Product Description

Possession and loss, rapture and despair: David St. John's narrator in this dazzling collection of poems remains unflinchingly aware that the trajectory between these two states is both brief and irresistible. Like modern Dante's Virgil, he guides us through a mosaic ofexperiences to depict the vast architecture of erotic desire and communion. The sexual bond, with its potential for the breakdown of all spiritual and physical boundaries between two formerly separate beings, becomes the site of almost unbearable psychological and erotic tension that runs throughout the collection. The Red Leaves of Nightfinds its breathtaking power in a recognition of the necessary impermanence of such communion, and gives voice to that most courageous of modern men--one who grasps the dangers of ecstasy yet cannot turn away.

Customer Reviews (5)

Got poetry?
These meditations on sexual intimacy, memories of love & desire, the passage of daily and historical time, color, place, and language are both devastatingly beautiful and raw in their emotion. St. John deals inabstractions, but I would not call him an abstract poet.Perhaps you couldcall it invention, perhaps it is metaphor or alchemy - he is toying withthe line between the concrete and the abstract._The Red Leaves of Night_begs the question of when a detail - the color of a woman's clothing or thetune she hums - is concrete and when it becomes a mere thought, anabstraction.Ultimately, St. John suggests that concrete and abstract aretwo sides of the same coin - that every word and every object has thepotential to be (or to signify) both, though that potential is neitherneutral nor safe.

lovely and lyric
This book was gorgeous.I immediately slid into his perception of places and relationships; his tone and language flowed well and were easy to follow, including everything from contractions in "Nocturnes &Aubades" to a faintly antiquated tone in "Troubadour."Thenaked body does not inhibit him, either; his descriptions mythologize thenatural beauty of the nude.Also, in a contemporary sense, his choice toleave out punctuation for several poems is brave, for he does it well.Ionly wish I could form poems as lovely as his.Even though the title poemleads the reader "to some newly solitary / & distant home,"the journey there is worth it.

Sensual Captivation
I found David St John's The Red Leaves of Night to be a captivating and stimulating read - both in its thematic sophistication and elegance of language. St John shows a capacity for precise and economic use of languagewhich results in a clarity which fully reveals the strength of his poeticimagery. This strength manifests most clearly in the many sensual metaphorswhich he uses to describe the human body. These wonderful images accumulatethroughout the collection and their highly visual nature makes the poemscome alive with images of the naked bodies which populate the text. The poems impressed me with their thematic sophistication, the clarity withwhich they expressed ideas, the intimacy of their detail and the honestnakedness of the subject matter. The Red Leaves of Night is a collection ofimmediate, passionate and powerful poetry.

Patron Saint of Contemporary Poetry
David St. John's "The Red Leaves of Night" is a must-read for all lovers of sensual, intellectual, and entertaining poetry.St. John's use of language is simply elegant while his descriptions are vivid andtangible enough to transform the text into a picture book.As he writes inthe poem "Music", "It became my passion to explaineverything/ With music even the randomness of starlight or death" weas readers plead for more lessons because we know he is speaking the truth!David St. John's collection is a modern example of what poetry is and whatit can truly be!

Language in love with mystery.
St. John is one of our masters, and The Red Leaves of Night is a gift to all readers of poetry who believe in the power of language to enact desire, embody mystery, and restore wonder.The sequence of Aubades and Nocturnesis dazzling; the final section of the book is very nearly transporting. ... Read more

Product Description

A haunting and inventive book length sequence of poems from the distinguished author of Study for the World's Body.

The Face is both fiercely lyrical and intimately conversational. Coming to terms with the failure of a great love, the speaker descends into his own dark night of the soul. Here are poems that explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly, the speaker reassembles his life and again finds faith in himself and the world. These poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope; meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others.

Deeply passionate and raw in its candour, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Lowell's Life Studies and Ashbery's Self–Portrait in a Convex Mirror were.

Customer Reviews (5)

The Fractured Eye
It's not hard to find the overriding theme of David St. John's The Face. Of course, one might say, obviously, the "novella in verse" is about faces, or more specifically the speaker's face, or even more specifically and metaphorically, the speaker's appearance and history/story. One might even continue on this thread and come to the conclusion that the work is about the masks we adopt (XXVII). But I believe the poems are more about the process of reflection, disintegration and understanding.
Throughout the work, there are references to mirrors and more importantly the broken shards of a mirror, as well as the ideas of shattering and disassembling. This is imperative to apprehend the mind set of the speaker. Here is a person who has suffered some trauma (does it really matter what?) and is merely trying to reassemble what has become undone ("assembling the disassembling"). Instances of this fracturing are also evident in the passages that speak about the movie being made out of the speaker's life. The creator (ironic), Infanta (telling) wishes to make the movie in reverse, that is show the speaker's life in an inverted sequence a la Merlin-esque.
Some of my favorite poems are XXV about the black rooms and even more XXX, the Edge World theme park idea. Overall, I think that David St. John has got something here, a cohesive and modern idea that translates well for the reader, as well as being a genuinely entertaining piece of literature (and I say literature because it is both poem and prose).

"The masks of Death, of Laughter...of the River...of flesh."
Questions of identity constitute the foreground of David St. John's most recent book, The Face, in which a multivocal anonymous speaker is continually "assembling and dissembling" his sense of self.The loosely coherent plot of this "Novella in Verse" (a categorization which presents its own identity crisis at the level of genre) has to do with various performances and shatterings of the speaker's identity, ranging from grief over a recently lost love to the absurd making of a movie about his life, starring a 19-year-old androgynous girl."Who am I?" he asks at the beginning of the second of the book's three parts; "(Who was I; who will I be?)... I held up my soul to the highest bidder & along came/ That devilman carrying his basket jangling with pieces of jagged mirror."

In his debut at the start of the book, the speaker appears costumed in a trench coat alleged to have been worn by Dennis Hopper.With faux sophistication, he repeatedly asserts that "Yesterday is so boring, don't you think?"In brilliant satiric moments throughout the book, St. John captures the flavor of Los Angeles' Hollywood culture in all its materialism, its loneliness, its vanity, and particularly in its conflation of reality and fiction, until the two seem interchangeable, equally violent and disorienting.At the heart of the poet's critique is an illustration of how Hollywood culture has bled so far into contemporary public life (particularly in Los Angeles) that as the movie about the speaker's life is on the verge of release, he asks himself, "Now when exactly was it that I ever could, in this world,/ Call this life my own...?"

Against the backdrop of this glitzy upscale urban self-consciousness, the book turns on the spit of the speaker's personal grief over the recent loss of a lover whose "face" we never get to see.Her absence is expressed appropriately through the sad, lyrical language of silence, leaving her nameless and featureless, discernable only by "the fever of her body, the white/ Ember in the long pillow of the bed."

Disconnected imagery combines with the speaker's radically shifting emotions to create an experience of displacement and confusion for the reader.Surfaces, shadows, costumes, reflections, drama, depression, sleeplessness, nightmares, the incessancy of nighttime (think film noire), spiritual vacancy, fragmented memories of Italy, flashes of recognition in the natural world, the touch of a familiar hand, theme parks, fast cars, drugs, Renaissance art, literary figures disguised as movie stars disguised as servants, cell phones and all their consequent mishearings humming and buzzing like "the insistence of a heartbeat long after the body has grown distant & cold."St. John wants us to feel as disoriented as his speaker.Accordingly, in some sections of the book, the plot dissolves completely, or more appropriately "dissembles" behind other valences of meaning.In addition, the speaker's modes of speech are so various and surprising that it's not entirely clear at first that we are dealing with a single speaker throughout the book.At times, he has us laughing out loud, and then we suddenly find ourselves sympathizing with his "pane of circumstance/ Broken always by [his] own reflections."To complicate matters further, St. John intermingles real people (Toni, for example, to whom the book is dedicated) as characters among the obviously fictional (Infanta, Antonioni, Cybèle).

For all its fragmentation, The Facetriumphs in its presentation of some of the most pressing difficulties we face in our hi-tech, overpopulated, commercialized, and plot-obsessed culture.This is a book to be read several times and considered on many levels as a journey through the vibrant intricacies of human consciousness and its inexorable public and private struggles.

To Love and Write in LA
David St. John's newest work, The Face, a Novella in Verse, chronicles the fallout of a love affair in a loosely narrative manner, addressing issues of time, identity and longing in the process, and employing self-reflexivity as a tool to ward off the pitfall of preciousness. Written in the voice of an LA denizen who feels, he "had come, it seemed, to the end of my life," and whose life is in the process of being made into a movie, the 45 numbered poems take us through a wide range of styles, from the unabashedly romantic and sensual to the sardonic and angry.

