Much Needed Unrest

Robert Maslen - Winner of the 2022 IOTA SHOT Pamphlet Awards

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Much Needed Unrest - Forthcoming 14th August 2023 

Much Needed Unrest is a glimpse into corners of our contemporary lives – at a lake in Berlin, inside a Bradford mill terrace, on a kelp farm on the Isle of Skye, gazing at sculpture in a Leeds gallery – with an acute sense of disquiet, searching for what’s beautiful, certain or absurd.

The reality of troubled family history, loneliness, struggles to make a living and cracks emerging in our climate and hard-pressed communities reveal the primal instinct for change and survival.

It begins with a simple yet subversive act of resistance, refusing the bleak perspective offered, and steps – like the narrator of Sentinels, imagining the sculptor at work – ‘… sideways, like this / to find the perspective of a child’.

Listen to a selection of poems from the Pamphlet read by Robert Maslen below:

'Kelp is the Future'

'Hushinish'

'Remember Bliss'

'Karitas Habundat'

from

Much Needed Unrest

by Robert Maslen

Robert Maslen studied language acquisition at Manchester University and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig before working in social research, specialising in the psychology of language, particularly metaphor.

His co-edited volume Metaphor Analysis (Equinox) appeared in 2010.

After stints in London, Cologne and Mexico City, he returned to Yorkshire, where he lives, with his family, close to the moors.