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    Birdsong on Mars
    Birdsong on Mars
    Birdsong on Mars
    Ebook171 pages52 minutes

    Birdsong on Mars

    By Jon Glover

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    About this ebook

    The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poems in this collection before his wife's sudden death from cancer in 2019. He developed the themes and fragmenting style of his previous book, Glass is Elastic (2012), where language was always quizzing itself and how it might relate to the actual and the historical world. Intense, playful, unpredictable, the poems surprised. Here, in the disturbing environments of Upstate New York, Calgary Bay or his Bolton front room the poet confronts illness (his own), hospitals (his visits) and wonderful ambulances (his transports). He resists attempts to see hints or destinies. Then bereavement throws up an actuality of a different order. The collection ends with a mock-sonnet sequence, written during the pandemic, in which the poet tries all the doors and windows to find her, to speak with her - love poems where love has not changed but its circumstances have. 'Will I want ever to get out of this place - the past of the poems in this book?' the poet asks. There are no answers, yet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateDec 21, 2020
    ISBN9781784109769
    Birdsong on Mars
    Author

    Jon Glover

    Jon Glover was born in Sheffield in 1943. He grew up in Surrey/South London and moved to study in Leeds in 1962. Apart from a crucial year in America in 1966-67, and many summers with his wife and children, and her family, in Upstate New York, he has lived in Leeds and Bolton, Lancashire, ever since. He has written four books published by Carcanet and two pamphlets of poems published by Northern House. He has edited with Kathryn Jenner The Complete Poems of Jon Silkin (Northern House Carcanet 2015). He is Advisory Editor of Stand magazine, and coordinates the Northern House books for Carcanet. He is Professor Emeritus in English and Creative Writing at the University of Bolton, Honorary Fellow of the English Association, and Honorary Fellow of the School of English, University of Leeds. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bolton.

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      Book preview

      Birdsong on Mars - Jon Glover

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