The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea
Poems
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the phenomenally bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time comes Mark Haddon’s first collection of poems.
That Mark Haddon’s first book after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a book of poetry may surprise his many fans; that it is also one of such virtuosity and range will not.
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea reveals a poet of great versatility and formal talent. All the gifts so admired in Haddon’s prose are in strong evidence here – the humanity, the dark humour, and the uncanny ventriloquism – but Haddon is also a writer of considerable seriousness, lyric power, and surreal invention. This book will consolidate his reputation as one of the most imaginative writers in contemporary literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the Curious Incident like title, fans of Haddon's novel will find this collection's pleasures less immediate, but that doesn't mean they aren't here. Forlorn yet resolved in the face of an abrupt change of station, Haddon's speaker makes his way through a Britain that seems composed largely of hotels and rich people, as strange to him as the world was to his earlier protagonist: "above the confusion of forks// you will realize that is/ where your journey starts." Other poems rewrite horatian odes, imagine "Christmas Night 1930" and effect a "decimation" of John Buchan's novel The House of Four Winds. Technically accomplished and spikily humorous ("You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake/ I messed with Mr. In-Between"), the poems are marbled with scenes of same-sex love and desire, and ruminations on writing, fame and death. They will whet appetites for Haddon's fiction follow-up.
