Fred Spoliar - Goodlands
Veer2 Publication 012 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-31-8] A5 size. 36 pages.
February 2022. 
£4.00 (+ postage and packing)

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Fred Spoliar - Goodlands

Urgently unproductive, goodlands will and won’t dig into the rubbled grounds of capitalocene pastoral, where the accumulations of enclosure and empire and the accretions of tenancy are the conditions for sonneteering and the lyric subject’s ‘slot for frack sachet i’. This poetry refuses to (be) work, ‘to hitch art to the ethical plough’, to improve; rather, it inhabits the detritus of proximity, an ‘aesthetics of crushed’ where residual exhaustions meet blackberry-juice erotics, contradictory flowerboxes, and comrade owls. If HM Land Registry structures the couplet, where are the (already-and-not-yet-sprung) poetics of land defence? goodlands is nettle-sharp and wanting, haunting ‘this park I have to unlearn loving / but also can’t leave’.

-      Katy Lewis Hood

From the Acts of Inclosure to the Shard's lifts and panels, goodlands reaches out to killed history, spitting songs of terra firma and bird prosody. Was pastoral lost from the off, Saturn and Penda striding over their demesnes, or can the packaging and owned flowers around our feet proliferate into something else? It's difficult to imagine better ways of being with each other when the property relation is chewing it all up and the angels of conformity run free, everyone you love tired out in the park we 'can't leave'. But the warped sonnets and manifestos of this book produce a set of inventive resistant materials, 'best love-forms', where no one needs to bother with the word 'psychogeography' and your favourite poets play on forever. In the depths of the night, with the disaster's afterimage right there in front of us, goodlands asks 'How can we hurt so much, and not wake.'

-      Dom Hale

This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

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