Aidan Semmens – författare

If you can imagine William Blake playing Scrabble with Joni Mitchell, Catherine of Aragon booking into the Holiday Inn, or Cassius Clay meeting the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, you’re ready for the dreamworld created by Aidan Semmens in The Jazz Age. After five books of intense – some would say difficult – poetry, he has produced something more accessible, surprising, and fun. In a series of prose vignettes he casts an array of historical figures into times and places other than their own, playing on anachronism and dislocation to surreal, witty, frequently comic, occasionally poignant or disturbing effect. Each brief episode is crystalline, the whole piece theatrical, enjoyably absurd. You might identify a questioning of belief systems, of social hierarchy, of human individuality and inter-relationship – but essentially this is, as it is billed, entertainment.

The title Signals to the Disappearing Shore embodies an ambiguity central to the poems' care for the world we inhabit. Does the shore appear to disappear because viewed from a departing vessel - viewed perhaps by desperate emigrants or deportees; or is it literally disappearing, submerged or eroded by changes wrought by time and humankind? Are the signals waves of farewell, or urgent warnings? From the start, the theme of migration is set in a deep historical context, a pattern extended widely in the long poem 'A raga for Enheduana', which ranges in time and geography from the ancient Sumerian poet-priestess who is the earliest individually known writer to the contemporary crimes of some contemporary political leaders.Environmental threat is given sharpest expression in the central section of the book, eight poems drawing on the author's long-held concern over nuclear proliferation, both weapons and power, the human costs and land destruction. The book also includes the 12-part 'Journal of a plague year' written, as the title suggests, at the height of the Covid pandemic and the social restrictions that came with it, again drawing links between landscapes and events ancient, medieval and modern.

Thirty-some years in journalism have left little obvious trace in Aidan Semmens's poetry-though, like the sports headlines he writes for the News of the World, his verse is grounded in word-play and natural speech rhythms. In his first full-length collection he engages death, complexity, and the Authorised Version, which provides several of his titles. Other sources for his language include news magazines, war diaries, popular science and psychology texts, overheard phrases and the 2001 Aldeburgh Festival programme. This is a poetry of ideas and allusions, where, as in music or dream, any hinted-at narrative is liable to be subverted, taken to unexpected ends.

'Here, where Time brings pasture to the sea' - the eminent Victorian A.C. Swinburne, from whose long work about the lost city of Dunwich this collection takes its title, was not the first or last poet to be struck by the landscape, and history, of Suffolk. Until almost within living memory Suffolk was a farming-fishing place, not all that far from London, yet strangely remote. Perhaps for this reason its coast was already something of a haven for writers and artists before Benjamin Britten made Aldeburgh the base for his annual music festival. The county's climate appeared to make artists and writers, as did its superb medieval architecture and its huge band of sea. This collection of poems past and modern is powerful testimony of that, all of it both contained and released, created in and, to various extents, by Suffolk. This is a collection of poems that will surprise the reader: Suffolk natives, incomers and visitors are all represented. From older times come Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Ann Candler, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield and Bernard Barton.From modern times we have-listed in order of appearance-Andy Brown, Angela Leighton, Tamar Yoseloff, Ronald Blythe, Victor Tapner, Pauline Stainer, John Matthias, Wendy Mulford, Claire Crowther, R.F. Langley, Andrew Brewerton, Rodney Pybus, Charlotte Geater, Zoe Skoulding, Deryn Rees-Jones, Aidan Semmens, Michael Laskey, Herbert Lomas, Anne Beresford, Will Stone, Richard Caddel and Michael Hamburger.

'A Ritual Landscape' sets out Aidan Semmens' stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that 'have legs'-that continue the journey outward begun in A Stone Dog and The Book of Isaac, and elaborate the argument and project of one of our most ambitious and accomplished poets. What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined since the poetry of Roy Fisher in, 'a place of gathering /an enclosure of power and spirit, ' in a 'slow recovery of knowledge'

"Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways. The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come. The first poem announces 1917, the start of the Russian Revolution, and from there follows its aftermath. There is a restrained lyrical quality to the poetry which prevents it from being oppressive and, as with the best of sombre narratives, there are moments of humour. Never was a collection more pertinent to our own uncertain times or, as Semmens put it in one of the poems, `we infer the future from data about the past / like a dream of meaning / a badly crafted lie'. An essential read." -Geraldine Monk"Life Has Become More Cheerful unfolds this history in three sequences: the moment of revolution, the emerging shape of its failure and a depiction of the present world in the long shadow of revolution's incompletion. At each step we are given a poetry which examines the exact pathology of revolution itself conveyed in a series of highly charged, unattributed monologues. A chorus of disembodied voices, caught in the fervour of unprecedented experience, ricochet off unavoidable events and come to speak unbearable revelations. The book is the collective song of these figures, singing of `a bitter wind blowing from / Paradise, the end of order.' -Kelvin Corcoran