The Man Who Spoke To Owls - Softcover

This new collection brings together three central elements in the poetry and prose of David Grubb. There is the world of surreal identities, of wonders, disturbances, angels, fire sermons and celebrations where animals and people speak with both words and silences. There is the unfinished business of growing up in a strict religious household and seeking meanings beyond rituals and texts. In the third section of the book Albania, Bosnia and other locations create a world where nothing is certain, the past provides constant challenges and distant voices call. The darkness is broken by stars. Throughout the book there are ordinary people facing the extraordinary and variations of identity; James Agee and Walker Evans reporting the images of poverty, Christopher Smart hauling his hardships, Emily Dickinson in a radiance, people from Porlock, Gogol and the horse dream doctor and the pig man, poets and ghosts expressed with a distinct compassion and sensitivity and a wide range of styles. The Man Who Spoke To Owls provides a rich and radiant stream of propositions and identities, a way of reaching beyond.

David H W Grubb was born in 1941. Poetry collections include The Memory of Rooms, Selected Poems (Stride 2001),The Elephant In The Room (Driftwood 2004), Out Of The Marvellous (Oleander 2006), It Comes With a Bit of Song (Salt, 2007). He has also published three novels and an autobiography, and was editor of Sounding Heaven and Earth (Canterbury Press 2004). He has been Tutor of Creative Writing at University of Reading, the River and Rowing Museum, Henley on Thames, and Norden Farm Arts Centre. He also runs a mentoring scheme for individual writers. Much of his writing had been influenced by working in places of extreme poverty and civil conflict. A collection of short stories will be published in 2009. David Grubb's writing has been praised by John Fowles, D.M.Thomas, Ronald Blythe, Selima Hill, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Redgrove,John Silkin and John Burnside. Much of his work has been influenced by rural landscapes and traditions in England and conflict zones such as Bosnia,Rwanda and Kosovo, where he worked delivering humanitarian aid. In all of his writing there is a tension between traditions, fables and spiritual faith and the terrors of failed states, extreme poverty and the voices of suppression and domination.