Sebastian Schloessingk

Stil Cagey Sebastian Schloessingk

'I'm saying "This is not a slam." Actually, I don't really know what a slam is. I imagine a mosh pit of vigour and spontaneity. Nothing could be less spontaneous than this reading, and the stuff of it. Which is why, the poetry word having largely migrated to those kinds of scenes where I would shrink booed off into the shadows, I'm offering tonight ... merely texts ... short texts in lines to be precise' (or stils). 'What they are beyond that you can decide.' From a reading by Sebastian Schloessingk.

Stil Cagey is a second collection. The first, Cry of the No-no, was published in 2017, also by Gometra. Among things Jamie McKendrick liked in that, the line 'we are not the prehensiles we were', the 'mentally "oven-ready" chickens' and the 'pithy apothegms of Surrender Hanky.' Hannah Baker Saltmarsh cited 'The whole world of ointment-saying missed out on' and 'The perks / of non-stardom are infinite.' Sebastian Schloessingk (at a subsequent reading): 'I'm very pleased with my book.'

Schloessingk has appeared in Verse, Oxford Poetry, Formafluens, Dedalus and Quadrant. And wrote the libretto for Magma, an opera by Lamberto Coccioli, premiered 1998. Editor of Qualm 2003-2017. Born in Britain, of German and Irish parents, he lives in the Welsh Marches.

Jamie McKendrick: 'Schloessingk's poems all have an instantly recognizable and original voice. There's an appealing subtlety and variety of tone to them, and a syntax that mirrors the twists and turns of a very particular consciousness. They range widely over the material and the material itself is wide-ranging.'

Don Paterson: 'Poems full of terrific things.'

Roc Sandford: 'Irresistible, consistent, crafty, chancing the rescue.'