{"product_id":"9783988321572","title":"Next: Collected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003ePoetry by the screenwriter of 'Hideous Kinky' starring Kate Winslet, and script editor of Jane Campion's 'The Piano'.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis poetry volume is the yield of almost nine years of notebooks, observations and locations, mostly Athens and Berlin, but a smattering of London, Marrakech, Cameroon and West Bengal. I am a worker in film and stage: it is a wandering life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe act of observation may be at the heart of all this, of observed events on a daily, human scale, but also of recorded personal feelings and reactions, a springboard to some more generalised reality, to the mythos of the particular moment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA lost button on a Berlin cafe pavement, a shabby girl in golden sandals, a civic rubbish bin, the lures of poverty, the nags of memory; each is commonplace enough, but a window, too, onto the sightlines and vanishing points of human possibility.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePoetry functions at the edge of grammar and hence the edge of meaning, with all its pitfalls and opportunities. Yet to quote an unexpected and surprising source, Anais Nin: 'In dreams we dream alone. Only reality is shared.' Not only author, but player in that concomitant. The imaginary speaker, the imagined self, imagined listener - all of that, of course. And yet there is the broader stage of common struggle and imagination whose best practitioner may yet remain the popular song. It wakes you, a half-discovered melody, half-invented, a fragment at your bedside. Not the stuff of dreams. A visitor, for real. The stuff of song, whose voice is simple in its simple imperative, simple in its life-affirmingness. Singer. Sing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFor fans of Catullus, Tu Fu, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Berthold Brecht, Jacques Prevert, and Robert Graves.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vine Leaves Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46354291032305,"sku":"9783988321572","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0674\/5433\/7265\/files\/9783988321572_p0.jpg?v=1765008721","url":"https:\/\/shop.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9783988321572","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble","version":"1.0","type":"link"}