Proud Flesh (Salt Modern Classics S.) [Paperback]

John Wilkinson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Salt Modern Classics S. | Publication Date: September 1, 2005

Wilkinson's searing classic, Proud Flesh, is a blistering journal of love's intensities and convulsions. Panning across its characters like a camera, this is lyric poetry as film noire, filled with jealousy, violence and sexual obsession. Incandescent images and language play across the bodies of the lovers, each caught, frame by frame, in an intense act of surveillance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This reissue of an early book by stratosphere grazing British experimental poetry stalwart Wilkinson rewards the negotiation of its evasive surfaces. While Milne writes, for instance, of "the tension here between the projections of love lyric and the materiality of text," Wilkinson asks of a "he" in the first poem, "Will he boil his underwear, when living in the world / where prompts are few? Do you rate his speech lucid?" which is funny and interesting in ways the critical discourse about these lines cannot be. In another piece-all of the poems here are untitled, giving rise to questions about where one stops and the next begins, and most are cast in three- or four-line stanzas-Wilkinson writes, "Love compels me to its dialect, love whose law / furs the imperial tongue," trails off, then later picks up the thread: "& the flesh / goes out / to love what's lost and sealed, was hallowed / or erupts." To wade through the poet's jagged syntax and shifting diction-he mixes plain speech with medical terminology and a thesaurus's worth of 50-cent words-requires suspending any desire for anything other than the momentary meaning of a line or phrase or thought. Slowly, however, it becomes clear the book strives to reinvent the love poem, in language, form and mission-peel back the scar tissue of tradition, undercut the idealization of the beloved and leave us to, as he says, "outlove." Wilkinson hopes these experiments result in an "interesting failure." There is great pleasure in watching his attempts.
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About the Author

John Wilkinson is Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches literature and creative writing, having worked in UK mental health services for three decades. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the National Humanities Center. The Guardian described his last book of poetry, Lake Shore Drive (Salt 2006), as "multiplex, visionary, ragged, and exceedingly strange because exceedingly true to reality". Drew Milne is the Judith E Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. His books include The Damage (Salt) and Go Figure. http://drewmilne.tripod.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Salt Publishing; 2 edition (September 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844710653
• ISBN-13: 978-1844710652
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,717,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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