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Strange Land

Tim Kendall

Cover Picture of Strange Land
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Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 903039 73 1
Imprint: OxfordPoets
Published: January 2005
216 x 135 mm
80 pages
Publisher: Carcanet Press
  • Description
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  • Reviews
  • Like King David's, the muse of Strange Land, Tim Kendall's voice is angry and loving, plaintive, disdainful, celebratory. This is a twenty-first-century psalter. A first collection with conviction and authority, Strange Land gathers poems of love and of the natural world, elegies and satires, poems of childhood and parenthood, verses of the familiar and the exotic, apocalyptic and meditative. Kendall resists settling for the comfort of a single voice: in their formal variousness his poems evoke lives that are questing and contradictory, antic and mundane. The history of the last century cannot be evaded - poems are haunted by the Second World War and its legacy, by Einstein, by the space race and the transformative discoveries of Hubble. Strange Land surveys present and past with implacable intensity. That intensity requires the drowning of all other poets in 'Ship of Fools', a loving satire in which Kendall finds himself the sole survivor of a poetry scene sunk to unexpected depths.
        The Psalms provide a ground bass for the book's music; they inspire and accuse the author as he engages modern culture. They are present not only as a key source of allusion, but also in their emotional range. The book's title comes from Psalms CXXXVII, which is luminously illustrated on the book cover.
      
    Tim Kendall was born in Plymouth in 1970. He has published studies of Paul Muldoon and Sylvia Plath and was founding editor of the poetry magazine Thumbscrew . He lives with his wife and children in North Wiltshire and is Professor of English Literature, University of Exeter. His full-length study, Modern ... read more
    Tim Kendall was the founder-editor of Thumbscrew , one of the best British poetry magazines of the 1990s: though now folded. read more
    Martyn Halsall, Church Times , 2nd December 2005
    Songs of Zion in a strange land
    This first full collection of poems by Tim Kendall is billed by his publisher as 'a 21st-century psalter'; and the cover shows groups of medieval people looking thoughtfully baffled. read more
    John Greening, Times Literary Supplement , 8th July 2005
    And when He didn't
    Opening with a childhood trauma, half recalled in brief prose paragraphs hoarded coins, a smashed window, a rock "vanishing at high tide" - Tim Kendall's first collection goes on to surprise us (he has written a book on Sylvia Plath) by being anything but "confessional". read more
    Paul Engles, Jonathan Sandoe.com, read more
    Fiona Sampson, Tower Poetry , Oxford, February 2005
    Tim Kendall was the founder-editor of Thumbscrew , one of the best British poetry magazines of the 1990s: though now folded. read more
    David Morley in The Guardian , Saturday March 12, 2005
    There is a passage in Frederick C Crews's send-up of Eng lit studies, The Pooh Perplex , in which "Simon Lacerous" (a parodic FR Leavis) claims that: "The trouble with Winnie-the-Pooh is that it constitutes a vast betrayal of Life." read more
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