Something, I Forget
Published on 26. October 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-1-80017-353-8 (ISBN)
Description
while news love meant to keep forever
is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper.
'Another Lighthouse'
Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things - a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum - resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves.
Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.
is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper.
'Another Lighthouse'
Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things - a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum - resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves.
Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.
Reviews / Votes
'This is artful, precise, thoughtful and quite often beautiful poetry... Leighton combines all her considerable strengths: precise, allusive density of expression; deft aural music; a flair for creating new forms; and a huge descriptive talent.'Victoria Moul, The Friday Poem 'One of the strengths, however, of Angela Leighton's new volume, her sixth, is its awareness of forgetful rememberings like this... It's an exciting, experimental effect.'
Hugh Barnes, The Arts Desk
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
200 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-353-8 (9781800173538)
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
Additional editions
Person
Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. The daughter of a Yorkshire (composer) father and a Neapolitan mother, she has always recognised her heritage of mixed languages and conflicting standpoints. Perhaps for this reason her work has always pushed at the boundaries of literary form. Her most recent critical work, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), sets autobiographical creative prose alongside critical writing to suggest the connections between them, while her volume of poems, Spills (2016), interweaves memoir, short story and translation with original poetry. The permeable flow of the language, towards music on the one hand and other literatures on the other, lies at the heart of her own writing.
She has published poetry and short stories in many magazines, including the New Yorker, TLS, Poetry Chicago, Archipelago, The Dark Horse, and others. Something, I Forget is her sixth volume of poetry.
She has published poetry and short stories in many magazines, including the New Yorker, TLS, Poetry Chicago, Archipelago, The Dark Horse, and others. Something, I Forget is her sixth volume of poetry.