The Men from Praga by Anne Berkeley

The Men from Praga by Anne Berkeley

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.

Anne Berkeley is one of the poetry group Joy of Six, with whom she has performed across the UK and in New York. Her pamphlet The buoyancy aid and other poems was published by Flarestack in 1997, and a selection of her work appeared in Oxford Poets 2002 (Carcanet).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781844714223
ISBN 10	1844714225
Title	The Men from Praga
Author	Anne Berkeley
Series	Salt Modern Poets
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2009-04-28
Number of pages	84
Prizes	Short-listed for Seamus Heaney Centre Prize 2010 (Ireland)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.