Description
Paradise Takeaway is a long poem with Luton Airport in it. Part memoir, part invention, it takes us along the bus and train routes of the London metropolitan area, not stopping at the eponymous fast food outlet en route to Aylesbury. On the way you’ll meet the Spirit of Rail, the Lady of Passport Control, a famous German philosopher, and other figures real and unreal.
Warning: this book contains Marmite.
Somewhere at the back of it all is ‘Germany: A Winter’s Fairy Tale’, Heinrich Heine’s long poem on returning to Germany for the first time after thirteen years in Parisian exile. Drawing on thirty years of trips back from Berlin to the UK, and a lifetime of not always entirely healthy eating, Alistair Noon reflects on what it is to watch a country and a waistline changing. And there isn’t a single mention of You Know What.
Praise for Alistair Noon:
‘Alistair Noon is emerging as a poet of rare depth, power and significance. — Ross Cogan, Orbis
‘Noon’s skill and thematic reach, not to mention the unfrequented path he has set out on, mark him out as a poet to watch carefully.’ — Henry King , PN Review
Alistair Noon. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 80 pages, October 2023.
About the author: Alistair Noon grew up in Aylesbury. He studied German and Russian at Bristol University and has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, bar a couple of years in China. His translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam have appeared in the Guardian and New Statesman as well as three volumes from Shearsman Books. Paradise Takeaway is the third full-length collection of his own poetry.
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