BAD IDEA reviewed by Steve Hanson in The Manchester Review of Books

Steve Hanson, the editor of Some Roast Poets poetry magazine, and excellent The Manchester Review of Books (I call it ‘The Chester View of Books’ because of the way the cover folds over!) has reviewed my Bad Idea alongside Adrian Clarke’s Euromancer. It’s good to be there with my old comrade from Floating Capital days – and a good friend. Thanks Steve ...

 The review, in the Manchester Review… is here: The Problem of England | (wordpress.com)

and (now) in the paper version of the journal, on the first (unpaginated) page of Issue 7: Summer 2021.

I blushingly delighted in the statement, ‘It is utterly brilliant’, of course, but I was particularly tickled by: ‘This book is the sound a man of enlightenment and renaissance makes as he sees the long rich curve of knowledge – our real ‘heritage’ – being flushed clean down a political shitter.’ Quite.

Here are links (to links) to poems, from Bad Idea, which are versions of Michael Drayton’s renaissance sonnets. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/robert-sheppard-two-more-poems-from-bad.html

One of these poems, first published in International Times, I read on this video, recorded this afternoon (just for you!):

There’s a general post on Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’; that’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ). That'll give you the idea, the bad idea.

I am also delighted to say that Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, as is Adrian’s book, so you may buy it HERE and NOW:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Read the first review of Bad Idea, by Alan Baker, in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

 Read the second, by Clark Allison, here, on the Tears in the Fence website: HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

Here's one by Billy Mills: The English Strain and Bad Idea by Robert Sheppard: A Review | Elliptical Movements (wordpress.com)

 I write about Adrian’s earlier work here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links

How to buy The English Strain books one and two together

 

As is obvious from a lot of posts on this blog, The English Strain and Bad Idea – my two new more or less simultaneously published texts – are part one and two of the longer sonnet transposition project ‘The English Strain’. They belong together, are probably best both read together. Or can be. They certainly have been reviewed together. The best place to purchase both of the volumes in one or two clicks is not with the presses’ sites (which I would normally advocate), but through The Book Depository:

The English Strain (Shearsman) is available here:

https://www.bookdepository.com/English-Strain-Robert-Sheppard/9781848617469?ref=grid-view&qid=1624618269968&sr=1-13

Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoon) is available here:

https://www.bookdepository.com/Bad-Idea-Robert-Sheppard/9781912211746?ref=grid-view&qid=1624618185198&sr=1-11

(They have many of my other books available too, including the critical ones, and I noted 13% off the price of Twentieth Century Blues!)  

There are many inter-linked posts about ‘The English Strain’. Here are two comprehensive ones, each with further links to earlier stages of the project, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here (written after I’d completed it but before it found its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’; that’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ).

Book three, British Standards, remains unpublished, but may be read about here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

 

 Above: a composite image that wasn't used as the cover of The English Strain. This one has me in the composite, but I made it blurry. In the end the state before this one was used. I'm fascinated that Barrett Browning's eyes show through so strongly. The second is the image for the cover, as used, to Bad Idea. Patricia Farrell produced both of these startling images. 

 Read the first review of both volumes, by Alan Baker, in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

 Read the second, by Clark Allison, here, on the Tears in the Fence website: HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

Read a third review, by Steve Hanson, of Bad Idea on its own, in the Manchester Review of Books, here:

Pages: BAD IDEA reviewed by Steve Hanson in The Manchester Review of Books (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Here's another, from Billy Mills here: The English Strain and Bad Idea by Robert Sheppard: A Review | Elliptical Movements (wordpress.com)

The Poem ‘Adversarial Stoppage’ from FLIGHT RISK is published in Mercurius

Under the title ‘The Linguistic Eye-Scans of Robert Sheppard’ my poem ‘Adversarial Stoppage’ appears as part of Marcus Slease’s curation the ‘Absurd-Surreal’ in the magazine Mercurius here: The Linguistic Eye Scans of Robert Sheppard — Mercurius . There are lots of goodies here, too: Mercurius . Other absurdists include Vik Shirley. 

I was asked to provide an author-statement, which I found quite difficult to do, because I’m happily not quite sure what’s going on in the text (and in others from the same sequence). I said, ‘This poem operates as a linguistic eye scanning the images that the world offers and which it refuses to read sensibly or realistically. It is a kind of squinting, although sometimes the world is just plain weird. It isn’t difficult, if you don’t look for difficulties.’ Really, it’s a guide to reading a poem that I’m assuming a reader would have trouble with.

