Folklore by Tim Atkins

Folklore by Tim Atkins

Folklore is an ecstatic, dreamlike, and starkly realist poem sequence which extends, challenges, and continues the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, John Clare's visionary lyrics, the elegiac minimalism of AE Houseman, contemporary work of Geoffrey Hill, and linguistic innovation of Gertrude Stein and the language poets.

At a time when so many poems read as unnecessary and under-motivated by-products of decidedly other careers, the guilelessness, amusement and scantily-clad affect of Atkins’ Horace is both a balm and a tonicIf Atkins were Horace, someone (Harry Gilonis? Chris Hamilton-Emery?) would have given him a villa well over 20 years ago.

-- Miles Champion * The Poetry Project Newsletter *

Tim Atkins does for translation what Gertrude Stein did for nouns.

-- Lisa Jarnot

When I heard some of these poems in Tim Atkins’ voice I was instantly interested and amused: my pleasure and enjoyment have continued, reading them.

-- Tom Raworth

This is the finest long poem to come out of Britain.

-- Michael Gizzi

Tim Atkins' debut (Folklore) is one of the most promising I have fallen for for many years. It's not clear to me what the overall shape is of the sequence of which these rural prose pieces are parts, but at this point every piece leaves you wanting more than it says and the cumulative effect is quite entrancing. We are facing a poet of resolution and sensibility. This is truly lyric poetry in a landscape where almost everyone else is didactic. The setting is resonant not only of Piers Plowman (quoted in the colophon) but of A.E. Housman and John Masefield, however, the conduct of the text resolutely avoids literalness to preserve a sense of absolute space, as an abstract painting wipes out recession and numerical space but opens an edgeless plane which engulfs us and so is space in the pure form. Like Piers, it is autobiographical and yet non-realistic. The text becomes progressively less explicit, exploiting the cumulation of context.

-- Andrew Duncan

Tim Atkins is the author of Folklore 1-25, To Repel Ghosts, 25 Sonnets, and Horace. Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UEL, editor of the online poetry magazine onedit, and translator of Petrarch, Horace, and Buddhist texts, he is a Buddhist, husband, poet, and father. He is a happy man.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781844718986
ISBN 10	1844718980
Title	Folklore
Author	Tim Atkins
Series	Salt Modern Poets
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2011-09-28
Number of pages	84
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.