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The Acts of OblivionPaul Batchelor
Categories: 21st Century, British, Second Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (144 pages) (Pub. Dec 2021) 9781800171992 £11.99 £10.79 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Dec 2021) 9781800172005 £9.59 £8.63 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 and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends — pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record — they forced the people to forget. Against such injunctions, Paul Batchelor's poems rebel. This long-awaited second collection, The Acts of Oblivion, listens in on some of England's lost futures, such as those offered by radical but sidelined figures in the English Civil War, or by the deliberately destroyed mining communities of North East England, remembered here with bitter, illuminating force. The book also collects the acclaimed individual poems 'Brother Coal' and 'A Form of Words', alongside visions of the underworld as imagined by Homer, Lucian, Lucan, Ovid, and Dante.
Intensely characterized, and novelistic in their detail and in their grasp of national catastrophes, the poems in The Acts of Oblivion vindicate Andrew McNeillie's description of Batchelor as 'the most accomplished poet of his generation'. Batchelor's first book, The Sinking Road (2008) was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize. He has also published a chapbook, The Love Darg (2014), and edited a collection of essays, Reading Barry MacSweeney (2013). He has won an Eric Gregory Award, The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation, and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. His poems and translations have appeared in several anthologies and in Granta, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.
'This is a substantial and challenging collection that covers a terrific range of theme and subject matter...a formal tour-de-force. All through this book there is a strong sense of form from free verse to the ballad. Here is a collection that performs that rare fear of making the reader both think and feel. A cracking good collection.'
Steven Waling, The High Window 'Substantial and very impressive...Batchelor's gifts have long been apparent: now that he has served them with such formal power, range and subtlety, who in his generation will take up the challenge offered?' Sean O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement 'The poetry is lively, full of flair, yet reveals deeper currents of love and loss...This is a rewarding book, rich in allusion and strength of purpose. Above all, the poetry is refreshing and energetic, revealing a powerful voice.'
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