Maybe you don’t. Try it here. : The Linguistic Eye Scans of Robert Sheppard — Mercurius

Thanks to Marcus.

The poem is dedicated to S.J. Fowler, and it is not incidental that last year I reviewed his book of collaborations, Nemeses (See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thoughts on Collaboration 9: Nemeses: Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019 (+ review on Stide)

‘Adversarial Stoppage’ is part of a longer manuscript of similar poems – oblique, teasing, transactional, in 4 line stanzas – that I have been writing over the last few years (by a slow method quite different from, and somewhat obscured by, the ‘transpositions’ of ‘The English Strain’ project: see here: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The whole is entitled (provisionally) Flight Risk.

Companion poems (I mean, poems from the same cluster) include a long six part poem (or is it a long poem, even a series of these 4 line stanza poems?) ‘The Accordion Book’ that appears in the second issue of the vital magazine edited by Colin Herd, Adjacent Pineapple. My poem, here;

‘The Accordion Book’ is a long and deliberately involuted poem, in six parts, dealing with perception, art and (in places) cognitive extension…. The first four also appear in The Robert Sheppard Companion. See here.

The 23rd issue of Blackbox Manifold carries two more poems from Flight Risk, ‘Hammer Glow’ and ‘The Listening Table’, and you can go straight to them here. http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/ 

I’m very pleased that the title poem, ‘Flight Risk’ is now published on MIRAonline, that is, the online version of The Mechanics’ Institute Review. You may read it here, and watch me read the first twenty lines here: FLIGHT RISK by Robert Sheppard – MIR Online

(I blog about it separately, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A new poem 'Flight Risk' published today on MIRAonline , though I don’t say anything there that I haven’t above!)

Patricia Farrell now (24 May) has some work in the same serial feature:

A Selection of the Poetry of Patricia Farrell — Mercurius

Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent publication is High Cut: My Model of No Criteria (Leafe Press). Her collection Logic for Little Girls is forthcoming from Knives Forks and Spoons.

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote a transposition of a John Thelwall sonnet for the WOW Festival in Liverpool

This is my last poem in this first batch of of OTD 2020... (I don't know whether there will be a second. I have been drawing attention to poems from British Standards that were published online and that escaped much notice at the time.)

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus ('Covid' seems to have been a later term, in general use, and even, more recently, 'CV19') and (what we didn't know was the first) lockdown trundled on, I wrote one of my last responses to it: one of the ‘14 Standards’, which uses a 'standard' Romantic sonnet for its own purposes. ‘The Vanity of National Grandeur’ was published on the WOW Festival, site, after having been commissioned by Victor Merriman as a response to the incarceal term 'lockdown'. My poem is here: https://www.wowfest.uk/wowfest19/499-an-overdub-of-the-vanity-of-national-grandeur.html

My account of this poem and ‘14 Standards’ as a whole may be read here, (with video):

Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post) 

But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. It is a transposition of the poem named in its title.

The Vanity of National Grandeur by Citizen John Thelwall

It took Covid-19 to topple Bo’s giddy lust,
zigzagging virality of virility. The bong-gong
his near knell. He shifted Victory (over) Europe Day
around his post-Brexit holiday calendar. Adjust

in Time. The cheated hand waves the pennant to
We’re Meat Again as spitfires spit universal spores.
Labour is a sponge squeezed dry. Who was that Masked
Psilosopher? My curious hand shakes at his suffictions.

A consolation consul, he’s got a creamy tub of poesy
into which he stirs radicalism like jam. Frontline
is always somewhere/somebody else, hi-viz patrols
to broken train tracks. Thunder affords unsympathetic
background, scowling backdrop to his latest Skype.
His pocket awakes into rising alarm.

6th May 2020

'Psilosopher' and 'suffictions' are coinages of Coleridge, a friend of Thelwell. They can be worked out from the context, but the first is a false philosopher; the second is a baseless fiction used as a first term in a specious argument. (Think current Covid conspiracy theories!)

