Alexandra Sequence

Redmond John

In "The Alexandra Sequence" John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the "mummers play", a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book's title takes its name from an area of Liverpool, a city shaped by its recent history of trade and migration, still recovering after a long period of decline. Experiences of urban uprootedness and social precarity shape suburban livelihoods that are "livid with accident". Drawing on the two central themes of the mummers play – combat and resurrection – the poems reveal both dark and light parallels between the modern neighbourhood and medieval theatre: the carnivalesque zombie-drummers marching through a local park find their mirror-image in the daily disguises of life in a housing estate, or in the masked infractions of the 2011 England Riots. Mixing narrative and lyric, Redmond paints a neighbourhood of lively, unlikely references, from Juvenal to Tommy Cooper, Brueghel to indie rock.

About the Author

John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. After completing a D. Phil on the subject of contemporary poetry at Oxford, he taught for two years at Macalester College in Minnesota. Currently he is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He reviews poetry widely and was associated with the poetry magazine, Thumbscrew. He has published a textbook "How to Write a Poem" (Oxford: Blackwell) and was the editor of "James Liddy: Selected Poems" ("Dublin: Arlen House"). His critical book "Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry" has just been published by Seren.

Reviews

"Ingenious, maverick, brilliantly protean – welcome to the quicksilver world of John Redmond's new collection" – David Morley

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