Chris McCabe – författare

London in the dark end-times of the late noughties; escaped war criminals and their hired thugs scavenge like hyenas amid the city's smut and glitter, the system appears in nonchalant free-fall and words drop cheaply as grimy metropolitan rain. With this dystopian backdrop, where language is spun, redacted and renditioned, McCabe and Reed's gritty riposte performs an angry and elegant resistance. The result of this psychogeographic collaboration between two of modern poetry's most distinct voices is this - a poetry chain-letter that seeks to interrogate the city at one of the most peculiar and sinister points in contemporary history and to map the capital on foot, under their own light; poems as foundlings; the weight of language and place obsessively and voraciously explored. Beneath flagstones, in river silt and on the top decks of buses, the strange, dark energies of the city find their way into this electrifying exchange of poems."McCabe and Reed's wide-eyed, X-rayed Cubist vision of London is more than a cultural mapping. It is a significant addition to the poetry of London. Partly a response to Whitehall's warring, it uncovers deeper historical and pyschogeographical interplay within the city. Horizontal and vertical layers of story are contextualized and abstracted to reveal multifarious states of being, control and flux. These anchored, edgy scripts of multiverse unearth deposits in angular localised texts that make you smile, laugh, wonder and leave you wanting more. A tour de force in every way." David Caddy"This book is both a celebration and a dark critique, appropriate for the dark times we inhabit. Intense and uncompromising and I'm already looking forward to reading Part Two!"Steve Spence, Stride MagazineChris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and The Restructure, all published by Salt. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as Poetry Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School.Jeremy Reed has been described by the Independent as "British poetry's glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie." He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award.

Gold Medal Winner for Poetry and Special Honours Award for Best of Anthology at the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards. One language is falling silent every two weeks. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will be lost by the end of this century. With the loss of these languages, we also lose the unique poetic traditions of their speakers and writers.Poems from the Edge of Extinction gathers together 50 poems in languages from around the world that have been identified as endangered; it is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world. With poems by influential, award-winning poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo, Hawad, Valzhyna Mort, and Jackie Kay, this anthology offers a unique insight into both languages and poetry, taking the reader on an emotional, life-affirming journey into the culture of these beautiful languages.Each poem appears in its original form, alongside an English translation, and is accompanied by a commentary about the language, the poet and the poem - in a vibrant celebration of life, diversity, language, and the enduring power of poetry.This timely collection is passionately edited by widely published poet and UK National Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, who is also the founder of the Endangered Poetry Project, a major project launched by London's Southbank Centre to collect poetry in the world's disappearing languages, and introduced by Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London, and Dr Martin Orwin, Senior Lecturer in Somali and Amharic, SOAS University of London.Languages included in the book: Assyrian; Belarusian; Chimiini; Irish Gaelic; Maori; Navajo; Patua; Rotuman; Saami; Scottish Gaelic; Welsh; Yiddish; Zoque.Poets included in the book: Joy Harjo; Hawad; Jackie Kay; Aurélia Lassaque; Nineb Lamassu; Gearóid Mac Lochlainn; Valzhyna Mort; Laura Tohe; Taniel Varoujan; Avrom Sutzkever.

Gold Medal Winner for Poetry and Special Honours Award for Best of Anthology at the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards. One language is falling silent every two weeks. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will be lost by the end of this century. With the loss of these languages, we also lose the unique poetic traditions of their speakers and writers.Poems from the Edge of Extinction gathers together 50 poems in languages from around the world that have been identified as endangered; it is a celebration of our linguistic diversity and a reminder of our commonalities and the fundamental role verbal art plays in human life around the world. With poems by influential, award-winning poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo, Hawad, Valzhyna Mort, and Jackie Kay, this anthology offers a unique insight into both languages and poetry, taking the reader on an emotional, life-affirming journey into the culture of these beautiful languages.Each poem appears in its original form, alongside an English translation, and is accompanied by a commentary about the language, the poet and the poem - in a vibrant celebration of life, diversity, language, and the enduring power of poetry.This timely collection is passionately edited by widely published poet and UK National Poetry Librarian, Chris McCabe, who is also the founder of the Endangered Poetry Project, a major project launched by London's Southbank Centre to collect poetry in the world's disappearing languages, and introduced by Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS University of London, and Dr Martin Orwin, Senior Lecturer in Somali and Amharic, SOAS University of London.Languages included in the book: Assyrian; Belarusian; Chimiini; Irish Gaelic; Maori; Navajo; Patua; Rotuman; Saami; Scottish Gaelic; Welsh; Yiddish; Zoque.Poets included in the book: Joy Harjo; Hawad; Jackie Kay; Aurélia Lassaque; Nineb Lamassu; Gearóid Mac Lochlainn; Valzhyna Mort; Laura Tohe; Taniel Varoujan; Avrom Sutzkever.

