Pretty

By Ahren Warner

Ahren Warner's second collection of poems opens with the sequence Lutèce, te amo: a raw paean to the Paris it inhabits that flits between past and present and offers both adoration and horror in equal measure. Elsewhere, London 'licks and laps'; an anonymous man 'works his bones with a micro-plane' and translations of Baudelaire and Kojève rub shoulders with Kurt Cobain and 'Little Lord Tory-Tit'. More capricious, fleshly and darker than Warner's previous work, Pretty culminates in Nervometer: thirteen poems hovering between a collage, translation and performance of Antonin Artaud's Le Pèse-nerfs, which bring Pretty to a beautifully ugly end. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370958

Ahren Warner

Ahren Warner has published four books of poetry with Bloodaxe. His debut, Confer (2011), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013, and followed by Pretty (2013) and by Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His fourth collection, I’m totally killing your vibes, was published in 2022. His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, The sea is spread and cleaved and furled published by Prototype in 2020, and a film – I’m thinking what would sound sincere but also, like, oh, that’s super cute, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).

Book preview

Nocturne

Between the apocrypha

of Einstein defining madness

as the same thing done over,

expecting, in effect, causation to acquiesce

and Freud, in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur

– that the sanest of us

has known the soft psychosis of the lover –

Biret plays Chopin,

kneads herself through him, his

injunctions

– trios played and played over –

each time a remaking, each time a submission:

a slow cloud rising, mushrooming over

a citified harbour. Listen.

LUTÈCE, TE AMO

Memory has no real estate…no city

where you come home and know where you are.

Is there no when

where this rampaging dream will rest?

    [Durs Grünbein, ‘Europe After The Last Rains’]

‘

DÉSINVOLTE

, adj…Showing an excessive liberty… Manner of being, of speaking, light and relaxed…from the Italian, disinvolto…from the Spanish, desenvuelto…past participle adjective of desenvolver…’ [Le Trésor de la Langue Française].

‘

ENVOLVER

(From the Lat. involvĕre)… To cover an object partially or totally…’ [Diccionario de la lengua española].

‘

IN-VÓLVERE

– To wrap up, envelop, enwrap, cover.’ [J.E. Riddle, A Complete English-Latin and Latin-English Dictionary].

I  Here

the pigeons are désinvoltes like, I guess, the old slum shacks of the Carrousel were once dis-involvebantur,

their ramshackle awnings unwrapped, packed off, their vendors sent north of this palais wall.

Expelled I guess, like these pigeons, casual, expelling mid-air: piss-shit combos let fall,

land and dribble, bake and harden on the rock-hard foreheads of Murat, Molière and Voltaire.

II  Pretty

but mad, Mademoiselle Autre had fashioned her accordion from a rock des Causses;

a block she’d found and forced from its hole in the wall of Philippe

Reviews for Pretty

[annebrooke · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Sadly, this is a pretty much pretentious and shallow poetry collection, which is not as clever as it thinks it is. There are one or two moments of much needed grace where I thought a real poet might be emerging, but it never actually happened. One to avoid.