Jeremy Reed
Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. Björk simply called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001), Duck and Sally Inside (2004), This is How You Disappear (2007), Piccadilly Bongo (2010), Voodoo Excess (2015) and Candy 4 Cannibals (2017) all from Enitharmon Press. He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley. Jeremy Reed is currently Marine Society Poet Laureate.
Upcoming events:
Candy 4 Cannibals Book Launch
Dr. Jeremy Reed
Wed 22 November 2017
6pm
Free Admission
Enitharmon Editions, 10 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL
RSVP essential: info@enitharmon.co.uk
Candy 4 Cannibals
Jeremy Reed’s dynamically energised new collection Candy 4 Cannibals finds him again pushing new frontiers of language and subject matter out to the edge, as his starting point. His impacted day-to-day London life, using the capital as the basis for poems powered up by a characteristic immersion in subcultures, is offset by deeply personal recollections of two dead friends, the poet Lee Harwood and the sixties fashion entrepreneur Bill Franks. Reed’s acute originality and an imagination described by J. G. Ballard as ‘unique, almost extraterrestrial in its talent’ again combine to create a poetry that literally dazzles in its spectacular...
£10.99
Saint Billie
This collection centres on the legendary figure of the jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-59), 'Lady Day', whose talent propelled her from poverty in Baltimore to fame as a vocalist in Harlem nightclubs and international celebrity through her recordings with Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. But her life was scarred by personal tragedy and by the drug addiction that led to her premature death. From this dramatic material Reed creates a highly charged series of poems and prose pieces, some spoken by Billie herself, some by the poet as narrator, which brilliantly illuminate the singer's world and the heady atmosphere of the...
£7.95
This is How You Disappear
This is How You Disappear celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on Reed's life as a poet. Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed's personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, 'Rawhide', This is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.
£9.95
Voodoo Excess
Voodoo Excess
In this volume, Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones. Starting from the band’s early days in 1962 leading up to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality, he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon. Along with this, he includes everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members.
DRIFT AWAY
It’s like looking across a busy docks a harbour industry to find the stage remote as the modular ISS, the band isolated as astronauts doing moon-hops for...
£9.99
Sooner or Later Frank
Sooner or Later Frank finds Jeremy Reed optimising his London quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail, Reed makes the capital into personal affairs. His characteristic love of glamour, rock music, seasonal step-changes, and a Ballardian preoccupation with the visionary render this new S Recommendation, in John Ashbery's words on Reed's recent work, 'a dazzling tour de force.'
£9.99