Research Catalog

Title

Void studies / Rachael Boast.

Author

Boast, Rachael, 1975-

Publication

London : Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2016.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

64 pages; 20 cm

Summary

"Void Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Études néantes was to consist of poems written as musical études; these would not convey any direct message—but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This "impossible project" has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music—but despite their esoteric nature are by no means "difficult" in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances, and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book—one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame."--Back cover.

Uniform Title

Poems. Selections.

Alternative Title

Poems.

Subjects

• Symphonic poems
• English poetry > 21st century

Genre/Form

Symphonic poems

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

I. Afterlife -- A second time -- Reverdie -- Sunday -- Night vision -- Rooms of the world -- Anonymous -- Snow -- Airtime -- Night porter -- The script of sleep -- Quicksilver -- Seeing double -- Human torch -- Pleasant thought for morning -- Moment -- Secret alphabets -- Testament -- The call -- Return of the song -- Poem of the dream -- Night of the echoes. -- II. The glass-hulled boat -- Double exposure -- Album -- Clair de lune -- Wine bar -- The white sun -- Atrocious fanfare -- Dream of the poem -- Fireplace -- Heat wave -- Flash of lightning -- Door of the rose -- Eleventh hour -- For one night only -- Another hive -- Ten string serenade -- You tried the door -- Reverie -- Shattered -- The other woman -- Contretemps -- Château Néant. -- Poems of the lost poem. From the French -- Autumnal -- Special reserve -- Orpheus's cloak -- Ranchera -- 'Travailler toujours' -- Peonies -- Found poem -- The abyss -- Fairytale -- Coda : lost poem. -- Notes & acknowledgements.

ISBN

• 9781509811458
• 1509811451
• 9781509811465 (canceled/invalid)

OCLC

962073892

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library