Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Published to mark C.H. Sisson's 80th birthday, this collection of his work provides summary insights into the nature and meaning of the mental and physical worlds.

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Certain Windows is Dan Burt's second chapbook collection. It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among others, the poet's father comes alive here and in the poems, a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action. Dan Burt is a master of traditional forms, memorable lines, which continue accruing sense and pleasure with each reading. The scale of his concerns is matched, in the sequences, by a substantial formal architecture, and an answerable narrative informs each poem. In Certain Windows the dominant notes are elegiac and philosophical and he is rigorously unsentimental in his retrospects and unillusioned in his sense of the natural and social worlds.

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A playful and enquiring first collection by a new poet of real promise.

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"All Just', David Herd's second Carcanet collection, makes poems from the fractured phrases and competing idioms of contemporary movement, its translations between public and private spaces. Conversations start and are broken off. Public announcements intervene in private situations. In the background, an emergency is about to unfold. Taking bearings from Dover and London, from elegy and protest, from official structures that determine where people can go, and the futures that cross them, "All Just" explores the social spaces in which we all move. It asks what it means to be at large in the world, and what language we have to document the journey.

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"Paralogues", which takes its title from the Greek word for 'ballads', is the British debut of an original Canadian poet and editor. Evan Jones explores Greek mythology, Roman and Byzantine history, art and travel, from contemporary perspectives. The myth of Actaeon is re-imagined in three ways, and "Paralogues" concludes with a sequence retelling the Byzantine folk ballad "Constantine and Arete". Translation is central to the collection, from the modern Greek of Miltos Sachtouris to the Austrian German of Raoul Schrott. Readers encounter people and places real and imagined: the lonely figure of the poet Cavafy in Victorian Liverpool, God in post-war Paris, the landscapes of Europe and North America at once familiar and unfamiliar.

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In The Crossing Fee Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five years as a health consultant), the poems sound the 'plummet and allure' of life on both worlds. Grounded in myth and also in close observation, The Crossing Fee records a momentous exploration of space and history: 'For the tides are always bringing / news of something strange.'

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Arguing with Malarchy is full of voices: tender, sinister or angry, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther's poems are alert to the ways a life can be briefly snared in the turn of a phrase - or in the moment when lanaguage fails. She explores silence, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the pauses and boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten or invented, the living and the dead. In the book's first part, a chronicle of mourning writes out of the silence into 'the bare threads of tunes', to begin a new story. In the second part, Luther's characters live in their language: 'Keep talking,' the old man tells Malarchy. We travel through elemental landscapes of sea and sky, shadows and wide savannahs that exist beyond language and sustain when words are silenced.

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Finger of a Frenchman explores looking, and writing about looking: looking at surfaces and beyond them, at what is depicted and what is hidden in shadow, at how a transient chemistry of light may be fixed in colour and words. Kinloch's poems are portraits of artists and reflections on art through five centuries of the artistic bond between Scotland and France. John Acheson, Master of the Scottish Mint, takes Mary, Queen of Scots' portrait for the Scottish coinage; Esther Inglis paints the first self-portrait by a Scottish artist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ticks off his portrait painter, Allan Ramsay, and Eugene Delacroix offers David Wilkie a brace of partridge for tea in Kensington. The Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and Charles Rennie Mackintosh bring the gallery into the twentieth century, where Kinloch considers the hybrid art of figures such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Watt and Douglas Gordon in analytical prose-poems. In the book's second part, a mini-epic of a seventeenth-century priest's Grand Tour offers a reflection on the nature of Collection itself, whether of paintings or poems, the composing of fragments into a whole.

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'It is the poet's job to invent beautiful falsehoods.' John Gallas's falsehoods are beautiful, ribald and audacious. Made from found language liberated from books, walls, the internet and radio, his forty lies construct an extravagant alternative reality of Russian assassins and magical shirts, Babylonian gardens, flying monks and the mathematics of Omar Khayyam. From Inner Mongolia to outer space, in tanka and sonnet and villanelle, Viking haiku and musical staves, Gallas collaborates with the print-maker Sarah Kirby to beguile the reader with stories and puzzles, and with pictures that create visual false memories of facts that never were.