Here's the rest the online STANDARDS (sometimes with videos)

Pages: OTD 2020: a version of Horace Smith's 'Ozymandias' was written; it and other 'Standards' appear in The Cafe Review in the USA (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote this lacuna-pocked poem as a version of one of Coleridge's sonnets (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I heard the ambulances in the lockdown silence and wove them into a Leigh Hunt sonnet (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote a lockdown transposition of a Willian Bowles sonnet and was rude about Bo (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Three more 'Standards' appeared in Overground Underground in 2021, and I write about them here, AND read two of them on video: Pages: Three new poems from British Standards published in Overground Underground (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Poetics of the Sonnet in 'The English Strain' / excerpt from 'Idea's Mirror' in The Lincoln Review

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it had gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Read the first review of those books together, by Alan Baker in Litter, here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

One day, I hope, the third part, which is now complete, British Standards, will be available as a book. Until then, here is a post about its development: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Robert Sheppard: My Poetics of the Sonnet in 'The English Strain' / excerpt from 'Idea's Mirror' in The Lincoln Review

I am pleased that I have an excerpt from ‘Idea’s Mirror’, the final sequence of Bad Idea in The Lincoln Review. The Lincoln Review . Read that here: https://www.lincolnreview.org/rsheppard

 

 

Here's a video of the first poem.

Hopefully, these samples will make you want to purchase the whole of Bad Idea, on sale now from KFS Press. Here: https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

 

There’s another post on Bad Idea here . (‘Idea’s Mirror’ is described separately here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ).

 Having accepted my poems, one of the editors, Alison Smith, persuaded me to write a poetics piece. I had just written one specifically for The English Strain, the project of which Bad Idea is the second part (as yet unpublished). So the result is a meditation upon my obsessive use of the sonnet form, which nevertheless opens out into a general poetics. In some ways, it’s a continuation of the personal parts of my serial posts on the innovative sonnet (that led into a chapter of The Poetry of Saying). (See here: Pages: The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: One of 14 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

However, this piece brings it up to date, to my renunciation of the sonnet frame, now that I have completed the last poems of 'The English Strain' (See here: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . Thanks, Alison for the prompt. Given that I have written several kinds of sonnet, it is a surprise to find myself looking back to a very early text from 1978. (I had considered it once before here: Pages: The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Eight of 14: My Own Sonnets (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) But coming back to it, I found myself considering this isolated poem as an unknowing precursor of recent discoveries (it also demonstrates how the avant-garde gesture in British poetry of that time wasn’t to be found in a creative writing textbook). It took decades to catch up with myself. However, I can't see it heading up a 'Collected Poems'. It belongs now in this essay.

I say in it: One axiom I do have is provided by the opening words of my critical book, ‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.’ (The Meaning of Form, Palgrave, 2016: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks)) This is echoed in the dedicatory poem to volume two of this project, Bad Idea:

I hang out inside these sonnets, punching
echoes into new shape, because I take
poetry as the investigation
of complexity through the means of form....

Read my “Hanging Out Inside Sonnets: A Text and Anti-Commentary” here. 

(I’ve since realised that it isn’t an anti commentary at all: it’s a commentary. And here is a poetics I wrote before this piece, also pertaining to the work in this project, and beyond, I hope:http://nclacommunity.org/newdefences/2021/07/16/shifting-an-imaginary-poetics-in-anticipation/ ) 

This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

Also in The Lincoln Review 2 (2021) find:

POETRY

James Brasfield

Mary Buchinger

Michael Chang

Felix Chow

Gemma Gorga

Ivan de Monbrison

Juanita Rey

Robert Sheppard

Marcus Slease

Virgil Suárez

Anannya Uberoi

Lauren Winchester

Jennifer Wong

Lindsay Young

Jane Zwart

PROSE​

Sally Gander

Alan Michael Parker

Andreas Philippopoulous-Mihalopo 

Cathy Ulrich

COMICS​

Casey Jo Stohrer

ART​

Yvwh Elohim

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jay Waters

POETICS

Robert Sheppard

INTERVIEWS

Colin Bancroft

Jennifer Wong

REVIEW

Andreas Philippopoulous-Mihalopo's The Book of Water

A second review of The English Strain and Bad Idea by Clark Allison appears on the Tears on the Fence website

I have a second review of the more or less simultaneously appearing two first books of my ‘English Strain’ project, The English Strain and Bad Idea on the Tears in the Fence website.

It is by Clark Allison.

