Zeppelins (Salt Modern Poets)

Zeppelins (Salt Modern Poets)

by Chris Mc Cabe (Author)

Synopsis

With grit and humour Zeppelins takes on the speed and surrealist chaos of the metropolis at the beginning of the 21st century. On the look-out for abandoned scraps to make sense of the sprawling whole - senseless advertisements, discarded notes, overheard conversations - McCabe hawks the fringes and thoroughfares for his sources. He discovers an underground of the cynical and power-hungry, shamelessly clashing registers with experiences of redemptive warmth and love.

Urban, inquisitive and with a restless interest in the now, McCabe writes about Pete Doherty's arrests and the Essex reaction to England's exit from the World Cup in 2006. Playful and serious, with an eye for the strange and comedic, this is a book about what it means to be alive in a city as we head towards the second decade of the new century.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 96
Edition: First Edition; 1st printing.
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Published: 01 Nov 2008

ISBN 10: 1844714381
ISBN 13: 9781844714384
Book Overview: Every afternoon, right on cue, a dark Zeppelin cleaves the western horizon of the Olympic Park's privileged dustcloud: in confirmation of Chris McCabe's prophetic title. Gloriously off-message, this necklace of language-grenades is revealed as a manifesto for sprung insolence, random migrations of a conscious soul. The dirigible poetry-sock, engine purring, floats like an unattributed quote over our shamed and electively traumatised metropolis. McCabe has mastered the art of the non-fatal collision. He shudders, on public transport, through a topography restored by love. Slender works by John James, Barry MacSweeney and Tom Raworth, scavenged from the perimeter fence of a budget culture, sustain a writer who is always on the move. The captain's monologue is brisk and self-confident; his beating heart is visible beneath a tight black vest. Book your passage now. The poet won't wait. -- Iain Sinclair There is a shortage of political poets in the UK, and of funny poets, and of vital performers and poets who fascinate as well as innovate. Chris McCabe lessens all these deficits. -- Roddy Lumsden I thrilled to this brilliantly individual collection. -- Jeremy Reed

Media Reviews

McCabe writes with the lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage.

* The Guardian *
Author Bio
Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry and Zeppelins. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as a Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School.