The refractory and elusive nature of time and self are considered from many different angles in the course of the book, as in the 3rd poem which states "When it's over/It's already been over, everybody knows, long before it's finally over." This is a comment on relationships, but it contains the shifting, unsteady sense of temporal consciousness that marks a number of poems in the book. The poem goes on to echo Bob Dylan's "Don't think twice" toward the end, with the line "I don't mind any of it, not even those years I've wasted like silence." Time is addressed in a subtler way in the harrowing poem number 11 which begins "Shattered, shattered, shattered. There are so many ways/ To break the vessel, sometimes no single way will do," And goes on to shatter our notion of what is entailed by a vessel: "The vessel is only the shape to be recalled as what once one was..." The book contains many instances of such "assembling and dissembling," in the narrator's effort to pick up the pieces of self after the proverbial "break up."

Each poem is filled with questions that the narrator directs at himself, a friend or a lover, in the relentless interrogation of reality and facades that occupy the book.The pronouns are blurred and the "you" comes to stand for either a beloved or the divided self. Yet, even as the narrator braves visits to a hilarious and hair-raising "Edge World" where his "self pity/..sets even the dingoes howling" and continues to "push the day up the hill" in Sisyphean ardor, readers are whisked through European landscapes, introduced to Sharon Stone and are given the chance to ponder the significance of Dennis Hopper's trench coat. Set against the Hollywood backdrop, the Face puzzles the notions of self as mask and performance, reaching for, and attaining, a "sweet delight" in the process.

What's in a face
David St. John's "The Face" is a grab-bag of voices and sunlit scenes, sprinkled with some gorgeous lyric and incantatory permutations; its purported narrative (it's described as a "novella in verse") about a man coming apart while his life is being filmed is attentuated enough not to hold all the movements and ideas of the poems together, but coherent enough to function as its own entertaining thread, and as a gloss on the less narrative poems.

St. John at his best-the lyrical, musical St. John-puts in more than an occasional appearance in this book: "Where had the river swung against / Its passage from one life into another?" (10); "Blood funnel, passion leaf, hollow pane, darkening / Nude high in the ripped moon. Here, hold the slender globe of / Your lantern in the mute, pulsing night." (53); "Where were you all that light ago, busy as a scarab in the dust, / Hard by the bed? Winters passed, forecasting new bad memories." (17) Acute longing and a subtle violence go hand in hand in the most intensified of these gems (for example, poems XXXVIII and XL). Wit is in season as well, in multiple plays on "assembling" and "dissembling" wind throughout the work-reference to semblance/mask/face/mirror and the complicated tango of identity -and in deceptively glib transformations which open onto knotty philosophical reserves: "The pane of circumstance / Broken always by one's own reflections." (4)

Tonally, the poems don't stray much from each other, in spite of widely differing formal strategies. This is one area in which the book suffers, as the neutral point of its register wobbles between jokey, self-deprecating intimacy and prosaic wistfulness. Many poems (especially the directly narrative) seem slack by comparison with the transcendent lyrics. At worst, the merely sentimental seizes center stage, as when the speaker describes the birth of his daughter: "toting along with her such innocence / As falls in whispers from the towers of cathedrals." (47) The tough-guy language and the anger, all the hotter, baser, darker emotions, somehow fail to convince as effectively as the regret, sorrow, and yearning.

With such a title and multiply-announced project, a book like this dwells unapologetically in the postmodern, and that is largely where it stays: looking at the face of surface from angle upon angle while feinting underneath. As such, "The Face" is suitable for a very broad audience; it's likely that anyone can find a praiseworthy poem in it, from film-lovers to fiction-readers to language poets to unreconstructed Romantics, but as a whole the book hangs heavy with overdone verse.

An Exciting & Daring Novella in Verse
THE FACE by David St. John is an exciting and daring departure from his previous books of poetry.St. John is at an age and stage in his careeras a poet where most poets begin to protect territory and write and the same poems and the same book over and over again under the theory that it?s what his/her public wants.St. John has always taken risks and deserves our admiration for continuing to do so.This book is a story of a spiritual quest but one that is exciting and never heavy-handed.Some of its 45 sections are terrifying, some riveting, some consoling, and some are fall-down-laughing hilarious.A stunning book, profound without ever being obscure.Read it! ... Read more

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A remarkable collection representing early and recent poems by David St. John, the critically acclaimed author of Hush, The Shore, and No Heaven.

Customer Reviews (1)

Great beauty
There is great beauty in David St. John's poems, and this selection contains some of his classics:"Guitar," "Hush," "No Heaven," among many others. There is something delicate andpassionate in all his work. This book is haunting. ... Read more

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PRISM contains all new poems by award winning poet David St. John. Each poem contains a reference to a color, hence the name PRISM. The poems are lyric, accessible and beautifully crafted. Robert Hass said of St. John's poetry in the LA Times Book Review, "It is not just gorgeous, it is go-for-broke gorgeous...velvet and intricate..."

PRISM includes 17 full color photographs by Lance Patigian.

The total affect is one of beautiful words and color. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Elegant, Subtle, Yet Accessible
Great book!Elegantly produced book of poems by one of the best poets writing today.The poems are subtle, sensuous yet wholly accessible.David St. John is a poet who feels things passionately and makes the reader feel them, too.Photographs are incredible, too.

A delight!
PRISM is an absolutely gorgeous book -- amazing poetry by one of the best poets writing today.  It has dozens of elegant, eloquent sonnet-length poems by David St. John plus 16 full-color photographs by Lance Patigian.  But, still, the book has humor and plenty of (yes!) old-fashioned romance and sentiment.  Many of the poems are love poems; and all of them are about colors in one way or another.  This is a book you can pick up, open, and begin reading anywhere.  A great book to read aloud to a friend or lover.  I'm going to buy several more copies to give away as Christmas gifts! ... Read more

Product Description
Poetry. IN THE PINES first appeared as a limited editionchapbook, which is reprinted here along with uncollectedwork. Spanning twenty-five years in his career, the work reflects theprogression of a major voice in American letters in poems that predatehis highly influential HUSH and including those that follow thepublication of his selected poems in 1994. From earlier poems thatreflect the decadence of their times to recent work that embodies thepresent world, St. John's fresh imagery draws the reader into elegantpoems that resonate with the mysteries of life. "Goodbye, old friend,goodbye, goodbye .../ The only evidence is my heart. / I lived, theysay, & then I died; so what? --/ In between, just a breath of scarletsmoke" ("After Esenin"). David St. John's many awards include aGuggenheim Fellowhsip and three National Endowment for the ArtsFellowships in Poetry. He currently lives in Venice, California andteaches at the University of Southern California. ... Read more

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Here, for the first time, David St John has selected from essays and reviews written over the course of his career -- about many of the major figures of our time: W S Merwin, Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, Jorie Graham, and dozens of others -- and brought them together with six uncompromising and refreshingly candid interviews about the craft of poetry and the state of poetry today. ... Read more

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A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career. ... Read more

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In a series of master classes on the craft of poetry, over 80 poets in groups of 15 have been meeting with award winning poet, David St. John, since 2001. There are over 12 master classes a year. The experience has been rich and rewarding.In this antholoogy, the Cloud View Poets present some of their finest work polished and honed by these seminars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An impressively diverse collection of 82 poets
Selected, compiled and edited by the team of Morley Clark, Jane Downs, C.B. Follett, and Susan Terris, Cloud View Poets: An Anthology - Master Classes With David St. John is an impressively diverse collection of 82 poets who each had in common that they studied poetry with David St. John (Professor and Chairman, the Creative Writing Department, University of Southern California) in one of eight weekend seminars he gives each year. Each poem in this anthology was written contemporaneously with the poet's enrollment in one of those seminars. The range, styles, subject matter, span the spectrum, but taken altogether provide an impressive (albeit collective) representation for the quality of those instructive seminars, the professor who taught them, and the students who enrolled in them. Why We're in Bakersfield: We're waiting for your voice to drop, for your 'nads to reach their apt angle.//True, the city is scruffy in spots,/but there are parks and trails and sushi bars/to complement the taquerias.//We're waiting for you to become interesting,/for your brain to blaze neon.//Meanwhile we bear the heat,/squeegee the dust from our windshield and/watch people wheel their babies through the mall.//Mornings we find ourselves downwind/of the ample valley--scent of barns and cow dung,//first light rising over the Tchachapis/from the Mojave beyond, sixteen-/wheelers headed our way.//We long for that light, and wait for you. -- Joel T. Katz
... Read more

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This spirited anthology of contemporaryAmericanpoetry focuses on thenew poem--thehybrid--asynthesis of traditional andexperimental styles.As Cole Swensen argues in the introduction to this comprehensive new anthology, thelong-acknowledged"fundamentaldivision" between experimental andtraditional is disappearing inAmerican poetry in favor ofhybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguisticexploration. The focus inAmericanHybrid is on the blend; the more thanseventy poets featured here--including Jorie Graham, Albert Goldbarth, and LynHejinian--have found newand often unique ways toreconfigure the innumerable andsometimes conflicting voices of the past thirty years. The editors have craftedshortintroductoryessays on each of the poets in theanthology, providing biographical backgrounds and positioning them within the current of contemporarypoetry. This new anthology isessential reading for those who care about the present moment--and thefuture--of Americanverse. 3 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Nowhere to go but up
'American Hybrid' . . . giving a sort of genre-sounding name to work like this--which is, in general, poorly constructed, shallow, and afloat by virtue of its cleverness--is kin to giving each bit of the kitchen dross its own bin. Swensen and St. John's gushing intros rarely help, and left this reader, at least, feeling a regular 'bait-and-switch' disappointment. Matthew Zapruder's backcover comment, iterating this book is all the response needed to critiques of contemporary verse, sums that status quo of these 'Hybrid' types: hipster moxie without a bit of substance.

Experiment for Experiment's Sake
I only got through 2/3 of the book (has to go back to my local library) but what I did read was very mixed. My chief concern with this anthology is how it breaks down the tensions in United States Poetry to a "fundamental division" between narrative and experimental texts when all that is explored in this volume is the negotiation between variations in U.S. English non-linear narrative in contemporary academic poetry without putting any focus on hybrid texts outside of academia and/or explore the boundaries of English.

Many of the selections from the poets really only hint at the possibility of hybrid text as the samples rarely show a collision of the two coming together with only a few poets actually able to balance plain language and disrupted text in a single poem or even a few pages. Some of the poets who do show the best of all worlds in this collection include Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, John Yau and Harryette Mullen.

With a shaky premise to begin with (poetry has always benefited from a collision between various camps, not just a late 20th century argument between academics), a very loose definition of "academic poetry" (probably included because almost every poet is in academia), and a mandate that hybrid poetry can lead us back to a "purer sense of language" and help in the "renaming of the world" (I thought that was the job of all poetry), this collection doesn't offer a plurality of voices but instead seeks to limit the definitions of what new poetry can be.

does what an anthology should do
I seek the following qualities in a poetry anthology:

1. Introduces me to some poets and poems I have never read before: this anthology has a number of poets whose names I vaguely know but about whose work I know little to nothing. Since they are alongside other poets I do know better and already like, it gives me confidence in the quality of the work that the editors have chosen.
2. The anthology contains expository writing commenting on the place of the poems within the greater literary context: yes! There are two excellent essays by the editors at the beginning of the book.
3. Biographical information about each poet appears somewhere in the book: in fact, the bios introduce each poet's section of work, which is much better than having to constantly flip to an appendix.
4. The book is substantial but not so large that it won't fit in my handbag: this size is perfect. It's much smaller than those Norton anthologies I had to buy for undergrad English classes.

A previous reviewer mentioned that these poems are difficult and not to her taste. I agree that the poems are difficult. Fortunately, difficult poems are exactly my taste. This makes returning to the work again and again much more rewarding for me.

Too Modern for Me
I read this book, cover to cover, slowly, a few poems at a time. Most of the work is post-modern and/or language poetry. I found the intuitive leaps to be confusing and truly made little sense of much of the work. About ten percent, I enjoyed. I also enjoyed the brief biographies given for each poet. This is not to say that this is not an excellent book and a good representation of its particular genre. It is simply not to my taste. ... Read more

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Learn how to train your memory, enhance your mental abilities, and keep your mind agile and alert. This book's expert tips, clear text, and hard-working illustrations will show you how to improve your concentration, organize your thoughts, and retain and recall information quickly and accurately to make your memory work for you both in personal and professional situations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

improving your memory
I haven't recieve this book yet. I already have communicate clearly from DK publishing. can somebody please answer me.

A cracking little book!
This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen for the price: every page is in full colour, there are photos; drawings; tables explaining ideas and concepts; and much more. It's a work of art. And the content is excellent: very well written, succinct and to the point; very practical tips; loads of great examples; brief case studies of individuals with memory issues and how they resolved them; fully indexed; and on and on! This book is ideal for a teenager or an adult and an essential purchase at this bargain price. I even tracked down the author's site which is at davidthomas.tv -- well worth a look too! ... Read more

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The heartwarming adventures of a young orphan girl and a magical white giraffe in exotic Africa. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

a beautiful and amazing story
This story is about a girl that loses her parents and moves to Africa to live with her grandmother.She has a relationship with a white giraffe that is very beautiful.THe book was inspiring and moved me.Sometimes I had to ask my parents for help with the hard words but I understood most of it.I think many children and adults would enjoy reading this story.

Tribal myth triumphant
There were things I liked about this book (descriptive language, unique setting, the need for preservation of African animals) however I could not get past the scary theme of tribal mysticism and myth conquering western mores.How did I get there you ask?It was not hard to see when the past was made clear by the grandmother's explanation of why the girl was not allowed to remain in Africa, why her parents felt driven to wisk her away to a more civilized England. The character, Grace, strange name for an African sangoma, prophetic mystic healer, has given them the prophesy that their child had been chosen to be the child in an African legend, one who had power over all animals, the one who will ride the white giraffe.To thwart the power of that prophesy and the tribal religion that it came from, Martine's mother and father take their baby daughter and leave Africa.Did that work?No.The tribal legend and power is greater than western thought and values...the parents die in an unexplained fire and Martine's mother has changed her will (unbelievably# and left the care of her daughter to her mother in Africa, leaving the reader to realize that one cannot escape the pull of this religion. Did the mother finally surrender to her fears while she was raising her daughter in England?
You just cannot escape the author's intent in this book to promote tribal beliefs over western beliefs.Almost all of the western type people #the rich kids in the school in Africa, the corrupt game reserve caretaker,etc# are characterized as evil and resistant to the tribal cultural myths and beliefs and the care of endangered animals; whereas, the African tribal people #Grace and Tendai, etc.) are characterized as good and kind, life affirming.When the author depicted the tension between Grace and Martine's grandmother she does not bring up the possibility that the grandmother blames Grace and her mystical beliefs for the deaths of Martine's mother and father.That is left for the reader to infer I guess, but you would have trouble making that inference because never once does Martine come to that realization that this prophesy's fulfillment necessitated the deaths of her parents.She's just happy to be the one chosen to ride the white giraffe and save the animals.

wow!
i am so happy i found this book. its a great read. i just bought the last lepoard and dolphin song. agewise i think 5 to 9 would like it but 10 to 17 would understand and loooove it. please buy this book!

An Awesome Book
I really got into this book. It is very good. It is hard for me to get hooked on a book, but afterthe first chapter, I was hooked.It was very good.

The White Giraffe
This book is called the White Giraffe by Lauren St. Jean. It is about a girl named Martine who's parents die in a fire in England. She must move to Sawbona,Africa with a grandmother she doesn't even know she has! In Africa, she bumps into an old women who tells her "she has the the gift of the four fathers!" Martine is confused by this and wonders "do I really have this gift,if I do can I find out what it is?"I loved this book because it is about animals.It is awsome! ... Read more

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Unique in its coverage, evocative and beautifully illustrated, this celebration of the British country lines in their heyday captures the total experience of railway life--the sights, the sounds, the smells, the very essence of the steam age. There is authoritative coverage of every aspect of country railways, from the stations to the engines, from passengers to the men who operated the trains, the bustle of activity, and the long, lazy summer days. Throughout are a wealth of anecdotes and quotations, cameo studies and superb illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

DEADLY EMBRACE
At one point in this book there is an intriguing short account of a minor disaster that occasionally occurred when shunting railway rolling stock. What could happen was that the wagons got into such a position that nothing could move until something else moved first, a kind of deadly embrace. When I read at another point the best short summary I have yet seen of the attitudes and mindsets that led to the wholesale obliteration of Britain's rural railway network in the 1960's I thought again of those wagons in their deadly embrace that a little foresight and competence could have avoided.

The book is basically for the flourishing railway nostalgia market. It is one of the best and most comprehensive of its kind, and I hope that the paperback edition does as much justice to the superb photography as the expensively-produced hardback does. It aims to pack in a lot of information and comment, and when I came to the second plate following the contents page I momentarily feared it might be overdoing the detail a bit - the actual snapshot is magnificent, a kind of High Noon on the West Highland line, and the effect is not really enhanced by the information that another locomotive, not attached to either train let alone shown in the picture, had `failed before Dumbarton with a broken pin on the right hand valve gear radius rod'. No worries fortunately, the contributors keep their understandable enthusiasm and garrulity in check thereafter. The text is mainly by David St John Thomas with attributed contributions from other writers. These are miscellaneous in nature, the general idea being to communicate the `feel' of the rural railways in their heyday. Ireland as well as Great Britain is given extensive coverage, and there is a welcome amount of comment on some of the quainter enterprises that could surely have been undertaken nowhere else in the world such as my own beloved Leek and Manifold Light Railway which, as the text says, `went from nowhere to nowhere'.

The main narrative is knowledgeable and provides some handy correctives to popular misconceptions, notably in pointing out that the decline of the country railways took place later and more abruptly than is commonly thought. However the most significant and enlightening section relates to the `reshaping' of the railways carried out in the 1960's. What had happened was this. After the war the British Railways Board was managed by placemen, amateurs and timeservers. They had no concept that the world of rail services needed fundamental change. They ploughed on with the production of steam locomotives instead of converting at once to the cheaper and more passenger-friendly alternative of diesel. They maintained the elaborate system of semaphore signalling instead of replacing it with modern lights, they retained the antiquated profusion of manual signal-boxes, they put up a pig-headed resistance to converting stations to unstaffed operation, they refurbished stations and track only days before closure, and they connived inertly at maintaining jobs that had no modern relevance. To their uncomprehending frustration they found that the railways were losing money hand over fist, government policy thwarted their attempts to raise fares, and the outcome was one of the most deplorable strategic studies that ever masqueraded as a business review.

There was no feasibility study evaluating alternatives. A crude and question-begging cost-effectiveness formula was applied, and for all its grandiosity and pretentious presentation the supposedly new strategy was only a front for a panicky wholesale application of what had been the Board's thinking for years, namely to prune the network savagely. Undoubtedly, the situation had got out of hand. Dieselisation and resignalling were now in progress, but desperately late. Undoubtedly, the trades unions were dinosaur organisations with an inbuilt resistance to change. However the fact seems to me undeniable that there had been a total lack of vision at management levels. It was late in the day, but still not too late to consider other scenarios, and while only the most myopic enthusiasts objected to every last closure, the general arguments put forward in the reshaping document were so full of holes that the more appropriate cases were tarred with the disingenuous crudity of the overall presentation. The opposing sides were now locked in their deadly embrace, neither able nor willing to budge. A very British solution was therefore invoked, namely a public enquiry that for sheer dishonesty would have disgraced the Soviet Union. The terms of reference were blatantly rigged to prevent proper questioning or argument, and the whole wretched panic-stricken apology for a strategy was implemented almost without change.

The results can be seen in Britain's rural communities to this day. In particular, the compensatory bus services that the reshaping plan blithely envisaged materialised only briefly where at all. These communities are now largely without public transport, bus conveyance is a busted flush, and the ecologically positive alternative of rail will have to be reconsidered after the unnecessary damage has been done. I remember the gist of a wry poem giving a roll-call of the stations for closure read by Michael Redgrave on television. Fairford, Coniston, Moretonhampstead, Gosport, Minehead, Silloth and even Barnard Castle, some of you may yet see rail service again in my lifetime. ... Read more

Product Description
This text celebrates 150 years of the London Midland and Scottish Railway retelling in words and pictures the full story, from the earliest beginnings with the opening of the London and Birmingham line through the problem-ridden years following the amalgamation in 1923 to 1998. The book presents the story with contributions from experts in all fields including many who worked on the line, and explores the ramifications of what was once the world's largest commercial organization. ... Read more