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The July-August 2021 issue; Major account by Poet of Europe Sinead Morrissey of her experiences in Gdansk, with reflections on the Belfast troubles among which she grew up; Sujata Bhatt breaks a long poetic silence with a suite of new poems; Rory Waterman and Poetry London editor Andre Naffis-Sahely converse, and sparks fly; Caitlion Stobie's amazing tribute to Tony Harrison's V, a new poem entitled W, bridges the gap between his politics and ours; New to PN Review this issue: Padraig Regan, Jordi Sarsanedas, Nuash Sabah and Kare Caoimhe Arthur; and more...

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The March-April 2021 issue; The last interview with the poet John Ash; Major new talent featured: Michael Brett; Novelist Kirsty Gunn reads Henry James during lockdown; Reem Abbas, the young Palestinian poet, explores the Ghazal; Tony Roberts examines the Publisher/Poet relationship (Giroux and Berryman); New poetry by Jane Duran, Yeow Kai Chai, Rebecca Perry & Shane McCrae; New to PN Review this issue: Reem Abbas, Francis O'Hare, John Fitzgerald & Maurice Riordan; And more...

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The long title poem of John Greening’s The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. The collection is haunted by other kinds of silence too, especially that most emphatic one (notably in Greening’s witty formal verse letter, `Airmail for Chief Seattle’ and an Egyptian sequence based on wall paintings in the British Museum), but at the same time it is open to the bright potentiality of the unknown, the beyond. A tribute to the late Dennis O’Driscoll is a bold meditation on hope, a mood intensified in a series of uplifting Hölderlin translations. Elsewhere, Greening visits the Peak District, Brecklands, chalklands and a lost world of highwaymen and mythology beneath the runways of Heathrow, tuning in to the special music of each place. Along the way are striking individual poems on trees, penny coins, Hilliard miniatures, a coal bunker, a totem pole, the X5 bus route and musical migrating geese.

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Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness, the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician’s disorientating art that `makes nothing appear’. Artists’ mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar-seeming world; an estuary blurs distinctions between land and sea. Like the eighteenth-century artists’ landscape mirror that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed, the poems in Judith Willson’s first collection are concerned with the very act of looking, how it selects and transforms what is seen. Their landscapes are borders and boundaries, places shaped by the persistence of a past which still presses close to the surface, its meanings as unstable as the play of light. Objects disclose stories of their travel through `peopled time’: poems `reach through thick folds into pockets / for a letter or a glove’.

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Shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021. Fawzi Karim's poetry has been widely translated, among other languages into French, Swedish, Italian and English. Carcanet published Plague Lands and Other Poems (2011), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This new selection, translated by Anthony Howell working from the author's own versions, explores the experience of becoming at home in London, passing from a sense of exile to a sense of uneasy belonging. In his introduction the poet is tactful, candid, touching on some of the most urgent themes of our time including exile and the possibilities of home. Between the poet, a major literary presence in his language, and his translator, a poet of many talents and skills, a kind of dialogue exists. The accommodations between two traditions formally uneasy in one another's company is compelling to read. The poet's and the translator's contrasting memories meet and confer at the level of language and image.

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The latest edition of PN Review, one of the outstanding literary journals of our time

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Tony Connor's tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor's abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman.

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This is John Birtwhistle's first collection of poems since 'Our Worst Suspicions' (1985), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In the meantime much of his writing has gone into libretti, including 'The Plumber's Gift', performed by English National Opera. He has not, however, been neglecting poetry - as can be seen from the energetic variety of form and tone displayed here. Birtwhistle accepts from modernism the duties of visual clarity, concision, and originality of phrase; but he unites this with a romantic commitment to feeling and to organic form. His subject matter is wide-ranging as ever, but shows a new intensity about the the life cycle.

