Launched: 17th May 2012
Price: £8.99
ISBN: 978-0-9570984-2-8
Alistair Noon’s Earth Records presents the poet as a truly global citizen with a passport for anywhere in time and any place with darkening city streets, restaurants only the locals know about and the crumbling facades of history flickering behind modernity’s bright new colour schemes.
Noon’s precise attention to sound and form creates a bittersweet and infectious musicality as he explores the holiday plans of poets, the strata of old and new Europe, shifting tectonic plates in the Soviet Union and China and the poet’s place within or without it all.
"Knockout poet." - Kelvin Corcoran
"This is genuinely terrific writing, of wonderfully gratifying complexity. There's no one else, to my limited knowledge at least, who is taking on these big questions – with so many terms of reference. It's work that draws me back, which is something that real poetry demands." - Tom Lowenstein
"Alistair Noon’s poetry is important because he is one of the younger poets who are working on the regeneration of a central space without which the whole cannot be an open field. Instead of a ditch between two extremist positions with their weapons pointing at each other, we are offered a freedom to roam, and a refusal to be bullied into false choices. The bite of modernism shorn of academic mysticism cohabits contentedly with lyrical plain speaking. Urban realism is his entry to this discovery, directly experienced, the signposts of our conditions ruthlessly catalogued as they fall before his eyes, and the whole of Europe is the theatre at his command." - Peter Riley
Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury. Besides time spent in Russia and China, he has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, where he works as a translator. His poetry and translations from German and Russian have appeared in nine chapbooks from small presses. Earth Records is his first full-length collection.