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Synopsis
This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination of lyric and narrative, form a novel contribution to poetry. The story is of an abruptly ended first love affair, an encounter and marriage with another, the joy of birth, the mourning for the infant’s death and its aftermath. The voices of the protagonists, rooted in their local habitations, weave in and out of the speech and consciousness of each of them with all the nuances, pleasures and regrets of hindsight and its shifts in recollection. "Its imaginative heart lies in Dale's exploration of what we might call his characters' 'duolects', the private languages with which couples construct their own intimate world of shared understandings, memories and allusions. When, under the pressure of regret and desire, these begin to leak out, the poems take on something of the quality of palimpsests in which none of the characters is able to overwrite completely their earlier, ineradicable words to each other." TLS Peter Dale is renowned for his translations from French (Corbière, Laforgue, Valéry and Villon) and Italian (a complete terza rima English version of Dante’s Divine Comedy). His new and selected poems, Edge to Edge, appeared in 1997 and was followed by Under the Breath in 2002. He now lives in Cardiff.
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