We are honoured to have esteemed poet Claire Trevien as one of our experimental poetry pamphlet authors. Her Penned In The Margins collection, Asteronyms, is a real favourite of ours. Her idiosyncratic poetic vision, in English pulled from the depths of a French mind, is often gobsmacking, painfully entertaining.
Claire Trévien is a British-Breton writer currently living in Brittany, France. She is the author and editor of several poetry and non-fiction books including The Shipwrecked House, which was longlisted in the Guardian First Book Award, and the remarkable Asteronyms. She was the recipient of a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship in 2018. Trévien founded Sabotage Reviews and the annual Sabotage Awards, which under her guidance has become the single most important prize celebrating the activities of Indie Publishers and Events Organisers in the UK.
Her new pamphlet, Brain Fugue, is as inventive and playful as we’ve come to expect from this glorious poet. Claire can bring concepts, ideas and feeling to life with phrase after startling turn of phrase. She can play with form to create new and exciting ways of placing words on the page.
But as with much play, things can quite easily tip into becoming a more serious kind of struggle. The struggle to feel settled – to understand – and finally, the struggle to find some kind of inner peace. Because lively energy and brilliance can also speak of the frantic attempt to find solutions that are never quite within reach.
This complex, multi-layered pamphlet of poems speaks of the complexity of the human mind as much as it does the complicated mind of this poet. Brain Fugue is an astonishing piece of work. Order your copy here>>>>>>
Sample Poem from Brain Fugue:
Brain as City
As the sky drawstrings to darkness,
your buildings wake
– raise their skirts out of the gutter
with an unsteady focus;
the park uproots itself,
swings to the right,
its eyes two horses on springs,
its mouth of sand empties.
The river abandons her bed
tips out into the street,
(which itself has unlocked its jaws,
the crossroad crumples into
the alley, headlines procreate
with street signs, “STOP CHICKEN”,
“ORGANIC KING”, “WARNINGLAND”).
Now, the Ladbrokes rolls out
like a rubber band ball,
accumulating house numbers.
They lurch forward: bus stops,
compost bins, roofs of clay, slate, and grit,
doors united into a leg
(windows leave
the most curious prints behind),
and they sink deep, and then deeper,
into the mushrooming ground,
not a spire left
to periscope.
Claire’s incredible film poem Interpunct.
https://www.clairetrevien.co.uk/
Twitter: @CTrevien
Instagram: ctrevien
