Icarus on Earth by Jane Griffiths
Jane Griffiths's second collection re-imagines lives. Her poems are populated by people ranging from the invented to the mythological to the wholly real. Somewhere in between, the title-sequence recreates the life of Icarus as it might have been had he been born in modern suburban England. Through the voices of his father, his mother, his mildly inept biographer, and the girl-next-door, it explores the gap between desire and reality, and the consequences of trying to get across it. Icarus stands for the people in many of the poems, passionately concerned to test the limits of what is possible in many different kinds of flight, both literal and metaphorical. It is a book of elegies for lives not lived as well as actual lives.
The extraordinary exuberance of Jane Griffiths' poems is a product of their strange balancing between the image and the ideaThe images seem to have a verbal life of their own, generated by a dominating thought that the reader is hardly aware of. But then it dawns on you, slowly but unforgettably, and you enjoy the things in the poem all the more when you see what they are for. -- Bernard O'Donoghue
Jane Griffiths' A Grip on Thin Air is a major achievement...an outstanding first collection, complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation. -- Sarah Broom * TLS *
Jane Griffiths' A Grip on Thin Air is a major achievement...an outstanding first collection, complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation. -- Sarah Broom * TLS *
Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland and Devon. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), and Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852246952 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852246952 |
| Title | Icarus on Earth |
| Author | Jane Griffiths |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2005-03-25 |
| Number of pages | 64 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |