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Chris
Preddle, Cattle Console Him
96 pp, ISBN: 978-1-904130-41-3, £8.99 (paperback only),
Publication, July 17 2010
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A
note about Cattle Console Him
The consoling cattle in Chris Preddle's second collection can
be seen from his kitchen window in Holme in West Yorkshire.
Preddle's arrestingly crafted poems are often grounded among
local friends and the nearby moors, but there is nothing parochial
about their concerns. Taking in things as various as Gilgamesh,
the Greeks, medieval monks, courtly love, music, modernism,
the golden ratio, compost bins, James Bond, and Caterpillar
tractors, Cattle Console Him is a meditation on love,
friendship, art, politics and the contemporary world, a meditation
that is ever mindful of uncertainty, change, and mortality.
Cattle Console Him is the work of a writer who is at
once witty, erudite, sardonic, grave, civilised and humane.
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A note on Chris Preddle
Chris
Preddle has retired to a windy shoulder of the Pennines in West
Yorkshire. Born in London in 1943, he was educated in South
Africa and at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where he was
taught by Peter Levi. He read Medieval and Modern Greek at the
University of Oxford. He worked in public libraries in London,
Elgin and Kendal, and as a librarian for two child care charities,
Barnardos and Action for Children. He compiled a revised
edition of the leading library classification of social welfare,
the Bliss Bibliographic Classification (Class Q). He is married
to Jacqui, and they have four grownup children between them
and two grandchildren. His first collection was Bonobos
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Biscuit Publishing, 2001). He is presently
working on English versions of all Sapphos poems and fragments.
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Praise for Cattle Console Him
The
first thing you realise on reading Chris Preddles poetry
is its authors intelligence; the second is his technical
skill line-propelling rhymes and inventive forms gracefully
achieved then how enjoyably deployed these talents are
for our benefit. A classical Muldoon or postmodernist Longley,
only the names of the best contemporary poets come to mind when
I try to describe him; study this wonderful collection yourself
and see what I mean. Ian Duhig
Accessible, erudite and technically assured, Chris Preddle
emerges in this, his second collection, as a metaphysical poet
advancing a long tradition. These are poems of admirable formal
invention and lightness of touch, abounding in half-rhyme, homophone
and musical variation. Whether meditating on a muddy Yorkshire
field or a Greek sea, their themes resonate across a wide range
of cultural reference, from Sappho and Boethius, classical and
Christian, to the early 21st century. Rooted in the material
world, particularly in the landscape around the Yorkshire village
of Holme, where Preddle lives with his wife Jacqui, they momentarily
illuminate the autobiographical, provisional and domestic, identifying
within the particular situation an eternal predicament, and
ultimately affirming the redemptive power of art and, above
all, of love. Katrina Porteous
Chris Preddle is a fresh inventor. He brings language
together in new ways and in new forms. His sequences are full
of surprises: a wonderful new presence. Michael
Schmidt
Chris Preddle lives in the village of Holme, in sight
of the Pennines. Many of his poems imagine this place as Arcadia,
an ideal region of rustic contentment, with his friends there
playing Virgils shepherd poets. There are also uxorious
poems for his lady Jacqueline, travel poems, others about nature,
literature, history. These are philosophical poems, clever and
learned, and they delight in wordplay. John Wakeman
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From
Cattle Console Him
The
Tower
No
matter how often the TV replayed
the plane igniting the tower, no matter how many
fell like any sky-
borne plague of Egypt from the disobedient East,
the
watchers in a kafenion in the Mani
Katastrophí, katastrophí!
a Greek chorus, replied
in the answering strophe, You in the West
have brought it on yourselves. Its gone
home, Yankees.
Volta.
Káno vólta, I take a turn
round the top of this afflicted tower
we rent for a season. About turn. I watch like
a Maniot
for all that Ive brought on
myself, no matter how often I tour (about tour)
these battelments distrest. No matter.
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Ruin
ASmurry smoory smeary rain
is blowing down from Holme Moss and its moor
on hawthorn, rowan
and
holly or holme, on sheepwalks, on cattle red and
roan,
on us. Jacqui and Chris, Mary
and Ken, we bend against the windbent rain,
which
comes at us and our roofs, shutters and rones
in combative waves like an army.
We live (we live well) in the policy and reign
of
an emperor (Imp.) of the west, who runs
like a rain gutter around the limits of things,
whose humour
affects us (imp!) like a murrain.
He
arraigned (aroint thee) and overran
Holme and Babylonia and the Country of the Living.
Errant Sumer
he made a ruin.
©
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