Warrant Error - Sheppard, Robert

. .

Résumé :
Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. Some of these look hard at the rhetoric of the war on terror and the one of terror, and, via pun, ferocious word-play and reversal, effect an interrogative unpacking more urgent even than in Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues. Some poems focus upon single times and places - the field of vision as well as the field of battle - with an imagistic precision that suggests that perception is the birth of clear thinking. Others offer counter-music to the global in the local, by focussing on the domestic world of fluid selves, small objects and minor incidents, with a tender and personal tone new to Sheppard's work. Against this, possible worlds and fantastic scenarios are offered to ask, in a speculative but often humorous way, how we got the way we are. As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories-real, fantastic, or both-are only our stories so far. To be continued. This is not so much about finding beliefs to endure (into) this dangerous century, but about presenting as poems a shifting ground upon which they will find themselves at war or peace....

Biographie:
Robert Sheppard has published many books of both criticism and poetry. The theoretically focused 'The Meaning of Form' (2014) is available from Palgrave, his episodic history of linguistically innovative poetry, 'When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry' (2011), is from Shearsman. Poetry includes the long poem 'Complete Twentieth Century Blues' (Salt 2008), a selected poems from Shearsman, 'History or Sleep' (2015), his fictional -poet trilogy 'A Translated Man' (Shearsman 2013), 'Twitters for a Lark' (Shearsman 2017), and 'Doubly Stolen Fire' (Aquifer 2023). His transpositions of canonical sonnets, the 'English Strain' project, is published as 'The English Strain' (Shearsman 2021), 'Bad Idea' (Knives Forks and Spoons 2023) and 'British Standards' (Shearsman, 2024). A book of essays on his work, 'The Robert Sheppard Companion' (Shearsman 2018), outlines these and other activities and publications, including his work in poetics. Sheppard lives in Liverpool and is Emeritus Professor at Edge Hill University....

Sommaire:
Since A Translated Man (Shearsman, 2013) new creative work has appeared from Robert Sheppard: an autobiography, Words Out of Time (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2015), and a book of prose-pieces, Unfinish (Veer, 2015). His selected poems History or Sleep appeared from Shearsman in 2015. His critical volume, The Meaning of Form was published by Palgrave in 2016. With James Byrne he co-edited Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (EHUP/Arc, 2017). He is Emeritus Professor at Edge Hill University, where in 2017 a symposium was held on his work, the papers of which are due for publication. He lives in Liverpool....