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THE SIXTY-FOUR SEASONS
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THE SIXTY-FOUR SEASONS

Price: £8.95

Every so often a new poetic personality arrives with a distinctive vocabulary, technique, and emotional involvement: welcome to the presence of James Russell. His title sequence, framed by the 64 hexagrams of the Chinese Book of Changes called I Ching, describes with frequent reflective asides the decline and aftermath of a relationship, within the loose narrative of a man and a woman, and then a man alone, on a train journey. Then follows a diverse set of poems written since that sequence. As a whole, the book negotiates a number of voices and personal narratives of living in 'the weather of the giant's thumb', across a field of reference stretching from academic philosophy to Bob Dylan and the Beverley Sisters. Aiming at the no-man's-land between the epistemic playfulness of early Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and the crafted forms and unillusioned realism of Philip Larkin, these poems reach a populous and colourful target.

The critic and academic John Kerrigan writes, "Russell's exciting verse is imaginatively up-front, lexically resourceful without being dictionary-driven, formally inventive, and free of would-be experimental precocity and the narcissism pervading mainstream British poetry. I find an exciting range of structures, syntaxes and vocabularies in the collection, always reaching out for a scale that can catch the amplitude of life. The writing is poetic because never merely purposeful. It sometimes moves unpredictably, even with a touch of giddiness. But why not challenge the reader? If poetry can't come out to play, we might just as well all stay at home."

James Russell, born in Bristol in 1948, was educated at the Universities of Oxford and London. For most of his professional life he has taught experimental psychology at Cambridge University, and is currently Reader in Cognitive Development. He has published four books on developmental and philosophical psychology, most recently What is Language Development? Rationalism, Empiricism, Pragmatism (Oxford University Press). This is his first published book of poems.


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