Very Man

by Charles Boyle

As a street beggar (Tamerlaine?) in the opening poem warns, a life is no simple narrative with a beginning, middle and end. The Very Man, Charles Boyle's fourth Carcanet collection, is rich in unexpected digressions and Yuri Gagarin and a star of the silent screen, American films and the Eastern Bloc revolutions, D.H. Lawrence and deep-frozen fish, religion and a self-assembly bookshelves kit, Masai initiation rites and suburban adultery, 1812 and office afternoons. Here too are Stendhal in a Paris heat-wave, Muybridge murdering his wife's lover and other portrait sketches that, for all their clarity and cunning, often refuse to distinguish between real and invented lives.

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

British poet and novelist, also writing as "Jack Robinson", Founder of the publishing house CB Editions.

Also published one novel as "Jennie Walker"