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    Brand New Ancients
    Brand New Ancients
    Brand New Ancients
    Ebook57 pages41 minutes

    Brand New Ancients

    By Kae Tempest

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    About this ebook

    With this dazzling modern myth in verse, Kae Tempest became the youngest winner of the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

    Yes, the gods are on the park bench, the gods are on the bus, / The gods are all here, the gods are in us. / The gods are timeless, fearless, fighting to be bold, / conviction is a heavy hand to hold, / grip it, winged sandals tearing up the pavement -- / you, me, everyone: Brand New Ancients.

    Kae Tempest's words in Brand New Ancients are written to be read aloud; the book combines poem, rap, and humanist sermon, by turns tender and fierce. Set in Southeast London, Brand New Ancients finds the mythic in the mundane. It is the story of two half-brothers, Thomas and Clive, unknown to each other -- Thomas the result of an affair between his mother and Clive's father. Tempest, with wide-ranging empathy, takes us inside the passionless marriage of Jane and Kevin -- the man who suspects Thomas is not his son, but loves him just the same -- and the neighboring home of Mary and Brian, where betrayal has not been so placidly accepted. The sons of these two households -- quiet, creative Thomas and angry, destructive Clive -- will cross paths in adolescence, their fates converging with mortal fury.

    These characters' loves, their infidelities, their disappointments and their small comforts -- these, Tempest argues, are timeless. Our lives and our choices are no less important than those of history and myth. Awarded the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, Brand New Ancients insists on our importance as individuals -- and asserts Kae Tempest's importance as a talent impossible to ignore.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateMar 10, 2015
    ISBN9781632862082
    Brand New Ancients
    Author

    Kae Tempest

    Kae Tempest is a poet. They are also a writer, a lyricist, a performer and a recording artist. They have published plays, poems, a novel, a book-length essay, released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. They received Mercury Music Prize nominations for both of the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos, and two Ivor Novello nominations for their song-writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons. They were named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, a once-in-a-decade accolade. 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. Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. They were born in London in 1985 where they still live. They hope to continue putting words together for a long time.

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    • 5/5
      Kate Tempest, a revolutionary author, incorporating her vocal back round uncovered the labyrinth of misery given to average people. This novella speaks volumes about the sordid reality that people live in while comparing/reminding humans to fiends and Gods. An inspirational reminder that everyone has the potential to be a God no matter what neglected baggage they carry.

    Book preview

    Brand New Ancients - Kae Tempest

    Brand New

    Ancients

    Brand New Ancients is dedicated to Camberwell, Lewisham, Brockley, New Cross, Peckham, Brixton, Blackheath, Greenwich, Charlton, Kidbrooke and Deptford, and all the gods from all those places who taught me everything I know.

    Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic – that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division within themselves. I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.

    JUNG: Dreams, Reflections (Fontana Press, 1995)

    All deities reside in the human breast.

    WILLIAM BLAKE

    Contents

    Brand New Ancients

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    Also by Kate Tempest

    Brand New Ancients

    This poem was written to be read aloud

    In the old days

    the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves.

    But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves,

    the things we’ve made ourselves into,

    the way we break ourselves in two,

    the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

    But we are still mythical.

    We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.

    We are still godly;

    that’s what makes us so monstrous.

    But it feels like we’ve forgotten we’re much more than the sum of all

    the things that belong to us.

    The empty skies rise

    over the benches where the old men sit –

    they are desolate

    and friendless

    and the young men spit;

    inside they’re delicate, but outside they’re reckless and I reckon

    that these are our heroes,

    these are our legends.

    That face on the street you walk past without looking at,

    or that face on the street that walks past you without looking back

    or the man in the supermarket trying to keep his kids out of his trolley,

    or the woman by the postbox fighting with her brolly,

    every single person has a purpose in them burning.

    Look again, and allow yourself to see them.

    Millions of characters,

    each with their own epic narratives

    singing it’s hard to be an angel

    until you’ve been a demon.

    The sky is so perfect it looks like a painting

    but the air is so thick that we feel like we’re fainting.

    Still

    the myths in this city have always said the same thing –

    about how all we need is a place to belong;

    how all we need is to know what’s right from what’s wrong and

    how we all need is to struggle to find out for ourselves

    which side we are on.

    We all need to love

    and be loved

    and keep going.

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