Arcimboldo's Bulldog
New and Selected Poems
Arcimboldo's famous seventeenth-century Mannerist portraits, in which the sitter's face is composed of vegetables and fruit, suggest how – in subordinating a mixture of elements into an unrelated whole – the imagination can translate and transform the medium of expression itself. Tim Liardet's "Arcimboldo's Bulldog: New and Selected Poems", which draws on his ten award-winning collections and adds new elements – fresh produce – reconfigures his life's work to date and draws it into a new, eloquent whole.
At the heart of the book readers will find material from his two T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collections "The Blood Choir" (2006), written while he was teaching in a young offenders' high security prison, and "The World Before Snow" (2015), exploring in formally challenging terms the obsessive love story between an American and an English poet. Each poem deploys a forensic precision: vivid images, large abstractions, symbols, allegory, elegy, provocation, confession and lyric all find their necessary place in his work.
"Arcimboldo's Bulldog" is a record of achievement and includes a promissory note towards Liardet's eleventh collection.
At the heart of the book readers will find material from his two T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collections "The Blood Choir" (2006), written while he was teaching in a young offenders' high security prison, and "The World Before Snow" (2015), exploring in formally challenging terms the obsessive love story between an American and an English poet. Each poem deploys a forensic precision: vivid images, large abstractions, symbols, allegory, elegy, provocation, confession and lyric all find their necessary place in his work.
"Arcimboldo's Bulldog" is a record of achievement and includes a promissory note towards Liardet's eleventh collection.
About the author
Tim Liardet has published seven full collections of poetry. 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" – a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. He has reviewed poetry for such journals as the "Guardian", "Poetry Review" and "PN Review" and has been Poet-in-Residence at the "Guardian". "The Blood Chair", his fifth collection, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize. He is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University.