
Several Deer
Adam Crothers(Author)
Carcanet Press Ltd
Published on 28. January 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-78410-244-9 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously.
It listens to the hits.
It listens to the hits.
Reviews / Votes
'The rollicking Adam Crothers confesses a preference for form "as jester or saboteur". There is menace and mischief in equal measure.' The Guardian on New Poetries VI (Crothers was a contributor); 'There may be a little Tennyson in the lighting here, but there's also Kanye and Austin Powers and an associative sequencing of phrases reminiscent of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon.' The Irish TimesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
None
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
159 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-244-9 (9781784102449)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984. He lives in Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in English at Girton College in 2010. He works as a library assistant, book reviewer and teacher. He contributes a regular series of 'Vestiges' to the literary magazine, PN Review. His work was anthologised in Carcanet's bestselling New Poetries VI in 2015.