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Windmills in Flames

Old and New Poems

Tom Raworth

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Categories: 21st Century
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Aug 2011)
9781847777850
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (92 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2010)
9781847770820
£9.95 £8.96
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  • sometimes a fragment of language
    illuminates a world not consistently round
    breathing its air

    from 'Baggage Claim'


    Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems (2003) was acclaimed by the Times Literary Supplement as a milestone: thirty years' work by a major poet of English modernism gathered for the first time. Raworth moves on, radical, inventive and politically engaged. Windmills in Flames takes a vertiginous ride through the language landscape we inhabit. Poems fragment and distort,veer in unexpected directions, reconfigure. Playful, often funny, Windmills in Flames is fuelled by anger at the use of language as an instrument of political deceit and military aggression.


    Raworth often writes – and at public readings always performs – in lower case. The delivery is so swift you don’t notice the tremble in the air until later, the grenade goes off. Statements coming at you, one after another,without qualification or hierarchy...No flim-flam...He’s all detail, all darting quickness. - Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books

    The poems have no purpose, though their author is happy should others find them interesting to read. This book collects some early works missing from the Collected Poems (2003). The rest were written since then. They will help the reader lose weight, have an attractive smile, be at ease with members of the opposite (or their own) sex, have relief from constipation, speak in tongues, fillet herrings and ultimately boost the Nation's economy. Tom Raworth

    Cover illustration Copyright ©Tom Raworth. Cover design StephenRaw.com


    Contents

    Into the Wild Blue Yonder     
    Cap     
    Breeding the Arsenic-Proof Baby     
    Continued    
    In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word Was
    With God, and the Word Was God    
    Rather a Few Mistakes than Fucking Boredom    
    Art is the Farthest Retreat from Boredom    
    Preserved People are Rare    
    Ground Swell    
    Drop in Existence    
    Vague    
    Thor Heyerdahl Solved the Mystery of the Statues? That Wasn’t the Mystery    
    How to Patronise a Poem    
    Intellectual Compost 6    
    Consolidation    
    Systems Disruption    
    26    
    Translation 2    
    Spime    
    With John Gian    
    Caller    
    Envoi    
    Listen Up    
    Coda to a Laureate    
    Seesound    
    Issue them Gasmasks    
    Language Construction    
    Equitable Deviation    
    Baggage Claim (a slugging welterweight natural)    
    Mechanical Gardens     
    Maltese Named Trouble     
    Viagra
    Pelf! Pelf!     
    Thanks for the Memory     
    Lippitude     
    Reynard     
    Icequakes    
    Rolled Homogeneous Armour     
    Never Entered Mind     
    Maul     
    Melody Road    
    Data Death : Zerone     
    Rivers of Bling    
    Once and For All     
    Shuck     
    Seething with Adventure    
    Chips    
    Birthday Poem    
    From Mountains and Gardens    
    Capture of Karadzic    
    Never Odd or Even    
    History Portrayed by Lifesize Working Models    
    Creaking Candle    
    Over Noise    
    Peanut Galleria    
    Underground Mutton    
    I Wasn’t Before    
    Looks Like We’ve Got Brain Matter    
    Heat Up the Dead    
    Anti-Terrorism Started    
    All Knowledge    
    Title Forgotten    

    Errata to Collected Poems (2003) 
    Tom Raworth was born in London in 1938. Between 1966 and 2017 he published more than fifty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose and translations. His graphic work was shown in Europe, the United States and South Africa, and he gave readings of his poems worldwide. Raworth received the Cholmondeley Award, ... read more
    Praise for Tom Raworth 'Brides in the source nail the soap-opera out of doowops? And then the parnassians for milfoils without floor-leaders. The Raworth loves to hum them toward the endeavour.'
    Clark Coolidge
    'Single-handedly, Tom Raworth has restored the value of quickness to English poetry. His is the alacrity of Shelley, of Byron, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, reinforced to meet a modern urgency. It is poetry of sensation, intelligence flashing down the spillway, faster than thought.'
    Bill Berkson
    'Tom Raworth is the one who's truly most interesting to me in England at the moment. I'm fascinated by what he's doing. He's an extraordinary poet.'
    Robert Creeley
    'As When is the selection I have waited for the whole spread of a great poets work.'
    Fanny Howe
       'It has the beauty and weight of a real thing in the world, and is just full of dark senses and wonders.'
    Adam Piette, Poetry London

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Cover of Collected Poems
Collected Poems Tom Raworth
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