Several Deer

Description

Addressing themes of destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, form, failure and rock n roll, "Several Deer" is the debut collection by a Northern Irish writer as much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. The poems many of them sonnets and doomed attempts at clear-eyed love poems are suspicious as to the legitimacy of the big beautiful transcendent moment, believing it false comfort. Adrift from a poet they don t much like, they console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture. Their speaker laments the state of the world while impotently aware that as a straight white male he s part of the problem; easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, he breaks much of what he touches. "Several Deer "charts the vain effort to undo the damage. It s a book about the gap between what one should think and what one actually thinks, between sounding good and being good. It doesn t take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits."

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984. He lives in Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in English at Girton College in 2010. He works as a library assistant, book reviewer and teacher. He contributes a regular series of 'Vestiges' to the literary magazine, PN Review. His work was anthologised in Carcanet's bestselling New Poetries VI in 2015.

'The rollicking Adam Crothers confesses a preference for form "as jester or saboteur". There is menace and mischief in equal measure.' The Guardian on New Poetries VI (Crothers was a contributor); 'There may be a little Tennyson in the lighting here, but there's also Kanye and Austin Powers and an associative sequencing of phrases reminiscent of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon.' The Irish Times