How We Met: (Salt Modern Poets)

POETRY BANK CHOICE. The title sequence of How We Met is based on the Sunday newspaper column in which famous people describe their initial meeting and their subsequent relationship. It invents five pairs of celebrities who are interviewed in this way and whose stories then interpenetrate, and eventually draw in even the interviewer herself. By comparing their accounts, it hints at the intermingling of love and power, of sexual obsession and the drives to both submission and dominance. Half the book comprises the long sequence `The William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip’ which is spoken by a veteran cartoonist who has been commissioned to draw a series of cartoons dealing with Victorian history, and focused upon Gladstone. These poems meditate upon cartoons as an art form, explore the cartoonist’s character and view of the world, and use caricature as a metaphor for expressing the distortions of memory and history, drawing upon its distinctive armoury of imagery, including its references to animals and machines, and its unusual combination of humour with uncomfortable responses such as anger, fear and contempt. It shows the impact on Victorian society, and therefore of those after it, including our own, of the British empire, industrialisation and urbanisation, and the changed sense of self that results from Victorian science, especially Darwinism. The two sequences, and the shorter, free-standing poems at the start of the book, use a wide range of forms, including free verse, syllabics, and metrical and rhyming forms such as the ballad and the sonnet. The book dwells upon the testing of the boundaries of the self which result, in particular, from the rise to prominence of the technological media, and, in this respect, compares and contrasts the present and the past.

Table of Contents:
Sideways At The War It could be love Sideways at the War The Scaremonger Postmodernism, Or, Grey Areas Folie a Deux Squawks and Speech Fallen Women #1-7 A Paper Bag Misconceiving Surface Impressions The Brownie Dress Crab Lane From the New Flats How We Met The William Ewart Gladstone Comic Strip Part One: The Medium i) Attempting a Likeness ii) Finding Likeness in Unlikeness iii) Exploding likeness through rebellion The Medium: Comic Strip The Medium: Searching for Shape Part Two: The Strips The Elastic Band Young Dog, Young Cat A Beast Fable An Enchanted, Perverted, Topsy-Turvy World Brother and Sister Re-Animator Rescue Work An Unlikeness An Ill Wind Dr. Morph and Mr. Darwin Dr. Morph and Mr. Gladstone Traffic Island Mid-Century Calm Napoleon's Double I Don't Think Victoria Grieving for Albert Dummies The Boy Who Turned Into a Puppet The Two Heads of Carlyle Making Myself Scarce An Irish Joke Turkey, Plum Pudding The Dark The Assumption Hatred of Gladstone A Secret Cyborg Gladstone Speaks from the Afterlife

About the Author :
Ian Gregson’s latest book of poems is How We Met (Salt, 2008). Call Centre Love Song, a selection of his poems, was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize. He has published poems and reviews in the London Review of Books, the TLS and Poetry Review, amongst others. His critical books are Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism, The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity iin Postwar Poetry (both published by Macmillan), Postmodern Literature, Hodder Arnold, 2004) and The New Poetry In Wales (University of Wales Press, 2007). Since 1977 he has taught in the English department at the university in Bangor and is now a Professor there.