Blood / Sugar

By James Byrne

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Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence.

"James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger."

Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review

"His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time."

Keith Richmond, Tribune

"In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit."
Wayfarers

"The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems."

Paul Stubbs
James Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Nov 26, 2009
• ISBN: 9781908376435

James Byrne

JAMES BYRNE is the pseudonym for an author who has worked for more than twenty years as a journalist and in politics. A native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Book preview

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Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © James Byrne 2009

Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

978 1906570 28 6 pbk

978 1906570 29 3 hbk

978 1908376 43 5 ebook

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The author is grateful to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these poems, or versions of these poems, first appeared: Ambit, Cimarron Review, The Delinquent, Fulcrum, Golden Boat, Jacket, The Manhattan Review, Openned (Anthology vol.1), Oxfam (CD: Life Lines 2), Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Salt Magazine, Times Online and Vair.

A selection of the poems in this book were first published in The Vanishing House (Kuca koja iscezava) by Treci Trg in 2009.

The front cover is an overpainted photograph, ‘18.1.89’, by Gerhard Richter. The author is grateful to Gerhard Richter for granting permission to republish his artwork.

Thanks to John Wedgwood Clarke, John Kinsella and Sandeep Parmar for reading different versions of this manuscript. Additionally, thanks to the Arts Council England for giving the author a grant to complete this book.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

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Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke

for my mother

Mary Shuttle

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2009

Contents

Recovery

Apprentice Work

Air Terminals

Days of 1973

Sestina for R

A Private Garden

Widowed / Unwidowed

Two Phonecalls at 4 am

From the Sky Parlour

Dowry for an Aerophobic

Speed Date

Serapis from a Postcard

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

A King’s Faith

Chess in Kirkuk

Nightnurse

Sanchez de Aldama

14th April 1930

(Reverb) At the Scene of ‘The Earthenware Head’

Prospecting Several Instances of Active Imagination

Four Interpretations of Photographs by Claude Cahun

Five Interpretations of Overpainted Photographs by Gerhard Richter

Avoiding a Close Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Three Presumptions Whilst in the Neighbourhood of a Friend

Voice Portraits of Uncle Patrick at the Reunion House

Not the Arm Wrestle

The Angel vs. Gabriel

Inclub Satires

Doctor One-Eye

Inviting the Ghosts

Thieves’ Society

To-tock-a-noo-lah

On Not Reaching a Summit

A Room in the House of Aries

Dragon Tree

Incest

Jackanoria

Entry (Cornwall 1991)

A Local Marriage

The Ashes

The Minister’s Daughter

What Remains of Old Addresses

Testimony

Notes

Biographical Note

Recovery

Let me imagine you coming home

from the dark, between body and mind,

making evidence of yourself

the way a tree waves up from its shadow.

There are dinner-halls you have silenced

with a single spark of wit,

there are men you have governed

through pure scent, pure posture.

Now for your most difficult trick:

to restart a life that ends by turning into gold.

In September (the month that tends to all others)

let me be able to conjure your best side,

to have some kind of grip on the intactness

of living, the