Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726280
Publication date: June 21, 2021
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726297
Publication date: June 21, 2021
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
This confident second collection by Dai George addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. As with the Auden of the inter-war period, there is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background, glimpsed in the ‘Fooled Evening’ of a world whose seasonal rhythms have fallen out of joint. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration.
“Against a background of ominously skewed weather, these poems search out ‘the structure of the new sky’, asking insistent questions of the world in all its unpredictability. Always sharp-eared, with a soundtrack that ranges from reggae to the most ephemeral jingle, they bring a sparkling attention to dailiness while sounding out a politics entwined with love, hope and subtle humour.” – Zoë Skoulding
“Dai George writes with a syntactical and lexical precision that is staggering. On this second collection he turns his hand to uncovering the minutiae of being in the world; noticing the passage of time; chronicling the sweeps and turns of the political climate; attending to the intimacies of shared experience. In his ‘History of Jamaican Music’, George adds in poetry to what Carolyn Cooper and David Katz have advanced in prose: extending a conversation on the singular contribution of a small Caribbean island to global music culture.” – Kayo Chingonyi
Dai George
Dai George was born in Cardiff in 1986 and has studied in Bristol, New York and London. His poems and criticism have appeared in The Guardian Online, The Boston Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry Review, The White Review, The Lonely Crowd, and many other magazines and anthologies. His first collection, The Claims Office (2013) was an Evening Standard Book of the Year. He works as Reviews Editor for Poetry London and teaches widely, in universities, schools and adult education. His first novel, The Counterplot, came out as an Audible Original in December 2019, narrated by Harry Myers.
His second collection Karaoke King is available now.
Photo by Peter Keeble
“The poems of George’s new collection, Karaoke King, are nothing less than transcendent. No tricksy stuff here. Just lucidity and formal grace; the words and the music. Their ability to move us to tears, to laughter, or contemplation of the mess we make of the world, and its extraordinary capacity for forgiveness, offering fresh opportunities for redemption.”
Kate Ashton, London Grip
“Karaoke King, is everything a second collection should be, surefooted, expansive and hugely entertaining. His voice is completely his own and this book deserves all the prizes it will surely be nominated for … Every poem in this collection has been weighed and counter-weighed, every word has been held up to the light and spoken aloud in the dark. Bravo Dai George, Karaoke King is my poetry book of the year so far.”
Caroline Bracken, Nation Cymru
“Intricately lyrical, Dai George’s second collection Karaoke King is infused with musicality and rhythm … Fractured across place and time, Karaoke King provides a mixtape of disenchanted dreams and bitter realities. However, persistent rhythmic experiments inject a much-needed vitality—it might not be the world the collection hopes for, but it’s the rhythm of life, nonetheless.”
Orla Davey, DURA
“Dai George’s verse is marvelously restive: one poem, mentioning ‘a split and democratic sky’, returns to the important word to harry and query it: “I mean democratic / as an argument that neither side can win.” These poems, many about music, are both thoughtful and melodic: George’s ear is precise, rueful, sanative. His images can amaze, yet through each poem journeys a voice we always want to know better, capable even in the tightest situations of the sort of thought you wish you’d had.”
Vidyan Ravinthiran
