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The Blood Choir
Tim LiardetSHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2006
Tim Liardet’s masterly new collection, The Blood Choir, will surprise readers with its dramatic subject matter: teaching poetry in prison. An acutely observed incident is recalled and given a multitude of perspectives, each perspective resounding with an emotional corollary – sometimes fear, often sympathy. The vision is dark, but not without humour. There is a playful inventiveness and an adroit irony, often at the author’s expense. As well as the work inspired by the prison there are digressions: several pieces stem from the foot and mouth outbreak.
Tim Liardet was born in London. He is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University. He has produced four collections of poetry with Seren. His third collection, Competing with the Piano Tuner, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998, and his fourth, To the God of Rain, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. The prison poems contained in The Blood Choir won the Smith Doorstop Competition and received an Arts Council England Writers’ Award, both in 2003.
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ISBN : ISBN 1-85411-414-X Pages :gwales.com : The Blood Choir
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Reviews
"The energy in these poems is threatening and pervasive; there is a sense on containment and isolation and of overwhelming fear ... Liardet humanises an inhuman world, making us face the complexities of the judicial system in our society, as well as criminal behaviour, without providing any easy answers”
The North, Sally Baker, Summer 07
“Liardet humanises an inhuman world, making us face the complexities of the judicial system in our society, as well as criminal behaviour, without providing any easy answers”
One of the year’s most impressive collections, an extended and carefully crafted reflection by a poet who spent a year teaching in a jail on the way prison dehumanises, but also releases strange kinds of ingenuity. In Goya-esque imagery Liardet shows prisoners wasting talent and time shackled into a single organism.
Financial Times, December 2006
"The Blood Choir is a work of extraordinary perception and honesty, unsparing with the harsh detail of how the prisoners adjusted to institutional life ..."
Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times, November 2006
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