Praise for this Book

‘“You’re awake now./You’re at the end of the line” – there’s something end-of-days about Julian Stannard’s poems, but it’s a gleeful, sharp-toothed, epicurean form of oblivion towards which they rush, “extinguished – it would seem – by rapture”. These are poems of love, “naked, blissful, snookered” and death “the beginning of history/or the end of history”. Stannard’s writing often occupies the red zone; of old wars, too many cigarettes and unlikely encounters with figures real and imagined from history, music and the screen. “The love microbe slips off its bathrobe” here – these are open, insouciant poems which relish and entertain, serving up a cocktail of literate enthusiasm and “Ligurian tumescence”. Fleet-footed, both sophisticated and bawdy, this New and Selected is a “knocking shop of our glorious epoch” and a reckoning-up of a singular, joyous and entirely original body of work.’ —Declan Ryan

‘If Baudelaire wanted to put his finger on the pulse of contemporary poetry, he would find it in these poems. Brilliance on acid.’ —Astrid Alben

‘Julian Stannard demonstrates better than anyone that “humour is a serious business”, that poetry is a space in which you have to earn the right to say absolutely anything you want, and boy, has Stannard cleared that space and earned that right. The ghost of Miles Davis becoming a Banyan tree, talking bulls, Priti Patel in a wicker basket followed by an eye disease called Priti-Patelitis, well-regulated dumplings, Bruno the rabbit-catcher – anything can stray into the frame of poem, and usually does. These poems are a fully-realised world.’ —Matthew Caley

‘Julian Stannard sketches the paradoxes of life at home and abroad. His poems have the rare quality of taking us by surprise while simultaneously delighting us. Once discovered, we can't wait to share them with friends.’ —Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor Emeritus, University of Genoa