Brilliant collection of poetry...A beautifully curated book to be read and reread.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads ReviewThis book is one that anyone with even a passing interest in poetry and/or language should have on their book shelf.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewSilver Medal Winner for Poetry at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards💙 For all lovers of poetry, languages and love in all its forms💚 Featuring original poems written in a variety of languages, accompanied by English translations and commentaries💖 Explore endangered and unique languages, from Akkadian to Ancient Greek, Yiddish to Yoruba 💛 Unlock the many facets of love across two and a half millennia through the timeless words of some of the world's greatest poets 💔 Flick through chapters themed around topics like unlikely love stories to impossible love💜 Perfect for the poetry, language or book lover in your life - including self-love for youThe introduction to the book and each chapter have been very helpful to a novice poetry reader like myself, and the inclusion of poems in their original language alongside the English translations are an added bonus for anyone interested in languages and the art of translation. The range of cultures, eras and attitudes to love is impressive and whether dipping in for a single poem or reading whole sections at a time it is a delight.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewTackling the ever popular and emotional topic of the love, the poems are exquisitely composed and a joy to read and reflect on.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewPraise for Chris' McCabe's anthologies:If you're interested in languages and poetry you'll love this book. It's a perfect mix of the original poetry with translation and commentary - very insightful as to the cultures of the languages featured. One of those books that should be much more publicised and valued that you feel lucky to find.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewThis is a wonderful anthology. To realise that many of the poems' languages will soon have no native speakers and thus their world in all its richness and diversity is lost for ever, is just awful. If Extinction Rebellion is important to you, buy the book and act now!⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review

Brilliant collection of poetry...A beautifully curated book to be read and reread.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads ReviewThis book is one that anyone with even a passing interest in poetry and/or language should have on their book shelf.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewSilver Medal Winner for Poetry at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards💙 For all lovers of poetry, languages and love in all its forms💚 Featuring original poems written in a variety of languages, accompanied by English translations and commentaries💖 Explore endangered and unique languages, from Akkadian to Ancient Greek, Yiddish to Yoruba💛 Unlock the many facets of love across two and a half millennia through the timeless words of some of the world's greatest poets💔 Flick through chapters themed around topics like unlikely love stories to impossible love💜 Perfect for the poetry, language or book lover in your life - including self-love for youThe introduction to the book and each chapter have been very helpful to a novice poetry reader like myself, and the inclusion of poems in their original language alongside the English translations are an added bonus for anyone interested in languages and the art of translation. The range of cultures, eras and attitudes to love is impressive and whether dipping in for a single poem or reading whole sections at a time it is a delight.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewTackling the ever popular and emotional topic of the love, the poems are exquisitely composed and a joy to read and reflect on.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewPraise for Chris' McCabe's anthologies:If you're interested in languages and poetry you'll love this book. It's a perfect mix of the original poetry with translation and commentary - very insightful as to the cultures of the languages featured. One of those books that should be much more publicised and valued that you feel lucky to find.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ReviewThis is a wonderful anthology. To realise that many of the poems' languages will soon have no native speakers and thus their world in all its richness and diversity is lost for ever, is just awful. If Extinction Rebellion is important to you, buy the book and act now!⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review

Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and THE RESTRUCTURE. His work is included in numerous anthologies including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, Adventures in Form and Dear World & Everyone in it. His plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in London and Liverpool.His work has been described by The Guardian as: 'an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century'.

In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix, McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.

Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham. Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' to a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.

-A Poetry Book Society recommendation -A book of the year - the Poetry School The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the ‘inscape’ of the living world.In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darkly comic and a true original.

Headstones are sliding earthwards. An urban fox forages for slugs. A jogger disappears into a forest of sycamores as high-rise blocks glister with the last of the sun.Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries.Stealing through the shadows, McCabe discovers stories of maritime disasters and the war dead, veers off the path with contemporary poet Stephen Watts, and trawls the archives to uncover one of London's overlooked mavericks, the career criminal-turned-poet William 'Spring' Onions. McCabe's lyrical prose and trademark dark wit are interrupted by a 'disembodied essay', spoken by a poltergeist who has returned to haunt his master's house.In this, the third instalment of McCabe's journey through London's Magnificent Seven, the stakes are raised as he places himself into the foreground of the cemetery as a performer. Can the burial grounds become a space for live theatre? Will the voices of the dead rise to meet the living? What ghosts emerge when darkness falls?

The garden exists for those who are ready to see it...Venture into the dense foliage of Abney Park Cemetery in the fourth instalment of writer and literary detective Chris McCabe's project to unearth the lost poets of London's Victorian cemeteries – the Magnificent Seven.Propelled through Stoke Newington's garden-cemetery by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen and Iain Sinclair, McCabe discovers the rich stories of resurrectionists, nonconformists, celebrated hymnologists, and one great lost writer from the Caribbean. In this visionary narrative, combining literary and historical research with dream-like meditations on poetry, nature and death, McCabe starts to believe that Abney Park could be the site of an alternative reality – a buried garden for a year in lockdown.

Join a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges, and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation, in McCabe’s sixth and most daring collection. Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented languages, Hedonism offsets the comic with the elegiac in a spectral and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination.This is a book where haunted pasts and futures collide; in a post-Brexit landscape, through cities both imagined and real, McCabe’s poems merge through timeslips and ghostly encounters, all the time electrified by the great connector of language at its most radical and unruly. These incandescent poems surge and resist expectation and formula – declaring “can it be, after all, that hedonism is the only activism?”