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Sound Houses

Will Eaves

Sound Houses by Will Eaves
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Categories: First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2011)
9781847771124
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(Pub. Aug 2011)
9781847779113
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  • Look at the collars with real names,
    Books, games, a stainless steel trophy
    Lifted, discarded, then bought by me
    Knowing I wasn’t the first or best
    And that envy can be laid to rest,
    Here in the warm room of no claims.


    from ‘Charity’
    Will Eaves’ first book of poems explores several continents, moods and stages of life. Common experience – of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, enjoying the natural world in all its nearness and remoteness – provides his themes. Wherever they are set, in the Australian bush or in a West Country sickroom, the poems keep faith with the consolations that come from close observation and stillness. Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; music and domestic ritual raise ghosts.

    Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday: in the transformational territory of childhood and the equally uncertain adult world of grief and loss.

    Cover image: Isolated House, 4 (detail), copyright © Harry Adams, by kind permission of the artist.
    I

    Evening Lesson    11
    Small Hours    12
    Demonstration Day    13
    English    14
    Majesty of Nature    15
    From Weymouth    16
    Bloody Ill    17
    Evacuees    18
    A Kilburn Massage    19
    Kickabout    20
    Salomon’s Offertory    21
    Three Flies    22
    Summit    23
    Accommodation for Owls    24
    Spider    25
    Charity    26
    Skimpole Abroad    27
    Ariel in Texas    28


    II

    Hornets    31
    Chestnuts    32
    Gold Coast    33
    Roman Road    34
    The Former Resident    35
    The Grass on the Other Side    36
    Curve    37
    Grounds    38
    Crater    39
    100,000,000 AD    40
    A Difficult Birth    41
    Cracked Happiness    43
    Any Impediment    45
    Bird Song    46
    Kin Limbo    47
    The Fight in the Lake    48
    Horus and Janus    49
    Clifftops, Folkestone    50


    III

    Avocado    53
    Punk Revolution    54
    The Field    55
    The Clock    56
    Elegies Around Noon    57
    Footsore    58
    Fantastic Blue    59
    Home    60
    Silverflash    61
    Powers of the Minor Gods    62
    Aberdyfi    63
    A Year Later    64
    Will Eaves was born in Bath in 1967. He is a novelist and poet. His books include Sound Houses (Carcanet, 2011), This Is Paradise (Picador, 2012) and The Absent Therapist (CB Editions, 2014, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize). The Inevitable Gift Shop (CB Editions), a “memoir by other means”, was published ... read more
    Awards won by Will Eaves Short-listed, 2014 Goldsmiths prize
    'Poetry is a pleaching of language into its most original, convincing and economic shape. Will Eaves has such technical magic at every moment in this collection. Whether semi-concealed narrative, allegorical landscape or literary annotation, each poem in Sound Houses is a pleasure and a satisfaction to encounter.'
    Peter Porter

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