About This Book
"...We looked in. Here were the eyes of the prisoner. So frozen that only the slightest movement was possible, was the delicate head of the huge and beautiful figure. Eyes with the lids partly closed stared into the dark space. The lids over which frozen cascades of tears bulged were pinned by lashes part open, part closed, for this figure was imprisoned by cold..."Vertical Line is both a book-length prose poem and a modern novel. It is also a cosmology. At its heart, where life might begin are giant and fearful forms: rock lords and a suffering figure - and light which spreads outwards, touching inner surfaces...
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What the Times said about ´Vertical Line´:
"A first time author and a new press might be difficult to assimilate all at once.
Certainly, Vertical Line by Peter Preston would be a demanding work even for a reader lulled by the ready assurance that a familiar imprint might provide.
But the new company has shown courage and will be rewarded for it.
"Described as a cosmology, there is little of the familiar scientific theories to threaten readers who expect a poetic work to evoke emotion rather than inform. No, a work of moving complexity this - and yes, at its core it might be possible to detect an inanimate beauty which has more to do with Relativity than with personal relationships - perhaps the more normal substance of our poetry. High time these beautiful regions too were laid bare.
"But the author´s techniques might be more familiar if one examined again the later Virginia Woolf or the paintings of Gustave Moreau. To venture into a subterranean cavern, to travel with a barely differentiated group of characters, to witness torment and death and to seek hopefully the rise of the unknown sun - to seek all this and to find comfort within the inanimate is a beguiling invitation almost impossible to resist.
"And at the end, when the journeys which direct this prose poem
have met it is almost impossible not to be grateful for having travelled with these beings, these characters which form and coalesce throughout the narrative - and for seeing with their eyes a beauty too rarely, if ever, glimpsed."
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Copies of the paperback edition of ´Vertical Line´ can be purchased via the shopping-cart icon at the top of this page.
