Urban Myths collects a wide range of John Tranter's best writing from a forty-year career together with a generous selection of recent poems. His work is noted for its technical virtuosity and masterful handling of traditional forms in a modern context including sonnets, haibun, haiku, odes, elegy, and Sapphics. There are poems like snapshots, a few lines long, and a film noir story that runs for over thirty pages. There are flashes of lyrical beauty and desperate adventures, fear and loathing in America and a quiet drink in a waterfront bar in ancient Alexandria.
Many of Tranter's poems engage with literary exemplars - Callimachus, Shakespeare, Schiller, Hoelderlin, Rimbaud, Sartre, O'Hara - and hold up their attitudes and procedures to a sharp contemporary scrutiny.
Alongside his more approachable narrative, lyric and critical work John Tranter has persistently explored a project of experimentation, interrogating the traffic between speech, writing and meaning, and challenging the preconceptions of the reader. In one example, Shakespeare's The Tempest is reduced to a dozen pages; in another, a gaggle of literary figures have their work shredded in a computer only to see it reborn in a fresh guise.
For all its delight in scholarship and the ironies of history, this writing is focussed on the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of the here and now.
- ISBN10 1844713873
- ISBN13 9781844713875
- Publish Date 1 September 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 22 May 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Salt Publishing
- Format eBook
- Pages 436
- Language English
- URL http://saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=1844713873