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    Secular Games
    Secular Games
    Secular Games
    Ebook87 pages31 minutes

    Secular Games

    By Alex Wylie

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Secular Games is Alex Wylie's debut collection. Formally exploratory and inventive, its poems range across subjects and settings: ninth-century Japan, Renaissance Italy, the surface of Venus, focusing afresh our own historical moment. Written over eleven years, this book is a poetic testament of our era in exacting, sensuous, restless language.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEyewear Publishing
    Release dateMay 22, 2020
    ISBN9781839780400
    Secular Games

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      Book preview

      Secular Games - Alex Wylie

      SECULAR GAMES

      Alex Wylie’s first collection interrogates and celebrates our

      capacity for invention, swither, vision and delusion. Exuberant

      in their range of voice and register, the poems are technically

      adroit, happy to rhyme ‘TV’ with ‘topsy-turvy’ and ‘Teletubby’; or

      ‘weather’ with ‘whether’; elsewhere, ‘lyres’ metamorphose into

      ‘liars’. Darkness lurks behind the playful language. Reality is a series

      of alternatives, the toss of a coin, as adumbrated by Wylie’s fine

      version of Borges’ A una moneda. Sometimes elegantly ‘spinning

      out a single thread further // than it should reasonably stretch’,

      sometimes honestly perplexed by ‘a thing / you can’t believe is real

      / but is’, Alex Wylie has written a book for our age.

      — CIARAN CARSON

      First published in 2018

      by Eyewear Publishing Ltd

      Suite 333, 19-21 Crawford Street

      Marylebone, London W1H 1PJ

      United Kingdom

      Cover design and typeset by Edwin Smet

      Author photograph by Joanne Dornan

      Printed in England by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

      All rights reserved

      © 2018-2020 Alex Wylie

      ISBN: 978-1-839-78040-0

      The right of Alex Wylie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      WWW.EYEWEARPUBLISHING.COM

      for Joanne

      Alex Wylie was born in Blackpool in 1980.

      He now lives in Leeds.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      1

      PICTURES

      KENSHO RIVER

      THE STAR AND THE DITCH

      THE WRECK OF THE CORMORANT, 1929

      ITALY

      UNPARABLES

      SOLILOQUY

      REVISITING THE FORGE

      A BAROQUE CEILING

      TAP-WATER

      FOUR VERSIONS OF BORGES

      JERICHO

      FATHER OF LIES

      FIREFLY

      THE ISLE OF MAN

      THE AGE OF AUSTERITY

      PLEASURE BOATS

      MYSTERIES

      A BOX OF DARKNESS

      THE SILKWORM CHAMBER

      PROPAGANDA

      2

      A NOVELIST CAN’T FINISH HER DEBUT NOVEL

      TO THE CHOIR

      THE REAL

      KNOWLEDGE

      BODY AND SOUL

      IRISH DANCING

      APOLOGY

      3

      SECULAR GAMES

      NOTES

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      The longest period of the life of man is only equal to the

      intermediate space between these games. For an age, or

      the space of one hundred years, which we call αίών, is by

      the Romans called seculum. This is an excellent remedy

      for the plague, consumption and other diseases; of its

      origin receive this account.

      Zosimus, Nova Historia

      [I] had precisely the feeling that comes over one when

      the curtain goes up at amateur theatricals. Here were

      we, the performers, until so recently, idly sitting in the

      wings. There was the audience waiting to give us the

      reception we deserved...

      Stanley Casson, Steady Drummer

      1

      PICTURES

      The men with pipes and braces lean

      Like cornstalks frozen in a trench.

      Their pint-pots

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