Name Alan Baker Role Poet | Books Not Bondi Beach | |
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Alan Baker is British poet He has been the editor of the poetry publisher Leafe Press since 2000, and the online magazine Litter since 2005.
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Life
Baker was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1958, and in 1985 he moved to Nottingham, where he still lives. In the late 1990s he encountered the email discussion group British-poets, which introduced him to the poets associated with the British Poetry Revival. He founded Leafe Press in 2000, and is now co-editor (with American poet John Bloomberg-Rissman) and is editor of its associated webzine 'Litter'. Leafe Press has published work by,among others, Kelvin Corcoran, Carrie Etter, Geraldine Monk, Lee Harwood, and, more recently, work by American, French and Mexican poets, and by the Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi.
Poetry
Baker published a series of poetry pamphlets between 1999 and 2009; in 2008, Bamboo Books published his translation of Yves Bonnefoy's 'Début et Fin de la Neige', and in 2011 Skysill Press published 'Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010' which brought together all of Baker's small press work to date, along with a considerable amount of new work. Baker's poetry is regarded as being non-mainstream, or experimental, and is also seen as both lyrical and political. Baker has an interest in prose-poetry, and his prose sequence 'The Book of Random Access' mixes the apparently personal with borrowed texts, and with references to Eastern philosophies in what has been described as a 'post-modern pilgrimage'. Baker's poetry and prose poetry "draws on array of modernist and post-modernist techniques". In some of his poetry 'repetition, or near-repetition, are frequently employed in a way that re-enacts the routines of everyday life... half-glimpsed or half-grasped.'.