Ventriloquise

By Ned Denny

Ned Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says in his essay on H lderlin about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night," consist? In the fact that the gods have departed, and in the rootless, heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods' traces, and there are glimpses here "through a veil of names" of nature's saving radiance, of the indestructible delicacy of Claude's last landscape, of a "wild grin of insect glee" just beyond the confines of sleep. As Denny's adept voice 'throws' itself into and through other texts, forms, places, things and times including works by Heine, classical Chinese poets, Pindar, Ronsard, H lderlin, Mallarmé , Victor Hugo and Lorca it becomes clear that the fathoming of our iron age is inseparable from the coming dawn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800173323

Ned Denny

Ned Denny was born in London in 1975. His debut poetry collection, Unearthly Toys: Poems & Masks, was published by Carcanet in 2018 and awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection the following year. B (After Dante), a version of the Divine Comedy, appeared in 2021. This is his third book.

Book preview

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Ventriloquise

NED DENNY

CARCANET POETRY

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Ventriloquism – the art or practice of speaking or producing sounds in such a manner that the voice appears to proceed from some person or object other than the speaker… (OED).

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me… (Galatians 2:20).6

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Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

I.Mode of the Orphan/Time to Die

Breath-Manifester

Two Poems After Ronsard

Chattels (Civitas Dei)

Blaze

Equinox

Arrest

Florescens

Found Poem (Deity or Sacred Puma)

Three Songs for the Turning Year

Night

Opium & Death

Five Poems After Wang Wei

Bycatch

Mughal Shade

Fone World (Civitas Diaboli)

Ithaca

Song

Maker

Heaven

Clareaudience

Blue Skies

Double

On Reading A Treatise of Civil Power

To the Fates

Replying to Subprefect Zhang

Opening the Mouth

Dusk: An Antique Song8

II.Mode of the Flowers/Alive, Alive-O

January

A Dam

Atlantis

Minoan

Vigil

Two Poems After Mallarmé

Reading

DMT (Omphalos)

Psilocybin

Two Zen Poems

Realm

June

Cubist Painting

Two Poems After Neruda

Talisman

Lapis

Comedy

Full Moon in Lent

Two Deathbed Sonnets After Ronsard

Black and White

Potsherds

And the Matter of the Hour Is as a Twinkling of the Eye

Wild Child

Redpilled

Twilight

Iron Age

Posthumous

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

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Ventriloquise

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To use words but rarely

is to be natural;

abstaining from speech

marks him who is

obeying the spontaneity

of his nature (this

was an old saying,

notes the translator, "which

Lao-tze found and adopted");

use words sparingly,

and then all things

will fall into place.

*

The poet writes, as I

think Cocteau has Orpheus

say, yet he is not

a writer; lies talk loud

but are weak, the truth

seems weak but is strong;

the secret’s revealed

to the one who knows how

to keep silent in song.

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I

Mode of the Orphan/Time to Die14

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Breath-Manifester

Each bared morning is a fine time to die,

Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level

Expanse of those lit and flesh-eating fields, the

Clouds that turn like ghost machines, the antic

Tremendous woods where Pan’s breath on your heart

Recharms a flame from its grey-furred ember.

I’ll wear my belt blazoned with Alpha Centauri,

For luck, whilst you’ll surely sport that Oxfam scarf

In whose puce stitch some crone has worked G.I.

E. (Glory To The Most High). Time to die, to be

Disturbed by the one re-re-repeated Word

Fanfared by each time-warping bird, each fierce leaf

Or pimped bud that is but love’s newest halloo

Over the heads of the dead and alive, alive-O.

laughing, you’ll lurch and say or