The English Funerals

The English Funerals is a collection of ten-line prose poems which embody an exploration of ‘epic’ verse and instantiate epic themes: the crossing of water, the consultation of oracles, descents into under– or otherworlds; the presence of miraculous beasts, and the immanence of death. Each short text allusively or explicitly contains three such themes and they are presented in a variety of voices – some old, some contemporary. The effect is that of an aural mosaic: each poem (tile) itself represents an epic fragment, but is juxtaposed with other tiles which themselves yield another story, another fragment of the epic whole – a disconcerting geography, whose voices and histories are present only briefly on the rim of extinction.