![]() Quote of the Day
Devotedly, unostentatiously, Carcanet has evolved into a poetry publisher whose independence of mind and largeness of heart have made everyone who cares about literature feel increasingly admiring and grateful.
Andrew Motion
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Desolate MarketJulian Turner![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (72 pages) (Pub. Jul 2018) 9781784105129 £9.99 £8.99 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jul 2018) 9781784105136 £7.99 £7.19 eBook (Kindle) (Pub. Jul 2018) 9781784105143 £7.99 £7.19 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have, or are prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
Julian Turner’s Desolate Market takes as its tuning fork a line from William Blake’s Vela, or the 4 Zoas: ‘Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy.’ Fascinated by the interaction of material and mystical forces, Turner sets up a series of test cases in which the power of the human imagination, and its susceptibility to quasi-mystical influence, are explored. Poems on influencing machines (mind-controlling contraptions housed in the brain, as described by some people experiencing psychosis) double as a critique of the totalitarian dreams of despots. The corrosive influence of the market economy (that other quasi-mystical force), with its power to bring about poverty, redundancy, terrorism, and alienation, is the subject of a later section of poems. The collection ends with the poet’s alternative vision of the birth of the cosmos, a ‘disinterested machine / spinning its great designs of flesh and soul.’
Turner’s ‘affecting, memorable and original’ poems (TLS) were shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Crossing the Outskirts, and his Planet-Struck was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Desolate Market is his most ambitious and urgent work to date.
Awards won by Julian Turner
Short-listed, 2002 Waterstone's Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection (Crossing the Outskirts)
Commended, 2011 Poetry Book Society (PBS): Choice - Spring (Planet-Struck)
'Turner's poems evoke the fourfold, anagogic phases of being and consciousness familiar to readers of both the Romantic poet, and his interpreters'
Fred Muratori, The Manhatten Review 'You'll see a wish to connect, almost a belief, that despite this fractured world, things can still be whole... Where Blake saw poetry as the potential for a "perfect unity" it is perhaps a perfect disunity that Julian Turner yearns for here.' Liam Bishop, Singapore Review of Books "There is a vast unfathomable symmetry to Julian Turner's new collection, whose conclusion in deep space is as intrinsically unknowable as the remote landscape of the Cairngorms in which the opening poem, Lairig Grhu, is set." Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times Praise for Julian Turner 'A blighted tree is said to be planet-struck. Similarly epilepsy, paralysis, lunacy and so on are attributed to the malignant influence of planets' Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable |
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
Anvil Press Poetry
Aspects of Portugal
Audio Books
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Carcanet Poetry
FyfieldBooks
Lintott Press
Little Island Press
Lives and Letters
OxfordPoets
PN Review
Sheep Meadow Press
The Carcanet Blog
Joe Carrick-Varty: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
New Poetries VIII: Andrew Latimer on Benjamin Nehammer
read more
Charles Boyle: The Disguise
read more
Benjamin Nehammer: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
New Poetries VIII: Phoebe Power on Jason Allen-Paisant
read more
Moya Cannon: On Poetry
read more
![]() |
![]() We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2021 Carcanet Press Ltd
|