Keston Sutherland

Keston Sutherland Poems

Keston Sutherland Biography

Keston M. Sutherland, born 1976 in Bristol, graduated with a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1997 and was the Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University 1997-98. He gained his PhD for a work titled 'J. H. Prynne and philology' in 2004, again from Cambridge University. Since 2004 he is a Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex, teaching English literature and critical theory. Already in 1995, Sutherland together with Andrea Brady founded the publishing house Barque Press where many of his books were published. His major 2007 poem Hot White Andy has been reviewed as "the most remarkable poem in English published this century" (Jacket). Beside his poetry Sutherland has published numerous essays on poetics, politics and philosophy and is the editor of the QUID journal (Barque Press) for poetics and critical theory as well as of the complete critical prose of J.H. Prynne.)

The Best Poem Of Keston Sutherland

[About to burn off...]

About to burn off what you are inside or throw away no doubt amounts to living inside out to get you very far, where under that eye sanity rolls over in slow motion like scum across the ocean top of inanity, not rated total but as too much lock spreads into weirder mush than binds you in a mortal rush whose lives are just as few, with tides like news to Libya that drag the answer out and back to life obeyed at last on track on the Riviera, communication flares, the lives drop out:

I have tried to make us communicate, but it is hard work for me, sending you the same thing, communication, a rectangle of mackerel, over and over and over again, delighted that you are so bored of pretending it has a meaning, ecstatic that you are so exhausted with getting it, and thrilled that you are so faintly exasperated past the point where you are ready to expect anything you get ever to be intelligible or match up to a relevant dream still of intimacy, in the cupboard under the stairs or among the vibrating restraints in the garage with the loud-opening door excitingly shut, where in our noise and silence we set out for here again.

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