Heat Wave is a form of poetic cabaret,'What good is sitting, alone in your room?/ come hear the music play!' If a cabaret is full of high jinks it can also land punches - truth can be masked by the burlesque and the grotesque: 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant'.
Luke Kennard has said of Stannard's writing, 'I know of few other poets who can write of cruelty, hysteria and disappointment with such levity and grace.' Will Eaves speaks of a 'comic vitality'. Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain.
Critics have noted 'a tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful.' The reader might weep and laugh on the same page. The lyrical and the demotic might walk hand in hand.
Julian Stannard was born in Kent in 1962. He has a PHD from UEA and taught at the University of Genoa. He has written several critical studies and eight volumes of poetry. He has been awarded the Crabbe Memorial Prize and the International Troubadour Prize and has twice been nominated for a Forward Prize. He is a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester.
Title: Heat Wave (Salt Modern Poets)
Author: Julian Stannard
ISBN: 9781784632182
Binding:
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Publication Date: 2020-09-15
Number of Pages: 112
Weight: 0.1100 kg
This is a brilliant collection, endlessly rich, strange and funny, blessed with a unique voice that is both instantly unmistakable, and yet capable of boundless elasticity. Locked down on Brexit Island, Heat Wave is the most perfectly unreliable companion anyone could wish for.
-- Alan Bilton * Ambit Magazine *