Carcanet Press - Near-Life Experience

Description
Author
Reviews

The poems in Near-Life Experience consider, above all, ideas of attentiveness: to art and experience, to nature and imagination; to the present moment as it happens, what it offers, leaves behind, and means.

Rowland Bagnall was born in Oxfordshire in 1992. He studied English at St John’s College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge. His poetry and reviews have appeared in various publications, including Poetry London, the Los Angeles Review of Books and New Poetries VII ... read more

Praise for Rowland Bagnall 'We glide along, drifting from all moorings. And Bagnall is excellent on this feeling, often catching on those exact sensations so difficult to convey because they have no fixed physical or emotional focus'

Emily Hasler, Poetry London
'There's a kind of deadpan humour in much of this work, in part achieved by the tension Bagnall creates...Some of the lines are hilarious.'
Simon Collings, Stride Magazine
'Bagnall's narrator is ongoing in spite of the weight of cultural references.'
Emma Desphande, The London Magazine
'There's a breathtaking precision with which Bagnall negotiates the inner life and lives of himself, of those around him and of his readers. Images and ideas loop and modulate, the world and its ideas are questioned and interpreted with with wit and deep attention. And if the tone is often melancholy and searching - yearning for some deeper connection and spiralling through art, film, translation and missed connections - I frequently laughed, I re-read poems out loud, I went outside and read them again. And what's going to keep me doing so indefinitely is the poet's defiant and hard-won sense of wonder.'
Luke Kennard
'A beautiful and eerie book, A Few Interiors tells us what it is like to feel the outlines of personhood becoming 'vaguer and vaguer'. It's no longer the 'sudden lapse in concentration' so much as the sudden lapse into concentration that unnerves, 'like only realising that someone has left a room when they re-enter it'. These poems move from memory to disaster to artwork to movie to prayer in an uncannily frictionless manner, while reminding us of the possibility that none of this has actually happened, or that we've 'seen it all before, only / in passing or in blinding light'. These hallucinatory and funny poems remain stalled, anxiously and hopefully, 'mid-brushstroke': the moment upon which everything depends, 'like the moment between knowing you might nearly jump / and actually nearly jumping'.'
Oli Hazzard, author of Blotter

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Near-Life Experience Rowland Bagnall Categories: 21st Century, British, Second Collections Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Due Mar 2024) 9781800173903 £11.99 £10.79 Description Author Reviews The poems in Near-Life Experience consider, above all, ideas of attentiveness: to art and experience, to nature and imagination; to the present moment as it happens, what it offers, leaves behind, and means. Rowland Bagnall was born in Oxfordshire in 1992. He studied English at St John’s College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge. His poetry and reviews have appeared in various publications, including Poetry London, the Los Angeles Review of Books and New Poetries VII ... read more Praise for Rowland Bagnall 'We glide along, drifting from all moorings. And Bagnall is excellent on this feeling, often catching on those exact sensations so difficult to convey because they have no fixed physical or emotional focus' Emily Hasler, Poetry London 'There's a kind of deadpan humour in much of this work, in part achieved by the tension Bagnall creates...Some of the lines are hilarious.' Simon Collings, Stride Magazine 'Bagnall's narrator is ongoing in spite of the weight of cultural references.' Emma Desphande, The London Magazine 'There's a breathtaking precision with which Bagnall negotiates the inner life and lives of himself, of those around him and of his readers. Images and ideas loop and modulate, the world and its ideas are questioned and interpreted with with wit and deep attention. And if the tone is often melancholy and searching - yearning for some deeper connection and spiralling through art, film, translation and missed connections - I frequently laughed, I re-read poems out loud, I went outside and read them again. And what's going to keep me doing so indefinitely is the poet's defiant and hard-won sense of wonder.' Luke Kennard 'A beautiful and eerie book, A Few Interiors tells us what it is like to feel the outlines of personhood becoming 'vaguer and vaguer'. It's no longer the 'sudden lapse in concentration' so much as the sudden lapse into concentration that unnerves, 'like only realising that someone has left a room when they re-enter it'. These poems move from memory to disaster to artwork to movie to prayer in an uncannily frictionless manner, while reminding us of the possibility that none of this has actually happened, or that we've 'seen it all before, only / in passing or in blinding light'. These hallucinatory and funny poems remain stalled, anxiously and hopefully, 'mid-brushstroke': the moment upon which everything depends, 'like the moment between knowing you might nearly jump / and actually nearly jumping'.' Oli Hazzard, author of Blotter	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog Sea-Fever: John Masefield read more Poems, Stories and Writings: Margaret Tait read more Selected and New Poems: John F. Deane read more Child Ballad: David Wheatley read more Hell, I Love Everybody: James Tate read more PN Review 273: Editorial read more
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