Paul Green: Gutter Talk

Paul Green
Gutter Talk

July 2010. 28 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-29-9 (= PSPS 1)
£4.50 (+ 1.00 p&p), €4.50 (+ 1.00 p&p), US$ 6.00 (+ 1.50 p&p)

"Taking its title from Heinrich Böll's The Casualty, Paul Green's sequence is a deliberate, but general observationof the divides between the cultures belonging to the East and the West. More specifically, it is a long meditationupon the contentiousness of war viz. the Crusades, WWI, WWII, and now Iraq and Afghanistan. Gutter Talk is to beread as both response and investigation. Areas of information are layered, mixed and sieved in accor-dance withthe way we receive news - by whatever censored or uncensored forms. Chance and intention combine to produce aresonant text, peculiarly opened by the necessity of its more formal restraints. Gutter Talk is a topical poem,critical of attitudes and events, without being in any way dogmatic or programmatic."

Gavin Selerie

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Commments:

"I'm very engaged by Gutter Talk - Paul comes off as a weirdly eccentric character in much of the volume's (surface)verbal expression, but as a simultaneously deeply committed & probingly philosophical thinker beneath his drollyunruly voice."

Dan Stryk

Excerpt from Gutter Talk

sonnet

A moon has stopped falling, but with an armoured light,
or an occasional perceptibility -
Oh roar, roar ... where there is too delicate a night;
for all the membraned labyrinths are ours to see,

and the wild, but inked-on screens are made to be crawled
through. This wronged world should need a greeting from the mind -
yet I know how its names are written, their sounds called,
and all those fleeting moments raged for, or consigned

to die. There was a moment, though, that seemed to scrap
the best affections. Now what seasons are there left,
or come to scatter in - to knock down, fold and tap
such life upon? I found my answer too bereft

of incidents. Thus, I chose lies, or wore a cap -
one that most could tread on - for dishonesty's trap ...