Aftermath

Middleton, Peter (2003) Aftermath (Salt Modern Poets), Cambridge. Salt Publishing, 188pp.

Abstract

Short description/annotation: A selection of poems about masculinity, memory, authority and science. Languages of science and policy try to talk their way out of poetic trouble in serial poems and longer sequences. Past and future, America, Greece, and conservative Britain, are all scenes of action.
Main description: Aftermath brings together several long poems concerned with masculinity, authority, and the politics of art, alongside a selection of shorter poems curious about science, memory and new technology, written over a twenty year period. Many of the poems search out traces of narrative and emotion in the often anonymous and neutralised languages of contemporary culture. This is an investigation prompted by the restricted civic space and cultural possibilities of a conservative Britain. Earlier poems were written in the shadows of a conservative roll-back of many progressive government programmes and a rapid increase in poverty and decline in education and health. This was also a time when poststructuralism persuasively mocked humanist and transcendental ideas about language. Was there any truth or hope in language? This is a poetry with arguments, a conviction, challenged at every turn, that observation and communication are still possible for the stretched language of poems. Included are two recent sequences, ‘Tell Me About It’ and ‘Next Gen,’ in which the selves called into being by New Labour and New Technology aspire to their own lyric sublime. The concluding poem, A Dialogue on Anachronism, looks back on the past two decades with some wonder and puzzlement.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics