PETER MANSON Poems of Frank Rupture
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Peter Manson lives in Glasgow. His other books include Adjunct: an Undigest and For the Good of Liars (both from Barque Press), and "Between Cup and Lip" (Miami University Press, Ohio). Miami UP also publish his book of translations, Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse. With Robin Purves he edited the seminal Object Permanence magazine.
REVIEWS of Poems of Frank Rupture
“It’s typical of the narrative persona conveyed in much of Peter Manson’s previous work that “The Baffle Stage”, the second of the Poems of Frank Rupture, should offer a kind of pre-emptive piss-take of the compositional techniques underpinning the collection’s subsequent and most significant piece, “Sourdough Mutation”, defined as it is by verbal shuffling of the “rack/lack/cack” variety (though far more myriad and pleasurable).[...] On the one hand, the formal invention of this poetry occasionally seems powered by a veritable dynamo of masochism; on the other, and not unrelatedly, it’s often hilarious.[...] This is what “Sourdough Mutation” feels like to read: like someone has extracted the hypnagogic voices from your supine head and played them back to you, algorithmically shuffled into pleasing patterns of sound and shape. It’s an act of generous communication to allow a poem to speak a reader like this: to show them that the most primordial aspects of their cognition are shared and understood. It also seems like it could have been an indirectly rejuvenative process for the poetic voice itself. At the close of that creation sequence in “The Baffle Stage”, Manson offers an almost-potty-mouthed reworking of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” – “I is this constellated cupid stunt” – which seems to get to the heart of the matter (8). The compositional logic may in essence be a logic of self-punishment – “I am a stupid cunt” – but embraced and played out in language, it yields a childlike, celestial play: a constellation of cupid stunts.”
Greg Thomas, Hix Eros (6)
“The case of Peter Manson provides another handy example of canonical speciousness.[...] If we expect our poets to write out of an experientially defined self, to ‘find their voice’, and take the assault course of form by cranking out the odd villanelle, then Manson can only baffle and disappoint. Expecting him to do these things, however, I would suggest, is no more meaningful than expecting Webern to write ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. [... This] poetry is thrillingly of the present moment, and pregnant with possibility for anyone who cares to absorb it. I have seen the future and it (still) works.”
David Wheatley, Poetry Ireland Review (115)
Reviews of previous work
Review of Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse:
“A superb translation”, David Wheatley, The Guardian
“Manson’s translations of Mallarmé never pretend to the Romantic ambition of recreating the poem from its origins, nor do they entirely estrange the English language from itself. What they do achieve is the creation of a contemporary English poetry that stands in tension with Mallarmé’s own in a way that deepens and highlights the potentialities of both. They will stand as a mark, singular and idiosyncratic rather than blandly definitive, of what translation can and should attain to.” David Lloyd, The Enclave review
“works of a patient and conscious art that releases its enchantment in a slow, increasingly potent vapour.” Allison Croggon, Overland
“a marvel of luminous precision.” Financial Times
Review of Adjunct: an Undigest:
"For those who believe erroneously that the avant-garde have no sense of humour, Peter Manson's Adjunct, An Undigest- certainly the most entertaining collection of the year - is highly recommended. A seven-year creation, it manically folds together rueful diary entries, irreverent comments on artists, writers and musicians, gleeful misprints, and all sorts of found and heard material. Undigested in appearance, but regurgitated in combinations either crafted or mathematically determined, the consistent hilarity of its relentless, deadpan juxtapositions has inescapably serious implications too.' --Robert Potts, The Guardian
Review of Between Cup and Lip
Peter Manson’s first American collection, Between Cup and Lip, is made up of an astonishingly varied set of slips of the tongue, jokes, bagatelles, serious wit and a jangling of all registers and codes… [The] poems here are more than a melange of procedural and prosodic compositions (though there are examples of both), but a quizzical quest, through comedy, for a procedural prosody or prosodic procedure, as Snarkish a beast, perhaps, as the old prose poem of old.This [Snail Book] is a wonderful poem, and reinvents procedural prose prosody as comic routine, with Snarkish laughs as tough as old snails.” Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold
Review of Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse:
“A superb translation”, David Wheatley, The Guardian
“Manson’s translations of Mallarmé never pretend to the Romantic ambition of recreating the poem from its origins, nor do they entirely estrange the English language from itself. What they do achieve is the creation of a contemporary English poetry that stands in tension with Mallarmé’s own in a way that deepens and highlights the potentialities of both. They will stand as a mark, singular and idiosyncratic rather than blandly definitive, of what translation can and should attain to.” David Lloyd, The Enclave review
“works of a patient and conscious art that releases its enchantment in a slow, increasingly potent vapour.” Allison Croggon, Overland
“a marvel of luminous precision.” Financial Times
Review of Adjunct: an Undigest:
"For those who believe erroneously that the avant-garde have no sense of humour, Peter Manson's Adjunct, An Undigest- certainly the most entertaining collection of the year - is highly recommended. A seven-year creation, it manically folds together rueful diary entries, irreverent comments on artists, writers and musicians, gleeful misprints, and all sorts of found and heard material. Undigested in appearance, but regurgitated in combinations either crafted or mathematically determined, the consistent hilarity of its relentless, deadpan juxtapositions has inescapably serious implications too.' --Robert Potts, The Guardian
Review of Between Cup and Lip
Peter Manson’s first American collection, Between Cup and Lip, is made up of an astonishingly varied set of slips of the tongue, jokes, bagatelles, serious wit and a jangling of all registers and codes… [The] poems here are more than a melange of procedural and prosodic compositions (though there are examples of both), but a quizzical quest, through comedy, for a procedural prosody or prosodic procedure, as Snarkish a beast, perhaps, as the old prose poem of old.This [Snail Book] is a wonderful poem, and reinvents procedural prose prosody as comic routine, with Snarkish laughs as tough as old snails.” Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold