barque

Andrew Duncan. Krakel Kakel-Ugn.

A roaring go at the poems of Thomas Kling, Düsseldorf author of selected poems 1981-93 (suhrkamp 1994) and morsch (suhrkamp 1996). Andrew Duncan, known for his vitriolic prods to the coagulating set in the pages of Angel Exhaust, retains the dictional play of the German original, accentuating its speed, political acuity and invention with his own stylish resourcefulness. Punk, fast, and new, Duncan's translations cultivate a rich strip of necessary violence.

1-903488-11-7. 1999. 32 pp. £3.00 / $6.00

Also by Andrew Duncan:

Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Selected Poems 1977-1999 (Salt 2000).
Pauper Estate (Shearsman, Kentisbeare, 2000).
Switching and Main Exchange (Shearsman, Kentisbeare, 2000).
Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (Waterloo Press, 2000).
Alien Skies (Equipage, Cambridge, 1993)
Sound Surface (Wiwaxia, London, 1992).
From the Kitchen Floor (Microbrigade, London, 1992).
Cut Memories and False Commands (Reality Studios, 1991).
Knife Cuts the Water (Poetical Histories, Cambridge, 1990).

Praise for Andrew Duncan:

'Andrew Duncan's work is adept, inordinate and alone. His poetry engages with the power-structures of information by bringing into being a series of virtual scenarios that synthesise giddy desire (for Cloud 9 beauty and peace) with a programme of action-man analytics. He has an apparently seamless control that renders the complex and obsessive in what I would call a High Access language; there is no nonsense. The result is like nothing else in current British poetry.' - Tim Allen.

'Duncan writes a poetry of monotonous power, with its origins in an extreme case of alienation. Despite the bewildering variety of arcane and sophisticated contexts in which his rhetoric is deployed, it is almost embarrassingly amenable to recuperation... Science-fiction, shamanism, psychosis, violence, myth and dream are significant to Duncan chiefly as inversions of mundane reality, which is otherwise invariably subject to caricature.' - James Keery, PN Review.

'...it's good to see this lad with his big boots on galumphing in, and rather loud, clearly unhappy with the soporific quiescence that clouds the cul-de-sac of an ageing pseudo-avant garde, now shy of audience, fame, readership, reputation... Between me and God, I'd almost snap, the Poetry does not need Readers! But it does. This poet... radiates quite an alarming sense of sheer Life, of physical, personal Presence. And when he writes "my poetry is not myself" he has managed to tell the plainest of plain lies.' - Michael Haslam, Angel Exhaust.

valkyriur. neuskaldisch / valkyriur. neo-skaldic.

di-

vided air, the horizontal.
gradually describing parabolas, then curves
the craft bodies. beautifully cutting arrangers
of closures. over eye-blinking geysirs shooting
out their geysir eyes. a rushing! of
the riders, the occupants; in hoof-cut air
panting souls of horses; A BLOOD PICTURE THIS, PATH
OF THE DYING BREATH. (illegible) north sea,
beautiful howls (in something like) away-jetting woods, wood
parts world parts, scoring, hiss over interalt.
to what kind of a closing valkyriur arrange!
(not just unreadable: a lost passus) valkyriur!
storm, neck veins thick as a pencil, diminuendo passage
burst stitches rough stitches, the vertical next. air
craft bodies in like-a-stone. in falling crashing still
pressing on the firing buttons, shrill necks, rocking,
shitting in multilingual bursts of prayer before at bottom
everything ends by ambush. without a song.