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WELCOME to the Home Page of Grevel Lindop, poet, biographer, critic, editor, essayist, and writer on just about everything...
The latest news is that Grevel's current project, TRAVELS ON THE DANCE FLOOR, is due for publication from Andre Deutsch publishers, part of the Carlton group, in September 2008.
When poet and biographer Grevel Lindop took up salsa dancing in rainy Manchester, he thought he was just keeping a New Year’s resolution to get some exercise. His only qualifications were two left feet (size twelve) and some excruciating memories of ballroom dancing lessons long ago in adolescence. But salsa has a way of taking over your life. Intense, intimate and addictive (a lot like sex, in fact) this adrenalin-pumping Afro-Latin-American dance style, which is rapidly becoming a worldwide craze, soon turned into a passion. He set out on an odyssey to discover the roots of salsa, learn the most authentic moves and find dance heaven in the heartland of this rich, kaleidoscopic tradition whose very name means a ‘sauce’ or spicy mixture.
His quest took him through the streets, clubs, bars and dancehalls of Cuba and Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Miami, bringing encounters with musicians and dancers, poets, artists and crooked cops, voodoo priests, hookers, hustlers and thieves - and even the occasional goddess!
The story of his adventures and misadventures on this amazing journey makes a spellbinding read. Watch the press, radio and TV in late summer and early autumn 2008 for news of TRAVELS ON THE DANCE FLOOR!
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CONTACT:
"To contact me, please email info[at]grevel.co.uk replacing [at] with @ "
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WHAT OTHER WRITERS HAVE SAID...
'This poet's best gifts - care for detail, love of Nature, clear eye and formal excellence. Every poem shows us more than we have seen with our own eyes.' - Elizabeth Jennings, The Independent.
'Every trick in the poet's bag works for him as for a master, so unobtrusively that it is only at the second or third reading that you become aware that the thought and feeling...are supported by an amazingly intricate web of sound.' - R.V. Bailey, The North.
'Grevel Lindop celebrates a cosmic harmony that upholds the greatest and the least parts of the universe...I find something akin to those early French films like Rene Claire's Sous les toits de Paris in the eye with which he habitually sees the world. [Yet] whatever parallel such poetry may have with Impressionism, the atmosphere is unmistakably English. His perspectives open on the stories within stories, where what is "real" and what is illusory are woven together. Grevel Lindop does not see the world about him as in need of "improving", for he sees all with the eye of love.' - Kathleen Raine, Temenos Academy Review.
'A lyric voice that handles images well, that distinguishes - as few poets do - the erotic from the sexual, that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace...It reminds you of an ordered and structured world. It is somewhat the voice of a happy spirit, with, maybe, a measure of regret and an interesting intimation of waste.' - Eavan Boland, PN Review
'Transparently accomplished. Lucid of contour, with a syntax almost too elegaically attuned to form, his work displays...the kind of internal 'itinerary' which (in Mandelstam's image) is the mark of achieved poetry.' - John Kerrigan, London Review of Books.
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