Publisher's Synopsis
"The Damage: New and Selected Poems" offers an up-beat selection from Milne's emerging oeuvre. Along with excerpts from the earlier works "Sheet Mettle" and "Bench Marks", this edition offers a new version of "How Peace Came", the art installation made with Andrew James, which is featured on the jacket illustration. Artistic collaboration informs a number of poems in dialogue with music, sculpture and pop lyricism, but this selection also includes a number of surprises, such as the occasional poem "Epithalamion" and a homage to Vladimir Mayakovsky. As well as collecting the pamphlets "Songbook", "As it Were" and "Familiars", the new works made available here for the first time include two longer sequences, "[sic]" and "sweeping new measures", which push and pull at the envelopes of contemporary perception. Milne's work can be read through his critical writings, which argue for a reworking of Hegel and Marx, or through his interest in the wittier ends of modernism, a mischievous impulse evident in the collection "Pig Cupid". Although often associated with Cambridge poets such as J.H.Prynne and John Wilkinson, this collection also reveals a distinctive Scottish edge.;The sequence "Aggropolis", first published in "Edinburgh Review", reworks the roadblocks put up around Scottish lyric by Hugh MacDiarmid. More recent poems in this collection suggest friskier dialogues with poetic notes associated with Samuel Beckett, Frank O'Hara, Mina Loy, or Tom Raworth. The damaged goods of contemporary capitalism are rarely far from view, but there is a lyric insouciance that cuts through Milne's wounded provocations.
