Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award In his fifth collection of poems, David Wheatley twins his birthplace and his current home, Ireland and Scotland, to engage issues of globalism, identity, and language. He takes inspiration from the Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, self-nominated President of Planet Earth, who in a state of apocalyptic rapture envisioned a new world culture, its rise and its dramatic undoing.In The President of Planet Earth Wheatley brings an experimental sensibility to bear on questions of land and territory, channelling the messianic aspirations of modernism into subversive comedy. We move between Pictish pre-history, the imaginary South American nation of 'Oblivia', and post-independence referendum Scotland.Wheatley marries classical, Gaelic, Scots and continental traditions. He deploys several styles – prose poetry; concrete poetry; translations from Middle Irish, Latin and French; sestinas and sonnets in Scots – to heady effect. The President of Planet Earth refashions language and the world it shapes, devising a transformative poetics.
About the author
David Wheatley was born in Dublin in 1970 and lives in rural Aberdeenshire. His previous collec-tions, published by Gallery Press, are Thirst (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006) and A Nest on the Waves (2010). A prolific critic, he has edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press (2003) and the Selected Poems of Samuel Beckett for Faber & Faber (2009). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, and has been awarded a variety of prizes, including the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and first prize in the Friends Provident National Poetry Competition. He has been praised by the TLS as numbering among ‘our finest poets’, and by Poetry London for his ‘sardonic and devastating wit’.
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