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Description
“Tim Craven is a poet of astonishing range and audacity who tackles issues of mental health, belonging, and identity with ingenious candour. He’s an utterly original voice for our times – welcome and essential.” –John Glenday
“The pleasures of Tim Craven’s book are manifold. Pleasure of intensities, pleasure of intimacies, pleasure in the ‘slant wiring’ and the open, ‘armourless’ forays into the fallen world. It is disarming in its crush of the particulars. It is startling in its expansiveness. It’s as if a forensic approach to experience will yield the soul. It’s got brainy architecture but also smart brick work and electrical engineering. Shatter rhymes with matter, evidence with brilliance. He does what good poets do, from ‘donuts, or elephants, or music’ he manufactures wonder. An impressive, notable debut.” –Bruce Smith
“Widely travelled in both geographical and disciplinary – not to mention emotional – terms, these are poems which, while they often celebrate and probe the small, the earthy, the ordinary, have their noses trained always on the elusive spoor of ‘the centre of things’. A meditative poet who works his way with careful honesty and linguistic verve through complex ideas, Craven can shift from comic to devastating on a sixpence, can upend, within a single image, the microworld of his reader’s consciousness. ‘all the fertility and futility/ is right here … the celestial,/ the microscopic’. Good Sons is spilling over with swag; it announces the arrival of a distinctive and capacious talent.” –Miriam Gamble
