Books by Michael Glover

There is always a moment – it comes to all of us, irrespective of race, class, religion and all the other what-nots – when you take someone aside and point out everything – everything that has gone wrong. And there is always so much of it, and it takes hours, days, of patient recitation, probably from a book, because it is far too long and involved – like a twisty rope, left out too long in the rain, behind the house, you know it, you have seen it with your own eyes – to commit to memory, even for an old hand such as myself. You completely and utterly exhaust yourself in the doing, you end up speechless, breathless, spent. I do anyway. One cannot walk away from one’s nature.In this monologue of a mind's slow dying, an actor, man of abundant words, faces his final audience: of himself. It is a face that he barely recognises through the mist of his own tragic decline...

Why should children enjoy all the picture books? Artworks by Ruth Dupré complement beautifully the verse and prose of Michael Glover in this book you will want to possess for the sheer sake of possession, as much as for the journey it will take you on. It is the story of a woman losing her grip on a life well lived, as past and present meld with real and imagined. The words convey mood like an adagio; images appear in your head as though through a fine gauze. You will feel you have learned something important by the end.

The great Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated by Franco's Falangists in an orchard outside Granada in 1936. This book of poems, a lament for his death which is also a tribute to his extraordinary lyrical gifts, is spoken by his imagined lover. It conjures, fleetingly, poignantly, the irrepressible gusto of his life: his gifts as a pianist, the dancing humour of his poetry for children, the street life of his beloved Granada, his brutal and incomprehensible death. Above all, it interrogates Death itself for its bewildering decision to snatch him away at the height of his powers.

Michael Glover's writes a poetry whose surface can be lightsome and almost casually, if not beguilingly, playful and direct. But the playfulness can be a deception. Laughter dries on the tongue. There is often a terrible uncertainty about the speaking voice, and a darkness about the themes the poems are exploring. The darkness of betrayal. The darkness of death. The darkness of never quite knowing where one stands. In short, the sands are forever shifting.This eighth collection, his first in five years, draws on a variety of themes and situations. It drifts on a boat in Canada. It constructs a quinoa cake from mere words and phrases. It scrutinises the films of the great improvisatory director John Cassavetes. It even picks apart the multifarious meanings of the word book itself. The influences are as generously widespread as the poems themselves, from Jorge Luis Borges to Archy and Mehitabel, from the lyrics of Edmund Spenser to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.In the past, Michael Glover's poetry collections have largely consisted of single poems, each one self-sufficient. This volume, by contrast, is organised into several sequences. The Quinoa Cake Recipe emerges from, and is a response to, long summer stays in Canada. Notes to Harris is a series of short poems in which one North American friend addresses another with a wry casualness. Under the Influence, a homage to Cassavetes, is spoken by a male character from a typical Cassavetes film, wayward and anguished: 'I am a raging bull of a man. I pulverise everything I look at.' In short, this is the widest-ranging and most accomplished collection that Michael Glover has ever written.

Michael Glover offersa detailed examination of the paintings of the acclaimed German painter NeoRauch, whose paintings deftly blend the iconography of Socialist Realism withthe stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque and Romantic past.