A city poet playing with country themes in a tongue-in-cheek way; references range from popular culture to country songs and heavy metalAn accomplished guitarist whose own original songs feature in this collection; will appeal to a younger audience and fans of indie music, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey, The National Strike etc...Witty and humorous, Crothers plays with a range of surreal and conflicting voicesOne of the key contributors in Carcanet's New Poetries VI anthology and a popular performer within the Cambridge poetry scene*For fans of Paul Muldoon and John Ashbery
Debut collection by a playful and existential young Northern Irish poet and musician
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PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
A city poet playing with country themes in a tongue-in-cheek way; references range from popular culture to country songs and heavy metalAn accomplished guitarist whose own original songs feature in this collection; will appeal to a younger audience and fans of indie music, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey, The National Strike etc...Witty and humorous, Crothers plays with a range of surreal and conflicting voicesOne of the key contributors in Carcanet's New Poetries VI anthology and a popular performer within the Cambridge poetry scene*For fans of Paul Muldoon and John Ashbery
Debut collection by a playful and existential young Northern Irish poet and musician
Description
Addressing themes of destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, form, failure and rock ’n’ roll, Several Deer is the debut collection by a Northern Irish writer as much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. The poems – many of them sonnets and doomed attempts at clear-eyed love poems – are suspicious as to the legitimacy of the big beautiful transcendent moment, believing it false comfort. Adrift from a poet they don’t much like, they console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture. Their speaker laments the state of the world while impotently aware that as a straight white male he’s part of the problem; easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, he breaks much of what he touches. Several Deer charts the vain effort to undo the damage. It’s a book about the gap between what one should think and what one actually thinks, between sounding good and being good. It doesn’t take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.
Awards
Winner of The Strong/Shine Poetry Award 2017 Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017
Critic Reviews
'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 Times
About the Author
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.
Addressing themes of destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, form, failure and rock n roll, Several Deer is the debut collection by a Northern Irish writer as much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. The poems many of them sonnets and doomed attempts at clear-eyed love poems are suspicious as to the legitimacy of the big beautiful transcendent moment, believing it false comfort. Adrift from a poet they don_t much like, they console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture. Their speaker laments the state of the world while impotently aware that as a straight white male he_s part of the problem; easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, he breaks much of what he touches. Several Deer charts the vain effort to undo the damage. It_s a book about the gap between what one should think and what one actually thinks, between sounding good and being good. It doesn_t take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.
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