John Redmond

Life
Ass.-Editor at Thumbscrew [poetry mag.]; writes regular reviews for London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, and Poetry Review/Eigse Eireann; Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and former Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota; currently writing a novel in 2023.

issued Thumb’s Width (2001), after the German phrase Daumenbreite (thumb-span), indicating a preoccupation with the miniature, treating of brothers“ childhood relationship and small things; MUDe (2008), from MUDsor Multi-User Dimensions being online worlds created by language alone in the electronic age; The Alexandra Sequence (2016) explores urban life through the prism of the ‘mummers play’ and street theatre.

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Works
Poetry
  • Thumb’s Width (Manchester: Carcanet: 2001), 242pp.
  • MUDe (Manchester: Carcanet 2008), 64pp.
  • The Alexandra Sequence (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), 72pp.
Prose
  • Poetry and Privacy (Seren 2013);
  • How to Write a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell: 2005), 168pp. [see contents].
Miscellaneous
  • ed. James Liddy: Selected Poems (Dublin: Arlen House: 2011), with a biographical essay by Tyler Farrell.
Reviews
incl. ‘Stirring your tea is only a normal activity if you stop doing it relatively quickly’; in London Review of Books, !7:13 (6 July 1995) [review of poetry collections by Maurice Riordan, Gerard Woodward, Pauline Stainer, Carolyn Forché, Michael Collier, and Charles Tomlinson.) [available online].
John Redmond"s LRB reviews incl.
  • ‘Stirring your tea is only a normal activity if you stop doing it relatively quickly’ (6 July 1995) - A Word from the Loki by Maurice Riordan; After the Deafening by Gerard Woodward; The Ice-Pilot Speaks by Pauline Stainer; The Angel of History by Carolyn Forché; The Neighbour by Michael Collier; Jubilation by Charles Tomlinson.
  • ‘Fading Out’ (2 November 1995) - The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley.
  • ‘Accidents of Priority’ (22 August 1996) - Can You Hear, Bird by John Ashbery; The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems by Jorie Graham; Selected Poems by Barbara Guest; Selected Poems 1976-1996 by George Szirtes; Adam’s Dream by Peter McDonald.
  • ‘Ringmaster’ (28 November 1996) - Expanded Universes by Christopher Reid.
  • ‘War against the Grown-Ups (21 August 1997) - The Dumb House by John Burnside; A Normal Skin by John Burnside.
  • ‘Send no postcards, take no pictures’ (21 May 1998) - One Train by Kenneth Koch; A World where News Travelled Slowly by Lavinia Greenlaw; A Painted Field by Robin Robertson.
and—
  • ‘Perish the though ‘t (8 February 2001) - Selected Poems by Derek Mahon.


Bibliographical details
How to Write a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell 2005), 168pp. CONTENTS: 1. The Question of Address; 2. Viewpoint; 3. The Question of Voices; 4. The Question of Scale; 5. Uses of Repetition; 6. Image; 7. Short Lines; 8. Long Lines; 9. Diction; 10. Uses of Syntax; 11. Tone; 12. Traditional Forms: Ode; 13. Traditional Forms: Epistle; 14. The Question of Background; 15. Conclusion: The Question of Variety; Index.

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Criticism
David Wheatley, review of Poetry and Privacy by John Redmond, in The Guardian (21 June 2013) [as attached.]

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Quotations
“Limo”: ‘You wouldn’t want this front-seat in your face / if you were me, if I were you, / so much in-your-face the Manhattan view / is cut-and carved like a crust / about its bulbous sheen. You wouldn’t want to guess / how much of life goes over my head / - and yours - flyover by flyover, in thin slices / of distance around the driver’s head: / small dreams where you wouldn’t / want to live. For if you were he, and I / were you, we wouldn’t pause here as he / must, where the pot-bellied bridges reflect / reflections from the road. We would make a fist also / and have it, as the streetsign does, that says, Our Lady of Snows.’ (In The Irish Times, 23 May 2005 [Weekend]).

Two Poems, in London Review of Books (21 March 1996)
“Before and After”  

After murder, the sleep of murder,
its slipways closed, its map unclimbable.
But, before that, as a car-door flicks

into last year’s Festival, it’s early yet.
After a lock clicks, the car relaxes,
reflections flicker from shop to shop

and most of what he is hangs from his hand.
After a balloon, the weight of a child
unbalances him and something draws

against a hard corner – but before this –
ice-cream, bells, a landscape of heifers,
mothers leaning across sunlit windshields

and, from side to side, nowhere to park,
except where bicycles curve their shadows
on separate outlines in the grass.

Before pickups crash across back fields,
there are small cries in the finishing trees.
Before the short flash of a coffinplate,

the scarecrow falls from an empty hat,
the sun twists through the country stiles,
the earthworms dive and rise and dive,

because what could be done had to be done.
After the town stands for the hearing,
before any sentence is read,

the newspaper shows two photographs:
This is his face as a young man.
And this is the man’s face after.
   
“The Last Hitchhiker”  

The last hitchhiker before town,
a pony-tailed Jesus with a sign
wavers wickedly in the door-panel.
Dublin, Texas? Is that what you mean?
As he leans through the cocked side-window,
an inch-to-the-mile map spreads from his side

and a long, dirty fingernail pierces a bay.
Yes, I like the cut of you, hitchhiker, hijacker,
you may case your backpack into my hatchback,
let your sleeping-bag roll on the back-seat
as the exhaust-pipe opens its flyblown parachute.

 One by one, the road-signs flicker by
and we sleepwalk under the skin of a car,
passing the lay-by, the drive-in eatery,
the scrapyard where lifting-cranes
scrunch up spent engines
and a bald-headed man pursues with vigour
the hare-lipped, shirt tailed assassin.
Available at London Review of Books (21 March 1996) - online; accessed 18.09.2023.

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