Luna Park

Description

Drawing on themes of magic, dreams and the nocturnal, Grevel Lindop's new collection of poems ranges in subject from the hidden histories of words to the folklore of yew trees, and in place from a haunted English library to a derelict Australian funfair and the streets of Mexico City. Including 'Shugborough Eclogues', a twenty-firstcentury take on the country-house pastoral, and sequences on the darker and brighter aspects of love, Luna Park deploys an original viewpoint as well as a wide range of traditional and modernist skills in verse. The book ends with 'Hurricane Music', Lindop's prose memoir of a visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

GREVEL LINDOP lives in Manchester; a former academic, he now works as a freelance writer. Carcanet has published six collections of his poems, including a Selected Poems in 2000. His Travels on the Dance Floor was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted as Best Travel Book 2009; his Literary Guide to the Lake District won the Lakeland Book of the Year award and his biography of the poet, novelist and theologian Charles Williams will appear from OUP in 2015.

Dazzling ... by various routes Lindop is weaving his strange and doubtful pilgrimage into the canonical mainstream of poetry, and he is doing it invariably with accomplishment. Bernard O Donoghue, "Poetry London"