Quennets

Overview

The poetic form used in these pages is one invented by Raymond Queneau in his 1975 book Morale élémentaire; it has come to be called the "quennet", after its inventor, as it has one more line than a sonnet. The three sequences which make up this collection experiment with psychogeographical quennets inspired by walking around the Essex estuary and the Berlin Wall Trail, with the final sequence retracing the steps of W.G. Sebald through Suffolk.

Reviews

'The lineation speeds along at a nice articulated pace, the Dantesque pitch is right and propulsive, the cast of villains is energising, the balance between language and lingo, the allusive and the obscene just right... Berrigan the perfect shambling guide...' - Seamus Heaney on Terry's Dante's Inferno 'It is brilliant... the pattern and rhythm very forceful and the lingo just stunning.' - Marina Warner on Terry's Dante's Inferno "These surprising and intriguing poems offer new ways of seeing overlooked places; of reading landscapes too often dismissed as illegible. Tonally adventurous, formally radical, sometimes witty, sometimes melancholically beautiful, they stand at a convergence of nature writing and experimental poetics." - Robert Macfarlane "Though Terry's 'I' is all but absent, his eye is keen throughout, seizing on significant details of his wanderings around estuaries, around the old Berlin Wall, and finally along the digressive paths followed by W.G. Sebald through Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn. En route, Terry's precise…selection of language – sampled from the vocabularies of biology, geography and history, among other disciplines – offer hints and glimpses and conjectures about the ways in which these three modern landscapes have been shaped by their past and present inhabitants and vice versa. There is no overt editorialising, but rather a pervasive air of pensiveness that invites many re-readings. These are poems of high ambition and integrity, and there is nothing else in the English language quite like them." - Kevin Jackson

Author Biography

Philip Terry was born in Belfast and has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing. His books include the anthology of short stories, Ovid Metamorphosed (2000), the poetry collections Oulipoems (2006), Oulipoems 2 (2009) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (2011), and the novel tapestry (2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the translator of Raymond Queneau's Elementary Morality (2007), and Georges Perec's I Remember (2014). Dante's Inferno, which relocates Dante's poem to current-day Essex, was published in 2014 and was an Independent poetry title of the year.