Los Alamos Mon Amour: (Salt Modern Poets)

Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2008 `Los Alamos Mon Amour’ explodes in the heart of the desert and unleashes a chain reaction of intense, moving, erotic and often darkly comical poems. Marlon Brando, Saddam Hussein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Queen Mother, Hannibal Lecter, and Yuri Gagarin wander through the blasted landscape encountering Italian wolves, Desert Orchid and the London Whale along the way. Around a core of searing love poems, `Los Alamos Mon Amour’ embraces passion, nostalgia, fear and wonder. A lost parent inspires terror and compassion by turns; madness intrudes upon the mundane; and St. Paul’s Cathedral mutates in a sequence of bizarre love letters to Wren’s iconic masterpiece. From traditional sonnets to a narrative constructed entirely from film poster taglines, the poems are formally and aesthetically restless, nosing around London, New York, Italy, and Yorkshire, watched over by the spirits of Lowell, Berryman, Hughes, Hitchcock, Mario Bava and Dario Argento. The poems veer from the terrifying to the tender, the comic to the apocalyptic, the lustful to the philosophical, and the cosmic to the domestic – often within the same line. An energetic and entertaining new voice in contemporary poetry: profound and playful by turns.

Table of Contents:
Los Alamos Mon Amour Saturn on Seventh Psycho A Tall Story about a Pushover Fusing the Braids The Open Road Contacts Unleashed Pike At Least Frigidaire Seroxat (R) Celestial Navigation Modern & Obsolete Slippers and Spoons Giallo The Death of Vito Corleone For Sale The X-ray Room Retuning St Paul’s Abductees The York Realist Long Haul The Dream Song of Saddam Hussein Son Awake Again Goodbye Radio City Protecting St Paul’s Buffy is Leaving Tuscan House The Approach London Whale Converting St Paul’s In Bocca al Lupo Italian Verb Drills Titanica Wearing St Paul’s Exploratory Apologia Withdrawal Method Brighton Restored Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine Soloist The Discovery of Fire Corrie Sonnet Paper Not Loaded Scattered Yuri Gagarin’s Three Homecomings Desert Orchid Bath Time Fitting Immuring St Paul’s My Best Friend The Hands Gyroscope Nato e Morto Outlook Good

About the Author :
Simon Barraclough won the poetry section of the London Writers' Prize in 2000 and is the author of the collections Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt 2008) and Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins 2010). He is also the editor of the multi-poet homage to Hitchcock's seminal thriller, Psycho Poetica (Sidekick Books 2012) and is co-author (along with Chris McCabe and Isobel Dixon) of The Debris Field: Salvaging the Titanic in Word, Sound and Image (Sidekick Books 2013).

Review :
Barraclough may see himself as travelling lightly through the world, but he catches the sense of what it's like to live in the modern city more astutely and more often than most other poets. Salt is to be congratulated on investing in publishing his first collection in hardback. -- Laurie Smith Magma This is a collection which deals openly and unsentimentally with bereavements and betrayals, childhood abuses and disappointments, all territory generally understood to be difficult both for poets and readers. Barraclough handles it well... This debut from Simon Barraclough, shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, demonstrates a poet's eye for detail and provides a vehicle for a laconic and totally contemporary voice whose dramatic talents could easily move him into theatre and radio as well as poetry. -- Jane Holland Under the Radar Any poet from Huddersfield must be within earshot of Simon Armitage and there are familiar elements (not least a torrential energy) in Simon Barraclough's first collection ... London Whale shows how it should be done, with fluidity, delicacy, and tonal variety ... There are several shorter (often sonnet-length) poems which balance everything successfully ... and ingenious miniatures. This is very good writing ... a beautifully produced highly readable collection. -- John Greening TLS ['Los Alamos Mon Amour'] simultaneously assaults and seduces the senses with an understated charm ... If it is Barraclough's broad palette of subject matter that draws the reader in, it is his attention to the craft of poetry that will endure. Like Simon Armitage, Barraclough grew up in Huddersfield and although in many ways he is a very different writer, there is something about this collection that brings to mind that first rush of excitement brought on by Armitage's early work. -- Chris Horton London Magazine