Peter McCarey

Peter McCarey's first full collection, comprising work from his five pamphlets, is an exhilarating journey on the U-bahns and runways of language: In a matter of hours / they can take you anywhere'. Collected Contraptions opens with water, rain and shadows; the inscription of the singer's mark' from the lost language of the Indus Valley civilisation shines from a Shakespeare sonnet; we are caught in a sci-fi spaghetti Western; a shady Czech smuggles a golem and a robot into pre-massacre Rwanda. Language shape-shifts, reinvents itself, before going on another road trip where stories are recited backwards and fast forward. Last is Tantris', an epic of intricate narrative whose message couldn't be more simple: Don't go: don't let the morning/ Turn your head with her shivering, thin grace.'

Collected Contraptions

Richard Price

Donny O'Rourke

Raymond Friel

David P. Kinloch

Five Point Two

Southfields

This is a book on reckless writing and careful reading, on invention and recognition. It's about how people find meaning and how we pass it on or lose it. The political expectations that drive it are inherited from religion; it tracks the chiliastic, digital divide between quality and quantity in the decades between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the receivership of democracy, venturing well beyond the author's stamping ground in poetry and translation, into philosophy, into linguistic and arithmetical pattern recognition, and into the merits and pitfalls of machine code as an aid to conversation. Mathematics and physics are admired from a distance, over the wall of algebra.

Peter McCarey

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