Cities are as complex and unknowable as they are familiar and unsurprising. We can feel as if we know a city intimately, or merely indicate its mysteries to our fleeting perceptions. Or its mysteries can appear in and through the mundane. Cities reveal their collective ghosts through their landscapes, their histories, their people, their sounds and smells. Cities ask us to invent not only ourselves, but a view of ourselves within the cityscape we imagine.
Jen Webb’s new collection of prose poetry riffs on the idea of the unspoken, the unexpressed-silences: deliberate and unconscious- as they are found in politics, in poetry, in the minutaie of personal relationships and histories. This is a powerful book of trying to pin down some kind of truth, or point to the place where it should exist.
Jen Webb’s new collection is a series of striking prose poems that explore the ways in which personal crises and memories might be re-examined through the elusive concept of the archive. How, she asks, might we construct a personal archive to ‘make sense of the past in the work of facing and building the future’? Each of these finely wrought poems is a record of life lived through significant moments.
Through the concise analysis of interviews with 76 poets from around the world, Dr Monica Carroll and Distinguished Professor Jen Webb investigate the context of poetic excellence. Creativity in Context examines these poets’ formative moments, the role that key individuals and institutions play in their lives, and how they locate themselves within communities. The result is a fascinating picture of the rich context within which poetic creativity takes place.
