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A poem is not an encoded message, nor is it an idea set to metre. It is a unique linguistic creation.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
Peter Abbs is the rarest of writers - a philosophical poet with a genuine lyric gift. His poems are equally arresting for their substance as their style. He plunders the literature of the past, but Abbs is one of the few contemporary poets sufficiently tough-minded to be able to borrow from Dante, Mandelstam, Rilke and Seferis without being bested by the inevitable comparison .
Dana Gioia
The sonnet sequence Father and Son is about the failure to communicate across the distance of the inarticulate, and in these strong, grave poems the son speaks for that dumb inheritance, the tragedy of a lack of culture that cast its shadow over so many gre y lives. These are some of the finest poems wri tten by any poet of Peter Abbs' generation .
Kathleen Raine
His genuine musicality and well-honed, distinctive voice deals with the loss of love, bereavement and re-finding of love. The controlled verse forms, most often of fourteen lines, prove him to be a consummate craftsman too, and the even, unfaltering tone ensures that all the poems inter-relate and flow together. Abbs deeply lives his poems, taking brave risks with his own raw experiences and his best work has been pressed out of him by necessity .
Patricia McCarthy in Agenda
A substantial biography of the spirit...Abbs' art is buttressed by craft. He is a gifted sonneteer, adept in both the strictures and variations of the form...Here is a poet who does not shy from the abstract...Forays into the mythic are symptoms of his range and exploration for there is plenty of hard imagistic terseness in th e poet's sensibility too....a self-interrogating, deeply serious poet .
Adrian Buckner in London Magazine
These poems offer constant raids on the inarticulate, conducted with energy and resourcefulness on a range of fronts, from the familial to the cosmic; from fraught autobiographical fragments that try to speak, posthumously, to and for the father whose ' silence spliced our mutual lives in two', through the adoptio n of a repertoire of personae: Heraclitus, Descartes, Nietzsche, V an Gogh, to the assumption of bardic and mythical roles.
Nicolas Tredell in PN Review
A real body of work .
Seamus Heaney
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Our task, then, is to adapt, not by becoming light entertainers but by forging the necessary anti-thesis - to evoke lost possibilities, to express further patterns of connection and signification, to converse with banished angels and repressed demons, to cancel and transcend.
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