Featuring Tony Lopez, Robert Grenier, Ron Silliman, Geof Huth, Carol Watts, Philip Davenport, Holly Pester, Tony Trehy. Design and drawings Darren Marsh.
'Available in white and soft white
one hundred per cent cotton, acid free
and buffered with two deckled and two
cut edges. These are hand made Bury Poems...'
(Tony Lopez, Works on Paper)
A collection of poems commissioned for the pioneering Bury Text Festival by Tony Trehy and edited by Philip Davenport. This book brings together some of the seminal poets of our time, together with newer writers, interweaving voices and histories. Alternately difficult, funny, angry, sweet-toned, The Bury Poems becomes a shared meditation on the act of putting words onto paper, and on the making of lives - 'industrial processes so delicate they fake the border of thought' (Davenport).
Bury, a small satellite town to Manchester in the north of England, was a 19th Century industrial centre of paper production. The collection takes this as its cue, starting with Tony Lopez's Works on Paper, which is couched in the technical jargon of papermaking. Lopez's poem sequence runs a theme through the book from which the others segue, making a book that is both one and several Bury Poems in their disparate textures. The legendary American visual poet Robert Grenier responds to the rural landscape around Bury, Carol Watts to a fatal accident in the locale, re-echoed in Geof Huth's suite on absence. Ron Silliman's neon work plays the notion of the poet 'buried' - here shown as a photograph sequence. Davenport uses local trams and buses as a metaphor for an internal journey. Holly Pester finishes with a comic-apocalyptic vision of hordes of refugees fleeing a destroyed South for the baleful pleasures of North. Finally as a PS, a triptych of poems from Tony Trehy is buried in the Footnotes, writing itself - and the book - into the footnotes of history.
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The Bury Poems is colour illustrated throughout with drawings by Darren Marsh, colour photographs including work by Julia Grime and documents from the Bury Archive.
An edition of 1000 published 2011.
an apple pie product | isbn 978-0-9539367-9-3
