Search results for ""carcanet press ltd""

Longlisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize. 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.'

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A travel book, a memoir and a discursive essay on family life, love, deep sea diving, swimming in the Mediterranean and the underwater sound-systems of hotels around the world, this title is a paean to the south of France, taking the reader by way of the trenches of WWI and the Rainbow Warrior bombing to the experiences of diving off Menton.

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To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. "The Hundred Thousand Places" is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island landscapes, from dawn to dusk. Make an early start, 'feel your way out/into what might - take form'. It is a long walk, along the coast, over mountain and moorland, through pine and birch forest, ending on a shore where the sea offers 'another knowledge/wild and cold'. Attentive and responsive, the unhurried pace of Thomas A. Clark's writing draws the reader into a shared journey, pausing on the possibilities of a phrase, the music of the names of trees and flowers, or turning the page to open new horizons.

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Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. `In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the `girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

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A sequel to Dante's Inferno (Carcanet, 2014), where Dante was relocated to the University of Essex, here the action shifts from Dante's island of Purgatory to Mersea Island in Essex.

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Boland's ground-breaking essays and interviews, first collected in Object Lessons (2006), are enhanced by essays and major later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry, the poet, and Ireland.

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The glowing, painterly poems of Jenny Lewis' first collection take soundings in the depths: of the layers of the pasts that create a life, of the sources of self and creativity, of the structures beneath the surface. It is a region of loss and of recovery, the realm where memories are stored and poetry is made. Ghosts appear. An unknown father, the 'young South Wales Borderer' who died when Lewis was a few months old, bequeaths an irrecoverable sense of incompleteness to his child. Poems about being sent away to a Masonic school, aged seven, reflect the shadow that loss casts, while a later sequence suggests how the missing pieces may be recovered from the depths. "Fathom" is an intense and textured collection that leads the reader from surfaces to the heart of things. In the end is a sense of affirmation, where self is made whole.

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"Essays on Departure" is a gathering of 25 years' work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English, work from eight books, including a generous excerpt from the electrically erotic verse novel "Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons", and new work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire. Often unabashedly narrative, at once witty and elegiac, this is a poetry in open dialogue with its sources, as close at hand or as surprising as Donne , Akhmatova, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth or the Algerian Kateb Yacine. In the past decade, this exchange has been informed by Hacker's widely-published translations of contemporary French poets, and for the first time a selection of this work is included with her own poems. Marilyn Hacker's poetry has been - and will be - acclaimed for its keen observations of the poet's two cities, New York and Paris, its fusion of precise form and demotic language, its music, its memory, its confrontations with mortality and its stubborn delectation of life.

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Drawing on themes of magic, dreams and the nocturnal, Grevel Lindop's new collection of poems ranges in subject from the hidden histories of words to the folklore of yew trees, and in place from a haunted English library to a derelict Australian funfair and the streets of Mexico City. Including 'Shugborough Eclogues', a twenty-firstcentury take on the country-house pastoral, and sequences on the darker and brighter aspects of love, Luna Park deploys an original viewpoint as well as a wide range of traditional and modernist skills in verse. The book ends with 'Hurricane Music', Lindop's prose memoir of a visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

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The poems in "Jilted City" inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission', McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.

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W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English - 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' - fresh and unfamiliar here in their original forms and contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading - and revaluing - one of the great modern poets.

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Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to political satire and social commentary. This representative selection of the poetry he has published from 1956 to 2006 invites readers to explore the range of his poetic world.

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Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much loved husband - sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous - to invoke his solid presence; it is the man rather than her grief which is the centre of the book. Many lyrics recall the closeness of their last months together; others confess the ambivalence of a long marriage. Theirs was never an easy relationship, and she is not afraid to register the differences between them. With wry humour, she questions her own life before their meeting, and looks steadily at a future without him. As she imagines that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets and her dependence on friends and children. Always in complete control of rhythm and tone, these beautiful lyrics explore the most intimate thoughts with a clarity and tenacity Ted Hughes once described as 'unique'. It is Elaine Feinstein's most passionate book of poetry.

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Dissects modern life and relationships with insouciant honesty and ruthless wit, and love poems that evoke feelings with. This book includes an extract from the opening chapter of the author's second psychological thriller, "Hurting Distance".

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A collection about war and its human cost by exiled Iraqi poet and a former literary editor of the "Baghdad Observer".

