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In Darkest Capital

Collected Poems

Drew Milne

In Darkest Capital
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Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Nov 2017)
9781784104917
£15.99 £14.39
Paperback (432 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2017)
9781784104900
£20.00 £18.00
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • In Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, ‘Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and ‘Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond. Along the way there are homages to Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, Kurt Schwitters, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Cage and Tom Raworth. His poems do not break down into form and content but insist on a continuity between lyrical purpose and critical thinking. An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism, Milne’s Collected Poems captures the ‘skewed luxuriance’ (Guardian) of his eco-socialist poetics.
    Drew Milne was born in Edinburgh in 1964 and grew up in Scotland. He lives and works in Cambridge with his wife, Redell Olsen, and two children. In 1995 he was Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery, London. His books of poetry include Sheet Mettle (1994), Bench Marks (1998), The ... read more
     '...here is where Milne's constructivist nature requires culture to complete itself, even as historical thought moves towards manifesto. As with the demands of lyric to be expressive song, all this woven space-time is highly compressed [...] Coming at mid-career, this volume of collected poems already demonstrates a furtherance of collectivities in utilizing the particular word for creative instrumentalities that develop critical thought, proof that the lyric poem can implement intelligent social policy.'

    Marjorie Welish, Chicago Review

      'Milne's poetic universe is suffused with a sharp awareness of the objects of mass consumption... A hectic and broken world leaves its bloody marks on his poems, where history is a butcher putting his finger on the scales.'
    David Lau, Lana Turner Journal


      'Milne thrives on both formalism and Marxism, but both are subservient to a wit and musicality that makes these dense, complex poems both readable and challenging.I love the fluidity of the language: this is poetry to read aloud, listening to the syntactical slipperiness, the echo and sustain of its music. This, for me has always been Milne's major strength.'
    Stride Magazine


    'Witty juxtaposition jostles with an unerring lyrical voice and an underlying ethical base which proves that the analytical mind can co-exist with that of the imaginative artist'
    Steve Spence, 'Technicians of Sensibility'

     'This is a stirring, generous, probing collection, sure-minded, steady under fire (including from its own satirical reflection), devastatingly clear about the devastations all will face, which so many suffer now, here in this world: ethical poetry of the highest order, looking you direct in the eye, from the several vantage-points of its many levels of engagement with the predicament, advocate-activist, searchingly political, witty and intellectual, metaphysical, Scottish, European, Marxist-ecological - a collection to savour (and then read again) as we move through into the bad times.'
    Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold


    'This is a book to live in and grow in, and through. One for the big list, until the end of our time.'
    Manchester Review of Books


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