John Welch – författare

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The meaning of the spiritual life illuminated by the great depth psychologist and the mystic saint. †

This is his fifth collection of poetry, containing work written over the last six years. As well as editing an anthology of South Asian literature, 'Stories from South Asia' (Oxford University Press, 1988), he has contributed articles reflecting his personal experience of breakdown and psychoanalysis to 'Poets on Writing' (Macmillan, 1992) and more recently to various journals, including the London Review of Books, fragmente, Scintilla and others. A number of the poems in 'The Eastern Boroughs' likewise express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing.

"Visiting Exile" is John Welch's first new collection since his "Collected Poems" and the analysis memoir, "Dreaming Arrival", published by Shearsman in 2008.

Born in 1942, John Welch has lived for the last forty years in Hackney in east London, married to the painter Amanda Welch. In 2008 Shearsman Books published his Collected Poems. Shearsman also publishes his memoir Dreaming Arrival which deals with the author's experience of psychoanalysis. Until his retirement John Welch worked as a teacher, mainly teaching English as a Second Language in local comprehensive schools, and at the same time helped run the South Asian Literature Society, an organisation that promoted interest in the literatures of the Indian Subcontinent. He has worked with the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan, and more recently the Iraqi poet Abdulkarim Kasid, on the English versions of their poems. In 1984 Oxford University Press published his anthology Stories From South Asia. This body of experience contributed substantially to his previous Shearsman collection Visiting Exile, published in 2009. Its Halting Meaasure covers a range of themes but there is a constant preoccupation with the problems and ambiguities surrounding the making of poems, 'our words like scented gardens for the blind'.

The title sequence in John Welch's new collection evokes early life experiences, some traumatic - material that had previously featured in his prose memoir Dreaming Arrival (Shearsman 2008). In Folly's Shade also brings together for the first time thirty unrhymed sonnets, dating mainly from the 1970s. Whether suggesting the light ancient coinage can shed on contemporary politics or moving through and reflecting on urban landscapes, there is throughout the book a recurring preoccupation with the ambiguities involved in the business of being a poet and above all the sheer oddness of us as a species inveigled into language and unable to get out of it.

John Welch's new book, his fourteenth since his first full length collection appeared in 1984, is writing that reflects on the strangeness of continuing to make poems 'Like a ball / thrown from an empty hand.' There is the recurring sense of 'an absence / embellished in the text' carrying on 'until It was / the page that silenced him'. Along with this there is the expression of an intermittent feeling of ambivalence regarding the 'business' of being a poet, the 'life of it'. Other work in the collection is declarative and of a more direct address.Previous comments on John Welch's work:"John Welch has been a significant figure since the early seventies, and deserves acclaim. His own aptly named Many Press has published numerous well-designed pamphlets... For my money, Out Walking is the finest volume Anvil have produced." -James Keery."No Flash effects, no random scramblings, no posturing, nothing sly or trivial. Writing as if your life depended on it." -Peter Hughes "His poems resist easy closure... Readers of contemporary poetry who value the art as an expression of the processes of thought, perception and feeling will find much that is compelling." -James Sutherland-Smith

Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, 'Dreaming Arrival' presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question 'Dreaming Arrival' looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself.

Published at the same time as the author's memoir 'Dreaming Arrival' this volume offers a retrospective of over 30 years' work, including as-yet-uncollected poems. This Collected - the latest in a series of large-scale retrospectives from Shearsman Books - demonstrates what many have already recognised: that John Welch's apparently quiet art is a powerfully communicative one.