Shed by Ken Smith

Shed by Ken Smith

Shed, as in the shed at the end of the garden where the ?rst scribblings that begat many of these poems took place, Shed as in the shedding of skins in these poems, the shedding of lives and identities, from the lost President Perdu and the night on the town enjoyed by Smith’s wandering landsman, Charlie Delta, and the seafarer, Abel Baker, to the restless other lives of Eddie in America and the marooned sailor in Medellin. Shed houses poems from all the poetry books by Ken Smith published by Bloodaxe in the last twenty years. It is a journal of two decades of journeys East and West, a deliberation between the longing for home and the longing to keep going through the babble of languages in a world that is all of it borderland and all of it dangerous. Along with The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980, it was superseded by Ken Smith's Collected Poems (2018).

Smith’s writing exists in permanent disagreement with English fashionHe gives at least as much emphasis to speech as to image, often essaying an eloquent bareness that links his work with ballads and anonymous song. A huge cast of overheard characters, wanderers, losers and remembrancers passes through his writing, bound by a common sense of loss and endurance…One of the signs of an important poet is that he or she leaves with an expanded sense of imaginative possibility. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times *
His poems are squeezed out from under the unrelenting pressures of history, politics and the natural elements…some of his poems read like translations from war-ravaged Eastern Europe. -- Charles Boyle * London Magazine *

Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, a writer whose work shifted territory with time, from land to city, from Yorkshire, America and London to war-ravaged Eastern Europe. He was called ‘the godfather of the new poetry’ because his politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry influenced a whole generation of younger British poets, from Simon Armitage to Carol Ann Duffy. Ken Smith was born in Rudston, East Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer. He worked in Britain and America as a teacher, freelance writer, barman, magazine editor, potato picker, BBC reader and creative writing fellow, and was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1985-87. He received America’s highly prestigious Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1997, and a Cholmondeley Award in 1998. Ken Smith was the first poet to be published by Bloodaxe, with his pamphlet Tristan Crazy in 1978. Smith’s first book, The Pity, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1967, and his second, Work, distances/poems, by Swallow Press, Chicago, in 1972. His early books span a transition from his preoccupation with land and myth (when he lived in Yorkshire, Devon and America) to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection (when he lived in East London). The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (Bloodaxe, 1982; reissued 1989) covers the first half of his writing career. In 1986 Ken Smith’s collection Terra was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. In 1987 Bloodaxe published his collected prose, A Book of Chinese Whispers. Four of his collections, Terra (1986), Wormwood (1987), The heart, the border (1990) and Tender to the Queen of Spain (1993), were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His last separate collection, Wild Root (1998), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. All these collections are included in his second Bloodaxe compilation, Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), the sequel to The Poet Reclining. In 1989 Harrap published Inside Time, Ken Smith’s book about imprisonment, about Wormwood Scrubs and the men he met there. This was published in paperback by Mandarin in 1990. Ken Smith was working in Berlin when the Wall came down, writing a book about East and West Berlin: this turned into Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (Hamish Hamilton, 1990; Penguin paperback, 1991. He edited Klaonica: poems for Bosnia (Bloodaxe Books, 1993) with Judi Benson, and with Matthew Sweeney co-edited Beyond Bedlam (Anvil Press Poetry, 1997), a book of poems by mentally ill people. He died on 27 June 2003 from a hospital infection caught while being treated for Legionnaires’ Disease, which he had contracted months earlier in Cuba. His last poems were published in You Again: last poems & other words (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) along with other uncollected work, tributes from other poets, photographs, a biographical portrait and interviews covering the whole range of his life and work. His Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in October 2018, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe's first title, Ken Smith's Tristan Crazy (1978), and with what would have been his 80th birthday.

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9781852245719
ISBN 10	1852245719
Title	Shed
Author	Ken Smith
Condition	Non disponible
Binding type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	2002-07-31
Number of pages	352
Cover note	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible