A Translated Man - Sheppard, Robert

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Résumé :
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....

Biographie:
Robert Sheppard has published numerous volumes of prose and poetry, creative and critical, fiction and non-fiction, has been widely anthologised and published in dozens of magazines and journals, over 50 years. Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, he lives in Liverpool, though he was born on the South Coast, where, before university in Norwich, his adolescent surrealism was first nurtured, and he was introduced to the radical British poetry of the day, to which he remains committed....

Sommaire:
Robert Sheppard has given this book over to his own invention, the fictional Belgian poet Ren? Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure - one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, Sheppard is extending his formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, he is exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it....