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The Ogre's Wife

Anthony Howell

Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (56 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2009)
9780856464225
Out of Stock
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  • Excerpt
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    A Kingfisher

    Frequenting a corner of an eye,
    Like a thing one didn’t really see,
    Its dodges reconcile me
    To the way you get undressed,
    Affording less than a glimpse!

    As for the one apparent
    To our friend, eliciting
    Her outburst as it darted
    Close to the surface,
    I guessed that stain on a backdrop

    Of river and trees, that ?ight
    I very nearly caught (but where
    Was one supposed to look?)
    Was lost for good. And then,
    There went the streak of it

    – Sooner gone than seen.
    Was it, was it – what?
    Sapphire? Emblem of all
    Snatches: sought like the dream
    One forgets even as one wakes from it.

    Anthony Howell’s first collection for several years moves in unusual directions. Guilt and society’s victimization of those it punishes are among its subjects: it begins with poems concerned with the harm caused by anorexia and moves on to investigate the situation of offenders held in units for ‘vulnerable’ prisoners. The collection includes two longer poems: ‘Ode to a Routine’ chronicles the odyssey of one sentenced to commute across London, while the title poem extends a theme of dubious empathy explored by Browning in ‘My Last Duchess’. As always Anthony Howell’s poems are cool, intelligent, entertaining and simply different from anything else being written.

    Anthony Howell was born in 1945. A former dancer with the Royal Ballet and subsequently a performance artist – he founded the Theatre of Mistakes 1974 – he has always been as active in literature as he has in movement. He has published several collections of poems and two novels. During ... read more
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