Books by Kelvin Corcoran

This is a new edition of Kelvin Corcoran's second collection of poems, from 1986.

These collaborative sequences were written during the winter months 2015-18. The poets' journeys took them from Hove via Paris to Istanbul, on to Baghdad then across the Steppes and along the Silk Road. They nearly reached the North Pole before landing on the Moon. Returning to England they recorded its savage devastation. Our bedraggled pair were rescued only by discovering in their battered rucksacks a formal austerity as regular and elliptical as the world itself, selflessly announced to the innocent reader with each desperate but conclusive breath.Previous Halsey/Corcoran collaborations include Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (West House 2001) and A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015).

Below This Level recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.

Not Much to Say Really is an account of extended conversations with four elderly patients in hospital. Standing on the edge of their time they look back over their lives - these conversations show the reader that the most personally lived events and experiences are the most powerfully shared in the common lot of mortality.

In Sea Table Kelvin Corcoran brings it all back home. Not that it was ever very far away, but he has been writing a lot of poetry concerning Greece. Greece, both place and stories, was a lens onto our present condition and its depths, and through that focus he developed an essentially lyrical field as the basis for a move towards larger forms.

For the Greek Spring is a selection of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry about Greece, combining new work with poems from his previous collections. The poet's sustained engagement with Greece is evident at every turn.

Hotel Shadow continues Kelvin Corcoran's remarkable poetic venture. Travelling out from the real Hotel Shadow in the low season, the work encompasses: Aristomenes and the ethics of terror; paternal affection; Xenophanes of Colophon; the origins of poetry itself and a subsequent history; family mythology and the vagaries of DIY.