Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Fur Coats in Tahiti
Fur Coats in Tahiti
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Casgliad o gerddi amrywiol gan Jeremy Over, yn arddangos ei ddawn ddiamheuol i chwarae â geiriau ac arddulliau, wrth archwilio'r berthynas rhwng sain a synnwyr, gan blethu'r cyffredin a'r anghyffredin wrth droedio llwybrau annisgwyl.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group and the New York school. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781784107635
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781784107635
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Fur Coats in Tahiti
- Awdur / Author
- Over, Jeremy
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2020-06-23
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Carcanet Press Ltd.
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 128 pages
- Size
- 140 × 216 mm; depth 10 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Reading Fur Coats in Tahiti , one gets the impression that its author, Jeremy Over, is trolling modern poetry. That’s not to say that he’s in any way cruel or taunting like the internet trolls of newspaper headlines, but rather he’s a playful court jester who is using the forms and familiar poetic reference points to make something entirely fresh and fun that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s no surprise then that Fur Coats in Tahiti is a poetry collection that sees Over shortlisted for 2020’s Wales Book of the Year for English-language poetry. The poems it contains are a hodgepodge of styles, tones, ideas and forms that collectively leave a reader questioning the nature of poetry and language. ‘EAT YOUR CHERRIES MARY’ is a prime example of what makes this collection so fun. Based on the traditional ‘Cherry Tree Carol’, Over takes the opening line, ‘O eat your cherries Mary’, and repeats it until the words are just sounds (‘each or cherries O / each or each or’). One can’t help but mouth along while reading and somehow find it making perfect sense that a poem that starts so traditionally can end through a process of Chinese whispers to become ‘eat your cherries / Slobodan’. Similarly, ‘The maid of Buttermere’ references the Maid of Buttermere, first mentioned in Wordsworth’s The Prelude , but rejects Wordsworth’s traditional poetry to become a nonsensical play on words that grows and adapts like a tongue twister to become fun sounds: ‘more butter made Maud mad, mad Maud made more, made more…’ What Over does is not simply oral playfulness – he is far more challenging than this and presents poems that make little sense if one tried to take them off the page. Reading Over’s notes on sources, we learn that the almost nonsensical visual poem ‘NOTES ON UM’, for example, applies Tom Phillips’s erasure procedure to his own ‘Notes on A Humument’. ‘NOTES ON UM’ can at least be read aloud and makes some artistic sense, though. ‘Kenneth Koch Uncorked’ meanwhile takes up ten pages of the collection with seemingly randomly spaced Os on the page. Again Over’s notes illustrate that he’s taken ten pages of Koch’s ‘When the Sun Tries to Go On’ – a poem that is supposedly lengthy and hard to decipher in its original form – and simply left the exclamatory Os. This is not poetry as you might typically expect to read it, but poetry as art and challenging ideas of what poetry is. Words no longer have meaning, just form on the page. Elsewhere Over experiments with ‘flarf poetry’, a form that modern early internet users developed to not dissimilar effect as William S. Burroughs’s cut-up poetry, 50 years earlier. This experimentation feels completely at home within this collection, with its references to writers as varied as Kenneth Koch, Wordsworth and G. K. Chesterton, and philosophers such as Kant. It’s no surprise given the variety of forms and playfulness on display that the collection ends with a 27-page series of alphabetical poems that indicate a new alphabet. As with elsewhere, meaning remains unclear and elusive and the 26 letters of the alphabet are joined with a final ampersand taking 27th place. Over’s titular fur coats, one imagines, are neither use nor ornament in sun-drenched Tahiti. What a fitting title for this collection then, where a reader can’t help but question the purpose of poetry. What is its use? Is it sound over form, or form over sound? Over offers no answers to such questions, but instead provides a fun, challenging and visual read that is well worth a read by any poetry fan.
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