Home Radio
by Luke Roberts
Home Radio brings together 75 poems written between 2011 and 2020. These are weathered forms of attention: pocket songs and daybooks, odes and longer workouts, bitter little lyrics and sweet generalisations. It’s all staked on the seasonal, whatever the edge is, where poetry ends and history muscles in.
ISBN: 9781838069889
156 pages
Date published: 03/11/21
Paperback
Luke Roberts is the author of Rosa (2019), Sorbet (2018), To My Contemporaries (2015) and other works of poetry. He is the editor of Desire Lines: Unselected Poems, 1966-2000 by Barry MacSweeney (2018), and the author of Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things (2017). He lives in London. Home Radio is Luke’s first full-length collection since False Flags (2011).
Home Radio brings together 75 poems written between 2011 and 2020. These are weathered forms of attention: pocket songs and daybooks, odes and longer workouts, bitter little lyrics and sweet generalisations. It’s all staked on the seasonal, whatever the edge is, where poetry ends and history muscles in. If it’s elegiac it’s also comic: Orpheus is our guy but he doesn’t keep his promises. In the city everything is momentous, the embarrassing sky and the sunset crashing, how everyone leaves and everyone comes back. You get these scrappy collages of talk to hold it all together, and you make them brush against the possibility of collective life. Here’s the rural avant-garde, the buried line of socialist modernism, the building covered in pollen. If you put your ear to the floor and squint you can keep it.
