Listening in

by Gareth Reeves

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This collection of poems are by turns humorous, painful, spiky and eloquent, recalling Gareth Reeves's father, the poet and critic James Reeves. The collection culminates in a sequence of fourteen lyrics about his father's partial-sightedness. For Gareth Reeves the anxiety of influence is a filial matter. In other poems the quirks of memory stimulate a difficult truth-seeking - about an organ-playing chemistry teacher, an Oxford suicide and odd-ball, a black American con-artist, an expatriate Marxist Englishman in California, about teaching Vietnam draftees, about selling blood in pre-Junta Greece - whilst in poems such as "The Cockroach Sang in the Plane-tree", "High Life" and "Gaps" (about the poet Norman Cameron), the concern with mortality finds bleak and disconcerting expression.
  • ISBN10 1857540115
  • ISBN13 9781857540116
  • Publish Date 22 July 1993
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 16 April 2014
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
  • Format Paperback (UK Trade)
  • Pages 64
  • Language English