Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Oyster by Michael Pedersen Oyster
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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Oyster by Michael Pedersen Oyster. Written by Michael Pedersen / Illustrated by Scott Hutchison. Paperback. Share: Reviews. Pedersen's poems exist in a febrile realm of heightened emotion; they come pouring across the page like a rowdy crowd at a Hogmanay street party [with] an infectious enthusiasm for the downright amazingness of existence' Scotsman. About the Book. Oyster is the second collection from prize-winning Edinburgh poet Michael Pedersen. From Grez-sur-Loing and festive nights to sizzling summers stretched out in the Meadows and Portobello, Michael Pedersen’s unique brand of poetry captures a debauchery and a disputation of characters, narrated with an intense honesty and a love of language that is playful, powerful and penetrative; he vividly illuminates scenes with an energy that is both witty, humourous but also deeply intelligent. Oyster is iced, spiced, baked and beaming for your pleasure. Oyster features bespoke illustrations from Frightened Rabbit lead singer and songwriter Scott Hutchison. ‘Oyster’ by Michael Pedersen, with illustrations by Scott Hutchison. This is the second poetry collection from Michael Pedersen, following 2013’s deservedly well-received Play With Me . Pedersen is well known as a co-founder of the Neu! Reekie! collective, which organizes nights of poetry, music and, if this collection is anything to go by, debauchery. Indeed, the poet’s preoccupation with hedonism – sex, drugs and alcohol all feature – puts you in mind of the Beat poets. What really distinguishes this collection, though, is a combination of verbal ingenuity and, courtesy of Scott Hutchison, characterful and witty accompanying illustrations. The best of the poems have a sensual lyricism that transcends both the Bohemian excesses and the apparent capriciousness. In ‘Obsessive Cannibal Love Poem’, for example, Pedersen writes: the biscuits I brought to snack on are your bones baked and sweetened; like counting stars I do not think I will ever be done kissing you: honey all over and deep inside, I will swallow your dancing tongue. The writing is clear, accessible and immediate – as befits on-stage performance, no doubt, but at times it suggests the simultaneous lightness of touch and depth of insight characteristic of, say, Norman MacCaig or Simon Armitage. Pedersen muses over playful questions as well as large emotions. In ‘Starry-Eyed’ he asks ‘can a bell ring underwater?’; in the title poem he wonders ‘How does tongue taste to oyster?’ before concluding ‘Best not to know.’ The lively humour present in the words and images contributes greatly to the book’s winning charisma, and helps to over-ride the occasional lapse into outdated Kerouac-esque bluster or potential self-mythologising (as in ‘Invitation to Luncheon with Caddy D’ and ‘Manchester John: Episode II’). The most successful poems tend towards dynamism, through their sheer verbal energy and their restless subject matter: Birds and trains I love to wake to, our great migrants, custodians of perpetual movement, fucking fascinating things – one engineered majesty, the other … in fact that goes fur both. (‘Birds and Trains’) Pedersen’s imagery is often a startling delight. ‘I’m a PC’ begins with an arresting image: ‘Reilly’s chest puffs out like/a pair of bibles.’ Elsewhere the poet combines the ordinary and the extraordinary to appreciable effect: I love you, she said, with the mechanical bareness of a warden clamping a car to the pavement, the payment meter and itself … (‘Gravity’) The fine, daft, clever poem ‘Transmorphosizing’ describes how a carpenter turns into a chest of drawers: The middle drawer was his heart – it had fallen off the runners, jammed so tightly that to open it would split the delicate wood; it would remain closed, widowed. This is typical Pedersen – to take an unlikely image and escalate it from a point of potential whimsy (the carpenter is called Chester Drawers) to a deeper, more affecting place altogether. When Pedersen receives a text from his girlfriend (herself a terrific poet) concerning ‘Humping Cows’, he composes a poem that begins ‘Dear Hollie/Let them hump’ before seeing in his support for their freedom to, er, love ‘a spirited free-thinking move/towards righteousness, beatitude/tender songs. But I’m no fur fooling/nae one, I’m love-struck and horny.’ It’s the love-struck rather than the horny Pedersen that writes the best poems, the ones that are filled with a life-affirming wonder. It is also this mature, more socially motivated Pedersen that approaches the subject of racism in ‘Conversation Overheard in Craigmillar Dental Practice’, a powerful and indeed unshakeable poem. The conversation, whether transcribed or invented (and I’d guess the former), is horribly plausible: ‘They’d huv you think you were sending them off to the electric chair rather than back to their ain fuckin country’; ‘Now I was thinking, eh – and hopefully you agree wi me – I’d rather be robbed off a Scot than yin o’ them any day.’ Here Pedersen confronts unpleasant attitudes with a detachment, a lack of commentary that results in a poem that is more, not less, disarming and effective; he allows the racism to present its own ugliness, with no overt additional judgement needed. Scott Hutchison’s illustrations deserve a special mention. They are by turns imaginative, amusing, sensual and provocative and thus they provide a perfect visual accompaniment to the poems. Hutchison is best known as a musician, but it is no surprise to learn that he studied illustration at the Glasgow School of Art. On the evidence of his work in Oyster , it is very much to be hoped that he will provide artwork for more books in the future. The poetry scene in Scotland has undergone some fascinating changes in recent years. Many Scottish poets of previous generations – such as Edwin Morgan and Iain Crichton Smith – were more comfortable, I think it’s fair to say, writing for the page than performing on the stage. Yet the contemporary writer is often expected to have a triple-layered presence: on the page, on the stage and online. The ebook version of Oyster is supplemented with audio recordings of the poet reading eleven of the pieces in the collection. While there are undeniably poets whose performance and/or social media skills surpass their literary merit, perhaps the future lies with poets like Pedersen who excel at all three. The poem ‘Oyster’ features a line that could equally apply to this vivid and spirited book: ‘oyster has many magics’. Oyster by Michael Pederson, illustrated by Scott Hutchison, is published by Polygon, 2017. Kevin MacNeil. Kevin MacNeil is a novelist, poet, screenwriter, editor and playwright from the Outer Hebrides. He is the author of books such as The Brilliant & Forever and The Diary of Archie the Alpaca , and editor of Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology (Selected by JL Borges and A Bioy Casares) and These Islands, We Sing . MacNeil has won numerous awards and currently lectures in creative writing at the University of Stirling. Related Articles. ‘If This Were Real’ by Gerda Stevenson. Gerda Stevenson is one of Scotland’s great renaissance women, equally gifted at acting, directing and writing. She has written, adapted and performed in numerous radio plays, as well as writing and directing for the stage, and has starred alongside Mel Gibson in Braveheart. In 2012, her layered, nuanced play Federer Versus Murray enthralled a packed […] ‘Play With Me’ by Michael Pedersen. Michael Pedersen’s aptly titled Play With Me is full of the writerly joy of playing with words, a delight in their sound and appearance as much as their meaning. Pedersen is drawn time and again to alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhymes and half‐rhymes, as if he is making patterns as much as poems; but his […] ‘The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping’ by Russell Jones. Edinburgh-based poet Russell Jones has published three pamphlets and edited Where Rockets Burn: Contemporary Science Fiction Poetry from the UK. The Green Dress Whose Girl Is Sleeping marks his debut book-length collection. The titles of the poems point towards idiosyncrasy and diversity — ‘My Secrets as a God’, ‘My Adoration of Tiramisu’, ‘Random Sample from […] ‘A Clearance’ by Fiona Wilson. If the book’s title and author’s name suggest a connection with Scotland this is entirely appropriate — Wilson grew up in Scotland and from the very first poem (‘Victorian Scotland’), a sense of Scottishness pervades her debut collection. The Scots Magazine, the Caledonian forest, Burns, Stevenson, Trocchi and Troon are all referenced. This is not […] Michael Pedersen & Scott Hutchison on Oyster. Our poetry columnist speaks with Michael Pedersen, co-pilot of Neu! Reekie! and Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit, to get the dirt on their succulent new collaboration of Michael's poetry and Scott's artwork: Oyster. The Skinny: how does Oyster compare to your first collection, Play With Me ? Michael Pedersen: It’s longer; it’s stronger; it’s likely more playful and severe in the one dollop. Most of these poems are appearing for the first time. Unlike with Play with Me where I published pieces in magazines and anthologies as I went, I kept these mostly to myself. Having worked with Gerry Cambridge [Editor of The Dark Horse poetry magazine] editorially and published and read further and fiercer, I’m now more confident in unveiling them in one strident swoop. The love poems remain ubiquitous, the liberalist free thinking attitude towards drugs and shagging balloons up and boogies. I’ve mined deeper with contemporary Scots language pieces and think I’ve upped my pop poetry ante. As of, the sugar paper lilted love pieces with brutal wee endings, well they get soppier and more gnarly still. Play with Me was soupy noodles, this is the full ramen.