from Praga
River
A Portrait of V Nubiola
Boots
Thirsty
Accident
Taking the Air
Advice from Nils
Nils Takes a Breather
Baudelaire's Pipe
A Change in the Weather
Vacant Possession
Matthew Crampton
Pauahi Crater 10 a.m.
Between the Twenty-sixth and the Twenty-seventh Floors
Chattel
Britannia
They
One Way of Listening to Windchimes
Food for Scandal
Gasometer
Great Lettuce in The Botanic Garden
My Backyard
Landless
Chamber of Horrors #2 Extra
The Cambridge Metro
