Martin Corless-Smith

Of Piscator

Complete Travels

Poetry. Fiction. "A man in his forties is walking along the embankment of the river Thames. He has recently abandoned his marriage and has thus imperilled his care and responsibility for his son whom he loves. He now does not know if he is experiencing freedom, or a condition of being irrevocably lost. Or are these the same? His brain, or so he has read, is a contorted maze of surfaces (he must look this up). But then what was the reality of the so called outside world? One so seldom saw or touched anything except a surface—that of the glittering river, for instance, which was like a looking glass, or like love. Unless one jumped in and drowned, that is. But then, might not life and death seem the same? Especially if one were a poet or a painter. Which he was. Both, I mean."—Nicholas Mosley

This Fatal Looking Glass

Nota is part travelogue and part philosophical examination. Corless-Smith here makes a compendium: layers of reference, of history, of text over text over text. Invented and real figures watch over a Self who admits to a history beyond the moment of simple consumption. The setting is an England in its Golden Age, a homesick construction to be consumed, with pleasure, in the discomfiting knowledge of its artificiality.

Nota

Bill Griffiths

Geraldine Monk

David Annwn

Gavin Selerie

Kelvin Corcoran

Alan Halsey

Collection comprises four boxes of material by and featuring contributions by English poet Alan Halsey. Born in London in 1949, Halsey managed the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, England; since 1997 he has lived in Sheffield, where he continues to work as a specialist bookseller. His work incorporates elements of visual poetry, while also appropriating both ancient and modern found texts; he is also a graphic artist and illustrator. Materials in this collection include many of Halsey's early chapbooks from the 1970s and 1980s; key compilations of his work such as "Wittgenstein’s Devil: Selected Writing 1978-1998" and "Marginalien"; journals to which he contributed; and two oversized broadsides (Box 4). Also included are works by poets such as Gavin Selerie, David Annwn, Kelvin Corcoran, Geraldine Monk and Bill Griffiths, to which Halsey contributed either as an author or an illustrator.

Collection of the Works of Alan Halsey

Every poem an epitaph, every poem a ticket to ride, from Sappho’s “bittersweet” eroticism to the “wild civility” of Robert Herrick. Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, painter, and translator of canonical poems, and each of these vocations is on view in this memorable defense of poetry as he reads from Virgil to Notley in sight of the impossible blue of Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan and Piranesi’s otherworldly Pyramid of Cestius while contemplating the paradoxes of the finite body of the poet dreaming immortal poetry. —Keith Tuma Querying the embodiment of poetry, Corless-Smith begins in the body of the poet—living and/or dead—and passes from there through the body of the reader in order to argue the mutual construction of the body of a poem as a shared body and a new commons, which, like all things vital to survival—air, water, hope—must be maintained as open and available to all. These succinct, elegant essays perform this maintenance and, in the process, return us to all poetry charged with the energy and insight necessary to continue that maintenance ourselves. —Cole Swensen

The Material Soul of Poetry

The Poet's Tomb

In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic at times nihilistic at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived. Praise for The Fool and The Bee: "Corless-Smith has an extraordinary eye for detail and this meticulously crafted collection is a pleasure to build a relationship with. It is the kind of book that demands attention, to spend pondering, to be read more than once...Wonderful stuff." -Andrew Taylor, Stride Magazine "There is something quite extraordinary in Martin Corless-Smith's handling of words, a lyrical hardness or punch that we're not used to and a kind of stagecraft...All glimpses of hope are spectacular fantasies cancelled by intrusions of reality, but there is also a delight in the writing itself, the extremely resourceful and virtuosic countering and elaborating that goes on, the singing and the dancing." -Peter Riley, The Fortnightly Review

Martin Corless-Smith

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