Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
    
 I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Clive's guest poet a "literary star"
« : 14.02.08 at 20:52 » |
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The poet Simon Barraclough, whose poems Clive has said have “the unmistakable stamp of a vision asserting itself through vocabulary”, and whom he has as a guest poet on his Clivejames.com website, was recently chosen as one of The Times Online's Top ten literary stars of 2008 Kevin Cryan EXTRACT Clivejames.com Simon Barraclough Sharing with other admirers of the late Michael Donaghy a winning propensity for using mythical America as a lexical paint-box, Simon Barraclough stands out even among the stand-outs in his readiness to make a knowing reference to the popular arts twice per line. The emphasis on the word "knowing", however, doesn't mean that the reader has to know too: all the reader has to do is follow the argument and the rhetorical rhythm, which in his case is as impossible to miss as the pulse of a mainstream jazz band rigged for dancing. Even if you doubt the iconic importance of Christian Slater, or can't spot the references to a dozen different Hitchcock movies buried in a single poem, you will recognize the suggestion that the Empire State Building, lit up at night, looks like a popsicle. Those of us veterans who felt as if we had joined the Parachute Regiment when we dared to mention a Ford Thunderbird will just have to face the fact that the new kids on the block behave as if they poured the asphalt.....[read on]
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