Sutherland, Keston: Meditations

The Last Books, paperback

Publication Date: May 29, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose.

“[T]he most extraordinary volume of English poetry in recent memory […]. Meditation 54 [is] surely the towering achievement of Sutherland’s career and of contemporary English poetry more generally.” —Julian Murphet, Sydney Review of Books

“[W]hat Sutherland’s Meditations knows, and demonstrates, is that it is only through pursuing and tarrying with the intensities of immediacy (in love, hatred, grief, depression, expression) that it might give way to mediation, to a process of working through; or else, that it might painfully intensify the blockages to mediation for which there are no theoretical or poetical solutions, but only practical ones: the resolve, for example, to radically transform the conditions of human experience and human relations so that life might truly live.” —Robert Scott, Lana Turner