Julian Stannard
Latest Release
Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is Julian Stannard’s ninth collection. He is a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. He taught at the university of Genoa for ten years. He is the author of Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (2018), a bilingual collection. He is a Hawthornden and Bogliasco Fellow. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward and he has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize.
Reviews
“At his best, Stannard is a very fine poet with an apparently nonchalant style that allows him to be pointed but never vicious, ironic but never smug, considered but never sententious … The finest poems here are at once deadly serious and humanely silly.”
Rory Waterman ― Times Literary Supplement
“The poetry of Julian Stannnard is a fresh and delectable pleasure because he is a flâneur without alienation, a wit whose sharpness comes at nobody’s expense, and a gourmand with a gleeful sense of mortality.”
Don Share
“Channeling Gogol’s Dead Souls, Julian Stannard’s Please Don’t Bomb The Ghost Of My Brother takes us into cities made aslant by the ridiculousness of death. His characters are at once unmoored and liberated, in a Monty Python-esque purgatory where a wink could be a suggestion an invitation – or the end. These are poems that know that grief and comedy are both sides of the same surreal coin, spinning wildly through the sky.”
Rishi Dastidar
“Imagine ‘Carry on Rilke’, or Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal reworked as an end of the pier pantomime, and you get something of the flavour of Stannard’s brilliant new collection. The mysterious poems are darkly funny, and the funny poems are disconcertingly mysterious. I can think of no better companion to have at your side as civilisation’s walls collapse and the world spins crazily from its axis”
Alan Bilton
“There’s an air of luxurious melancholy about these poems, a languid play of feelings and associations, that sets them wholly against the uptight, earnest strain in British writing and that appeals to me warmly.”
Christopher Reid
Film Poem
Upcoming readings
Home and Away with novelist Judith Heneghan and poet Julian Stannard
Join novelist Judith Heneghan and poet Julian Stannard as they each discuss the pull of place in their work and read from their latest books
“I started writing in earnest when I moved to Genoa in 1984. I lived in the Centro Storico, the city within the city, the largest extant medieval settlement in Europe – a labyrinth. I didn’t realise how much the strangeness of the place would get under my skin. Dickens writes about Genoa in Pictures from Italy and his account holds true today – a phantasmagoric interaction between grandeur and squalor. I started off with a poetry of reportage, mapping out my new neighbourhood. Yet over the years the writing slipped the contours of factuality and found a weirder kind of truth. Peculiarity has its own poetic; the everyday is full of the absurd. Ultimately, the act of ‘making strange’ is, I believe, a subversive one, challenging commonsensical conservative-reactionary values. Poets whose work I’m fond of include Giorgio Caproni, Paul Durcan and Selima Hill and I particularly like the work of Leonora Carrington.” (Mercurius)
– Julian Stannard
Julian Stannard 