Among other things, Clark says: ‘I’d say what we find is a considerable amount of libidinal energy and direction hewn according to the formal model of the sonnet form, so we get a fascinating mixture of the eruptive and the contained coterminously. There’s also a good amount not just of Westminster politics here but also gender relational controversies, which might be particularly fitting given the sonnet’s role as a mode for finding courtly favour. And a mite unlike Boccaccio, Petrarch was often studious and exacting, that is that the form must have it to the end. It is as if Sheppard is addressing this language by testing how suitable and appropriate it is to our times, which indeed it remains so, or not far off, perhaps more Machiavelli than Dante, however. It is a very effective trawl through history. But Sheppard throughout is agile, not easily pinned down.’

 Read it all HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

References to some of my many and much appreciated appearances in Tears in the Fence as a poet may be found here, including my most recent, in the current issue, which appropriately features two poems from British Standard (the recently completed third part of ‘The English Strain’ project): Pages: Two new poems from British Standards published in Tears in the Fence 73 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

Clark Allison has followed the public temporary appearances of sonnets from this ‘strain’ on Pages for a number of years now. To not receive an email about a recent post made me wonder if he was unwell! My periodicity (my temporary posting, which I've not done before) has actually been referred to in a piece in relation to the temporal progression of Brexit here, by Jamie Toy, in Versopolis: https://www.versopolis.com/arts/to-read/792/moving-but-also-staying-the-same

See also my reaction to that:  https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/06/jamie-toys-versopolis-essay-moving-but.html

Read the first review of these two conjoined books, by Alan Baker, in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

Read the third review, by Steve Hanon, in the Manchester Review of Books, here:

Pages: BAD IDEA reviewed by Steve Hanson in The Manchester Review of Books (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Read about ‘The English Strain’ Book One, The English Strain here , and about Book Two, Bad Idea here . I write about finishing Book Three (with links to its constituent parts) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

 

Book One, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman:

 

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea, is available from Knives Forks and Spoons:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

In addition to the print version of Tears in the Fence publishing my work, the online version has reviewed my work, whether it be of my critical work The Meaning of Form  https://tearsinthefence.com/2016/10/21/the-meaning-of-form-in-contemporary-innovative-poetry-palgrave-macmillan/

 or my selected poems History or Sleep:

https://tearsinthefence.com/2015/11/23/history-or-sleep-by-robert-sheppard-shearsman-books/

My various thanks to David Caddy and crew. 

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote a lockdown transposition of a Willian Bowles sonnet and was rude about Bo

👍ON THIS DAY 2020, when coronavirus had long taken hold and what we thought of as THE lockdown unfolded more slowly than we had thought possible, I was still writing my responses to it all, as here, in one of my ‘14 Standards’, using some Romantic poems (which will be presented deliberately out of order in any subsequent book, as though 'lockdown' stepped out of historical time).  It was published on the Poetry and Covid website, here: Six Poems (poetryandcovid.com)  

But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. (The website published a number of my poems, and I suspect they disappeared quicker than I intended. I expected them to select only one!) It is a transposition of the poem announced in its title. Bowles was very important to the development of the Romantic sonnet, and to Coleridge in particular,

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

To the River Tweed by William Lisle Bowles

Boss Bo’s wandering hand stirs the spirit
of those stuck in the world with a single pose
watching crumbling profit margins disappear
in a mighty wave plug the ear of pity

for Bo’s faith in the arrival of pre-lockdown
trains under Arriva franchise touches us all
blue ribbon Mersey free fringed with mist
my Muse eyes the bank lone impassive

returning theatre diverts his wandering wave
the soothing calm of presidential disinfectant
thrills in Bo’s nightmare throat he spills

his cleanest mots under his trembling mighty
hand as I sing he speaks of passing peaks of
grit and guts his wonted pride thumbs-up emojis

 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

27^th April 2020/13^th May 2020

Later tinkering. I actually did quite a lot of tinkering with this poem. I originally wanted to write a second poem with lacunae and caesurae (like the last one posted) but I really don't like holes in my lines. I can't hear the space, as it were.  In several poems I did just manage it, which is quite consistent with the decision that the '14 Standards' should all look different - and be different, therefore, formally distinct and distinctive from one another. I do remember that when I wrote it a thought of 'the Arriva franchise' and the chaos on the railways of Britain was already a distant memory. Yes, that first lockdown was the weird one, wiping the past hazy.

This poem comes from the ’14 Standards’ part of British Standards, which you can read about here:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post)

British Standards is the now completed third book of the ‘English Strain’ project: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!) There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

 I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Read the first review, by Alan Baker in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

Hopefully, book three will be one day available as a separate book. It was completed just before Easter 2021. Abandon all sonnets!

