As Best We Can
Published on 27. August 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-78410-988-2 (ISBN)
Description
As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.
Reviews / Votes
'Jeffrey Wainwright's work is among the most interesting of any poet now writing. Although he has an admiring readership, he has stayed under the radar much of the time, pursuing a line of poetic inquiry that links him to writers as various as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, Tony Harrison and even Charles Tomlinson (who like Wainwright was from the Potteries) - all of them in various ways historian-poets. Wainwright's particular imprint is a richly charged austerity, an ostensible plainness that, like a powerful magnet, summons suggestions to the page and the ear. Part of the pleasure of reading his work is trying to establish how he does so much by such apparently unspectacular means. An equally unobtrusive formal assurance has much to do with his success.' - Sean O'Brien, The GuardianMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
363 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-988-2 (9781784109882)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent and educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He taught American Studies at the University College of Wales Aberystwyth and for a year (1970-71) at Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY. In 1973 he moved to Manchester Polytechnic, later Manchester Metropolitan University, from where he retired as Professor of English in 2009. In 1984 he was Judith Wilson Fellow at St John's College Cambridge. He has translated Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, Pierre Corneille and Bernard-Marie Koltes for the RSC, the BBC and the Actors' Touring Company. He was northern theatre critic for The Independent newspaper for eleven years. His literary criticism includes Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (MUP) and Poetry the Basics (Routledge). Jeffrey Wainwright lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.