Anxiety Before Entering a Room: Selected Poems 1977–99(Salt Modern Poets)

It’s the tail end of the Seventies, the severity of hypothetical Marxism has given way to the anti-humanism of punk. In a province, someone anglophobe and technophile is attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one; other forms of consciousness are a shifting set of part-patterns. All around, a generation of English poets are connecting their output to their input. A cultural blockade comes down over all poetry except the most subservient. Filtered expanses of monochrome nuance concealed the fact that nothing was being said. The industrial recession of the Thatcher years lays bare the fragility of every social and psychological structure. Somewhere in the underground of North London, the invisibility allows a constant approximation to popular culture. The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour. Melancholic and esoteric virtuosity in deserted spaces is interrupted by a troupe of bedizened dropouts, impossibly nimble and competitive, and is redirected towards bright patched surfaces. The attack by the State and the South on a whole engineering civilisation is protested by the construction of complex symbolic machines. A lucid equivalent of turmoil is not the same as unstable maps of instability.

Table of Contents:
from In a German Hotel (1977 – 78) 1. Absence 2. Poem Two 4. Pissing Blood 6. Shape, scored in earth from Threads of Iron (1980 – 81) Dead Wind On First Publication Black pane and decor Dhofar “Laughing Man”: self-portrait by Richard Gerstl Turkish Music In Charnwood Almond Wind: Lament for Osip Mandelshtam For an artist having died in his dreams from Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (1983 – 87) Hic jacet Borbonius heros Griffin Carved in Walrus Ivory Light About living opposite the Brewery in Brick Lane The June Sun cast as the absent lover Those are jewels that were his eyes Night Train The metallic autumn Shapeshifting and Mismatches from Sound Surface (1992) Jadis j’ai cru Circular The Doll’s House from Surveillance and Compliance (1987 – 92) Roots of a Revolution The policy of weakness Heat Loss At Camden Lock Shiny circuitry Over and Over Fragments of the Above Dialogue poems from poems of 1991 – 6 At Cumae Three graves 18.4.91: Transparent radiation For C. Wind and Wear in Aix-en-Provence Martyrdom and Triumph of Sergei Korolev Chronique mondaine of the Fifth Poetry Conference in a Regional Style from Pauper Estate (1996 – 9) Looks like luxury and feels like a disease Adesso non posso At the Lido Collection towards the definition of a word Least Energy Structures Snow-puffed plumage

About the Author :
Andrew Duncan was born in 1956, and brought up in the Midlands, “in an atmosphere of technological optimism and class levelling which the South succeeded in reversing thereafter.” He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecomms manufacturer (1978–87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988–91).

Review :
[T]he poems range over the planet, through history, across cultures, always with a sense of rootedness in a historical / cultural consciousness. -- Keith Jebb Poetry Review Duncan has long been known as the editor of the exceptional magazine Angel Exhaust and a feisty controversialist, yet despite seven volumes, his poetry seems to be less known than he is. This book should redress the balance. -- Keith Jebb Poetry Review