I also write in response to the Poetry and Covid website and its AHRC project here: Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote this lacuna-pocked poem as a version of one of Coleridge's sonnets (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Alan Baker reviews 'The English Strain' and 'Bad Idea' in Litter

I’m pleased that the first review of ‘The English Strain’ project reviews both The English Strain and Bad Idea. Alan Baker’s account also makes reference to poems he has seen (on this blog and elsewhere) from part three, British Standards (though perhaps unconsciously).

I’m pleased he finds strength in my approach: ‘Among contemporary poets, only Sheppard could have achieved this unlikely synthesis; his poetry is learned, scholarly, satirical, outrageous and innovative as well as - most importantly - political.’ That's the Brexity and Covidy sides of the project. But I’m pleased he also sees the educative and restituitional aspects of the project: ‘Sheppard's work in these volumes is closely tied to the poets he is parodying, paying homage to and updating, and this sends the reader back to read the originals in a new light.’ The books are a sort of annotated reading list (though his references to Mary Robinson relate to Book Three and you won’t find her in these volumes! She may be read about (with video) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

Read Alan Baker’s review in full here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

 and then check out Litter more generally. It’s a great little magazine, with an impressive archive as well as ongoing productivity: https://www.littermagazine.com/

 

Here are two comprehensive posts to check out, the first that looks at ‘The English Strain’ Book One, The English Strain here (written after I’d completed it but before it found its title!).

 There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

 

It was good to receive this review at this juncture. I read it first yesterday, after looking at the manuscript of Book Three. It had been away in a drawer (I couldn’t find it at first!) for most of the legendary month one is meant to ‘put’ such ‘work aside’. The question I asked myself was’ ‘Is this book finished?’ I decided it was. (This released me from the probability of having to write a contrafact of Hartley Coleridge’s poem on the corpse of Napoleon as one about the Duck of Edinburgh!) That’s it: no more sonnets…

And now there's a second review of both books, here, from Clark Allison, here; https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

 I write about the end of Book Three (with links to its constituent parts) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

 Most of these links carry videos of me reading single sonnets.

Book One, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

Book Two, Bad Idea, is available from Knives Forks and Spoons:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Alan’s review of my Micro Event Space may be read here: Review - "Micro Event Space" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

I write a little about my collaboration with Alan Baker here: Pages: Alan Baker's Journal of Enlightened Panic (and the EUOIA poets) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Read the first review of Bad Idea, by Alan Baker, in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

 Read the second review of these books, by Clark Allison, here, on the Tears in the Fence website: HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

Read a third review, of Bad Idea, by Steve Hanon, in the Manchester Review of Books, here:

Pages: BAD IDEA reviewed by Steve Hanson in The Manchester Review of Books (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

ON THIS DAY 2020 I heard the ambulances in the lockdown silence and wove them into a Leigh Hunt sonnet

ON THIS DAY 2020, after coronavirus took hold and what we thought of as THE lockdown matured into 'the new normal', I wrote my response to the much-reported urban 'hush' as one of my ‘14 Standards’, using Romantic sonnets.  This one was published on the Poetry and Covid website, here: Six Poems (poetryandcovid.com) along with a number of the other OTD 2020 poems that I'm currently blogging. 

But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. It is a transposition of the poem named in its title. Obviously, mine is not about The Nile. When somebody asks me what I remember of the lockdown it will be sitting in the yard, reading Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, and hearing the ambulances going up and down Smithdown Road. It was about this time I also noticed the neighbourhood song-thrush, but he had to wait for me to be reading John Clare to penetrate my sonnets! 

 

The hush

The Nile by Leigh Hunt

 

now windows open on a

different world

hushed streets empty

of thronging bands breeze

stale the trickle of breached pipes

under paving between drains

routine buckles these oars of fire

dipped into treacle lake

under flaming sirens

ambulances whine as anxiety pools

red wine below floorboards keeps

time to stern brooding

fruity with breath’s

imagined judgement

 

17^th April 2020

 I write a response to the Poetry And Coivid website and AHRC project here: Pages: ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote this lacuna-pocked poem as a version of one of Coleridge's sonnets (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

This poem is from the ’14 Standards’ part of British Standards, which you can read about here:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post)

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages