Best Sellers:

Biting My Tongue | Bloodaxe Books
neil-astley-biting-my-tongue

Neil Astley

Biting My Tongue

Neil Astley

Publication Date : 30 Sep 1995

ISBN: 9781852243364

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Biting My Tongue speaks in different voices from different countries: mainly Ireland, France, and a breakaway republic. In many-layered poems spoken by women, men and animals, Neil Astley challenges fact and fiction, disrupting assumptions of biography and truth, gender and sexuality, change and transformation. Many of the poems, male and female, echo or play with each other. A recurring voice and constant presence in the book is a young Irishwoman, Rebecca Hayes, whose experiences and imagination set up a dialogue within and around the poems.

Biting My Tongue was Astley’s second full-length collection, following his debut, Darwin Survivor (1988), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

‘Astley is most concerned with people who cannot always find a voice, and experiences right at the boundaries of language… What is astonishing, again and again, is the exactness with which he captures their predicaments.’ – Julian May, Poetry Review

‘Powerful, dramatic, fiercely disturbing poems…Astley’s world is one created out of a profound sense of incongruence between the act of language and the act of love.’ – Anne Stevenson

‘His work displays a knack for the idiomatic, a gritty attitude towards power and dispossession and a smart employment of metre and rhythm…Most of these tales of treachery and betrayal, which take thriller clichés and invest them with doubt and emotion, are unsettling in rewarding fashion.’ – Robert Potts, Guardian

‘It combines imaginative scope, a strong sense of contemporary politics, an interest in gender… If nothing else, the book testifies to Astley’s influence on the prevailing themes and tones of contemporary poetry at Bloodaxe and beyond. At his best, he produces strange, compelling poems.’ – Sean O’Brien, Northern Review

  

BOOKS BY Neil Astley

Being Alive

Neil Astley

Being Alive

the sequel to Staying Alive

Publication Date : 28 Oct 2004

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Being Human

Neil Astley

Being Human

the companion anthology to Staying Alive and Being Alive

Publication Date : 30 Mar 2011

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Do Not Go Gentle

Neil Astley

Do Not Go Gentle

Poems for Funerals

Publication Date : 25 Sep 2003

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Earth Shattering

Neil Astley

Earth Shattering

ecopoems

Publication Date : 31 Oct 2007

Read More   amazon.co.uk
cart
CART
search
TITLE SEARCH

A-Z

AUTHORS

A-Z

CATEGORIES

View Larger Text