Somehow, although I have been
doing other things, this seems to have taken the whole day. Trying to be brief.
Trying to explain the conceit of the book, its accidental post-Brexit (or are
we pre-Brexit?) context. Trying to locate quotations that give a flavour of my
work, without too much detail. It’s not easy, but I have at least done enough
that I will post it on my blog, scheduled for a couple of days’ time. Here
goes:
Conceived as a continuation of the fictional poems Robert Sheppard
ventriloquised through the bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch in his A Translated Man (2013), the complete 28
poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors) presented here take on
a variety of new meanings in Brexit Britain. [sentence too long]
Working in collaboration with
other writers, Sheppard creates a stylistically various anthology of these
European writers, whose works range from the comedic to the political, from the
imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical. History may not be argued
away by the fictive. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in
vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own. There is no resultant
‘Europoem’ style, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative
nature of their production.
[I've already reversed the order of those two paragraphs.]
Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called
Sheppard’s work Complete Twentieth Century Blues ‘a major poem of
serious intent’. Alan Baker in Litter dubbed Warrant Error ‘political
poetry of the first order’.
On A Translated Man
Urgent, melancholy, whimsical,
hard-bitten, the voice of Sheppard/Van Valckenborch is also a force of rackety
elegance which revels in the production of richly imaged often surreal
phrase-extravaganzas…This is a dazzling addition to Sheppard’s oeuvre, witty,
poignant, and endlessly entertaining.
Lyndon Davies, Poetry Wales
Robert Sheppard is now as Belgian
as moules-frites and Herman Van Rompuy.
Tom Jenks, Tears in the Fence
On History or Sleep
Robert Sheppard’s selected poems
from Shearsman Books, History or Sleep, is threaded with a sense of
the other. Not ‘The Other’ with its sense of a doppleganger but the other which
exists in a type of absence, an ‘autrebiography’ or ‘unwritings’. ….Sheppard’s
poetry-frame sets up that haunting … {and what was becomes seamlessly what is
and the ‘punched hollows’ of the gone are filled with a lyric intensity that
twists ‘into a thin-throated flower’ that ‘wavers in the vibrant gulf.} probably omit the last part?
Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
Since Robert Sheppard’s previous volume
of fictional poems, A Translated Man (Shearsman,
2013), new creative work has appeared: an autobiography, Words Out of Time (KFS, 2015), a book of experimental prose, Unfinish (Veer, 2015), and his selected
poems History or Sleep (Shearsman,
2015). His critical volume, The Meaning
of Form was published by Palgrave in 2016. With James Byrne he edits Atlantic Drift: an anthology of poetry and
poetics (EHUP/Arc, 2017). He is a professor at Edge Hill University, where in 2017 a symposium
was held on his work. He lives in Liverpool.
