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    Taking Mesopotamia
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    Taking Mesopotamia
    Unavailable
    Taking Mesopotamia
    Ebook103 pages30 minutes

    Taking Mesopotamia

    By Jenny Lewis

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis’s search for her lost father—the young South Wales Borderer who led his troops across the desert by starlight in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, and a mixture of formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq war seen from a woman’s point of view—the horror of sons and daughters being sent into battle, the struggles of widows and orphans. Woven through the personal and geopolitical content is a more ancient strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first piece of written literature, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power, and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in 4,000 years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781906188191
    Unavailable
    Taking Mesopotamia
    Author

    Jenny Lewis

    Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet, playwright, songwriter, children’s author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has worked as an advertising copywriter and a government press officer for, among others, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also written children’s books and plays and co-written, with its creator, Kate Canning, a twenty-six-part children’s TV animation series, James the Cat. Her first poetry sequence, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996) was broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour, translated into Russian (Bilingua, 2002) and made into an opera with music by Gennadyi Shizoglazov which had its world premiere with the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in Perm, Russia, November 2017. Since 2012, Jenny has been working with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh on an award-winning Arts Council-funded project, ‘Writing Mesopotamia’, which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her work for the theatre includes Map of Stars (2002), Garden of the Senses (2005), After Gilgamesh (2011) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan al-Sayegh, Stories for Survival: a Re-telling of the 1001, Arabian Nights (2015). She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/Carcanet, Fathom (2007) and Taking Mesopotamia (2014). Jenny is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths.

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