The Age of Cardboard and String

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

"'Brilliant... Boyle's disaffection - middle-class, middle-aged, in a listless millennial culture - is rendered in a perversely attentive and humorous fashion, which itself almost compensates for the anomle and despair.' Guardian From reviews of Paleface: 'Howlingly funny... Boyle is a fine poet of the city - the solitary, broken-biscuit aspect of it, and of its rituals.' Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times 'Boyle's details resonate with historical and social awareness: his elegant, atmospheric concision achieves the effect of a radically compressed short story. And above all, the disengaged aspect of his poems is modified by an engaging self-consciousness.' Simon Carnell, Times Literary Supplement 'Sharp and skewed takes on our haplessly systemic mongrel existence.' Michael Hofmann, The Times"

UK Kirkus review

This book, Charles Boyle's fourth poetry collection, was nominated for both the Whitbread and T S Eliot Prizes in 2001. Boyles world is a dream-like, surreal take on the post-modern landscape where the mass media, advertising and celebrity culture are more real to people than their own needs, and fill time and space with constant noise and bogus activity. Meanwhile, infantilised consumers, intrigued by the latest gadgets, refuse to take moral responsibility for their lives. Adrift in a world where D H Lawrence can wear a Seiko watch or angels hold a convention at the Station Hotel, the narrators of Boyles poems find that language wont match their experience because it is overused and devalued. There are many shaggy dog stories in this book, which, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be passages of novelistic prose or advertising-speak, which have somehow lost their coherence. Mistakes and misreadings run rife, for only through accidents and strange juxtapositions can anything new be created. Boyle creates poems from misprints such as 'the horse in which Henry James was born'. Stendhal is a presence in many of the poems, perhaps because of the similarity of 'Boyle' to 'Beyle', Stendhal's real name. But the references to Stendhal also show that the listlessness and boredom of the modern city have antecedents. Boyles protagonists are often without a sense of direction and it seems that this situation is also that of the modern poet, whose only remaining job is to be a kind of anthropologist, seeking out oddities in the modern landscape. Many of Boyles transpositions of such surreal details into poems are extraordinarily funny. The poet makes the world strange again through defamiliarising objects and activities such as in 'Events with Parked Cars' where 'The car of a beautiful woman is decorated with ribbons' and 'The car of a sailor always lists to one side'. This is an amusing, entertaining and cleverly skewed take on modern reality, which will repay many readings. (Kirkus UK)

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