Paradise Takeaway

Description

‘A contemporary homage to Germany: A Winter’s Fairy Tale, Heinrich Heine’s long poem on returning to his native country after thirteen years in Paris, Noon’s third full-length collection wittily and often touchingly traces a poetic journey of his own, beginning and ending at that cultural hub immortalised by actress and model Lorraine Chase, who in a Seventies Campari add responded to a refined suitor’s question ‘Were you wafted here from Paradise?’, with ‘Nah, Luton Airport!’ … Using Heine’s ‘Ancient Mariner’-style quatrain verse form throughout, with a largely ingenious array of rhymes, Noon presents an outsider half longing to find some way of integrating back into his homeland, half wishing he had stayed well away.’ — Nick Cooke, in The High Window

‘This is a sequence of poetry for our time, a minor ‘epic’ if you like, which is both an entertainment and a commentary on our various predicaments’ — Steve Spence, in Stride Magazine

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.

Alistair Noon reads three sections from Paradise Takeaway in this short film made by Paul Cooke: