Anthony Howell Boeken

Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim remembers pre-war Baghdad, but his poems explore history's merciless, incomprehensible continuum.

A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell is a multifaceted artist known for his poetry and novels. His debut poetry collection, Inside the Castle, was released in 1969, followed by novels such as In the Company of Others and Oblivion. Howell's poetry has gained recognition, earning him a shortlist for the Paul Hamlyn Award and features in prominent publications like The Guardian and The TLS. His translations of Statius and Fawzi Karim have also received acclaim, showcasing his diverse literary talents.

Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced - a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly. This is the persona whose voice permeates in this book.

The centrepiece of Silent Highway is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontass voyage to the arrival of the Windrush bringing immigrants from Jamaica, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi and the Marchioness disaster.

This inquiry into the relationship between the 'step' in dance and the 'foot' in verse invites the reader into a tapestry woven by its crossed paths. A duel career as a dancer and as a poet allows the author to follow his interest in the dance origins of scansion and link it to how the foot connects lyric writing to an 'exiled sense' through the felt tread of its rhythm. This is to rediscover the physical feeling of poetry; the fulcrum of a relationship that goes back to the Greek chorus, when every phrase was danced. The author shows how verse and the dance emerged together, as we initially developed bipedalism and speech. Written is [sic] a discursive style which allows the author to wander whenever digression seems appropriate, the book offers the reader an entertaining compendium of anecdotes, notions and quotes concerning the relation between our words and our movements. Walking in itself may have ushered in predication syntax putting one word in front of another as one put one foot in front of another. Did song emerge separately from language and stimulate ritual dance among women who linked their steps to sounds? The link of speech with movement is explored in ancient art, in theatre and in military drill and psychoanalysis. From the ballet to performance art, the author traces the evolution of recent creativity free verse finding a parallel in Mick Jagger dancing freely on his own in the '60s while performance artists used the freedom of conceptual art to explore 'action phrases' linking task-orientated movement with verbal articulation. -- Back cover