| Casket Contributor(s): Brown, Andy (Author) |
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ISBN: 184861683X ISBN-13: 9781848616837 Publisher: Shearsman Books OUR PRICE: $9.45 Product Type: Paperback Published: June 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Physical Information: 0.08" H x 5.5" W x 8.5" (0.12 lbs) 32 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The Franks Casket (or Auzon Casket) is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest, donated to the British Museum by a private owner from Auzon, France. Made from whalebone, the front, back, sides and lid of this small chest are decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Each rune has an equivalent letter in the Latin alphabet, allowing for Anglo-Saxon and modern English translations. Each rune also has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ('fisc'), f signifies 'wealth', i 'ice', s 'sun' and c 'torch', yielding a sequence of four images. To write the poems in this collection, I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word and then used these images, or variants of them, to write the poems. Using this multilevel technique of 'translation', the following poems are an attempt to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present, of the place where I now live: the River Teign and its surrounding area. --Andy Brown |
Contributor Bio(s): Brown, Andy: - Andy Brown's recent poetry books include Bloodlines (2018) and Exurbia (2014) with Worple Press. Previous books include The Fool and the Physician (2012), Goose Music (with John Burnside, 2008) and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 (2006) with Salt Publishing. He co-edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine (Bloomsbury, 2016) with Corinna Wagner, and edited The Writing Occurs As Song: a Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman Books, 2015). He is Associate Professor at Exeter University, where he founded the creative writing programme. |