Quennets

The poetic form used in these pages is one invented by Raymond Queneau in his 1975 book Morale élémentaire; it has come to be called the “quennet”, after its inventor, as it has one more line than a sonnet. The three sequences which make up this collection experiment with psychogeographical quennets inspired by walking around the Essex estuary and the Berlin Wall Trail, with the final sequence retracing the steps of W.G. Sebald through Suffolk.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast and has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing. His books include the anthology of short stories, Ovid Metamorphosed (2000), the poetry collections Oulipoems (2006), Oulipoems 2 (2009) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2011), and the novel tapestry (2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality (2007), and Georges Perec’s I Remember (2014). Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s poem to current-day Essex, was published in 2014 and was an Independent poetry title of the year.