Name: Onebody and other poems (2023)
SKU: 978-1-915241-13-9
Price: 12.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

Onebody and other poems (2023)

£12.00

Onebody and other poems reintroduces an audience to Paul Eric Howlett’s drive to take the straight-forward to the edge, searching out where the borderlands of poetry might exist and asking why they exist. Yet, in the No man’s land between poetry and the non-poetic, can simplicity in expression still mingle with the Real, and produce art?

This second collection of Howlett’s poetry, once again written across the years, extends the reach and ideas presented in his début collection, The Bedfordshire Boy, (Waterloo Press 2022), arranged from Howlett’s manuscript works. Both volumes contain work of the sort that regrettably only rarely today.

N.B. Due to legal and license limitations, this edition is only available between 06/2023 and 06/2028, and not available for sale beyond the UK.

Front cover image: Wire sculpture portrait of American dancer Josephine Baker by Alexander Calder, 1927-29; with kind permissions granted by and licensed © GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

ISBN: 978-1-915241-13-9 Category: Collections Tag: Howlett-Onebody

Praise and Poems

Following his début collection, The Bedfordshire Boy, (Waterloo Press 2022), which brought together manuscript works written across a number of years, Paul Eric Howlett’s second collection, Onebody and other poems, seeks to experiment and challenge the limits of simplicity in language before it loses any pretensions to the status of poetry. Elements of surrealism widen the scope, with political lyrics and love poems also entering, to illustrate the artistic relevance of such a venture. In essence this collection represents an exciting authorial ‘freedom of speech’: ‘this wind bawls flowing way secrets/ intuition stills in your guts/ vigil ideas were once on trust/ oblivion their cradling now/ the gender sung chain, a cold tongue, stone ear’ [from ‘OLD POET’]

‘…Essential Howlett: hinge of “gesture” and its mix of invitation, distance (very Geoffrey Hill), birth/decay, sensuous description and hyper-awareness of the delivery of sound in poetry… a collection also where iridescent endings – organic, light-filled, elegiac – encapsulate the brilliance of Howlett’s finest work.’
Simon Jenner (Director, Waterloo Press)

N.B. Due to legal and license limitations, this edition is only available
between 06/2023 and 06/2028, and not available for sale beyond the UK.

Praise for The Bedfordshire Boy:

“Paul Eric Howlett’s deftly-crafted poems are firmly rooted in place, and in the senses, giving us a vivid world characterised by both serious quest and playful questioning.”
Paul O’Prey, CBE (Chair of the Edward James Foundation)

“In this powerful patterning of rural memory, we find the glory of the everyday – but withered slightly, in that blood-eye rust of a lens that covers our memories of home.”
Gisele Parnall (Tears in the Fence)

“In a collection that takes in the spells cast by the poet’s immediate location and a wider European scope, Howlett has quietly laid out an ambitious project that hinges on poetry’s reach both near and far…I urge that Howlett’s marvellous book be sought out at once.”
David Hackbridge-Johnson (The High Window)