Dear All,
KFS is proud to announce the following:
'The Only Life', by Robert Sheppard. £5
"Sheppard the poet presents three short stories about poets. His fictional poets begat fictional poems, of course, which lie as fragments of greater wholes, marvellous or ludicrous, in teasing virtuality. These stories – their styles range from the clipped short short to the expansive experimental – give us the world as only a poet could, as kinds of poem, for our delight and horror. But in writing only of poets he writes of everything else. We see the ethics of poetic ambition and absorption under scrutiny, learn to see writing as an artificial language, as translation, but we also bear witness to the clashes between poetry and everyday life, between the demands of science and silence, between the perils of longevity and celebrity, success and failure, completion and erasure. The chameleon like identities of these not exactly heroic writers respond to political and historical events, which, as is appropriate to the fabled indirection of the short story, happen in a proximate elsewhere, but just within range of its hearing. The fog of history and the steam of sex are intermingled in these intricate, absorbing and often funny, poignant stories.
A classic triptych of moods and movements, forensic, sharp-elbowed, with a ripeness you can taste. Sheppard's prose curves elegantly between ease and disease, live ghosts and city shadows. Borgesian, teasing, wise."
- Iain Sinclair
And
'Soma | Sema' by David Toms. £7.
"David Toms’ latest collection pushes forward from the remarkable sustained song-cycle of Those Feet and Where They are Going or Tom O’Bedlam Sings His Song (KFS, 2010) into more formally-diverse territory, adding haptic and visual elements to his highly distinctive diction. Toms brings his historian’s sensibility to the problem of thinking inside the physical forms of language and this poetics reaches its peak in the recombined found-texts of ‘A Brief History of Ireland – Version #136’. That this piece reflects on the ‘transformation of the class structure’ suggests a politics that fears what ‘terminates / the / possible’ at the same time as asking ‘what if I find complicity / Complementary?’ Language is put under tremendous pressure here and responds in exhilarating fashion – ‘each word / pict / is another / word / clipt’ – nominating ‘someone to singh / a neww song’ whilst speculating on ‘the difference / Between freedoms / And mere:: / Feeling’. Essential and urgent writing that insists you ‘touch/pause/engage’."
- Scott Thurston
These books are available to buy from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk as part of our 3 for £10 deal
Or you can order them from any library in the UK for 50p.
Yours,
Claire Thompson.
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