Moon for Sale

The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakányová, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He has published a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993. Lucky Day (2005) was shortlist ed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and was a Guardian Book of the Year. Small World (2012) was the SMIT Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. His poems have been widely anthologised and have been translated into French, Finnish, German, Hungarian and Portuguese. He is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library.