Poetry. Harry Matthews writes: "The title of Philip Terry's brilliant book pays explicit homage to the Oulipo; but while he uses many of the group's methods, he invariably goes his own way with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. He has taken the notion that poetry can emerge from arbitrary procedures and transformed it into a sumptuous variety of explosively novel delights."

Author Hometown: LONDON UK



About the author: Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962 and has been working with Oulipian and related writing practices for over twenty years. His lipogrammatic novel The Book of Bachelors (1999), was highly praised by the Oulipo: "Enormous rigour, great virtuosity but that's the least of it." Currently he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex, where he teaches a graduate course on the poetics of constraint. His work has been published in Panurge, PN Review, Oasis, North American Review, and Onedit, and his books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (2000) and Fables of Aesop (2006). His translation of Raymond Queneau's last book of poems, Elementary Morality, is forthcoming from Carcanet. Oulipoems is his first book of poetry.