Alan is still an underrated writer, I feel. I have taught his work, though: read this interview with my students about his work in Whether,
He took part in The Other Room reading for the EUOIA, one of my guests who travelled quite a distance to be there in Manchester, for which I am most grateful.
Alan Baker
was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and
now lives in Nottingham, where he runs Leafe
Press. His collected poems were published by Skysill Press as Variations on Painting a Room in 2011,
and his most recent collections are all
this air and matter (Oystercatcher) and Whether
(KFS). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi.
Sections of The Book of Random Access can be found in Great Works, The Hamilton Stone Review,
and on his own blog, Litterbug.
Here’s his own recent solo foray into fictional poetry.
Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, Robert Sheppard has created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.
There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.
This collection marks a
continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the
fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here;
the book is also available from Shearsman here )
All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.
All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.
