Antler

By: John Clegg

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Paperback | 25 July 2013

At a Glance

Paperback
80 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 13.0 x 0.5

Paperback

$18.69

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Eric Gregory Award Winner

The poems in Antler stalk their quarry over difficult ground. Prehistoric landscapes blend with genuine and imaginary anthropology; the real world becomes distorted through the dark mirrors of folktale and myth; fraudsters, liars, and con-men lurk perpetually in the shadows. This panorama is emotional, too, most vividly in the collection's centrepiece: the sequence 'Vaisala and Sinuhe', charting an astronomy professor's infatuation with one of his postgraduate students, who may or may not be a werewolf. Pared-down, playful and often very funny, Clegg's poetry keeps faith with what is tactile and tangible (moss, leather, bone), distilling plainspoken diction, luminous imagery and a unique worldview into lines which remain in the head for a long while after the book has been closed.

Industry Reviews

Clegg mixes "genuine and imaginary anthropology", and the join between those aspects of his work that are essentially tall tales or fabulation and those that the results of diligent research is practically invisible. So too is the transition between tightly controlled traditional form and ranging free verse, the former being done so softly and unostentatiously. A quick march through some of the titles ('Moss', 'Nightgrass', 'Wounded Musk Ox', 'Kayaks', 'Meteor', 'Dill', 'Mosquito') reads like a sort of ingredients list - words as ancient elements, boiled down tinctures, excavated knucklebones and panned nuggets, bottled and labelled for cautious use in the creation of spells and medicines. Plus there's the over-arching sensation of the poet's joyous obsessiveness, like a child collecting shells or insects, in everything he writes about.

So yeah, yeah, I recommend it.

-- Jon Stone * Sidekick Books *

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