Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry) (Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series)

Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry) (Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series)

by RuthPadel (Author)

Synopsis

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Ruth Padel's lectures link metaphor to silence and white space on a page. Equating a poem's music with its politics, she explores tone, register and harmony, suggesting that how poems hold our attentionA is through tensionA . Finally, she investigates what it means for poems that they are given toA other people. With her trademark blend of literary analysis, psychological and mythical learning, an intimate knowledge of Greek poetics plus a generous and joyful trust in the energy of today's poetry, Ruth Padel plumbs unheard rhymes, Echo and Narcissus, the silent music of John Cage, and what happens when Paul Durcan plays Seamus Heaney at ping pong. She wears her erudition lightly, paying playful attention to the resonances of many different poems - and to their smaller atoms, words and syllables. A fascinating and groundbreaking book, Silent Letters of the Alphabet is a gift for anyone writing, reading or teaching poetry today.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 30 Mar 2010

ISBN 10: 1852248270
ISBN 13: 9781852248277

Author Bio
Ruth Padel is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and is currently Resident Poet at Christ's College, Cambridge. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently a biography in poems of her great great grandfather Charles Darwin. She began as a classical scholar at Oxford and writes a wide range of non-fiction as well as poetry, including two books about reading modern poems, a much admired travel-conservation book about wild tigers, a groundbreaking study of Greek myth and rock music, and two books on the idea of consciousness, and of madness, in Greek poetry, tragedy and religion. She gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at Newcastle University in 2008, published as Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Bloodaxe Books, 2010).