The Messier Objects - Zand, Michael

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Résumé :
The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astronomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. The Messier Objects are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation. In Michael Zand's latest book, the legendary clusters, galaxies and nebulae that Charles Messier 'mistook' for comets become ciphers for cultural and political adjustment, pleas for redirected looking. The mistake, Zand suggests, is only a mistake because thinking makes it so, and we need to see 'beyond the main sequences/of the regular stars.' Like all Zand's writing, a hesitant and fractured syntax is used to probe dislocation across discourses, from ongoing conflict in the Middle East, through climate change to - with tongue only partly in cheek - the squabbles that continue to dog British poetry. These are serious poems not without humour, and they are all the more humane for it. -Jeff Hilson If the universe is expanding, then these poems follow that expansion by enlarging the possibilities of language... -Peter Jaeger...

Biographie:
Michael Mehrdad Zand Ahanchian is a writer, poet, editor and researcher. He was born in Iran but has spent most of his life in London. He now lives near Reading and is a research student at Roehampton University, where he is working with Peter Jaeger, Jeff Hilson and Mark Knight.His poetry has a penchant for the frayed edges of language, the places where tongues get tied with each other and where sometimes something new emerges. He has read at a number of poetry events, including Openned, La Langoustine est Morte, Crossing the Line and Diverse Deeds, and has participated in various collaborations with musicians and sound artists.Other projects include his blogsite proetics and an ongoing international translation project called lexico, for which he won the Roehampton Poetry Performance Prize in 2008. He is currently working on a new creative and contemporary translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, called ruby....

Sommaire:
The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astro-nomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. The Messier Objects are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation....