Brand New Ancients

Product Information

I read this out loud in its entirety (sitting outside on the porch, lying on a bed, waiting for the potatoes to boil in the kitchen, sitting on the couch after dinner), and parts of the poem made me raise my voice and speed up, unintentionally. Kae Tempest shows how the old myths still live on in our everyday acts of violence, bravery, sacrifice and love – and that our lives make tales no less dramatic and powerful than those of the old gods.

Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. Tempest uses rhythm, rhymes, different lyrical styles (including rap) and other stylistic devices to great effect. I really like Greek Mythology and loved how Kate played around with it, finding examples of ancient God’s in everyday people. They received the Ted Hughes Award for their long-form narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D’Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for their work as a playwright.Tommy and Clive, half-brothers who don’t know it remind me a little bit of the half-brother’s in my favourite play, Blood Brothers. I read this in a single sitting, and that final line was a complete gut punch - I had to let out an audible breath when I finished! She deftly weaves together two generations of modern families, telling stories of love, betrayal, anger and revenge with a minimum of verbiage.

This studio production of her acclaimed stage show captures her unique blend of street poetry, rap and storytelling.This is just so much better than any piece of Art or performance I've experienced in a very long time, possibly ever. A modified version of this poem, with actors but also the poet performing an abridged/revised version of the poem, is available in an almost 12 minute film in YouTube.

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. Leggerlo in inglese dà un valore aggiunto, permette di carpire tutta la musicalità del testo originale; bella la storia delle persone comuni come noi, che ricordano le antiche divinità. Her poetry flows in a way that translates to the page extremely well but works even better when spoken aloud (as the poem should be, the title page advises). I was drawn to this narrative poem by the cover – Ancient Greeks toting briefcases and smart phones.And so what you get instead is this artificial geezery ecosystem that kind of people who read poetry can look into as a kind of class sublime: we can thrill a bit to these meaningless pub-n-thud lives before going back to Waitrose. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Winner of the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry, Kae Tempest’s Brand New Ancients plays with mythology to tell the story of young people in modern times as their lives spiral out of control. Brand New Ancients has been adapted an as album, theatre piece and a short film (which can be found for free online here!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. 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.