Oblivion is the title of a wonderful slow tango by Astor Piazzolla.
Recently published: OBLIVION
a tango fantasy thriller - ISBN 1 903 006 02 3
Oblivion is the title of a wonderful slow tango by Astor Piazzolla.
A cocktail of tango, crime
and fantasy, Oblivion is a novel that explores the darkest corners of the
Selected Poems - (ISBN 0 85646 324 8) this is available from Anvil Press Poetry Ltd, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill, London SE10 8RT
Below you will find a selection of poems from Anthony Howell's new
book - Dancers in Daylight -
(ISBN 0 85646 364 7) published by Anvil Press Poetry
Howell has also published Spending:
Poems - (ISBN 0 874320 27 6) - published by Menard Medames - a
book of erotic poetry with fine illustrations by the artist Dilys Bidewell.
Spending is a meticulously wrought collection
concerned with sexuality, interspersed with drawings which run parallel to
the text without illustrating it. The poems are highly charged - as
much by the psychological tension of intercourse as by the allure of the
acts described. What is made explicit is the mood of the event, its
sourness as much as its sweetness, with the poems spanning the
diapason of these intimacies.
Performance Art publications
HOMAGE TO MORANDI
Text of a 1980 performance by The Theatre of
Mistakes, with drawings by Peter Stickland
Published 2006 by Grey Suit Editions: ISBN 1 903 006 01 5
price £10 plus £1 postage
Available at GSE, 33 Holcombe Road, London, N17
9AS
Forthcoming: GOING by The Theatre of Mistakes,
Grey Suit Editions
NOTIONS OF A MIRROR
'The best of Ashbery's English disciples is without doubt Anthony Howell,
and his volume Notions of a Mirror deserves the attention of anyone who cares
for poetry at all.' - ROBERT NYE in The Times
WHY I MAY NEVER SEE THE WALLS OF CHINA
'[He offers] so much good poetry that one is astonished that Howell's name
is not better known. He has a finely attuned eye and ear ... If Howell were
only a descriptive writer, that would be refreshing; but he is a thinker too,
and the scaffolding of reason he erects raises his poems to distinction.'
- JOHN GREENING in Poetry Review
'His new collection is long and intense, but at no time difficult to follow. Most of the poems celebrate travel and the uniqueness of places, and they include the best poetic account I've read of the ecstatic miseries of air travel ... Howell has style to spare and is happily unclassifiable.' - PETER PORTER in The Observer
HOWELL'S LAW
'I read it ['Boxing the Cleveland'] all of four times, gluttonously, and
have memorized whole chunks ... The poem surprises with its depths - but
all the poems in Howell's Law are surprising in some way . . .' - SYLVIA
KANTARIS in Poetry Review
'Well-made yet open-ended poems on a bewildering variety of themes ... ['Boxing the Cleveland'] is one of the most splendidly sweatily physical poems I have read for years.' - ROBERT NYE in The Times
'Curiously strong...' - JOHN ASHBERY in PN Review
'In his elegance, his clarity of eye and mind, his quickness and range
of reference, and his wit, Howell is a constantly rewarding read. Always entertaining
and thought- provoking, he can also engage the emotions. Warmly recommended.'
- GLYN PURSGLOVE in New Welsh Review
SELECTED POEMS
'It is possible to overstress the similarities between one writer and another.
Howell, however, courts such an approach - not because he is an emulator,
rather that he is an eclectic original' - PETER READING in The Times Literary
Supplement
About DANCERS IN DAYLIGHT
The title poem to this comprehensive collection is set in Rome - where a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev seems hallucinatory to the poet, himself a dancer, as he investigates the times of another great performer who died tragically: Paris, the mime of the first century AD, brutally assassinated by Domitian.
The poem is disturbing, as are the poems prompted by the death of his mother. Pain and embarrassment figure as much as tenderness in this unsettling collection. The author is an independent innovator; a maverick operating outside schools and coteries. Yet however frank or sour the content, we are always struck by the form - its sweetness - and its clarity. His verse juxtaposes tones, recognising that we are prompted to loathing as well as to remorse when we go through periods of suffering.
But not all these poems concern a confused sense of loss. Howell is a well- travelled writer: the latter half of the book features poems written in New York, in Serbia, in the Pyrenees, on the Cote d'Azure and on the Costa Brava, in Naples and in Buenos Aires. Howell has striven to find a quality in descriptive verse that is tantamount to abstraction.
Then there are poems which celebrate an active life, a vigorous sexuality, the subtle steps of the tango. So the book is a rough ride, soothing pain with serenity, but then wrenching us out of quietism back into something less comfortable. Paradox abounds. In the words of Richard Lovelace, "We dance to the music of our chains."
Urbane, profoundly ironic, these new poems by Howell continue in the vein
of subtle dandyism for which he is renowned.
Anthony Howell
33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS
E-mail: anthony@ther00m.wanadoo.co.uk
(note the two zeros)
www.anthonyhowell.org
Anthony Howell
A selection of Poems
LATER
It was only later
That she didn't want to be anywhere,
When, wherever she was,
She wanted to be driven somewhere else.
If she stayed with them
She wanted so to be with him.
