Cattle Console Him

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