Bøker av Michael Glover

Designed by Marks Barfield Architects, Cambridge Central Mosque is an innovative building, which is both sustainable and socially and architecturally integrated into its neighbourhood. Illustrated with architectural drawings and photography by Sir Cam, Morley von Sternberg and others, this book details its evolution and realisation, highlighting how the mosque breaks new ground, and reflects ongoing debates about Islam and Britishness. It discusses how geometry is a central feature, and focuses on its timber structure or ' trees', as well as on the many sustainable features of the building and its carbon neutrality. The mosque has become a unique place of community worship, and the book concludes by providing a sense of the day-to-day life of the mosque, as well as the lessons which can be learnt from it.

The best poetry takes your mind to unexpected places. But is it the poet's quirkiness that carries you there, or your own?Poems to challenge and stimulate, make you laugh and make you wonder. Complemented by marvellous paintings.

This guidebook takes you exploring London beyond its most famous sights to find the art we have never quite noticed before: the hidden statues, paintings, and murals that have escaped from the official museums, and often live unnoticed lives in tucked away places. A famous literary cat, for example, or a painting by Hogarth on the bend of a stairs in an ancient hospital.

There are many more words than you could ever wish to use! I taunt you with those words. I bellow them out into the air within your hearing in order to humiliate you. That is why you avoid me, because I burden you with so many words, heaping them upon your head, or flinging them after you as you hurry away from me, fine, well-turned, latinate, polysyllabic, Miltonic words of the kind faithfully and carefully stowed away only in dictionaries. That is where I live my rich and fulfilling life, within the pages of many dictionaries, with my torch and my eyeglass, digging ever deeper into dictionaries, preferably the old ones. I spend whole days together down there, a deep-cast miner of words. Clothes mean nothing to me. Abluting this body means nothing to me - let it stink to high heaven! I have no time for such irrelevancies. There is too much steady accumulation to be done, and each day offers me twenty-four hours only in which to do it. What am I to do with these words now that you have refused to listen to me, now that you have left me here to my own devices? The question is an irrelevance. I do not need to justify this pursuit. When they are all present in front of ¿ and behind and beside ¿ me, I need do nothing but admire their magnificence as they stretch away and away from me. These words speak for themselves.Can you describe these seven hundred and ninety-four paragraphs as a collection of stories each of that length? Or are they more glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of other people: fleeting moments in complicated, or simple, lives? In modern jargon, might they be called prose poems?No two readers will interpret them the same, and probably not as the author envisaged - but isn't that the point? Doesn't fiction take on a life of its own once you set it free?It is perhaps a book more for dipping in and out of than one to read end-to-end, and depending on your mood, the weather, the day of the week, you will see something different, something new, and something outside of the story itself.

The best poetry takes your mind to unexpected places. But is it the poet's quirkiness that carries you there, or your own?These poems are too good to be just for children - grown-ups will enjoy reading them aloud to children for their own sake, as well as for the reaction they provoke. Or why not just read them to yourself? They will challenge and stimulate, make you laugh and make you wonder.Come along with us: who's fastest, you or the wind? Or can you keep up with how fast life runs? What is the symbolism of that chocolate house? Did the poet even know, or is that for the inner child to decide? Ruth Dupre's marvellous paintings make it a visual feast too.

In the Summer of 1940, after evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and the Franco/German armistice which followed the fall of France, Britain stood alone against the armed might of Hitler's Germany.

On holiday in France, during a particularly warm spell, the exotic bugs descend. Many would reach for the citronella candles, or worse - the fly-swat and toxic aerosols to go on a killing spree like some insecticidal maniac. Not so an artist like Ruth Dupré. Instead she recorded their characters, their quirks, their oddities, in ink onto delicate Japanese paper.Coming to these pictures later, Michael Glover was taken back to those heady summer days, and this collection of poems - of artfully chosen words about those wingers, leapers and creepers - was the result. Each poem is accompanied by one of the original monoprints.Wingers and Leapers and Creepers is a homage to all bug-life: the true rulers of the world, upon which we, and all life on Earth, depend. Perhaps we can learn to love them a little more...

