Quennets
About this book
In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the 'quennet' is reworked and refigured in response to three perimeter landscapes. The first sequence, 'Elementary Estuaries', is inspired by a series of walks along the Essex estuary, the poems' appearance on the page suggesting the landscape's expansive estuarine vistas, its pink sail lofts and windswept gorse, beach huts and distant steeples. In the second sequence, written after a series of walks around the Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, the form changes to reflect the physical, almost bodily tension of the wall as an architectural and social obstruction. The final sequence, 'Waterlog', retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, and here the quennet's newly elongated shape and ragged margin evoke the region's eroding coastline, its deserted piers and power stations, electric fences and waterlogged fields. Terry's project is bold in scope, his poems subtle in effect, a mix of sign and song, concrete and lyric, Oulipo and psychogeography. It is a work about boundaries, political, social, and natural, and about the walk as a critical apparatus through which these fields are shown to connect.
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Information
ELEMENTARY ESTUARIES
Blue buoy | Untampered simile Grey water | Black buoy |
Still creek | White knight Red rubble | Cold stream |
Grey sky | Yellow contamination Light breeze | Blue sheep |
Birds silhouetted on the mudflats lights on the Colne | ||
Still buoy | Outstretched branches Icy pool | Cold sheep |
Deserted paddock | Crunching gravel Azure sky | Distant beach-huts |
Retreating sheep | Anchored vessel Flapping page | Sharpening wind |
Uncertain seagull | Chiaroscuro clouds Flapping crow | Withering rosehip |
A shadow points across oyster beds A lone steeple marks the opposite shore | ||
Retreating clouds | Crunching sheep Azure sky | Chiaroscuro beach-huts |
Lone redshank | Lean sparrowhawk Vandalised sign | Lone duck |
White horse | Green armadillo Dancing teasels | Startled pheasant |
Burnt-out car | Decoy wall Vandalised sign | Distant rumble |
A dense wall of white masts guards the marina Pikes of middle England | ||
Decoy duck | Green armadillo Inaccessible sign | Burnt-out pheasant |
Red Andros | Red Charmer Red Crusader | Red Camelot |
White Siskin | White Shadowfax White Panacea | Wh... |
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Contents
- Elementary Estuaries
- Mauerweg
- Waterlog
- Author’s Note
- Copyright