Why Are You Shouting?
Published on 25. July 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
100 pages
978-1-80017-453-5 (ISBN)
Description
Why Are You Shouting?, James Womack's fourth Carcanet collection, thinks about two things in particular: our struggle as individuals to find connections between ourselves, with friends, family and lovers, and the efforts we make as groups to connect to the environment we live and die in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years, the poems set out to find points of hope and solidarity, against a common backdrop of disruption and collapse to which we are often wilfully blind.
Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection's title suggests that raising one's voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in.
The ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunts the collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to willed ignorance.
'The God of whom I speak is dead.
I did my makeup in a disco ball.
I looked at the whole magnificent
creation of the Lord, and asked,
sadly, "Is it cake?"'
Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection's title suggests that raising one's voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in.
The ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunts the collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to willed ignorance.
'The God of whom I speak is dead.
I did my makeup in a disco ball.
I looked at the whole magnificent
creation of the Lord, and asked,
sadly, "Is it cake?"'
Reviews / Votes
'A frustrated energy merges with sentiment in poems that feel like a last hurrah to living as we know it... These poems meditate on what it means to live and believe. They are contemporary narratives that consider the failures of the past and the possibilities of the future. Dark times anchor Womack's writing, but faith remains.'Kadish Morris, The Observer 'His language is rich with the unexpected cadences of conversations between speaker and spoken-to in which one or both parties are still figuring themselves out ... In the messy networks of community Womack explores, the familiar is no less complex than the unknown, and sometimes knottier.' Imogen Cassels, Literary Review
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: 8 mm
Weight
113 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-453-5 (9781800174535)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
James Womack lives in Cambridge, where he teaches Spanish and study skills. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017) and Homunculus (2020). He also translates widely from Spanish and Russian, most recently Camilo Jose Cela's The Hive (NYRB Classics, 2023).