Imprint: Triarchy Press 
Publication: 25th April 2016
180pp. ~ 17.8 x 25.4 cm  ~ Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-909470-94-1
Price: £15.00

Tags: Poetry, history, translation, place, phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, music, dreams, memory, Derrida, hauntology.

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Draping the Sky for a Snowfall  

Julian Wolfreys
Foreword by   J. Hillis Miller     ~ Afterword by Jean-Michel Rabaté
​

Draping the Sky for a Snowfall is a collection of poetry and essays by the stupidly gifted writer, musician and academic Professor Julian Wolfreys. Accompanied by numerous photographs and paintings, the book takes us on a journey through :
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our sense of place ~ grief and trauma ~ memory and recollection ~ memory and narrative ~ chance, coincidence and meaning ~ love ~ the sense of mood and feeling ~ absence ~ language ~ reading ~ allegory ~ imagination ... and much more.

But, while the essays are often 'hard work', inviting us to grapple with Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, the finer points of linguistics and  etymology, they are often also light, playful, beautiful. And each essay, appearing on the right (recto), faces a matching poem. The poetry (printed verso) is usually firmly located on the Isle of Wight, in the Baltic, in a café or on the steps of a railway station and is often the beautifully and minutely observed account of an event, action, remembrance, plant or bird. Sometimes the essays explain or offer context for the matching poem, and other times the essay is replaced by a photograph or illustration.

At whatever level you absorb the poetry, read the essays and  explore the illustrations, this is  remarkable writing - writing that sometimes seems to touch us directly, bypassing the cognitive and, at other times, opens the doors of the mind onto corridors peopled with ideas we had never imagined existed.

​Read the poem Josefka and watch the accompanying film/soundtrack by the author.
Literable iterature - Julian Wolfreys:
"Language has its ghosts, it ghosts, ghostwriting, across tongues, from one to another, shifting, sifting, and the shifts in expression bear the traces of a former version, while moving under the radar, across borders. In becoming other, the singularity of the former self remains as a spectral trace, and therefore maintains itself, maintenance (maintenant) being the now, and the now, and the now, and so on, without full presence; the translations that take place, in taking place mark, remark, the trace of the other, the trait as retrait, leaving only the ghost of itself; and this is the difference in the utterable, the utterable as iterable. Iterability is the condition of writing, which allows for the paradox of sameness and difference to emerge. Iterability for Derrida does not simply signify repetition; rather, every iteration is an alteration, a modification—a supplement in both senses, being both an addition and a replacement—of the same. Iteration depends on a minimal remainder and the illusion of an identity of the same so that repetition can be recognised in the first place." ​

Read more:

About the author
Foreword

Readership:

General readers of contemporary poetry, academics working in the humanities and social sciences, teachers of literature, professional and amateur phenomenologists, and students from undergraduate through to doctoral level.

Related titles:

Also by Julian Wolfreys:
Silent Music
Haunted Experience
The Grand European Bestiary

Reviews

"Julian Wolfreys has an uncanny ability to capture the most precious of moments and feelings, those that are of manifest importance but paradoxically most elusive. 'Proserpina Sleeps' is a case in point: Wolfreys carries his learning lightly as he describes the stage in the Roman myth wherein Proserpina wakes, 'Stirring, to return, / Easing the leaden season.'  Wolfreys’ poetry is deeply personal, and one might turn to 'Representations' for a sustained reflection on the past, something that has preoccupied his scholarly work for many decades: 'The past has not abandoned me / The beloved dead are no less beloved / Though they fail in the return / Careless of all that is / Uncountable, the very thing / We want to give.'  Draping the Sky for a Snowfall is a gift to our senses."
Tom Ue, University College, London
"Julian Wolfreys is an extremely distinguished poet... his poems strive again and again to understand, from the perspective of whatever moment he writes a poem now, what occurs in an event, a crisis, and how to bear witness, to find adequate words for it. 
    ...read these wonderfully melodious and powerful poems for yourself and in your own way. Reading them has been a great, but troubling, delight for me."
From the Foreword by J. Hillis Miller
Read the Foreword in full
"What a wonderful read. Just browsing through the pages, the lyrical and the essay and picture parts, is like moving slowly meditating in words (not through or by or on) in the poems, then shifting to ´thinking´ in various discourses - plays and experiences confronting / interweaving / reciprocally illuminating all those places and landcapes of mind. 
Anna-Margaretha Horatschek
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
"A majestical canopy fretted with tiny golden fires, miniature pleasures, grand passions. Draping the Sky is the work of a conjurer of the imagination - of the impossible made possible - that rare encounter where word gives way to impression and impression spirals back to base word. A pure joy. One has the impression that these words have simply washed over Wolfreys' imagination and that he merely records their passing, such is the effortless beauty of these verses. A work of superb grace, warm recollection, punning hilarity and infinite mourning. Wolfreys' words wash over us like driftwood - like driftwords - of recollection and love, of letting in and letting go, of powerful ebb and achingly passionate flow."
Eamonn Dunne