Sarments

<p>“This collection is an essential delight; a ‘book resonant of a life / neither following nor in pursuit’ gathering old and new work all equally fresh. As the epigraph to the first poem attests ‘<em>one does not work out of a reaction against but rather out of affection for something</em>.’ Like Mayakovsky John James has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness rage and tenderness – and like the Futurist to weld the aesthetic to the social. Here is that rarest poet: able to adequately respond to pleasure and equally able to create it. The selection spans 50 years of work in all its subtlety of tone and address – a hybrid of a Welsh ‘praise’ tradition playfully mannered English reserve and New York School exuberance. This is a poetry deftly attuned to various musics overtly engaged with the visual arts yet just as happy out in the streets at home and abroad – and more than partial to a walk in the countryside. The poems of the last decade are singular in their ‘reach toward the poetry of kindred / where we speak in our work as we seldom do otherwise.’ Embrace this <em>New and Selected</em> James: here is an effervescent poetry that can leave nobody indifferent.”  —Simon Perril</p><p> </p><p>“James is decidedly un-English in his love of French and German poetry in his unembarrassed (and unembarrassing) celebration of the pleasures of the flesh and in his Marxist and republican politics – which seem to legitimate a taste for the finer things on the grounds of international solidarity against a British suppression of the capacity for joy … John James is one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry.”  —John Wilkinson</p>