Littoral

Debney, Patricia (2013) Littoral. Shearsman Books, 80 pp. ISBN 978-1-84861-293-8. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:40616)

Abstract

Item Type:	Book
Additional information:	Littoral is a collection of prose poems that explore and emerge from geographical, psychological and formal states of liminality. Written in situ on the North Kent coastline, the work’s central reference point is the shore itself: the covering and uncovering of land and what is revealed or not revealed; the patterns of tides and winds as they relate to what is predictable or not predictable. Throughout, the coastline embodies ‘betweenness’ as well as ‘meeting point’; this in turn enables the larger poetic investigation into the nature of change, suspension, and movement. The use of formal coastal and geological terminology provides a dislocation or ventriloquism through which an alternative experience of land-based life is entered; differently naming leads to differently understanding. The creation of this liminal space is realized through prose poetry, itself a boundary-stretching form; here the form’s many tensions between prose and poetic conventions – such as the use of the sentence as unit alongside poetic fragment and internal rhyme – deepen the work’s engagement with mutability. As such, Jane Monson, editor of The Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press, 2011), cites the prose poems in Littoral as ‘brilliant in themselves and important contributions to the genre’; George Szirtes captures the work by observing that ‘it looks to understand, to note and to register phenomenon as meaning. In doing so it speaks of patience, precision and the way one reads one’s life into nature: gingerly, with due courtesy and humility. The process is an essential part of the domain of prose poetry, combining the sobriety of reportage with the transformations of poetry.’;
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
Divisions:	Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User:	Stewart Brownrigg
Date Deposited:	07 Mar 2014 00:05 UTC
Last Modified:	16 Nov 2021 10:15 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/40616 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)