The Alexandra Sequence
Ingenious, maverick, brilliantly protean – welcome to the quicksilver world of John Redmond’s new collection.” – David Morley
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Ingenious, maverick, brilliantly protean – welcome to the quicksilver world of John Redmond’s new collection.” – David Morley 〰️
In The Alexandra Sequence John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the mummers’ play, a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book takes its title from an area of Liverpool, a city shaped by its recent history of trade and migration, still recovering after a long period of decline. Experiences of uprootedness and social precarity frame suburban lives that are ‘livid with accident’. Drawing on the two central themes of the mummers’ play – combat and resurrection – the poems reveal both dark and light parallels between the modern-day neighbourhood and medieval theatre: the carnivalesque zombie-drummers marching through a local park find their mirror-image in the daily disguises of life in a housing estate, or in the masked infractions of the 2011 English Riots. Mixing narrative and lyric, Redmond paints a neighbourhood of lively, unlikely references from Juvenal to Tommy Cooper, Brueghel to indie rock.
MUDe
MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms off post-industrial community enable us to co-exist facelessly across time and distance, connected but solitary in the virtual realities of the motorway and the Internet. In the title poem, the reader becomes game-player in Redmond’s fictional MUD, where a traditional Irish landscape blurs with fantasy elements. Redmond creates a new kind of poetry from the online world’s fissiparous language, elliptical, self-interrupting, and fixing with invention.
On MUDe:
“the most exciting and inventive collection of poetry I’ve read in the past few years” – Luke Kennard in Poetry London 61 (Autumn 2008)
“a beautiful musicality” - Robert Potts, ‘A Place of Casual Collisions: MUDe by John Redmond’, The Guardian:
Cliona Ni Riordan, ‘John Redmond, MUDe’, Etudes Irlandaises
Kenneth Keating, “‘dude I have alts’: Computer Technology and Poetic Innovation in John Redmond’s MUDe and Geoffrey Squires’s Two New Poems”, Comparative Becomings: Studies in Transition, Ed Michael G. Kelly and Daragh O’Connell. Peter Lang, 2016. 177-195.
Thumb’s Width
The title Thumb’s Width, from the German Daumenbreite (roughly equivalent to an inch), indicating this collection’s concern with the miniature. Sketching the childhood relationship between two brothers, the poems frequently focus on small objects – shrimps, cigarettes, ‘cat’s eyes’, plastic soldiers - to which childhoods become attached. Beginning on the west coast of Ireland, particularly the tiny islands where human settlement has ceased, the book travels out, geographically and thematically, by means of a variety of lyric, comic, and dramatic forms. These patterns act to fold the smaller, remembered patterns of an Irish childhood into the larger shapes of the adult world.
On Thumb’s Width:
“Redmond excels at miniatures, and paints them with a droll, original touch.” - Helen Dunmore in The Guardian
“beautifully discordant” – Colin Graham in The Irish Times
