The body is the 'bad machine' of George Szirtes' latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines - sources of energy and delight in their prime - go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of 'minimenta' after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive - and constantly reinventing - poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery. Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
- ISBN10 1322485305
- ISBN13 9781322485300
- Publish Date 17 December 2014 (first published 24 January 2013)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 4 March 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books
- Format eBook
- Language English