When Kafka Met Einstein

James Knox Whittet

• Publisher: Iron Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780956572561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

When Kafka Met Einstein is the first full collection from Scottish poet James Knox Whittet.The poems combine the playful and the intellectual, moving easily between Nietzsche and the Teletubbies. Brought up on the island of Islay, some of Knox Whittet's poetry is inspired by the landscapes and history of Scottish islands, while elsewhere he is at Newport Pagnell Service Station at 3am, or writing about Iris Murdoch's Alzheimer's. There is also a poem about the little-known fact that Hitler attended the same school as Wittgenstein.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.James Knox Whittet was born and brought up on the Hebridean island of Islay, where his father was head gardener at a small castle. His poems have won the George Crabbe Memorial Award three times. His first poetry pamphlet, A Brief History Of Devotion, was published by Hawthorn Press in 2003; his second, Seven Poems for Engraved Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Callum MacDonald Award from the National Library of Scotland (2004). He has previously edited two acclaimed anthologies for Iron Press: 100 Island Poems of Great Britain and Ireland (2005) and Writers on Islands (2008); the latter was nominated by the Scotsman as one of the Books of the Year. He now lives in Norfolk.

Table of contents

• The Poems
• Biography
• Foreword
• When Kafka Met Einstein
• Transmutability
• A Brief History of Devotion
• In Memory of R.S. Thomas
• Cuttings
• Imprints
• Echoes
• Lawrence of Arabia in Collieston
• Moving with the Times
• The Last Man on Jura
• The Comma Butterfly
• Peaches
• Dante in Auschwitz
• Fires of Memory
• Hands
• Infinite Wheels
• Virginia Woolf on Skye
• Circles of Fire
• Borrowed Words
• Aisles
• 3 a.m. at Newport Pagnell Service Station
• Sea Winds
• New Wine in an Old Tea Urn
• Patterns of Carpets
• From The Tractatus to Teletubbyland
• Hebridean Haiku
• One Jewish Boy
• The Descent
• Torch
• Carousel of Silences
• Globed Lamp
• Tongues of Flame
• Late Night Phone-in
• The Destined Journey of Etty Hillesum
• Folds
• After Dark
• Terminus
• Spells
• The Lives and Deaths of St. Kilda
• A Lift
• Finding the Darkness
• The Biscuit Barrel
• Island Incident
• Fragments of Eden
• Laundered Towels
• Tea Dance on a Tuesday Afternoon
• Languages of Babyle
• The Resurrection of Gilbert Kaplan
• Absence
• Einstein in Cromer