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The Disguise

Poems 1977-2001

Charles Boyle

Edited by Christopher Reid

Cover of The Disguise by Charles Boyle
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Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Feb 2021)
9781800170285
£12.99 £11.69
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(Pub. Feb 2021)
9781800170292
£10.39 £9.35
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • The acclaimed poet Christopher Reid distils Charles Boyle's six books of poems into The Disguise: Poems 1977–2001, recovering a notable one-time poet, now known as a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, from poetic neglect.

    Charles Boyle established a reputation as a sharp, wry, disabused observer of social mores. Paleface, published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Age of Cardboard and String, also from Faber, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award. But in 2001 the well ran dry. Since the first year of the twenty-first century he has not put poetic pen to paper even once. The poems remain vital and fascinating, but they have about them also a kind of archaic cast: here we find the quintessential white male Englishness from the late twentieth century on display as if in a museum. Here too is the excitement of abroad (North Africa especially), and there are ghosts, absences, exile and evasions: in hindsight, these poems offer clues to their own disappearance after thirty notable years spent partly in the sun.
    Charles Boyle
    Charles Boyle is the founder-editor of the small press CB editions. Since publishing his last poetry collection in 2001 he has written fiction and non-fiction, mostly under the pen name Jack Robinson. ... read more
    Christopher Reid
    Christopher Reid is a former poetry editor at Faber and Faber and editor of the Selected Letters of Ted Hughes . His many collections of poetry include A Scattering, winner of the Costa Book Award in 2011. ... read more
    'Boyle the prose writer may be indispensable, but he couldn't have done it without the poems of this welcome Selected behind him.'

    David Wheatley, The Guardian

    'This is the business. From the start, you realise that you are in the presence of a sharp, subversive and observant intelligence, a writer with an ear for a story and the easy narrative manner of someone who - it comes as an instant relief to notice this - isn't going to bore you once.'
    Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
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