Rotten Days in Late Summer

Angebote / Angebote:

In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns sensuous, musical poetry to a profound and illuminating examination of the textures of adolescence, adulthood and death in the working-class communities of the Wiltshire countryside, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love shared with men and women alike. He explores, too, the metropolis, in its bewilderments, hypocrisies, pretensions and haunting promise.Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Poems', straddling the book's two worlds and charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships, 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father, and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life.The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. It is also our own. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.