A Suite For Summer
£12.00
John Freeman is a master of the ‘plain style’, working in a poetic line that takes in Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams. In this fine new collection many discrete lyrics, sequences, prose poems and longer pieces such as “Archer and Acorn”, debate ‘ways of saying’, as in the opening sequence “Tabula Rasa” where simple diction and the working of speech rhythms over line units create for the reader ‘a spaciousness/ for us to stand up in and/ a resolved immediacy for us/ to enter into through calm contemplation, like a door/ into an inheritance we lost.’
UK Shipping
UK Shipping
Letter 2nd Class £2.50
Small Parcel £3.99
Medium Parcel £6.50
International Shipping
Ireland
International Standard - Small Letter £6.60 - £10.10
International Standard - Medium Parcel £11.60 - 16.05
USA
International Standard - £6.60 - £16.16
International Standard - Medium Parcel - £39.20 - £76.00
International
International Standard - £6.60 - £15.00
John Freeman is a master of the ‘plain style’, working in a poetic line that takes in Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams. In this fine new collection many discrete lyrics, sequences, prose poems and longer pieces such as “Archer and Acorn”, debate ‘ways of saying’, as in the opening sequence “Tabula Rasa” where simple diction and the working of speech rhythms over line units create for the reader ‘a spaciousness/ for us to stand up in and/ a resolved immediacy for us/ to enter into through calm contemplation, like a door/ into an inheritance we lost.’
In Birstonas
Rainy day. Fresh air under the overhanging
roof of the chalet. I lean on the rail
looking at a wide deep river
surrounded by pine-forests. Somehow
I want to keep this, walk in the woods
alone or in easy companionship, quiet,
swim in the river, bathe in the spaciousness.
I return to the big table: another toast.
We have eaten well. When we drift outside,
I do manage a short walk on a mud path,
smelling the fragrant resin, feeling the drops.
We carry on with our programme, a mixture
of sight-seeing and performances. The moment
of stillness returns to me months later
on a rainy morning far away, in focus
and four dimensions, counting consciousness
as one, with its expansive promise.
Published: 1 October 2007
ISBN: 978-1-905208-10-4
Pages: 78
“There is life in these poems and a life. John Freeman knows how to make the ordinary and everyday meaningful without resorting to fashionable tricks and clever turns of phrase. What happens is there to be thought about and turned into poems which, with their unobtrusive technique, draw the reader into them and into their life. It’s a rewarding experience.”
Jim Burns
“His poetry re-awakens a sense of wonder in us… His way is to look very closely at nature and at human relationships. It’s the kind of attention Rilke recommended…”
Kim Taplin
John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in south London, studied in Cambridge and lived in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where for many years he taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan. Worple published A Suite for Summer in 2007, followed in 2016 by What Possessed Me, which won the Roland Matthias Award and the poetry section of the Wales Book of the Year awards in 2017. Other collections include The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride), and Landscape With Portraits (Redbeck). Stride also published a book of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets.
