Un poema che nasce per essere letto a voce alto e che fa della musicalità un elemento fondante e fondamentale del racconto.

Brand New Ancients has been adapted an as album, theatre piece and a short film (which can be found for free online here! I don't particularly want to discourage others from reading, just don't expect what I expected based on the other works I mentioned. Overall, I consider Brand New Ancients a fascinating poem that is best consumed as a performance, but one that impresses more with its style and linguistic competence than its deep insights. Tempest sings of the extraordinary contained within the ordinary in language that is sometimes elevated but more often the vernacular used by the characters she has created. And I have to add that reading this book with the author reading it + the music was excellent, it added a real tension, an authentic atmosphere.Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. I fear the culture industry in this country is about to eat Kate Tempest on toast, because she does a lot of things the country at large sort of wants to do: be edgy in a nondescript post Guy Ritchie kind of way, think about foreign countries only when they can sort of be used by British people, and kind of tamp down any possibility for meaningful change. This is a very short read, with stanzas musing on the constancy of the human condition and how we really haven’t come so far from the days when Zeus and Hera might have walked among us.

Mostly, in that it does not live up to its premise of finding the godlike in quotidian contemporary life. Tempest’s gods and heroes are the everyday characters, the little people who keep getting up and keep carrying on despite all odds.I was drawn to this narrative poem by the cover – Ancient Greeks toting briefcases and smart phones. Their remarkable stage presence is wholly audible in this poem, a spoken story written to be told with live music. The main story running through the poem, telling the story of a group of young people growing up in modern times, one the product of an affair, one unloved by his father, getting in trouble, their lives spiralling out of control and becoming more violent is brilliantly executed. Purtroppo la resa italiana non rende la musicalità dell'originale che, a mio modesto parere, costituisce un altro aspetto geniale del modo di raccontare la storia di Kate Tempest. I'm well impressed with this one, reminds me at times of Ginsberg's Howl, the short lines, long lines and repetition give you a feeling of constantly changing direction.

Please read this poem, and read it out loud if you can; it will leave you broken and hopeful and shocked and empowered all at the same time. We can recognise the events which lead to these outcomes, and this could give us the tools and the insight to change the narrative to make the best of what could be a bad situation. Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients pushes the idea of what poetry can be, telling a complete story through verse rather than serving as a collection of individual poems. It’s the kind of story that deserves to be read all in one go, preferably with tea, and lose yourself into the world of these characters whose lives intersect in ways that are recognisable to the reader. Kate started her writing as a rapper outside London, and that comes across in word choice, rhythm, and the way the poems scream for performance.It is entirely possible that this issue is one I only noticed because I read the poem instead of listening to it being performed; I might not have paid so much attention to the narrative structure otherwise. I think I never reviewed that collection; suffice it to say that I enjoyed it, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this review. If Homer got bladdered with Ken Loach in a south London pub, they might come up with something like this. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.