In this stunning first collection Jack Alun draws on twenty years of living in a rural area of the Midi, France to go beyond the clichéd and the picturesque and to prise out the raw, timeless and human elements in plain and compelling language. And behind the characters is a landscape that is at once stark, familiar and impersonal that undercuts every human action.In the second part, Vertical Horizons recounts the discovery of the grave of Christian da Silva, the local raconteur, singer, editor, publisher, teacher, poet and bon viveur. In the ambitious imagined dialogue between the dead poet and the living poet it becomes a homage to language, to poetry and to the powerful effect that the past has on our perspectives.Alun first came across this intriguing, relatively unknown poet when looking at the headstones in the village graveyard. His was a rock with a brass plate screwed to it, read simply - Christian Da Silva, Poet. Wishing to find out more, he went to Villefranche where he ordered a copy of his one book still in print, and then to a second hand bookshop, where he found another. After reading through both books, he decided he'd translate them into English, but as he began he soon felt that he was losing something of the colour and playful magic of the original. By this time Da Silva's voice was so much inside his head that when he sat down to write he found he was involved in a sort of poetic schizophrenia and very soon the Vertical Horizons section of the book was born from da Silva's phrases, words and ideas. The resulting playful yet serious interchange hopefully has turned out to be a far more fitting tribute, and in a contemporary form that maybe Da Silva would have approved of.
