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The Alexandra Sequence

John Redmond

The Alexandra Sequence
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, British, Irish
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2016)
9781784102043
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(Pub. Aug 2016)
9781784102050
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Author
  • In The Alexandra Sequence John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the ‘mummers play’, a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book’s title takes its name from an area of Liverpool, a city shaped by its recent history of trade and migration, still recovering after a long period of decline. Experiences of urban uprootedness and social precarity shape suburban livelihoods that are ‘livid with accident’. Drawing on the two central themes of the mummers play – combat and resurrection – the poems reveal both dark and light parallels between the modern neighbourhood and medieval theatre: the carnivalesque zombie-drummers marching through a local park find their mirror-image in the daily disguises of life in a housing estate, or in the masked infractions of the 2011 England Riots. Mixing narrative and lyric, Redmond paints a neighbourhood of lively, unlikely references, from Juvenal to Tommy Cooper, Brueghel to indie rock.
    John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. After completing a D. Phil on the subject of contemporary poetry at Oxford, he taught for two years at Macalester College in Minnesota. Currently he is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He reviews poetry widely and was associated ... read more
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