In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. While the lyric is central to Mengham’s work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these poems, prose-poems and modernist fables. There are echoes of Homer, Dante, Eliot, Pound, but also the deadpan of public tannoy announcements, the white-noise of urban soap-box oration, and the strange syntax and mannerisms of shampoo bottle blurbs. Cast through these contemporary styles, Mengham’s historically-aware poems become something unrecognisable: like Rilke’s description of a sculpture that ‘sees you from every angle’, his word-sculptures see across time with an eerie plasticity, surfing literatures and cultures over millennia, even within a single sentence. Mengham is a master of the micro-paragraph, a condensed, supercharged poetry bristling with alien clarity like, to borrow a phrase from the poems, angelic cattle-prods.
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Rod Mengham’s published poetry includes Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001), Parleys and Skirmishes (Ars Cameralis, 2007), Bell Book (Wide Range, 2012), The Understory (Corrupt Press, 2014), Paris by Helen (Oystercatcher, 2014) and with Marc Atkins a book of texts and film stills, Still Moving (Veer, 2014). He is also the publisher of Equipage, Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published monographs and edited collections of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, violence and avant-garde art, the 1940s, and contemporary poetry. He has co-edited the anthologies Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (2003) and Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2005). His translations include Andrzej Sosnowski’s Speedometry (Contraband, 2014).
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