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    Body of Work: Selected Poems
    Body of Work: Selected Poems
    Body of Work: Selected Poems
    Ebook155 pages46 minutes

    Body of Work: Selected Poems

    By Aidan Andrew Dun

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    About this ebook

    A poetry collection by the author of the internationally-acclaimed epic poem Vale Royal (published by Goldmark, 1995). There are 10 sections to Body Of Work, each named after a different somatic region. There are poems of the Hands, poems of the Lungs, Spine, Heart, Belly, etc. Subject matter is widely varied: there are urban poems, satirical and humourous verses, elegiac pieces, love poems, haikus and erotica, and a few longer pieces including 'De Havilland' (about the poet's airman-father who flew in night-fighting Mosquitoes in WWII). These are highly-crafted lucid verses which take the reader into an emotive landscape of literary vision; these are poems which clearly set out to communicate something of human experience. 

    Aidan Andrew Dun is a visionary, a pied piper of modern poetry. KATE KELLAWAY – THE INDEPENDENT

    Dun stands apart from all schools and schisms…He is the carefully regulated trickle of water that cracks stone. IAIN SINCLAIR

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThird Temple Press
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781393485407
    Body of Work: Selected Poems

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      Book preview

      Body of Work - Aidan Andrew Dun

      Table of Contents

      PROLOGUE

      EYES

      Colorado

      Little Observation in Sunlight

      Mirror and Wheel

      The Horseman

      Harvester

      Psychogeography

      On the Death of His Father

      Auto Elegy

      Pirbright

      Journey

      Waking

      Another Sky

      On Hearing of a Bomb Factory under New Management

      Transmission from the Wheel

      Green Man

      I Went

      SPINE

      De Havilland

      The Waterplane

      Hulagu

      HEART

      Black Sunshine

      Night-Bird

      Heart-Shaped

      Song

      Ball

      Fierce Moon

      Love

      Divorce

      To A Dancer

      Comet

      Crossed Flight

      Negatives

      Floods

      Santa Cruz

      Still

      Riverside Blues

      Little Flame

      For Christiana

      LUNGS

      Transmarine

      On Uppingham Road

      Androgyny

      Revelation

      A Way Home

      Out Of The Body At Coppelia

      Garden As Launch-Site

      Secret Song

      FEET

      Green World

      Vincent

      Endymion Soundings

      Escape

      Little River Road

      April Time

      Long Touch

      Black Passing

      Night Crash

      Heine Dying

      The Virgin of Potosi

      LINGAM

      Her Feet as Two White Swans

      Elixir

      Anthurium

      Surf Exit

      Rider

      Spring

      Hill Temple

      Trade

      Night Vision of the Ocean of Milk

      SPLEEN

      Skylark

      Here

      Tower Blocks

      Street-Seller

      Soul

      Recurrent Dream

      Years

      Hog

      Apple

      Three Disconnected Octets

      Signs of Life

      Pondering Heron

      Tramps

      Voyeur

      Free Will

      HANDS

      Street Scene

      Refugee

      War

      Nightfall In The Tropics

      Fireplace and Fishbone

      BELLY

      Street Sale

      Stink

      Avian

      Moonrise

      Fall of a Leaf

      Female

      Emotional Weather

      To an Ageing Goddess

      The Paradox Ladies

      PANCREAS

      Lubad

      Dead Trees

      Terrible

      Nothing Between

      Collision Course

      Pro-Life

      Wall Street

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      COPYRIGHT

      BODY OF WORK

      Aidan Andrew Dun

      PROLOGUE

      A poem communicates the mystery of a love-affair with experience. The poet’s passion for this world as mirror of super-reality explodes in a sensuality of language. Poems are kisses lavished on life, some ferocious and carnal, others tender and spiritual. A poem solves the primordial antagonism: Shall we eternally suffer or shall we eternally flee beauty? As lovers see perfection where there is only humanity, so true poems redeem the world.

      Poets stand at the equilibrium-point of the creation. Somewhere near this pivotal balance, Body Of Work maps human experience to somatic regions, representing the world through our most immediate signifiers: limbs, organs, body-parts. Poems are arranged around the microcosmos of anatomy. The spine, pointing continually at the sky and reaching up to the mind, is the special area of cosmological poems; also longer compositions. The heart is the sacred place of laments and love-poems. The eyes govern poems of vision, futurism and prophecy. To the lungs belong poems of euphoria, poems about music, poems of transcendentalism. Poems of transition belong to the feet; travelogue and pastoral are also here. Erotic visions, remembered and imagined, belong to the lingam. As ever the spleen is governor of existential complaint, urban angst and general melancholia. The hands, demonstrative and practical, take charge of occasional poems. In keeping with their tendency to directive gesture they also acquire the more didactic poems. Meanwhile, the belly, shaken by delightful spasms, is the region of comedy. Last but not least, the pancreas, (sometimes called ‘the brain of the body’, a mysterious gland full of minute eye-like cells known as the Islets of Langerhans) governs one-liners, solitary triads, nursery-rhymes, nonsense-lyrics, dedications and cryptic verses.

      Necessity of ordering is a trait of man, who tries to give formal unity to each thing he produces, and in so doing mimics the greater coherence of the universe. Body Of Work is built around an admittedly subjective system of affinities, attributions and sympathies. Yet in the process of consolidation of a decade’s poems around the theme of a somatic whole order seemed to emerge like a living being from a variety of elements. That being is now given birth in the present book.

      EYES

      Colorado

      A coastline surrounded by blue sky.

      Where the sea should be, cloud-surf

      driving over an enormous

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