Train Songs: Poetry of the Railway

Author: Paterson, Don

Brand: Penguin Random House

Edition: Main

Binding: paperback

Number Of Pages: 192

Release Date: 15-05-2014

Part Number: FLIBD9780571315789

Details: Product Description


'This is the night mail crossing the border,Bringing the cheque and the postal order...' -- W.H. AudenWordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes ('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow).Co-edited by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour - from Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond - starting from the poetry of departures and brief encounters, but taking in the American Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the addiction to speed which characterised the European revolutions. Trains have carried the freight of history from the Industrial Revolution onwards - the Armstice in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage, the death camps were organised around train timetables - and this new anthology shows how the train in all its forms has exercised a unique hold upon our collective unconscious.


Book Description


Train Songs, edited by Don Paterson and Sean O'Brien, collects the results of the huge and various inspiration that trains have offered to poets from Wordsworth to Hugo Williams


About the Author


Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collections include
Nil Nil,
God's Gift to Women,
Landing Light,
Rain and
40 Sonnets. He has published two books of aphorism,
The Book of Shadows and
The Blind Eye, as well as translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. He is also the author of
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets,
Smith: A Reader's Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy, and
The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and teaches at the University of St Andrews, where he is Professor of Poetry. Since 1997 he has been Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. For many years he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Edinburgh.

Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, broadcaster, editor and professor of creative writing at Newcastle University. His many books include a verse version of Dante's
Inferno, a novel,
Afterlife, and seven poetry collections, among them
The Drowned Book, which won both the 2007 Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and
November, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Foward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Awards, and the 2012 Griffin Prize. His
Collected Poems was published in 2012.

EAN: 9780571315789

Package Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.0 x 0.6 inches

Languages: English