The Flowering of Flint: Selected Poems(Salt Modern Poets)

“I believe the work of the poet should be existentially grounded. Being a poet is an interior vocation, not a selected career ...” “Part of the exacting work of the poet is to annihililate the mind’s protective defences and to silence the seductive voices of what others would like to hear ...” “Poets are the votaries of language ...” “Poets have little choice but to live between the menacing hammers, still labouring to utter the multiform truths of our being here and of our being now ... keeping open the creative possibilities of consciousness ...” These are some of the claims made by Peter Abbs for the contemporary role of the poet. The Flowering of Flint is a selection from work written over three decades in the spirit of his poetics. The poems range widely. Some are deeply personal issuing from the immediate pressure of experience: the haunting memories of childhood, the harrowing death of parents, the experience of love; some are disturbing eco-poems responding to the current violation of the planet; while others are more impersonal, exploring through the strategies of persona and impersonation, other poets’ experience – apprehensions of the ephemeral, the erotic and the transcendent. The voices of Sappho, Nietzsche and Rilke reverberate, suggesting that only in the resonating echo-chamber of a long tradition can the contemporary poet hope to fulfill the task of imaginative representation and consilience. Reviewing Peter Abbs’ poetry Kathleen Raine wrote that he had written some of the finest poems of his generation, while the American poet Dana Gioia claimed that he is: `the rarest writer – a philosophical poet with a genuine lyrical gift.’ The Flowering of Flint selected from seven previous volumes closes with a sequence of new poems which elaborate the themes of the whole volume, while pointing, in the last poem, to a new and freer idiom. In his preface Peter Abbs writes: `I would like to think that I am not comfortably settling down but keeping faith with the ineffable spirit of life itself.’

Table of Contents:
Foreword From For Man and Islands 1978 Prelude The Word It The Death of Three Cocks Evening after the Maelstrom From Songs of a New Taliesin 1981 Good Friday This Nomadic God From Icons of Time 1991 Prologue Who I am Fragments from a Catholic Childhood Premature Brith At the Oak Woods Unread Signs The Look-out Tower in the Oak Woods Myrtle Cottage at West Runton The Other Child The Vocation The Loss of Faith Father and Son Tongue-Tied Language! Generations of Farm Hands Predicament Winter Visit A Conversation with the Doctor at the time of the Chernobyl Disaster Crisis November Garden Other Memories FF11506 Driver The Singing Head Coda The Buddha Statue Open to Change From Personae 1995 Prologue Song of Orpheus Fallen Man with One Wing In Defence of the Raven The Messiah Rembrandt in Winter Letter to Theo from his Brother: June 1889 Egon Schiele in Prison: April 1912 Stanley Spencer’s Beatitude Dante to Virgil at the Entrance to Hell The Love Song of Peter Abelard Emily Dickinson’s Declaration D. H. Lawrence’s First Lesson: the Apple Homage to Simone Weil This Head New Constellations From Angelic Imagination 1997 In the Beginning A Tempest for our Times On Seeing Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid in the Rijksmuseum Artist’s Manifesto The Shadow on Bonnard’s Face Intimations of Mortality Too Near to Death Psalm Angelic Imagination: a Poem in Five Movements The Night Journey From Love after Sappho 1999 Post-Modern Love Incomparable Beauty First Fall-Out Kamikase Stars A Bleeding Wreath Las Vegas Perhaps Under the Burning Sycamore Pisces Descendants of the Fireball Jewels of Consciousness Speaking of Eros At Cuckmere Estuary A Mantra of Accidental Light A Violent Cleansing Navigating Darkness Last Rites At Cromer Hospital All Night in Hospital Travelling to a Foreign Land Extreme Unction At the Old House On Sheringham Beach A Girl in Sepia The Dance of Syllables Alchemists down the Age The Naming of Things Sprigs of Rosemary The Aura of your Face Massage A White Dark-Scented Rose Love’s Unicorn Girl with a Flute The Marriage of True Minds The Dance of Syllables The Song of Words From Viva la Vida 2005 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 Other Gifts The Silent One A Raw Planting Flowering Gorse Out of Touch It Returns 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 Seiltaenzer 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 Uebermensch Requiescat in Pace The Living Word Ars Poetica New Poems Learning How Not to Live Witnessing Living with Aphrodite In Praise of Chinese Soup Carving Stone The Way

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 :
The voices of poets sometimes seem too soft and small to be heard these days. They drown easily in a cataract of prose. But good poetry, against appearances, is resilient and sharp. And its task, as Peter abbs understands it, is to "break, blow, burn and make us new". His latest collection, distilled from seven previous volumes as well as more recent work, displays Mr Abbs as the brave and considerable poet he is: a seeker of the truth behind things, a metaphysician, and perhaps above all an alchemist, with "burnt fingers, charred skin, cracked hands." The Economist The voices of poets sometimes seem too soft and small to be heard these days. They drown easily in a cataract of prose. But good poetry, against appearances, is resilient and sharp. And its task, as Peter abbs understands it, is to "break, blow, burn and make us new". His latest collection, distilled from seven previous volumes as well as more recent work, displays Mr Abbs as the brave and considerable poet he is: a seeker of the truth behind things, a metaphysician, and perhaps above all an alchemist, with "burnt fingers, charred skin, cracked hands." The Economist His latest collection, distilled from seven previous volumes as well as more recent work, displays Mr Abbs as the brave and considerable poet he is; a seeker of the truth behind things, a metaphysician, and perhaps above all an alchemist. -- Review of Selected Poems The Economist