Teasing, funny and celebratory - "Rays" is a wry and tender lover's gift. Continuing Richard Price's virtuosic playfulness of form, it improvises on the formal shape of sonnet and canzone, charging them with the energy of blues and rock, glimpsing narratives of desire. In a restless, sleepless landscape where language becomes shrill, an alphabet of love poems creates a dreamy island, between the solace of haiku and the precisions of Emily Dickinson. The Renaissance poet Louise Labe and an imaginary band, The Loss Adjusters, sing the complex beauties of passion. Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation. Carol Ann Duffy. Cover painting: "Passing Aquaintance" by Dorothy Stirling (2009), reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
- ISBN10 1847778119
- ISBN13 9781847778116
- Publish Date 1 May 2012 (first published 28 October 2009)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
- Format eBook
- Pages 125
- Language English