Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People
screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st Century
Published on 6. September 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-84861-941-8 (ISBN)
Description
Beautiful feelings of sensitive people is just a five-word way of explaining to someone who never reads poetry what we are hoping to find in a book of poems. It is the most unifying (and featureless?) description I could find. It is not there to exclude political poetry - to have beautiful feelings and not wish for a beautiful world would be like lying on a beach for eight hours and not noticing that there is an ocean just in front of you. In fact, wanting to be Greta Thunberg is a beautiful feeling in itself. It describes a wide range of 21st century poetry but perhaps not the majority. The figures suggest that there is a public verdict on the poetry of the past, so of the period say 1970 to 2000, which is utterly favourable - people have an image of Being a Poet and they want to go and inhabit that image. It is a Yes vote. Maybe all those struggles were not in vain. But, that wish to be a poet does not necessarily mean you have much interest in the work of other poets.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
559 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-941-8 (9781848619418)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andrew Duncan was born in 1956 and brought up in the Midlands. He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecoms manufacturer (1978-87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988-91). He subsequently worked for many years in the Civil Service and is based in Nottingham.He has been publishing poetry since his Cambridge days in the late '70s, including Threads of Iron, Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, The Imaginary in Geometry, Savage Survivals and Radio Vortex (the last a selected poems translated in to German). He is one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated a lot of modern German poetry. He has published a good deal of literary criticism in recent years, above all The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry; Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry, A Poetry Boom 1990-2010, The Long 1950s, and others also published by Shearsman.