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Singing in the Dark

Alison Brackenbury

RRP: GBP£ 9.95
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Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 857549 14 0
Categories: 21st Century, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Published: February 2008
216 x 135 mm
96 pages
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Alison Brackenbury's ballads for the modern world sing with a truth and directness that reach back through Edward Thomas and John Clare to the English folk-tradition itself. There are poems about birds and animals, the ancient rhythms of weather, landscape and season. The modern world is held in balance: terrorism, foreign war and domestic tension.

    At the centre of Singing in the Dark are lyrics from Alison Brackenbury's radio poems, acclaimed by the critics:

    'Enchants' The Times

    'Glorious' Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

    'Filigreed with images of light and dark throughout, it's evocative, amusing and utterly compelling.' Frances Lass, Radio Times


    From Edward Thomas' army songs to Nick Drake's guitar, Alison Brackenbury's book offers music for dark times.
    Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. Her Carcanet collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), ... read more
    The first time I read Alison Brackenbury's Singing in the Dark I read it from cover to cover, and found it a cumulatively rewarding experience.  read more
    Alison Brackenbury's use of the natural world's routines in Singing in the Dark exerts a grip on Charles Bainbridge Singing in the Dark is Alison Brackenbury's seventh collection of poetry. read more
    In Singing in the Dark , Brackenbury employs the seemingly simple English ballad (invented, more or less, by Wordsworth, and later favoured by the likes of Auden and Edward Thomas) to grapple with knotty modernity - a clash of form and content that carries the risk of wistfulness but, at its most effective, throws up compelling antitheses read more
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