Rough Breathing: Selected Poems

For over three decades Harry Gilonis's poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time.

Gilonis's work has a light, lucid beauty underpinned by formal and procedural invention, with lyrics written from love and landscape as well as poems made from the innards of language. There is collaged bird-song, experimental versioning from the ancient Chinese and text written by a 'bot'. Borders between 'original' and 'translation' are straddled, or blurred, in intriguing and innovative ways.

Objectivist after the fact, party without nostalgia to the British Poetry Revival, cognisant of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Gilonis's poems are aware of their shape on the page and the sound they make as they go past the ear. They insist on being themselves as fully and openly as possible. The versatility and range of Rough Breathing, its use of processes, transparent or opaque, make it--besides being a fine collection--a radical pattern-book to challenge teachers and students alike.

Harry Gilonis is a poet, editor, publisher, and intermittently a critic writing on art, poetry and music. His writing has been translated into Catalan, (Scots) Gaelic, German, Polish, and Spanish. Poetry publications include Reliefs (1988), Pibroch (1994), Reading Holderlin on Orkney (1995), Walk the Line (1996), as well as collaborations with visual artists, Axioms (1994, with David Connearn), The Leiermann (after Schubert, with David Rees) and Forty Fungi (1994, with Erica van Horn).