Glasfryn Project

“Mixing and matching hybrid modes – memoir, essay, creative non-fiction, fiction, fictional poems, psychogeographical dérives, jokes, footnotes and poetics – Doubly Stolen Fire examines authorship, real, fictional, hoaxing, as well as the author’s own, from multiple viewpoints. Whether a woman named Anonymous, or a mongoose called Gef, a fictional Austrian poet whose lockdown diary records her poeticizing mannequin, or some version of the author himself tracking the paths taken by novelist Malcolm Lowry, the book hosts a cast of unstable actors. They keep returning to the scene of their literary crimes, Liverpool mainly, though their guilty fictions float out to Berlin, the Isle of Man, Sussex and even Ern Malley’s Australia. You can re-write the history of post-War British poetry if you listen to your mannequin, it seems. You can put in a call for ‘creative literary history’ and all manner of alternatives appear. All this in a volume bulging with Sheppard’s mercurial humour and wily wit, and crawling with his creatures.

Doubly Stolen Fire is a visionary glimpse into Robert Sheppard’s ‘inventory of the invented’. To begin with he is King Hoax, trickster offspring of Pessoa and Enderby with a smatter of W.C. Fields and Alfred Jarry. Curator of a fugitive archive of writings by and about imaginary authors, Sheppard is shapeshifter, saloon huckster, cabaret comedian, laugh out loud funny. The second part is a Firminist investigation into the Malcom Lowry labyrinth –psycho(somatic)geography, raw response, fragmented memory recovered. The work is imbued with loss, inky with fingerprints, words like haunted Kodaks.”

Jeff Young, author of Ghost Town, A Liverpool Shadowplay

“Robert Sheppard’s curiosity, brilliance and mischief are entwined as closely as ever in this gathering of poetry and prose. Continuing his excavations of poetry from perhaps-parallel universes, the first part explores the potentialities of fiction in and as poetry (or vice-versa), with the famous Ern Malley hoax as a touchstone for further inventions. In the context of this probing of authorial identities, the second part, with its focus on the apparently real Malcolm Lowry, shimmers with alternative possibilities. However, what holds the double construction of this book together is the character of Liverpool, its street names and gossip and half-heard stories haunting the fragmentary speculations that unfinish themselves, here and elsewhere at the same time. Behind the dissolving characters, there’s a committed sociality in Sheppard’s writing that makes it thoughtfully open to others as well as to language’s scintillating play of otherness.”

Zoë Skoulding, author of A Marginal Sea

Published October 2023. Uk £11.00

Aquifer Books

ISBN: 978-1-7393462-2-5

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If you prefer to pay by cheque (sterling) please make the cheque payable to Aquifer Books and send to Glasfryn, Llangattock, Powys, NP8 1PH
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View all: Aquifer | Posted on 27 Oct 2023 |