Wanderer: Songs of Solitude, Fragility, and Change

Wanderer: Songs of Solitude, Fragility, and Change
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1446665356

What do you do when life seems overwhelming, the world seems alienating and physical injury has become debilitating? For artist and poet Bruce Rimell, the answer was to turn away from the world, and to seek solace in landscape, astronomy and poetry. Written over a period of four years, ‘Wanderer: Songs of Solitude, Fragility, and Change’ emerged from this challenging time: the poetry addresses grief and memory, as well as slow-burn changes in the course of a human life. It mourns the passing of a once-cherished friendship, stands in sorrow before waterfalls, celebrates the passing of the seasons visible in the natural world. Framed as a journey across the heavens, the collection is interspersed with deeply personal, and idiosyncratic, hymns to various planets and stars, before returning home to Earth. ‘Wanderer…’ takes in diverse shifts in identity and lifelong movements through walks in moorlands and the wilds, as well as dreams, otherworldly encounters at secluded falls, and the night sky, all sprung from a somewhat hyperactive perspective. A free verse diary of some dark and difficult days punctuated with shards of light, ‘Wanderer’ takes the reader through a time of lost illusions, but a magical journey nonetheless. Sometimes, sorrow is as beautiful as joy: this collection seeks out exactly that kind of beauty.

Bloodhoney Songs

Bloodhoney Songs
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1445298872

Iceland is often labelled ‘a land of ice and fire’ – these days it has become something of a cliché – but when artist and poet Bruce Rimell visited with his husband in 2023, he felt plunged into a world of blood and honey, a place of poetry and song, recalling the Old Norse mythic images, as well as the magma which underlies and sculpts the vistas of this volcanic country… “to which I will say: I am a poet, I pray to waterfalls, let it outpour like rain…” Simultaneously a journey through Iceland’s natural, cultural and human landscapes, as well as a dreaming fall into the frenetic soul of a hyperactive poet, ‘Bloodhoney Songs’ takes in scenes from Reykjavik, ekphrastic verses springing from Icelandic music – from Björk to múm, Sigur Rόs to Ólafur Arnalds – and geological wonders, to evoke a sublime process of emergence from lifelong traumas as a Queer/ADHD person into a more hopeful place… “breathe out: you are coming to an end of your grief, a closing of time…” Moving from the waking world, through fractured dreams of love in Loki’s arms, into an eternal moment of stillness – the beginning of a fragile new world – this unique outsider’s view of Iceland is possibly the most unusual perspective on the country and its fascinating people you’ve ever read!

Echoes For Aphrodite

Echoes For Aphrodite
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1445793261

Artist and poet Bruce Rimell brings another strange and colourful poetic travelogue, springing from eight inspiring days and nights on the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades… "everything is touched by fingers of gales, all’s in motion: sea, air, land shivers" …walking through a volcanic terrain buffeted by strong winds from the tail end of an Aegean storm, with his perception transformed by calls for the return of the world famous ‘Venus de Milo’ – more properly ‘Aphrodite of Milos’ – back to her home island, the sight of her in the mountains… "hey Paris…! Aphrodite wants to go home" …as if Aphrodite herself was whispering in the breezes, her truest melody, feeling her way into the poet’s heart, his words, his dreams… "I’ve been hearing her voice, the one who smiles, who persuades into the human heart, and mine so easily opened, so swayed by heaven on earth, and shadows" …these verse notes are echoes, fragments of a song, as much from Aphrodite as for her, as well as an elegy to a unique and stunning island landscape… "ask how and why all day and all night upon the Melian isle…"

Shapes Of Shiny Brow

Shapes Of Shiny Brow
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2024-02-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1446148823

“…everyone’s got something to say with your mouth, even me…” A hyperactive, idiosyncratic and deeply personal journey into the mercurial Welsh poet-prophet figure of Taliesin, framed as a magical pilgrimage around Llyn Geirionydd in North Wales, evoking the lake and its waters as the bard’s own cauldron from which he continually emerges in different historical, mythical and fictional guises… “sometimes dreams are wiser than the waking…” Unfolding layers of meaning from the protohistorical cynfardd of the Old North to the ‘radiant brow’ of medieval legend, as well as Taliesin’s contemporary significance and links with other cultures, this crazed, garrulous exploration runs through the archetypal Celtic poet’s hall of mirrors with eccentric wit and blazing energy… “stand behind the cataract unbound, close my eyes: hear me, I speak...” Culminating in a wildly subjective, underwater encounter with Taloiastinos and the watis, two timeless and interrelated forerunners of the Taliesin mythos, and a forested fall into the mindset of the visionary poet who experiences no separation between self and other, this book is likely to be one of the most riddling, esoteric and obscure treatments of Taliesin ever released! “I am one who waits, says, I am one who watches, says, I am one who wanders off away, says…”

