Tuesday, July 24, 2012

News at Eleven: In its uninsistent but authoritative way,

The Malarkey is a condition-of-England book, driven by a concern for those who have little purchase on their own lives. The chilling "Newgate" combines a present-day sink estate with the grimly famous London jail and finds their common ground in architecture: "Far away a bin lid drops down/and the arches of Newgate tighten/as dead men walk through them/on the way to their dying." Here we enter the territory staked out in the late Ken Smith's prophetic London poems of the 1980s.

from The Guardian: The Malarkey by Helen Dunmore--review

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