David Morley

Over the past twenty-five years, the award-winning writer David Morley has become known as one of Britains most original poets. Renowned for his energy and linguistic inventiveness, Morley is a master storyteller, whose poems uncover universes bound together by language. From Romani tales to sharply observed lyrics about nature, from political allegory to vividly imagined histories, his poetry evokes the enchantment and truth of the natural world and our place in it.

In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend, he writes in After a Song by Gustav Mahler. In The Magic of Whats There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue and teach each other lessons; work, love, and lose what they have loved. The central section of the book enacts Clares own belief in the creative forms of nature itself: I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now in a brown huff, Wisdom snaring a warren with a snigger of wires. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us.--George Szirtes

Trad., Margarita Polo. Medios, modernidad y tecnología: Hacia una teoría interdisciplinaria de la cultura es una contribución fundamental a los actuales debates teóricos y metodológicos en torno a los estudios culturales y sobre medios. Los temas abordados van desde su estatus (y futuro) como disciplinas, hasta el significado magico, ritual, sagrado que adoptan la tecnologia y los medios de comunicacion de nuestra epoca, definidos como la esfera de lo nuevo, lo brillante y lo simbolico. Asimismo, se analiza la relacion de la tecnociencia con nuestra definicion de la modernidad y se reflexiona acerca de las criticas planteadas por la teoria poscolonial a los modelos historicos occidentales o eurocentricos hoy prevalecientes. Para profundizar en estas cuestiones, David Morley recurre a un amplio conjunto de disciplinas, desde la geografia cultural, la antropologia y la etnologia, hasta los estudios de diseño, la teoria literaria y la historia del arte, pasando por la teoria poscolonial y los estudios regionales. El resultado es una inedita perspectiva desoccidentalizada de los estudios culturales y sobre medios que desarticula la idea de que nosotros (occidentales) hemos llegado al fin de la Historia, ya sea como resultado de un destino ineluctable fundado en la superioridad del capitalismo de libre mercado con respecto a todas las demas formas de vida social, o como resultado del Deux ex Machina de las nuevas tecnologias basadas en la electricidad y la digitalizacion. Mas que dicotomias o divisiones binarias convencionales, Morley nos muestra las numerosas coincidencias y continuidades entre Occidente y Oriente, entre el pasado tradicional (irracional) y la logica de lo moderno, entre lo magico y lo tecnologico.

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 ChoiceShortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best CollectionFURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetrys power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morleys most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetrys capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the trembling hands of the magician in The Thrown Voice or the living hand of the poets celebrated in Translations of a Stammerer.

A blacksmith creates a girl from fire. A hedgehog conquers a kingdom. How do you ride a Camargue horse through time? How do circus people live, when the glitterball has stopped turning? In these poem-stories David Morley reinvents the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel and making. Opening with a celebration of friendship, the poems tell the world into being. In myths of origin and the natural world, the terrible chronicles of history and the saving power of folk wisdom, the poet weaves spells of Romany and circus language, invents forms and shapes, drawing his readers into a lit circle magical and true. Enchantment concludes a cycle of poems that began with David Morleys celebrated Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings.

Uno de los más importantes teóricos de los estudios culturales actuales examina críticamente en este libro el surgimiento, desarrollo y futuro de la indagación de la relación de las audiencias con los medios, uno de los temas mas conflictivos de la cultura contemporanea. Su posicion, apoyada en importantes trabajos de campo, enfrenta las teorias de los "efectos medibles" o de tiempos cortos, las teorias acotadas a los efectos individuales, para ubicar el estudio de las audiencias en el marco sociocultural, en la relacion con el poder, en las luchas por el significado o por la produccion de sentido. Los estudios de etnografia de la audiencia que Morley sintetiza en este libro se apoyan en un complejo trabajo interdisciplinario que, rompiendo con las formas tradicionales de los estudios sobre los "efectos" de los medios, ingresa contribuciones de la psicologia, la sociologia, la semiotica, la teoria de la ideologia, la historia de los medios. Los solidos trabajos de campo en los que se apoya, la innovacion de sus estrategias metodologicas, dan cuenta de formas de investigacion de la cultura contemporanea que rompen con muchos estereotipos y lugares comunes y contribuyen a un mayor rigor en la critica y el analisis cultural.

Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans and the more than human are twinned and entwined.In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Natures Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors in a theatre of flowers, pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is a zugzwang of six legs and letters. There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethovens Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poets authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.