Jonathan Galassi's second book of poems opens with a group of "dithyrambs", extravagent irregular compositions that evoke both the flow and ebb of the seasons and the currents of feeling in a life. Like the book as a whole, they draw on nature, history, and personal history, the world outside and the world within - and on the treasure - house of language itself - as the poet works to find form for experience. The forty poems in North Street are concerned with the space between "Turning Forty" and "Turning Fifty", between the assumption of maturity and the sighting of its limits. All are preoccupied in one way or another with the notion of an "otherwhere", a "world I don't believe in" in which the "water of memory" is washed by the "water of forgetfulness", and the "touch of forgiveness" allows a "guilty man" to "go free". It is between the poles - between "original desire" and conditional freedom, between the recognition of aloneness and gratitude for "the gnawing, the knowing/the being and being here" - that the drama, the story the North Street unfolds.
- ISBN13 9781857544978
- Publish Date 26 October 2000 (first published 1 April 2000)
- Publish Status Transferred
- Out of Print 19 August 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 96
- Language English