Blood / Sugar

James Byrne

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781906570293
• eBook ISBN:
  9781908376435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.
Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence.
"James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger."
Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review
"His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time."
Keith Richmond, Tribune
"In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit."
Wayfarers
"The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems."
Paul Stubbs
James Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

Inclub Satires

A Note to Ezra Pound from The Dreamer Party

Dear Loomis,

I, too, may risk Nimes to avoid the new Munros.

The whole night through,

Tiny-Tears in his gastric-sagging suit

skerrys about

molesting like a young rooster.

It makes me sick to the balls.

Shy at the pulpit,

the latest species (a cock-pheasant)

introduces then reintroduces the rooster,

who honours the applause with a pelvic wobble.

The Dreamer Prize

is little more than a vernal farce:

Brownload nods through it

like a loose button,

his burgundy lapel

dribble-stained –

clear evidence

he lost his wits in the 60s.

The poems are a death hand

that shint sideways

into what you have lettered:

malignant buncomb.

Everyone else appears

to appreciate the gyrator –

Zin-Zan smiles at his wife

as if he can see snow coming.

While the recently-queened Chanel Poet

(buffed up like a porcelain apple)

cares to market absolute clarity,

and so, says nothing of minor importance.

Lit. Fest. (INSERT HERE)

Holiness unhusked: elegise a losing mind

The idea arrives in language we don’t understand

*

Spoilbank of domesticity, inspiration a spiderplot

It leapt up and said WRITE ME! A complete ambush

*

Banquet rooms spill with latent patronesses

Would you like to carry my Rilkeian sonnets?

*

A ferric weight makes anti-bubbles in the air

If I could island one word, ‘delft’ would be her

*

Institutional racism glossed over in the Q&A

Should have brought more than a shawl, m’duckie

*

Thunder aftergongs – Lightening butts the room

I have no idea – It just came to me – It was like dictation

Klepto

Translation for inside-leg Careerism for inside-leg

The thrill-hunt began on a Cantab lawn

It wi...

Table of contents

• Beginning
• Title Page
• Contents
• Recovery
• Apprentice Work
• Air Terminals
• Days of 1973
• Sestina for R
• A Private Garden
• Widowed / Unwidowed
• Two Phonecalls at 4 am
• From the Sky Parlour
• Dowry for an Aerophobic
• Speed Date
• Serapis from a Postcard
• The Buddhas of Bamiyan
• A King’s Faith
• Chess in Kirkuk
• Nightnurse
• Sanchez de Aldama
• 14th April 1930
• (Reverb) At the Scene of ‘The Earthenware Head’
• Prospecting Several Instances of Active Imagination
• Four Interpretations of Photographs by Claude Cahun
• Five Interpretations of Overpainted Photographs by Gerhard Richter
• Avoiding a Close Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
• Three Presumptions whilst in the Neighbourhood of a Friend
• Voice Portraits of Uncle Patrick at The Reunion House
• Not the Arm Wrestle
• The Angel vs. Gabriel
• Inclub Satires
• Doctor One-Eye
• Inviting the Ghosts
• Thieves’ Society
• To-tock-ah-noo-lah
• On Not Reaching a Summit
• A Room in the House of Aries
• Dragon Tree
• Incest
• Jackanoria
• Entry (Cornwall 1991)
• A Local Marriage
• The Ashes
• The Minister’s Daughter
• What Remains of Old Addresses
• Testimony
• Notes
• Biographical Note