Rays

Price Richard

Teasing, funny and celebratory – "Rays" is a wry and tender lover's gift. Continuing Richard Price's virtuosic playfulness of form, it improvises on the formal shape of sonnet and canzone, charging them with the energy of blues and rock, glimpsing narratives of desire. In a restless, sleepless landscape where language becomes shrill, an alphabet of love poems creates a dreamy island, between the solace of haiku and the precisions of Emily Dickinson. The Renaissance poet Louise Labe and an imaginary band, The Loss Adjusters, sing the complex beauties of passion.

About the Author

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The youngest of the Informationist group of poets, he was a founder of the magazines associated with them, "Gairfish and Southfields". He is also the co-founder of Vennel Press, the imprint which brought many of the earlier Informationist collections to a wider audience. He is now Head of Content and Research Strategy at the British Library, London.

Reviews

"Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation" – Carol Ann Duffy

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