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    Bad Machine
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    Bad Machine
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    Bad Machine
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Bad Machine

    By George Szirtes

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The body is the 'bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politi, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrosti, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of 'minimenta' after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive -and constantly reinventing -poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery. Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateMar 27, 2014
    ISBN9781780370651
    Unavailable
    Bad Machine

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    Reviews for Bad Machine

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    • 3/5
      Not a huge amount that's profound here. A lot of formal play, which either interests you or it doesn't. The poems in the first section are the best, and 'The Lump' is the best of those. 'Children of Albion' is quite charming, but nothing to write home about.
    • 3/5
      Definitely better and sharper in the short form poetry than in the longer pieces. In the longer poems, the author gets lost in the shape and pattern of the words and it all comes across as muddled and not a little smug. However, the short poems are worth reading.