'In A Dictionary of the English Language, Dr Johnson defines ‘foul’ as ‘full of gross humours.’ It can also mean discoloured, obscene, and profane. Yet the phrase ‘a foul wind’ is specifically nautical: it’s a wind that blows against the direction you want to go — that sends you off-course and into misadventure.
'Isn’t that poetry, though, pushing back against your intention and will? In this new collection, Justin Clemens finds himself lost, wrecked, and washed up on the isle of the damned. He discovers a world of undrinkable Dummheit, stuffed to the gills with cyberpreneurs and pseudonatural secretaries, downsizing corporations and corruption taskforces, ‘80s rappers and ‘90s drugs, planetary plague and terra nullius.
'With a nod to Restoration drama and contemporary philosophy, A Foul Wind is a tour-de-force of morality, politics, and love.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.' (Introduction)
'In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.' (Introduction)