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A new and updated version of the 'Collected Poems of Eavan Boland', Ireland's pioneering premier female poet.

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'Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it?' At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the painter Jan Gossaert paints Danae, upon whom Jupiter descends in a shower of gold, as a plump nubile maiden, her face haunted, one heavy breast exposed. In a nineteenth-century asylum in Zurich, a woman writes endlessly to her husband, covering the same page over and over again until nothing is legible. In January 1947, Arnold Schoenberg suffers a heart attack. Brought back to life by means of injections to his heart, he writes his astonishing string trio, "Opus 45", shortly afterwards. The French poet, Francis Ponge is photographed standing at a window, looking out through a broken pane. Behind him, there is an empty room, devoid of furniture. Out of fragments of cultural history from the past four hundred years, Gabriel Josipovici has created a compressed, poetic narrative of solitude, love, illness and the ambiguous comforts of art. As clear and elusive as the arts it explores, this is the most beautiful and mysterious of Josipovici's books to date.

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Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. "Spirit Brides" combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.

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"Ice Memory" is the first book of poems by the German poet Joachim Sartorius to be published in English. A traveller between continents, cultures and eras, Sartorius is a poet of global reach, whose poems, full of sound and light, documenting the wealth and exhaustion of the world, are magnificently brought into English by translators from Australia, Britain and the United States. In memories and ruins, Joachim Sartorius shows how bridges can be built in a fragmented world. The book includes translations by Richard Dove, Robert Gray, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hulse, Christopher Middleton, Sibylle Schlsier, Andrew Shields, Nathaniel Tarn, and Rosmarie Waldorp.

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In her third book of poems, Sinead Morrissey builds on the achievement of her award-winning collection, "Between Here and There", by expanding the lyric into new territories and admitting new voices. The theme of imprisonment is variously addressed: in the actual prisons of eighteenth-century Europe; in the prison of our own limited perceptions of experience, particularly of other cultures when abroad; in the prison of the mortal human body itself. Alongside the intimate interiors of human relationships, the poems are also interested in broader discourses, particularly history, and range in scope from the Royalist convictions of a woman wearing a Scold's Bridle during England's interregnum, to the story of the number zero. Form and content, as well as the personal and the political, are blended throughout this collection with imagination and consummate skill. As in her previous two books, travel remains a source of inspiration: one exhilarating poem details, in nine 'chapters', a six-thousand-mile train journey across China in which the conflicting faces of a rapidly changing country jostle for space.The collection ends with a compelling act of ventriloquism, as Morrissey recounts, in the first person, the life and works of the great prison reformer John Howard, and details his vision for the moral regeneration of the corrupted human soul.

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Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed. In "The Good European" Iain Bamforth reports on fifteen years of "experimental living" during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in "Tristram Shandy". Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show "Bouillon de Culture", a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.

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Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun. This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.

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'Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying ...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day - who is Pessoa?' asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) answers that question. It is an essential introduction to the work of one of the most original European poets of the twentieth century. It includes translations of a broad selection of his poems and his extraordinary prose, and some of his original English writings. A major introductory essay by Octavio Paz, a critical anthology, two posthumous 'interviews' and illustrations from the Pessoa archive are also included, to reveal the world of Pessoa in all its richness.

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It is William Tyndale who gave the English people their first New Testament, translated from the original Greek, and half of the Old Testament, from the original Hebrew. This is a collection of his work.

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The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the Summer Elegies, published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002. These, with selections from her earlier work, are included, with an introduction by Karen Leeder and a full interview with the poet. Schlag uses the term 'elegy' in the same spirit as Ovid does; it is a mode which includes the themes of love, of place, and of the passing of time and the urgencies it induces. Schlag has developed a rapid, nuanced, unpunctuated style which involves the reader in various creative ways. Her world is as emotionally opulent as her beloved Tsvetaeva's, with whom she shares an impatience with faint-hearted love, and her tones can be as volatile and various as hers. Most of her poems secrete narratives, and those narratives are linked to her life in its widest sense. Her landscapes and the creatures, human and otherwise, that inhabit them are unforgettable.

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In her second book of poems Sinead Morrissey's worlds grow more diverse, encompassing the Orient, the Antipodes, America and an Ireland which recent history has changed and yet not deeply, a country observed through eyes that travel and time have made dispassionate and disabused.