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The spare and subtle poems of Nina Bogin's third collection map personal territory - places of memory and love as much as of language and geography. An American writing in her adopted France, in the eastern border region close to Switzerland and Germany, she examines - sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly - the traces history leaves on the land and its inhabitants, while also exploring her own, sometimes uneasy, relationship to time and place in a mother tongue that has undergone French and German influences, connecting her historically to the Middle Europe of her ancestors.

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In Jennie Feldman's second collection, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, "Swift" ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters - with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society's margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem cafe. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

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Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Aptly described by Gavin Ewart as 'a writer of great intelligence and vitality who can command a very powerful wry political comment', E.A. Markham was a leading light in British Caribbean writing. He was a poet, novelist and short story writer, essayist and anthologist. He completed this selection of poems from his previous books, together with an opening section of nearly fifty new poems, shortly before his death in Paris at Easter, 2008.

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At the heart of many of these poems lies an apprehension of things being lost or destroyed, and with this a need for consolation. The question of how we look for, or create, such solace - whether in faith or the rain, by doing a puzzle or watching TV - is one that threads through the book. In this work - her second collection - there is an increasing scope and depth to language as Stoddart seeks to explore paradoxes: poems of motherhood are double-edged celebrations, grief must come to some good. The ambivalence at work in her first book comes to intriguing fruition here in a collection of original and distinctive poems.

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In this delightful homage to the now unfashionable Neapolitan poet, two contemporary poets who share a fascination with his work present their selection of fresh versions from his best-known collection. In their introductions they explore the background to his work and the qualities, literary and human, which drew them to him.

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J.L. Gili's selection of Lorca's poems in Spanish, with his own unassuming prose versions as guides to the originals, first appeared in 1960. With its excellent introduction and selection it remains a perfect introductory guide to the great poet. The book is ideal for newcomers to Lorca who know, or are prepared to grapple with, a little Spanish. It influenced a generation of readers and poets, including Ted Hughes who first encountered Lorca through this book.

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Many tensions are at work in the playfully unconstrained poems of Stanley Moss: ordinary and mythical lives, the political and the personal, high art and low comedy intermingle, achieving an effect that is often surreal and always striking. Here, God and Death are not matters for detached speculation but constant and vivid presences, whether centre-stage or waiting in the wings. An engagement with history is brought to bear on legend and on current affairs: a poem addressing 9/11 summons up the figure of Walt Whitman, whose exuberance and resolute faith in humanity Moss echoes throughout the book. Serious and optimistic, light and dark, "Songs of Imperfection" is an uplifting and celebratory book.

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"The Anvil New Poets" series has built up a reputation for introducing ground-breaking work from the best new poets. The names included in previous volumes are testament to the quality of the series: Kate Clanchy, Colette Bryce, Alice Oswald and Mimi Khalvati were all first published here. For the third volume in the series, Roddy Lumsden and Hamish Ironside have tracked down ten outstanding poets from all over Britain, and beyond. They have read through several hundred manuscripts, as well as soliciting work from the best new poets appearing in magazines and elsewhere. The result is an anthology both cohesive and various, by turns musical, formal, observational, witty and surreal.

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The poetry of Sappho, who was born around 620 BC and lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, has inspired and fascinated readers and poets for two and a half thousand years. Today, as in antiquity, she is regarded as Greece's supreme lyric poet. Yet apart from a few near-complete poems, her poetry survives largely in tantalizing fragments. This book traces Sappho's reception in English-language poetry through translations and poems about her. From Donne and Pope via Swinburne, Bliss Carman and Pound to contemporary poets such as Michael Longley and Olga Broumas, it both celebrates and illustrates our changing image of Sappho.

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Brought back into print in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Vernon Watkins' death. Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: 'the greatest lyric poet of my generation.' Dylan Thomas referred to him as: 'the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English', or, in a letter, as 'the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today.' Philip Larkin wrote: 'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.' All Watkins's poetry was published by Faber & Faber in his lifetime, and he was friends with such widely differing poets as: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Kathleen Raine. When he died, in 1967, he was being considered for poet laureate, after the death of John Masefield. Since that time, however, although a few have continued to praise his poetry very highly, public awareness of it has ceased almost completely, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th Century poetry.100 years after Watkins's birth (June 27th, 1906), "New Selected Poems of Vernon Watkins" offers the first widely available selection of his poetry since his death, with a new introduction and notes, outlining the literary and biographical context of his work, and a foreword by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a rare joy thus to be reintroducing the work of a major poet to a new generation of readers.

