Synopses & Reviews
This collection of beautiful, avant-garde poems explores the new forms of community that have developed in response to modern devices, such as cars and the internet. Experimental language, including an innovative use of the lingo used by players of multi-user dimension (MUD) online computer games, skillfully illustrates how people can anonymously coexist while feeling wholly connected.
Review
"A poet to enjoy now and watch out for in the future." —The Observer
Synopsis
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 of 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 fizzing with invention.
Cover photograph Nathan Lankford, Florida &16th (c) 2008 Cover design StephenRaw.com
About the Author
John Redmond is a professor of creative writing at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of How to Write a Poem and a poetry reviewer for The Guardian, Irish Times, Literary Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.