Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.

*A city poet playing with country themes in a tongue-in-cheek way; references range from popular culture to country songs and heavy metal*An accomplished guitarist whose own original songs feature in this collection; will appeal to a younger audience and fans of indie music, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey, The National Strike etc...*Witty and humorous, Crothers plays with a range of surreal and conflicting voices*One of the key contributors in Carcanet's New Poetries VI anthology and a popular performer within the Cambridge poetry scene*For fans of Paul Muldoon and John Ashbery

About the Author
Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984. He lives in Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in English at Girton College in 2010. He works as a library assistant, book reviewer and teacher. He contributes a regular series of 'Vestiges' to the literary magazine, PN Review. His work was anthologised in Carcanet's bestselling New Poetries VI in 2015.

Reviews
'The rollicking Adam Crothers confesses a preference for form "as jester or saboteur". There is menace and mischief in equal measure.' The Guardian on New Poetries VI (Crothers was a contributor); 'There may be a little Tennyson in the lighting here, but there's also Kanye and Austin Powers and an associative sequencing of phrases reminiscent of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon.' The Irish Times


Awards
Winner of The Strong/Shine Poetry Award 2017 and The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017.



Book Information
ISBN 9781784102449
Author Adam Crothers
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Weight(grams) 159g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 154mm * 10mm