Viva la Vida: (Salt Modern Poets)

This is the seventh volume of Peter Abbs' poetry. Dana Gioia, the American poet and critic, described Peter Abbs as 'the rarest of writers - a philosophical poet with a genuine lyrical gift'. The poems gathered here continue to range broadly with a philosophical eye. They include a new group of autobiographical poems, some elegant love poems, and a powerful and disturbing sequence on the breakdown and madness of Nietzsche. The final sequence, Ars Poetica, affirms the power of poetry - of cadence and metaphor, of silence and heteroglossia.

Table of Contents:
Child of Pisces Child of Pisces Falling Like Gulls Head Gardener Aspen Leaves Grandmother Reading at Myrtle Cottage The Glass Dome of Childhood A Catholic Childhood The White Gull’s Beatitude Moving Statues Injured Gull Other Gifts The Silent One A Raw Planting Flowering Gorse Out of Touch It Returns Ancestor Worship On the Further Side of Speech Prometheus Bound Owl of Minerva The Last Journey of Odysseus A Northern Sappho Saint Augustine’s Quill The Search of Rumi In which Dante Meets the Pragmatists in the Ice of Hell In which the Damned Lovers Answer Dante After the Burning of Books The Genius of Turner Gerard Manley Hopkins among the Bluebells The Storm Cloud The Glorious Surgeon Last Things The Last Days of Kafka Song of Frida Kahlo Homage to Pierre Bonnard In Exile Out of Water Drowning Viva la Vida Blowing Dandelion Clocks at Seaford Head Red Fox Badge of Shame Bunch of Nasturtiums Wind Chimes Our Place On a Hot Summer Afternoon The Naming of Love Inconceivable Lives Small Love Poem Winter Love Poem Falling into Love’s Shadow Love The Flowering of Flint Ecce Homo: On Nietzsche’s Madness Against the Cold If You Should Meet Socrates Life as Dance Under the Bell-Tower in Genoa: Summer 1877 Seiltänzer At the Foot of the Alps In the Piazza: Turin, 3rd January 1889 Prometheus and the Eagle In the Psychiatric Clinic: Jena, 19th January 1889 Übermensch Requiescat in Pace Ars Poetica Return of the House-Martins The Day of the Paraclete Hallowed Be Thy Name It Haunts Agon Without the Gods Ariel’s Task Speaking of a Plain Geography Drive In Ars Poetica

About the Author :
Peter Abbs was born and grew up on the North Norfolk coast in England. He has written and lectured widely on the nature of creativity and the poetics of culture. He is the Poetry Editor of Resurgence and editor of Earth Songs, the first Anglo-American anthology of contemporary ecoverse. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Icons of Time, Viva la Vida and The Flowering of Flint. Most recently in The Greater Journey (2008) he has worked with the photographer John Pack to explore the relationship between image and word. He is Research Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sussex.

Review :
Peter Abbs is the rarest of writers -- a philosophical poet with a genuine lyric gift. His poems are equally arresting for their substance as their style. Abbs is one of the few contemporary poets sufficiently tough-minded to be able to borrow from Dante, Mandelstam, Rilke and Seferis without being bested by the inevitable comparisons. -- Dana Gioia A real body of work. -- Seamus Heaney These are some of the finest poems written by any poet of Peter Abbs' generation -- Kathleen Raine The poetry is impressive. The Independent These poems offer constant raids on the inarticulate, conducted with energy and resourcefulness on a range of fronts, from the familial to the cosmic. PN Review