Output details

Beyond

This collection asks, ‘How can techniques of imagery and sound best convey spiritual and emotional progress from despair, isolation and loneliness to optimism, effort and hope?’; and ‘How can London be rendered a universal symbol of life’s harsh realities, yet also of human love and compassion?’

The poems demonstrate how methods of metaphor and simile, sonnets with their volta, and couplets, quatrains and iambic pentameter with its reassuring beat, transmit how life can be rebuilt from an outlook of negativity and despair to an included and inclusive view of the world. Through changes of register, from prayer and lament to upbeat rhetoric and love poetry, Beyond narrates, via the musical movement and epiphany of each poem and via multiple representations of London and the rural, a journey out of depression to a place of renewed spirit and passion.

This book continues its author’s earlier examination (e.g. in A Knowable World 2009) of mental states and preoccupations of finding music and imagery to transmit observation and experience. Its audiences would include, especially, creative writers seeking a lesson in poetic imagery and form, academics researching psychological analysis and literary expression, those interested in female writing that engages with traditionally male canonical forms, and by general readers for its spiritual journey from a negative atheism to a positive humanism.

The work is located in mainstream modern lyric poetry from Edward Thomas and Frost through Larkin and Heaney to Douglas Dunn, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson, yet represents a revision and reassessment of this style through its female perspective, a metropolitan as well as a rural focus, the author’s knowledge of other mental states, and allusions and techniques borrowed from ancient drama, rhetoric and philosophy. It represents an original contribution to poetry, London writing, psychological analysis and the literature of the human condition.