Aftermath: (Salt Modern Poets)

Aftermath brings together several long poems concerned with masculinity, authority, and the politics of art, alongside a selection of shorter poems curious about science, memory and new technology, written over a twenty year period. Many of the poems search out traces of narrative and emotion in the often anonymous and neutralised languages of contemporary culture. This is an investigation prompted by the restricted civic space and cultural possibilities of a conservative Britain. Earlier poems were written in the shadows of a conservative roll-back of many progressive government programmes and a rapid increase in poverty and decline in education and health. This was also a time when poststructuralism persuasively mocked humanist and transcendental ideas about language. Was there any truth or hope in language? This is a poetry with arguments, a conviction, challenged at every turn, that observation and communication are still possible for the stretched language of poems. Included are two recent sequences, `Tell Me About It’ and `Next Gen,’ in which the selves called into being by New Labour and New Technology aspire to their own lyric sublime. The concluding poem, A Dialogue on Anachronism, looks back on the past two decades with some wonder and puzzlement.

Table of Contents:
Equations First Thought Here Is A Clue Spare Explanations Many People Do Not Like The Idea That Time Has A Beginning To the Lifeworld Forefathers Romantic Gallery Theory 2 Against Interpretation Divided by a Common Language City Life A Bomb’s Eye View Tell Me About It The Poetics Of Labour Put Yourself In Their Place Another Dispatch Escapist Western Here We Report Fire Works Poetry For Dummies Finding A Voice In the Mottram Archive I Left A Little Of Myself Behind In That Novel Such Theory Looks Like Advocacy The Unsayable Blaming The Sixties New Human Abstract One The West In Pictures Deep Time Cognitive Mapping Sing Me Believe It Or Not Predictive Curves A Sonnet And A Half For Ted Berrigan It’s A Crime It Is All Our Story Front Line Epic The Trouble With Metaphors Eat Sleep Work Based On The Classic Novel Pump-Priming The Economy After The DNA Code Was Broken Persuasion The Eagle Book Of Imperial Poetry That Turner Prize Bed Some Syllables Are Missing in this Elegy The Personal Poem Time Team Cinematics Of Memory Paternalisms 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Next Gen 1/Civil society 2/Lyric moments 3/Political subjects 4/Drives 5/The new anthropology 6/They bring us words for our poetry 7/Beyond Vision 8/Dogs, Dragons and Tygers 9/Online enchantments 10/The Sonnet 11/Poet and critic 12/The body Expressions Californium 98 Mendelevium 101 Fall Out Shelter Up Above the Moral World High-Heel Boots Charles Olson Intravention I Feel Your Pain Topologies Portrait Of An Unknown Man Sacred Object Purpose Unknown A Dialogue on Anachronism Afterword Notes

About the Author :
Peter Middleton was born in 1950 and grew up in both England and the United States. After a first degree at Oxford University, he took a PhD at Sheffield University, and studied for a year at SUNY Buffalo with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke. He is the author of a book on masculinity, The Inward Gaze (1992), co-author with Tim Woods of Literatures of Memory (2000), and author of a book of essays on poetics, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). His poetry and essays have appeared in magazines in the UK and US, and with Piers Hugill he is editor of Torque Press. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton.

Review :
The waltz of the intellect among the words opens onto a world of misplaced politics in the aftermath of desire's collision with history. Peter Middleton's muted songs spook this tale of the trying. -- Charles Bernstein This is a learned group of texts in dispute with itself, that questions itself and its reader as part of its production. Peter Middleton is an engaged academic, but in public he, as this collection demonstrates, is a considerable poet with direct responses to scientific and ecological practices, uses language as a material, works on an interface between what, on the one hand, he once named the male inward gaze and, on the other, its vulnerable surface. His interface shifts from narrative to cusping disquiet, from crafted conversation to directed poetry. -- Allen Fisher This Middleton poem is formally innovative; it does not spill, every line has elastic on it and snaps back. -- Ira Lightman Pages