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This consummately fascinating study into the relationship between dance and poetry – the “step” of dance, and the “foot” of verse – presents a complex, intricate interlacing of disciplines. Dappled with personal anecdotes alongside probing evolutionary questions, historical depth and contemporary insights, it is at once thought-provoking and engaging. The author’s experience as both a dancer and poet inform his unique investigation. He ascribes his long-held passion for both to a deep-rooted childhood awareness of rhythm: “Rhythm is common to both pursuits. Increasingly I have come to feel that dance is a language and that language is a dance.” I found the “Which Came First?” chapter especially compelling. The author’s exploration of humankind’s transition to bipedalism and language takes in fascinating linguistic and archaeological theories, and links the shift to bipedalism to the development of reflective thought, and to walking as an expressive activity. Suffused in spirited intellectualism and a global perspective, this is a must-read for anyone interested in poetry, dance and exploring the history of humanity through the lens of the arts.
'Anthony Howell’s new prose book, with a title that would have enthralled Rimbaud, incarnates otherness from within an ultra-inventive mind that creates, coolly and passionately at the same time, a coalition of the alienated or, more mildly, differentiated selves which make up this post-modern personality with its urban Jewish and rural Quaker roots. It took an epileptic fit to trigger Howell’s remarkable exploration of psychic chaos which is contained, not so paradoxically, in a super-formalistic structure, a systems network involving repetition as in a baroque poem, that would be a credit to French formalists such as Jacques Roubaud, Raymond Queneau and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Among many themes there is a harsh critique of Israel, but written as much in sorrow as in anger from within the goodly tent. The author intersperses his own text with his fluent version of a novella by Mamdou Adwan, the tragic story of an old Palestinian who has been dispossessed of all he owns. This counterpoint complicates further the music of Howell’s earthly spheres, but such are his skills that we read the book as a straightforward story, a story whose unrevealed codes work on us subliminally so that we are transported, as if listening to Bach.' — Anthony Rudolf
The centrepiece of 'Silent Highway' is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the 'Windrush' bringing immigrants from Jamaica, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi and the 'Marchioness' disaster, via the Fire of London and many incidents in which the river has been spectator or participant. Howell's mix of verse styles and skill with cameos ensures that interest never flags. In other poems he demonstrates his pleasure in avoiding the predictable and in writing on a wide variety of subjects. Among the many poems of place, in which he excels, are some disturbing descriptions of modern Britain; in the final section, poems inspired by a winter spent in Brazil, he has surprises in store, such as the witty (and true) poem 'In Praise of Shopping'.
Anthony Howell's first collection for several years moves in unusual directions. Guilt and society's victimization of those it punishes are among its subjects: it begins with poems concerned with the harm caused by anorexia and moves on to investigate the situation of offenders held in units for 'vulnerable' prisoners. The collection includes two longer poems: Ode to a Routine chronicles the odyssey of one sentenced to commute across London, while the title poem extends a theme of dubious empathy explored by Browning in My Last Duchess . As always Anthony Howell's poems are cool, intelligent, entertaining and simply different from anything else being written. 'The best of Ashbery's disciples is without doubt Anthony Howell' - Robert Nye in The Times .
In the title poem, set in Rome, a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev strikes the poet, himself a dancer, as hallucinatory. Along with the poems prompted by his mother's death, it is one of several unsettling poems in this collection. Yet a celebratory strain runs through the book, providing a counter-balance: there are poems which celebrate active life, vigorous sexuality, and the subtle steps of the tango. The result is a characteristically robust and varied collection which continues the vein of subtle dandyism for which Howell is renowned.
Anthony Howell's choice from his five previous books displays a poet of great variety and accomplishment. From playful short poems to extended narratives, whether in free verse or traditional forms, his skill enlivens his subjects and offers surprise and delight. His poetry has appealed to readers as diverse as John Ashbery ('curiously strong') and Peter Porter ('Howell has style to spare and is happily unclassifiable').
This finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline. Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of the theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture. Taking the theory of primary and secondary colours as his model, Anthony Howell posits three primaries of action and shows how these may be mixed to obtain a secondary range of actions. Based on a taught course, the system is designed for practical use in the studio and is also entertaining to explore. Examples are cited from leading performance groups and practitioners such as Bobbie Baker, Orlan, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Robert Wilson, Goat Island, and Station House Opera. This volume, however, is not just an illustrated grammar of action - it also shows how the syntax of that grammar has psychoanalytic repercussions. This enables the performer to relate the system to lived experience, ensuring a realisation that meaning is being dealt with through these actions and that the stystem set forth is more than a dry structuring of the characteristics of movement. Freud's notion of 'transference' and Lacan's understanding of 'repetition' are compared to a performer's usage of the same terms. Thus the book provides a psychoanalytic critique of performance at the same time as it outlines an efficient method for creating live work on both fine art and theatre courses.
This finely illustrated book offers a simple yet comprehensive 'grammar' of a new discipline. Performance Art first became popular in the fifties when artists began creating 'happenings'. Since then the artist as a performer has challenged many of the accepted rules of the theatre and radically altered our notion of what constitutes visual art. This is the first publication to outline the essential characteristics of the field and to put forward a method for teaching the subject as a discipline distinct from dance, drama, painting or sculpture. Taking the theory of primary and secondary colours as his model, Anthony Howell posits three primaries of action and shows how these may be mixed to obtain a secondary range of actions. Based on a taught course, the system is designed for practical use in the studio and is also entertaining to explore. Examples are cited from leading performance groups and practitioners such as Bobbie Baker, Orlan, Stelarc, Annie Sprinkle, Robert Wilson, Goat Island, and Station House Opera. This volume, however, is not just an illustrated grammar of action - it also shows how the syntax of that grammar has psychoanalytic repercussions. This enables the performer to relate the system to lived experience, ensuring a realisation that meaning is being dealt with through these actions and that the stystem set forth is more than a dry structuring of the characteristics of movement. Freud's notion of 'transference' and Lacan's understanding of 'repetition' are compared to a performer's usage of the same terms. Thus the book provides a psychoanalytic critique of performance at the same time as it outlines an efficient method for creating live work on both fine art and theatre courses.
Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced - a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly...This is the persona whose voice permeates First Time in Japan , enabling Anthony Howell to speak without calculating the soundness of the view expressed. As always his poems are distilled from irony, wit and an intensity of poetic craft, creating another unsettling fusion of modernism and bravura tradition.
An eye for detail informs these poems by Anthony Howell. The book charts his wanderings from Hampshire to Australia, and finally to Sicily. His renewed interest in the description of emotional as well as geographical landscape is one of the pleasures of this large collection. Here he allows subject matter to temper the abstraction for which he is noted, while still demanding that each poem should be an exhilarating manifestation of language. Robert Nye wrote that his last collection Notions of a Mirror (1983) 'deserves the attention of anyone who cares for poetry at all'; Peter Porter found it 'a delightful book - fresh, clever, humane and dandified once more...The best of the poems are as arresting as the work of French surrealists like Reverdy and Desnos. But there is British sturdiness as well'.
An eye for detail informs these poems by Anthony Howell. The book charts his wanderings from Hampshire to Australia, and finally to Sicily. His renewed interest in the description of emotional as well as geographical landscape is one of the pleasures of this large collection. Here he allows subject matter to temper the abstraction for which he is noted, while still demanding that each poem should be an exhilarating manifestation of language. Robert Nye wrote that his last collection Notions of a Mirror (1983) 'deserves the attention of anyone who cares for poetry at all'; Peter Porter found it 'a delightful book - fresh, clever, humane and dandified once more...The best of the poems are as arresting as the work of French surrealists like Reverdy and Desnos. But there is British sturdiness as well'.
This book brings together Anthony Howell's previously uncollected poems written between 1964 and 1982. His early collections of poems Inside the Castle (1969) and Imruil (1970) established him as one of our most talented new voices, a view which the wit and accomplishment of these poems will confirm. Notions of a Mirror marks the re-emergence of a remarkable poet.
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