The Alexandra Sequence

In The Alexandra Sequence John Redmond views contemporary urban life through the suggestive prism of the mummers' play, a seasonal British folk-theatre staged in the streets and door-to-door. The book takes its title from an area of Liverpool, a city shaped by its recent history of trade and migration, still recovering after a long period of decline. Experiences of uprootedness and social precarity frame suburban lives that are 'livid with accident'. Drawing on the two central themes of the mummers' play – combat and resurrection – the poems reveal both dark and light parallels between the modern-day neighbourhood and medieval theatre: the carnivalesque zombie-drummers marching through a local park find their mirror-image in the daily disguises of life in a housing estate, or in the masked infractions of the 2011 England Riots. Mixing narrative and lyric, Redmond paints a neighbourhood of lively, unlikely references, from Juvenal to Tommy Cooper, Brueghel to indie rock. // 'Ingenious, maverick, brilliantly protean – welcome to the quicksilver world of John Redmond's new collection.' (David Morley)