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Fool | Bloodaxe Books
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Greta Stoddart

Publication Date : 15 Sep 2022

ISBN: 9781780376271

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

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing?

The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’.  Such mindlessness is not quite imaginable, but perhaps it is possible that by unknowing a thing we can start to see it differently. There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool – but can anyone be trusted to know anything?

A low-level hum of discordance runs through these poems: between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, fools maybe, thinking aloud, continually distracted by the necessary performance of being.

Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

'Stoddart ranges dazzlingly across the nature of time, reality, happiness and self in what feels like an understandably feverish, obsessive anxiety... Among current major UK poets, Stoddart’s poetic voice is perhaps as hard to categorise as anyone’s, except in its excellence. Even more than its wondrous three precursors, Fool will demand re-readings to absorb its full richness.’ – Matthew Paul, The Friday Poem

‘What is knowable, and how things are known, are themes of the collection. The Fool, a figure whose consciousness it often explores, may see more clearly through a gaze uncluttered by received ideas.’ – Carol Rumens, The Guardian, Poem of the Week

‘Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection Fool looks at ways in which, left to ourselves, we look for truth and meaning, how we inhabit various states of being and how it is we can know so much and so little at the same time.’ – Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review, introducing her interview with Greta Stoddart

'Reading and re-reading the spare, prosaic poems in this absorbing collection has been something of a quiet revelation.' - Jill Sharp, The High Window, on Fool

'For all its philosophy and wry commentary on the human condition this is a humane and wise book, always open to the questioning and exploration it advocates.' - Pauline Rowe, Orbis, on Fool
 

Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin

USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org

  

BOOKS BY Greta Stoddart

Alive Alive O

Greta Stoddart

Alive Alive O

Publication Date : 25 Jun 2015

Read More   amazon.co.uk

Related News & Publicity

News & Publicity


Greta Stoddart's Fool: reviews, interviews & poem features

Greta Stoddart's Fool: reviews, interviews & poem features

Greta Stoddart's fourth collection Fool reviewed in depth in The Friday Poem; Poem of the Week feature in The Guardian & interviews in The Poetry Review and on Planet...

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Poetry Events


Greta Stoddart Events and Readings

Greta Stoddart Events and Readings

Greta Stoddart's joint online launch reading for Fool is available to watch on our YouTube channel.

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Poetry Events


Launch reading by Jane Griffiths, Shazea Quraishi and Greta Stoddart

Launch reading by Jane Griffiths, Shazea Quraishi and Greta Stoddart

This launch reading by Jane Griffiths, Shazea Quraishi and Greta Stoddart from 21 September 2022 is now available on YouTube.

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