But if she left and went to stay with him
Then she longed to be with them.
Helpless, yet intolerant
Of help at either end,
She had already ceased
To admit that she would cease.
Her best friend
Had just been to visit her.
She sighed for him and said
That she wished that he would visit her.
And later, later she sat,
Half in, half out of the seat,
Either getting into the car
Or getting out of it.
FROM A WILDERNESS
Her voice has made love to my ear.
The nightingales heard and fell silent.
I wanted to swallow her voice.
Now I've a thirst for her breath.
Giving her up would be death.
Her voice has made love to my ear.
Hers is the air of my choice.
The nightingales heard and fell silent.
AROMA OF LIFE
The sight of old women near death is beginning to prey on my mind.
Each of us must die alone, abandoned, no one can come with us,
Even if someone is holding onto a hand, life ebbs from it, and
A person always goes from life alone. But what of the old woman
Clothed in her peasant's black, hunched over herself by the
Pleskevitza stall? As you get more feeble, fainter,
You hunch over more and more, bent around your knees like that,
And in the end only your back can be seen, your forehead
Somewhere beneath it, pressed against the pavement, with a
Cardboard box in front of it, as people queue for their meaty burgers,
Hot off the grill, wrapped in delicious tortilla-style bread;
And you can add anything you like from the little boxes there:
Crushed paprika, onions, chives, chopped cabbage, chopped carrot,
Chopped beetroot, mustard, ketchup, and a simply delicious
Mixture of sour cheese and paprika, which oozes out all over the
Place as you bite into your well-stuffed tortilla and pleskevitza.
GRUMUS MERDAE
Yesterday they chose her curtain rail.
He was allowed to bear it out of Homebase.
Isn't he her knight in shining armour?
Finding it too short, he took it back,
Exchanged it for a longer lance, or rather
Two in one more pricey plastic pack.
These will need a double screw between them.
She isn't screwing him. This afternoon,
Having secured a surreptitious key,
He sneaks inside her new house with his builder.
There, upstairs, they assemble and affix
His trophy, which he paid the extra length of.
This ends up cut short and far too high.
Still, they screw the bookcase in her bedroom
To the wall just where she wants it - maybe.
Later, when his madness is brought home to him,
He gets drunk on the cognac meant for her,
Makes horrible apologies, then snaps
Everything, undoing all their screwing.
Lies on the sofa dully after that,
Pierced by the lance of guilt.
FROM A FATHER
When you have done with being a girl
Please come to me, and if you are ever
Ample and womanly, let me be tender.
Though you are just a landscape to me,
Loved, but far away, thinking of you
Fills me still with so much warmth
And friendliness. I need to feel
The rasp again of your sardonic self.
My craving for reunion matches
Your desire to keep us well apart.
How horrid I have been to you.
But I was only desperate to
Find some way of enchanting you.
Once you seemed quite fond of me,
And now perhaps you feel that I'm
Some nasty sort of glue. But that's untrue.
I shan't conjecture anything of you.
NIL BY MOUTH
"My mouth never tries."
An indomitable friend
Tells me why she cannot be
My naked love again.
Pulse oximeters network
Through connectors
To my mother's mask
Below this frigging sign.
TINTINNABULUM
"So when one wing can make no way
Two joynéd can themselves dilate."
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Hung with small bells, his Pompeian charm
Comes with one wing and dangles down,
Called to its turns by the whim of the air.
This haunted noon, strung from a pine,
It practically refuses to revolve at all,
Setting off tremors that would register
Only on the tympanum of a hare;
And yet its less than perceptible chime
Touches him with an imaginary feather,
Inching arousal out of its shell
As far as the long slow head of the snail
Whose rapture is a sort of bradyseism.
URSULA
Ursula works at a writers' cafe
In Regensburg - where they've chosen to offer
Literature, dished up with literary food
To suit the occasion - she does the cooking:
I can see her seasoning a bird.
Here, where the vamps with overwrought features
Have been replaced by tourists, and teachers,
Ursula follows you fluently, slick
As anything coating these Argentine reaches.
Cradled now, she sighs as if asleep.
Only the melody happens to matter;
Lengthens the beats of your newly wed hearts.
But Ursula, Christ, it's like dancing with butter.
You're holding a girl who melts in your arms,
Meets another partner and departs.
Each of us feels he's already inside her,
Then the sensation is over, not done;
It would be something to offer an arm
And walk her home through a concretized dawn,
Nicely basted as she'd be by then:
Drenched in a seasoning of her own making;
Flavoured by the fronts of other men.
VENUSBERG
Common to reach out and up, but surprise in a minor keysweetness, with the poems spanning the diapason of these intimacies.
Anthony Howell is a published poet and novelist, and has conducted many creative writing workshops. He also edited Grey Suit - a magazine published as a vhs videotape which featured readings by John Ashbery, F.T. Prince, Les Murray, Hugo Williams and Cris Cheek - among others. He organised several poetry events in Cardiff in the 90s. He is an accomplished and entertaining reader of his own poetry. He has published many volumes of poetry, mainly with Anvil Press Poetry, and his novel, In the Company of Others - concerning a group of classical dancers doing class - was published by Marion Boyars and was well received.