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Book Cover for: The Occupant, Jane Draycott

The Occupant

Jane Draycott

Paperback
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In galleries and living rooms, on trains and trams and buses, mysterious scenes are briefly illuminated, their occupants caught in 'some small act' or dream - in the National Gallery a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; on a winter train a commuter invokes their braver, doppelgänger self as a fire-fighter; in an abandoned sanatorium the grand piano dreams of former days and waits for a returning patient. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem 'The Occupant' draws on settings proposed but left unwritten by Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff in his great 1934 modernist narrative 'Awater'. Draycott's new collection, following in Nijhoff's formal laisse monorime footsteps, traces The Occupant in a search through the streets of a stifling summer city, where 'at tills/ and kiosks police post notices, / Missing: Have you seen this wind?'

Book Details

  • Publisher: Carcanet Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 31st, 2017
  • Pages: 64
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.20in - 0.30in - 0.20lb
  • EAN: 9781784103002
  • Categories: • European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh• Women Authors

About the Author

Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999.

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Book Cover for: Pearl: A Translation, Jane Draycott
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Book Cover for: Roman Domestic Medical Practice in Central Italy: From the Middle Republic to the Early Empire, Jane Draycott
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Book Cover for: Approaches to Healing in Roman Egypt, Jane Draycott

What people are saying

Praise for this book

'Her searching curiosity and wonderful assurance make her an impeccable and central poetic intelligence.' Penelope Shuttle, Manhattan Review
'Draycott uses the language of dreams to make the quotidian illusionary, like a vapour captured in lexicon. Sleeplessness haunts the collection... Homeliness is pushed, just, over to Freud's unhomely conclusions. The dream world, enticing and enlightening as he might have it to be, proves no more accommodating than our own.' Lucy Cheseldine, STAND

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