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This selection from the most productive Christian pen of the 19th century is also an introduction to one of its most compelling and troubled minds. John Henry Newman (1801-1891) was a dominant figure in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches. His writings and his human presence in Oxford and elsewhere had an abiding impact on both communions and contribute still to the spirit of ecumenicism. This bok concentrates on Newman's life and work up to 9 October 1845, the mid-point of his life and the moment be became a Roman Catholic. He was a prolific and subtle writer, a great prose artist whose sermons, tracts and polemics, together with a talent for organization and an ability to inspire others to faith and action, launched the Oxford Movement and the controversies that still follow from it. The 12 years between 1833 and 1845 are among the most important for English Christianity, and they were shaped for the most part by the pen and energy of Newman, a rather shy, quiet Oxford don, whose enduring legacy was to restore to the Church of England its Catholic heritage. Newman was complex and sometimes contradictory as a man, and even in his most formal writings the man is present, responding to social and political pressures of church and state. A great communicator, with a need for self-disclosure, he is nonetheless revealed "and" concealed in his writings.

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A collection of poems produced by Brian Cox since his retirement as a Manchester professor, which portray scenes from his own life and convey a sense of ending and losing a role.

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In this collection, Jon Stallworthy and Peter France introduce Blok's poetry into English, retaining as much as possible his distinctive form and tone. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experience, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler.

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Thomas Blackburn was a haunted and difficult man. His childhood was tormented by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin colour, and an overaffectionate mother. The moral and sexual uncertainties of this period were to form the core of his later poetry and prose. Influenced by Yeats, his work in the Fifties and Sixties dramatized the conflict between faith and sexuality, drawing on myth, Christian imagery and Jungian tropes, he produced a spare and challenging body of work. Although his life was interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he continued writing through the early Seventies, his work becoming more intimate and confessional. He was an influential teacher and friend of many artists in London during the 1950s and 1960s, his daughter recalling a scene in which her father, wearing a white linen suite, danced cheek to cheek with a black leather-clad Francis Bacon.

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Combining traditional forms and those associated with modernism, this collection focuses on love, loss, and the different ways in which people - for better or worse - can be significant to each other.

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First selection of Andrew Young's best-known short poems and the long mystical poem Into Hades. The volume is illustrated by Joan Hassalal's powerful wood-engravings.

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This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny, and her nephew James Edward.

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Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known to Anglophone readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.

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The latest novel by acclaimed writer Gabriel Josipovici, encompassing suspense, love, family and the work of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.

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An accessible gathering of work by New Zealand's foremost poet.

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A gathering of work by one of Britain's most vital and well-established poets.

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A colourful new collection by one of the outstanding Caribbean poets of our time.

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Small World tells a story of the changing relationship between a father and his two daughters, one severely disabled, a 'mermaid in a wheelchair', the other discovering the difference of her elder sister, the 'moon' to her 'earth'. Each succeeding poem gathers further telling detail as the father listens and observes with affection and surprise the strange world they inhabit, gradually reflecting on his own contrasting childhood. Finally, the book ends with a shock experience that brings all that has gone before into sharp focus.

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The Selected Poems of one of America's most eminent poets.

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New Selected Poems is a poet's choice of over thirty years' work. Minhinnick's poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes 'An Opera in Baghdad' as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.

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Zig Zag consists of five new sequences by Anthony Rudolf, a poet whose craft has been enriched by his experiences as a translator of French and Russian literature. Poems about memory, time and loss are complicated by humour, lyricism and a light touch.

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With the economy of a proverb and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to 'my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

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'Rough music' is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampson's characteristic lyric intensity deftly fuses metaphysics and politics with the vernacular of daily life.

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Multi-award-winning poet Capildeo's new collection brings home the delight, frustration, restlessness and continuity of striving to live a connected human life in our fragmenting times.

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These poems are apocalyptic and sensory, coming from a place of hurt and love, of the human spirit struggling to transcend 'base matter' and make sense of the world.

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The highly anticipated second collection from the winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022.

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The March-April 2023 issue An issue of dialogues, with whales, with Rimbaud, with Mexico, Afghanistan, Germany, Canada, with John Lucas, D.H. Lawrence and many more Includes new poems by Colm Tóibín, Claudine Toutoungi, Parwana Fayyaz, Stav Poleg and others Anthony Vahni Capildeo 'Touch and Mourning' Zohar Atkins 'Are Philosophers Normal?' New to PN Review this issue: Fabio Morabito, Sarah Mnatzaganian, Mark Haworth-Booth and Maithreyi Karnoor and more...

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