The Trapper they called him,that man Joseph Tredinnick,late of Porthcothan Bay, Cornwall- and, my god,what an inhospitable spot that was in those days!This is a dark, Gothic tale about a Cornish misfit by the name of Tredinnick: a rabbit trapper by trade, and a trapper of souls. It is part horror story, part phantasmagoria - you will be dragged against your will to witness his descent into madness, and start to question what is real and what is not.

There is always a moment – it comes to all of us, irrespective of race, class, religion and all the other what-nots – when you take someone aside and point out everything – everything that has gone wrong. And there is always so much of it, and it takes hours, days, of patient recitation, probably from a book, because it is far too long and involved – like a twisty rope, left out too long in the rain, behind the house, you know it, you have seen it with your own eyes – to commit to memory, even for an old hand such as myself. You completely and utterly exhaust yourself in the doing, you end up speechless, breathless, spent. I do anyway. One cannot walk away from one’s nature.In this monologue of a mind's slow dying, an actor, man of abundant words, faces his final audience: of himself. It is a face that he barely recognises through the mist of his own tragic decline...

Why should children enjoy all the picture books? Artworks by Ruth Dupré complement beautifully the verse and prose of Michael Glover in this book you will want to possess for the sheer sake of possession, as much as for the journey it will take you on. It is the story of a woman losing her grip on a life well lived, as past and present meld with real and imagined. The words convey mood like an adagio; images appear in your head as though through a fine gauze. You will feel you have learned something important by the end.

The great Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated by Franco's Falangists in an orchard outside Granada in 1936. This book of poems, a lament for his death which is also a tribute to his extraordinary lyrical gifts, is spoken by his imagined lover. It conjures, fleetingly, poignantly, the irrepressible gusto of his life: his gifts as a pianist, the dancing humour of his poetry for children, the street life of his beloved Granada, his brutal and incomprehensible death. Above all, it interrogates Death itself for its bewildering decision to snatch him away at the height of his powers.

Michael Glover's writes a poetry whose surface can be lightsome and almost casually, if not beguilingly, playful and direct. But the playfulness can be a deception. Laughter dries on the tongue. There is often a terrible uncertainty about the speaking voice, and a darkness about the themes the poems are exploring. The darkness of betrayal. The darkness of death. The darkness of never quite knowing where one stands. In short, the sands are forever shifting.This eighth collection, his first in five years, draws on a variety of themes and situations. It drifts on a boat in Canada. It constructs a quinoa cake from mere words and phrases. It scrutinises the films of the great improvisatory director John Cassavetes. It even picks apart the multifarious meanings of the word book itself. The influences are as generously widespread as the poems themselves, from Jorge Luis Borges to Archy and Mehitabel, from the lyrics of Edmund Spenser to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.In the past, Michael Glover's poetry collections have largely consisted of single poems, each one self-sufficient. This volume, by contrast, is organised into several sequences. The Quinoa Cake Recipe emerges from, and is a response to, long summer stays in Canada. Notes to Harris is a series of short poems in which one North American friend addresses another with a wry casualness. Under the Influence, a homage to Cassavetes, is spoken by a male character from a typical Cassavetes film, wayward and anguished: 'I am a raging bull of a man. I pulverise everything I look at.' In short, this is the widest-ranging and most accomplished collection that Michael Glover has ever written.

A laugh-out-loud visual history of the strangest piece of men’s clothing ever created: the codpiece.The codpiece was fashioned in the Middle Ages to close a revealing gap between two separate pieces of men’s tights. By the sixteenth century, it had become an upscale must-have accessory. This lighthearted, illustrated examination of its history pulls in writers from Rabelais to Shakespeare and figures from Henry VIII to Alice Cooper. Glover’s witty and entertaining prose reveals how male vanity turned a piece of cloth into a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself. The codpiece, painted again and again by masters such as Titian, Holbein, Giorgione, and Bruegel, became a symbol of royalty, debauchery, virility, and religious seriousness—all in one.  Centuries of male self-importance and delusion are on display in this highly enjoyably new title. Glover’s book moves from paintings to contemporary culture and back again as it charts the growing popularity of the codpiece and its eventual decline. The first history of its kind, this book is a must-read for art historians, anthropologists, fashion aficionados, and readers looking for a good, long laugh.

Michael Glover offersa detailed examination of the paintings of the acclaimed German painter NeoRauch, whose paintings deftly blend the iconography of Socialist Realism withthe stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque and Romantic past.