Eidolon by Sandeep Parmar
Partly a modern revision of the Helen myth, Eidolon meditates on the visible and invisible forces of Western civilisation from classical antiquity to present-day America. An Eidolon is an image, a ghost, a spectre, a scapegoat. It is a device, like deus ex machina, to deal with the problem of narrative, specifically Helen's supposed deceit and infidelity. The Eidolon, as a device, is something beauteous and beguiling - as a thing, or as a preoccupation, it is the siren song to the poet who listens for silence. Who gives Helen her voice and what need unites it into a single, constant loathsome creature? Helen is as much the city of Troy as its famed plains and high walls. It might as well be Helen smouldering on the great pyre of defeat, even though she escapes unscathed in Homer's Odyssey and is restored to her husband's side by the eidolon's unique guarantee of her chastity.
Sandeep Parmar was born in Nottingham in 1979 and was raised in Southern California. She received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008 on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is the Reviews Editor of The Wolf magazine and edited The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet Press (2011). Her critical book on Loy, Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies, appeared from Bloomsbury in 2013. She teaches twentieth-century literature and creative writing at the University of Liverpool.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781848613928 |
| ISBN 10 | 184861392X |
| Title | Eidolon |
| Author | Sandeep Parmar |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Shearsman Books |
| Year published | 2015-01-15 |
| Number of pages | 72 |
| Prizes | Winner of Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize 2017 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |