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Alistair Noon

Biography
Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury, Bucks. Besides time spent in Russia and China, he has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, where he works as a professional translator. Following appearances at international sound poetry festivals in the mid- to late nineties, his work has appeared in magazines including Jacket, Poetry Wales and World Literature Today, as well as in several chapbooks and the full-length collection Earth Records.
Notes
Recordings
This recording was made at Queen Mary University of London by Jacqui Johnson on 17 May 2012.
- The Gulls of Camden
- The Molecule Man
- To a Friend in Iron Tree City
- The Photo Flies to the Land of Morals
- Guerrillistan
- Conversation with Professor Smirnitsky
- Punk Upgrades to First Class
- The Lakefarers
- Motility Patterns
- The Falcon of the Lausitz
- The Wolves of Brandenburg
- The Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1960
- Stonecipher Towers
- The Written Complaint
Bibliography
- At the Emptying of Dustbins (Oystercatcher, 2009)
- In People's Park (Penumbra, 2009)
- Animals and Places (Longbarrow, 2010)
- Long and Other Short Poems (Silkworms Ink, e-chapbook, 2010)
- Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution (Gratton Street Irregulars, 2010)
- Out of the Cave (Calder Wood, 2011)
- Across the Water (Longbarrow, 2012)
- Swamp Area (Longbarrow, 2012)
- Earth Records (Nine Arches, 2012)
As translator:
- The Last Drop. Versions of August Stramm (Intercapillary, e-chapbook, 2009)
- 16 Poems. Monika Rinck (Barque, 2009)
- The Bronze Horseman. Alexander Pushkin (Longbarrow, 2010)
As editor:
- Seán Rafferty. A Revue (Intercapillary, e-chapbook, 2009)
Essays
Sample Text
From 'By the Bornholmer Bridge', Swamp Area
Each spring, clouds rise at the old coastline,
the vanished cliffs of the Berlin Wall,
where the Asahi Foundation expresses its joy
that the national fissure has closed.There are clouds across Wuhan Campus, too,
on hills where Spring’s Red Guards once fought.
It costs ten Yuan now to watch these performers,
wowing the audience with their white blooms.Their season words are ready to rain.
Gift. Cover. Commodity. Species.
Among those meanings, how could the trees
have existed before they got names?Reviews
'One fascinating thing about the poems in Alistair Noon’s At the Emptying of Dustbins is the way in which their content almost makes them read like poetry in some eerily good translation: political lyrics are few and far between in contemporary British poetry. There is a perceived distance in British tradition between the personal and the political, and in this pamphlet Noon plants the fertile soil between the two.' -- Nathan Thompson, Horizon Review
'I don't know any poet who flies about so carefreely, never alighting in the pigeonhole for long enough to become ringed. Each poem represents a moment of attention just long enough to signal its intention, and then it moves on.' --Giles Goodland
'This is genuinely terrific writing, of wonderfully gratifying complexity. There's no one else, to my limited knowledge at least, who is taking on these big questions – with so many terms of reference. It's work that draws me back, which is something that real poetry
demands.' --Tom Lowenstein on Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution'There is a poetical category called “the new formalism” but I don’t think Alistair Noon is in
it. For all his belief in formal properties he is not writing in opposition or trying to turn any clock back. He does, I think, see a central space in current poetry which is being neglected or drained by extremism on both sides and seeks to regenerate it. He is just as concerned as any avant-gardist to use poetical language to reveal what lies below the surface, but does not see this being done by negating language itself, and thus denying cultural partnership with the reader. He distrusts the levels which the experimenter needs to excavate through, and this means he trusts perception.' -- Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review'Knockout poet.' --Kelvin Corcoran
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- The Molecule Man