Dear Boy (Faber Poetry)
Intimacy, self-staging, anxious affection, and rising desire appear in quick succession across these poems. Candor and irony coexist, and the short pieces cut sharply into emotional instability.
Work Information
Its intimate voice never settles for sweetness alone; it leaves instability behind.
Dear Boy is a debut poetry collection that stages the heat and anxiety of romance through a chain of witty monologues. Shifts in voice and unexpected reversals of perspective draw out both the lightness and the danger in the poems.
Review Summaries
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Readers praise its smart, dark wit and its ability to hold both rough desire and playfulness at once. At the same time, the shifts in voice and freewheeling style divide tastes.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2018-06-12
- Pages
- 64 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.1 x 0.8 x 19.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571284054
- ISBN-10
- 0571284051
- Price
- 2449 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British
"These fast-paced poems sting the collection with electricity. They are the quick-fire reports of an ecstatic new voice in contemporary UK poetry." - LA Review of Books Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair for vocal cross-dressing, the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction - an ingénue masquerades as a femme fatale, a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient, and parents seem more unruly than their children. Eccentric, intimate, arch, anxious, decadent and sometimes mournful, the book's confiding, conversational voices tell stories recognizable and refracted, carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs and rides: the anguish and energy brought about by a long-distance love affair, which propels and terrorizes and ultimately unites the work. Dear Boy is an irresistible and enlivening collection by a new poet of startling and various gifts.
Emily Berry grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University, and Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. In 2008 she won an Eric Gregory Award. She is a co-editor of the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives and a contributor to The Breakfast Bible , a compendium of breakfasts to be published by Bloomsbury. She works as a freelance writer and editor.
Reviews
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I sat at the bar drinking a glass of bourbon, neat, while reading this arresting collection of poems. Definitely one of the most satisfying afternoons I have enjoyed in a while. There's a very good chance that my mind became more intoxicated with the quality of this poet's verse than it did with the Knob Creek in my glass. This book absolutely needs a publisher on this side of the pond. Highly recommended.
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Emily Berry's prize winning first collection is very good. I bought it not knowing her work until a selection was published in Penguin Modern Poets 1. The poems are all very readable.The title poem "Dear Boy", sees a sophisticated woman dropping gently a young lover who she has caught being unfaithful It is a beautiful blend of resignation with a sharp edge.She mixes passion with wit. I particularly liked her two love poems written to Husband - such passion! Three poems about an odd woman Arlene which intrigued me. By now you will have gathered she at least one fan! I don't wonder this book won a prize. Well worth it
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Very happy with this collection.
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Wonderful new person, to me, having located her work first in a recent Penguin Modern Poets edition, that revived series alluding to ones in the 1960s. I sent a copy to a London friend who loved it, told a friend in Berlin to chase it up, and have preordered this lovely poet's next volume.
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brilliant