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Alexandra Sequence

  • ISBN-13: 9781784102043
  • Publisher: CARCANET PRESS
    Imprint: CARCANET PRESS
  • By John Redmond
  • Price: AUD $24.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 20/12/2016
  • Format: Paperback (216.00mm X 135.00mm) 72 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Poetry by individual poets [DCF]
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In The Alexandra Sequence John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the `mummers play', a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book's title takes its name from an area of Liverpool, a city shaped by its recent history of trade and migration, still recovering after a long period of decline. Experiences of urban uprootedness and social precarity shape suburban livelihoods that are `livid with accident'. Drawing on the two central themes of the mummers play - combat and resurrection - the poems reveal both dark and light parallels between the modern neighbourhood and medieval theatre: the carnivalesque zombie-drummers marching through a local park find their mirror-image in the daily disguises of life in a housing estate, or in the masked infractions of the 2011 England Riots. Mixing narrative and lyric, Redmond paints a neighbourhood of lively, unlikely references, from Juvenal to Tommy Cooper, Brueghel to indie rock.
John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. After completing a D. Phil on the subject of contemporary poetry at Oxford, he taught for two years at Macalester College in Minnesota. Currently he is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He reviews poetry widely and was associated with the poetry magazine, Thumbscrew. He has published a textbook How to Write a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell) and was the editor of James Liddy: Selected Poems (Dublin: Arlen House). His critical book Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry has just been published by Seren.
*Dublin-born Redmond is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool*The seven sections of The Alexandra Sequence evoke settling in to a new community and becoming part of a neighbourhood*Strangers, masks, concealment and revelation: how do we live with one another, how do we love*Political themes include Liverpool's experience of 2012 riots*Poems mix story and song, contemporary life seen through prism of the 'mummer's' (British folk) play
'Ingenious, maverick, brilliantly protean - welcome to the quicksilver world of John Redmond's new collection.' David Morley
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