Holding Unfailing – Edward Ragg
ISBN: 9781910836514
£8.99

Edward Ragg’s debut collection, A Force That Takes (2013) was a Cinnamon Press Poetry Award winner. This entrancing second volume probes the complexity of contemporary China, from Beijing to Shanghai, through the dizzying landscapes of a country undergoing profound change.

Intriguing, supple poems that range across the world and across the landscapes of the mind.

Sarah Howe

 

This collection has for its central focus scenes from contemporary China, observing with detachment and direct emotional intent those personal landscapes which fan out from Ragg’s experiences of a country undergoing profound change. Such landscapes and the burdening memories accompanying them create poems of concentrated philosophical energy.

They search and question. Ragg explores paths and places across a world shot through with colour. Yet he reins back from the expected celebratory note, in order to sift truth from falsehood, to travel from height to abyss. This is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection.

Penelope Shuttle

The Human Chain

IV.

We breathe the same air and breathe
in the language across the waters
you made and made your own singing

the disinterred marvels of a planet
lit with the precision of cut turf
like sparks from the sharpened edge

of Beowulf’s steel. Each vowel seeping
from the peat-rich bog, each poem the miracle
of a sluice suddenly watering the earth.

Author biography

Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1976 and since 2007 has lived in Beijing. He was a joint-winner of the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and A Force That Takes was his first collection, followed by Holding Unfailing and Exploring Rights. His poems have appeared in numerous international magazines and anthologies, including the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the author of a number of critical works and articles on wine. Edward is the co-founder of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting.

Edward is currently working on the collection, And Then the Rain Came, which will be published by Cinnamon Press in Spring 2022.

And Then the Rain Came–Edward Ragg
ISBN: 9781788641357
£9.99

Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award with his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, whilst Exploring Rights (2020) confronted ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival. And Then the Rain Came turns to love, physical and mental geographies, well-being and the vitality of the present. Set against the backdrops of the global pandemic and climate crisis, each poem embraces present perception in the awakening motif of rain.

Listen to two poems from And Then the Rain Came recorded at the online launch in April 2022:

At the Wedding of Water

Albaldah by Night

The manifestations and properties of water are excitingly explored in Edward Ragg’s new collection. Here are living poems where narrative and lyric work together to contemplate the energies implicit in water. The intriguing emphases laid upon the meanings of the word ‘present’ give a unique edge to the poems. Glass, tears, ice, rivers, wine, salinity, tides: all these elements are woven into the texture of this collection, where the illuminations and fluidities of language are beautifully captured.

Penelope Shuttle

In his latest volume Edward Ragg weaves together two deft poetic sequences as a tribute to the power of water and the yearning water can evoke. From the shadows of Durham Cathedral to the Chinese water-town of Tongli, water in this collection is the long-promised rain, the speckled pattern on a window and dew evaporating to a new day. Framed within the challenges of navigating the world in the Covid era, this is a book to read, keep and cherish.

David Tait

Nothing To Be Done

What are we to do about yearning?
Yearning, desire: which are not the same.
Yearning after desire. Rain spreads
across the windowpane. How many
hours have I lost to this? Another’s desire.
She feels for me in the Shanghai night
as I observe this Durham afternoon
feeling her. Nothing to be done:
which is not the same as doing nothing
or saying ‘We can do nothing, my love’.
We can. Rain percussive on tiles and panes.
Yearning is that desire which can
never be answered… Do not answer, love.
Nothing to be done. Love (persistently) quiet.
How the light rain of my desire falls all night.

Author biography

Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1976 and since 2007 has lived in Beijing. He was a joint-winner of the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and A Force That Takes was his first collection, followed by Holding Unfailing. and Exploring Rights. His poems have appeared in numerous international magazines and anthologies, including the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the author of a number of critical works and articles on wine. Edward is the co-founder of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting.

Exploring Rights — Edward Ragg
ISBN: 9781788640732
£9.99

Edward Ragg’s debut collection, A Force That Takes (2013), won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award. His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the transformations of a resurgent mainland China. Exploring Rights strikes new ground, exploratory and questioning of our roles and ethical choices, in a poetry that defiantly and playfully confronts ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival.

The Price of Convenience

A crisp minus eight this Beijing morning,
changing lanes tattooed with skid marks
that paint an oily patina on subversive terrain.

Pavement fragments under girths
of idling concrete trucks. Everything
sits on the precipice of buckling

under its own pretext, steam billowing
from manholes that dot the lie of this
construction site’s unimaginable depths.

I touch the accelerator and the obedient
bonnet speeds off assuming car-shaped
jets of a unique vapour. As if I really was

the first aviator, falling in love with clouds.
Recalling all the air miles and flights
I’ve actually survived… And who is

funding this extravagance you,
rightly, ask? The giants of literature.

Pausing to reflect on a commuter’s life
and where the last fifteen years
irrevocably went behind the wheel.

Conceiving the life-toppling absurdity
of reciting this poem’s first steps sifted
from streets flecked with carbon-fibre and spit.

The price of convenience is detection,
the analyst said and is correct, since,
now we’ve gone and written down

the whole sorry story, a confessional
of unimaginable subterranean depths,
smarting at the latest linguistic shift

when the news anchors joined
the military by identifying assets
on the ground, aerial or maritime,

now I have returned to the correct exit,
aligning myself with precision and grace,
what is this, conveniently, if not a final word?

This is a complex and intently-reasoned collection which addresses historic and contemporary issues with unflinching attention. There is mordant wit, formidable energy, and a relish for analysis of various appetites. A prevailing and chilling concentration is sustained throughout. These poems witness the urgency of recording and understanding our past and present human darknesses.

Penelope Shuttle

Exploring Rights could not be more timely but is not only that: this book has the sustaining resonance of true works of art. This is formidably intelligent yet also tender and approachable poetry — a poetry of care, linguistic brio, philosophical range, sharp assessment, and occasionally savage indignation. Ragg modulates expertly between dispassionate attention and impassioned song. In Ragg — an Auden for our moment — delicate lyricism and discursive command co-exist. Exploring Rights registers our modernity and its human (and more-than-human) challenges, from Europe to China to the US to the Arctic. Ragg is a varied maker — a wizard of sampled documents, archival materials, legalese, spam, bots. Ranging from Catullus to Himmler to our era of surveillance, Ragg’s many-tongued verse shimmers with a complex intellectual and sensual music. Ragg tests his art on the most difficult yet urgent question: how and whether to pursue ‘the luxury of the poem’ in these days.

Maureen N. McLane

Author biography

Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1976 and since 2007 has lived in Beijing. He was a joint-winner of the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and A Force That Takes was his first collection, followed by Holding Unfailing. His poems have appeared in numerous international magazines and anthologies, including the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the author of a number of critical works and articles on wine. Edward is the co-founder of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting.

His most recent collection is And Then the Rain Came, (Spring 2022).

Cinnamon began in 2005 in a tiny village at the foot of the Moelwyn mountains in North Wales’ Snowdonia area. We began with a home-printed poetry magazine and 2 poetry collections, one of which was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It seems like a life-time ago, but poetry remains at the heart of what we do (which is why so many of our novelists are those who write with great lyricism too).

We hope you’ll choose some poetry to challenge, comfort, nourish, delight and transport you. From exquisite pamphlets to startling collections, the Cinnamon Press poets demonstrate how vital poetry remains.

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