Beeley Far The North

Beeley Far The North
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2023-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 144668279X

In summer 2022, poet and artist Bruce Rimell visited the Coasts of Antrim, Northern Ireland. After a lifetime reading Irish mythology, and wandering that ancient landscape in his mind for years, this was the first time he had set foot on the physical island itself. Unsurprisingly, his imagination caught fire, and ‘Beeley far The North’ is the result. Framed as a picaresque jaunt around the region of Ballycastle, taking in notable legends and landmarks from around the town as well as Rathlin Island, this eccentric narrative poem takes as its primary inspiration the Middle Irish tale ‘Buile Suibhne’, or, in Seamus Heaney’s translation ‘Sweeney Astray’. Rather than retell this tragic story of this frenzied and cursed figure, half wildman half broken bird, through a different perspective, however, Bruce chose to take poor Suibhne’s madness as a character to inhabit, eyes through which to experience this part of Ireland in a madcap way which mirrored the rapid “seven days, eight nights” of his sojourn there. In doing this, he has also tentatively begun to forge something of a new, unconventional, and hopefully unique, approach to psychogeography, which he has playfully termed the beeley. Oddly unorthodox but always vibrant in tone, ‘Beeley Far The North’ is an experiment in trying to speak of the human dynamics of landscape in a fresh and hyperactive way.

Elegies And Dirty Truths

Elegies And Dirty Truths
Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Bruce Rimell
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1445298953

A dark, brutally honest, and sometimes sordid voyage, written with a wired, savage voice, into the promiscuous heart of a gay/Queer and hyperactive/ADHD outsider who has internalised a world of pain, but still finds himself, standing, still surviving... "don’t freak if this all goes horribly wrong: it’s fine…" Trigger warnings run their gauntlets everywhere, but there are moments of beauty and sorrow, which is beauty in another guise... "don’t see my eagerness, my tears, or if my eyes blank: it’s fine…" Not for the faint-hearted perhaps, this collection jumps frenetically from elegiac tributes for queer heroes to self-destructive sexual acts in a kind of shadowy no-place and no-time, confronting casual encounters, abuse and queerphobic hate towards a poetic self attempting to act as an antenna for Queer suffering everywhere... "don’t stop: I’ll be your willing sacrifice…"

Schubert's Beethoven Project

Schubert's Beethoven Project
Author: John M. Gingerich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2014-05-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1139952080

Why couldn't Schubert get his 'great' C-Major Symphony performed? Why was he the first composer to consistently write four movements for his piano sonatas? Since neither Schubert's nor Beethoven's piano sonatas were ever performed in public, who did hear them? Addressing these questions and many others, John M. Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's career and his relationship to Beethoven. Placing the genres of string quartet, symphony, and piano sonata within the cultural context of the 1820s, the book examines how Schubert was building on Beethoven's legacy. Gingerich brings new understandings of how Schubert tried to shape his career to bear on new hermeneutic readings of the works from 1824 to 1828 that share musical and extra-musical pre-occupations, centering on the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet and the Cello Quintet, as well as on analyses of the A-minor Quartet, the Octet, and of the 'great' C-Major Symphony.

Migrations

Migrations
Author: Charlotte McConaghy
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250204011

* INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of the Year in Fiction "Visceral and haunting" (New York Times Book Review) · "Hopeful" (Washington Post) · "Powerful" (Los Angeles Times) · "Thrilling" (TIME) · "Tantalizingly beautiful" (Elle) · "Suspenseful, atmospheric" (Vogue) · "Aching and poignant" (Guardian) · "Gripping" (The Economist) Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.

Alastor

Alastor
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 126
Release: 1816
Genre: English poetry
ISBN:

How to Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing
Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher: Melville House
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1612198554

** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.