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.

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, Barnardo’s 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 Sappho’s poems and fragments.

Praise for Cattle Console Him   “The first thing you realise on reading Chris Preddle’s poetry is its author’s 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 Virgil’s 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

Reviews of Cattle Console Him   New Walk, 2, Spring/Summer 2011 "These intelligent, finely wrought poems knit together allusion and ambiguity to make up a rich intertextual web." – Sarah Jackson Acumen, 69, January 2011 "Occasionally, there appears a poet, the pleasure of whose poems resides not so much in what they say, as in their form, which insistently thrusts itself under the reader's nose. Hopkins was one such poet, Chris Preddle is another ... Chris Preddle is a mighty clever poet ... a ... word wizard ... [R]ead the book for its Joycean fireworks of alliteration, its doubles entendre, its sometimes absurdly-stretched references, and see what you think. Ask yourself: Is this book brilliant or what?" – William Oxley PN REview 200, July-August 2011 "Passers-by can see Chris Preddle and his wife Jacqueline through their 'uncurtained windows'. Immersing oneself in Preddle's poems is like looking through those windows into his life in Holme in rural Yorkshire, and into the intricate quicksilver thought processes he expresses through a variety of cultural references from myth, poetry, art and music. His language and verse forms are inventive, filled with chiming homophones, puns, rhymes, and orthographical experiment, from the Joycean 'Polyphilophloisboisterous' to the incantatory 'quorum quarum / home holme us' and onomatopoeic 'smurry smoory smeary rain'. " – Rachel Redford

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. It’s 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 I’ve brought on myself, no matter how often I tour (about tour) these battelments distrest. No matter.           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.   ©