Andrea Brady

'Canterbury Bell', a new poem by Andrea Brady.

How much labour in yanking          the moon one landing / to the next, yard to parking                  lot scrub culvert wood, / nightly rate       of pills per hour    how many threads / of linen go to make up    the cold       worker’s coat? / It is possible to wish        for no power more

Andrea Brady’s monumental study of poetry and constraint focuses on ‘the ways that poets invoke bondage as metaphor while effacing the actuality of bondage’. Milton’s aspiration to deliver poetry from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’, and Blake’s injunction that ‘poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’, associate formal freedoms with political liberation. The modernist discovery of free verse was quickly followed by a formalist reaction in the 1940s, which was in turn displaced by renewed experimentation over the following decades.