Gravity: (Salt Modern Poets)

"Gravity" presents the first five books of poems from the sequence "Gravity as a consequence of shape", started in 1982 and scheduled for completion in 2005. "Gravity" includes the books "Brixton Fractals", "Breadboard", "Civic Crime", "Dispossession & Cure", and "Fizz". The sequence is an inversion of empirical demands. Each untitled poem has been relabelled with a jazz dance from a list of dances, from African Boog to Zip. The design of the overall work uses the model of a crushed cylinder, the process of a crumbling wall and a variety of contingent energies, interrupted narratives demonstrating crowd-outs, descriptions of shifts in focal consciousness, fleeting interruptions that damage continuities and expectations with named actors; Burglar, Badger, Fireman, Mathematician. These narratives are supported by decoherent syntax, moving positions that question strident notions of coherence and over-determined incoherences. This is a syntax that sometimes avoids and sometimes embraces tried stanza structures through the use of unreliable sentences and designed forms that exercise deliberate breaks from golden mean or idealised exactness.The poems rely on inconsistency leading to prepared and unexpected transformations that link or rhyme into following or previous poems. One preparation involved labelling a cylinder with stanza indications to provide sonority, bending the cylinder in upon itself and producing new damaged sonorities from the crushed indications. This transformed geometry energises the process of aesthetic productions in each reader's involvement. One activity transforms words by sound, another by meaning and another by inversion or critique of its proposals. One unrealised proposal is to demonstrate truth. Another is to confirm a lack of reliance upon expectation. The subjects bridge biotechnology and quantum physics through a system of urban gardening and leaking streets. The proposals demand civility and are preposterous.

Table of Contents:
1. Brixton Fractals Banda Around the World Ballin' the Jack African Twist accretion Atkins Stomp African Boog Bel Air Boogaloo acuity Boogie Stomp Black Bottom Boogie Break Birdland 2. Breadboard Boogie Woogie Bop coda to Boogie Woogie and Bop for Albert Ayler Boston Monkey Break-a-leg Breaks brend Busoni Butor. Passing Time again Bristol Stomp Bugaloo Buzzards and Bees Buzz Step Buzzard Bunny Hop Buzzard Glide Bumble Bee 3. Civic Crime Cakewalk Camel Walk Cha Cha Charleston Charley-Bop Chicken 4. Dispossession & Cure Dirty Dog Accounts Choo Choo Chug Chorus Hook chreod cigar Convalescence Circle Conga Continental Walk Crab Walk Collimate Curie dance disk duck-pillow Dog Work Consciousness Commodity: Three Kinds of Perception 1. Ditty Bop Walk 2. Dixieland One Step 3. Double Shuffle 5. Fizz Grind Fish-Tail Frug Eagle Rock Ferneyhough Funky Broadway Fox Trot Freeze Goose Neck Heebie Jeebies Dispossession & Cure 2 Horse Huckle Buck Hully-Gully

About the Author :
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian, lives in Hereford. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry & Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has exhibited in many shows including Hereford 2013, London 2003 and York 1993. Examples are in the Tate, the Living Museum, Iceland, King’s Archive London and various private collections. His last four books were Place, Entanglement, Gravity and Proposals.