Aliquot

John Clegg

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800172357
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800172364
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence,' which take us from Codon to Coda via a number of -ines (Glycine, Asparagine, Tyrosine, etc). The complex exercise grows out of George Herbert ('What though my body run to dust?') and administrative duties at a genomics conference in which the language spoken, the terms used, find their way into the organising imagination and prosody of a formidable, witty verse craftsman, with serious contemporary concerns. Aliquot, John Clegg's second Carcanet book, is storm-spooked and jumpy: haunted by jaguars and lynxes, its uneasy silences broken by the retort of punt guns, lightning strikes, and floodwater breaching defences.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• The Lecture Notes
• Aliquot
• Propane Calendar
• ‘Cervantes ransomed…’
• The Sun Box
• Lull
• The Punt Gun
• Ancient Juniper
• The Nordeney Dykemaster
• ‘Faience pendant anthropoid bust amulet…’
• ‘The superyacht rides off the shore…’
• The Ozymandias Protocol
• ‘Radical Essex’
• An Attendant
• Convergence
• The High Lama Explains How Items Are Procured for Shangri-La
• Dormer Windows
• Farmer’s Riviera
• For the Reintroduction of the Lynx in England
• Hurricane Joaquin
• Jump, scorpion,
• The Chopping Board
• Language as Sonora
• The Bass Boat
• Lucan – the Waterline
• Mannerisms
• Quebec City
• Lightning Strikes School Tree
• The Book of the Dead
• The Cuspis of the Cone
• Mr Knox’s Hammock
• Chili Bean Soup
• Nothing Affirmeth
• Fen
• Touch me, touch me not
• The Same from the Air
• The Regift
• Sally Purcell cashes up at the King’s Arms
• At Houghall
• A Gene Sequence
• On the Red-Eye
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright