Solitary Hotel - JP Seabright

“This compelling sequence of poems by JP Seabright is spikily insistent with its brilliant conjuring of longing and loss. Transposed by the poet to the North Norfolk coast, it channels the restless loneliness and dying embers of hope in Samuel Barber’s song-cycle ‘Despite and Still’, but has a haunting, new music of its own. Whilst the dedication reads, ‘after Samuel Barber, after James Joyce’, and the poet credit texts by Joyce, Woolf, Graves and others which sit behind a poetry of erasure, echo, and summoning, nevertheless this sequence creates a series of its own present and ‘luminous’ moments out of what it describes as its ‘scratchings out’ and ‘near imperceptible’ marks against time. From its textual fragments, its intense, contracted lines, and its use of great, cold, spaces of empty page, this edgy, heartbreaking poetry orchestrates the gaps and separations between us and our solitary states of being.”

 

Susie Campbell, Poet and performer

 

“This wonderful sequence is a skilful erasure of one of the four songs featured in Samuel Barber’s ‘Despite and Still’ with bits of Virginia Woolf folded in. Such a drastic reduction beautifully reveals the essence of the piece and the whole thing is steeped in a distinctive, Prufrockian flavour.”

 

Richard Skinner, novelist, poet, essayist and critic