21st Century
A01=William Letford
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Author_William Letford
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCF
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_poetry
Humour
India
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
Scotland
Scottish
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working class
Product details
- ISBN 9781784102005
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 25 Aug 2016
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Billy Letford’s Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, ‘poackets ful eh ma fingers’, or stumbling from a bar ‘like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free’, the characters in Letford’s poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. ‘On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She’s smoking a joint. It’s not a surprise.’ Letford’s words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernity’s unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, ‘rotten with wonder’, that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt’s humble endurance. ‘There’s dignity there. Lay yourself open.’
Billy Letford published his first collection of poetry while working as a roofer. Since then, his work has been adapted into film, projected onto buildings, carved into monuments, adapted for the stage, written onto skin, cast out over the radio, and performed by orchestras. He has helped restore a Medieval village in the mountains of Northern Italy, taught English in Japan, fished with his bare hands in Indonesia, and been invited to perform in Iraq, South Korea, Lebanon, Australia, Germany, India, Poland, and many more countries.