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This collection studies writers and mystics, past and present, and considers from a Christian poet's perspective how religious or mystical experience informs the imagination. The text provides readings of Elizabeth Jennings's chosen authors and offers clues to her own poetry. Though her first concern is poetry, she draws on prose writers to effect her explorations. Writers considered include: St Augustine; St Teresa of Avila; George Herbert; T.S. Eliot; Charles Peguy; Simone Weil; Gerald Manley Hopkins; David Gascoyne; Julian of Norwich; St John of the Cross; Henry Vaughan; Thomas Traherne; Rainer Maria Rilke; Edwin Muir; Hart Crane; and Wallace Stevens.

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The explosive and highly controversial new film of The Crime of Father Amaro is set in Mexico, in a material and religious culture of this century not unlike the provincial Portugal where, as a young man, de Queiros was despatched to train for the consular service. The Crime of Father Amaro is set in Leiria, a provincial cathedral city, in which the hypocrisies of churchmen were not far to seek. Father Amaro, a young man like himself, with a priestly rather than a diplomatic vocation, falls into a relationship with a woman, and their tragic story unfolds with a harsh relentlessness. The situation of women, tightly swaddled in conformities yet fevered in their illusions of romance, much troubled the young author in this and later books

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Conjurors presents this poet's best work, much of it for the first time.

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These short poems, considered as Iraqi haiku, reflect an urgent wisdom beyond their original borders.

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This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are 'inserted headlong into life' and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work - at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac - Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, 'troubling the stubborn world for meaning'.

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Sarah Broom's poetry profoundly engages the landscape of her native New Zealand. Experienced as both nurturing and menacing, tender and indifferent, it is the context within which other terrains are explored: heightened states of awareness, the physical extremes of illness, the drifts and tides of close relationships, the complexities of motherhood. Intensely conscious of death, her poetry is fiercely attached to life and love.

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Reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, this work records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, and the continuity and remaking of the source.

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This collection of poems rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland describes a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird and then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh. Recording a violent, clannish world of fierce hatreds and passionate loyalties, the ballads tell vivid tales of raids, feuds and betrayals, romances and acts of revenge.

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In this radical anthology, the work of three of Ireland's most important and best-loved contemporary poets is featured. Each has, in a different way, cleared new creative space from which to speak and to sing. The anthology comprises an essential selection of some 40 pages from the work of the poet

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The Adulterer's Tongue casts a brilliant light on the world of Welsh-language poetry. Poetry has been written in Welsh for over fifteen hundred years: an ancient literature, it is also a vibrant part of the culture of modern Europe, often overlooked by English speakers. Robert Minhinnick's translations bring six outstanding contemporary Welsh language poets into the spotlight, providing the Welsh texts en face. Minhinnick, himself a leading poet, is conscious of the responsibilities of translating out of a minority language. His versions take risks, but honour the originals' forms and intentions, making audible a wide array of individual styles and voices. The poets here each in different ways remake the language and culture they inherit. This collection testifies to the abiding creative energy of the Welsh language and culture. The poets are: Bobi Jones, Menna Elfyn, Emyr Lewis, Iwan Llwyd, Gwyneth Lewis and Elin ap Hywel.

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In 1997 Matthew Welton received an Eric Gregory award for his poetry, the next day he threw his only copies of the prize winning poems into the Thames, he took the train back to Manchester and started writing again. This book includes everything he has written since.

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The concept of this text is that each piece of writing is a scientific paper of itself, a series of findings. The practices of writing science and poetry are a single discussion of perception carried out with the same eye and ear, and in the same laboratory of language.

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In contemplating her own death, Louise Gluck confronts the possible and the inevitable in this, her ninth and boldest book.

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'Transparently accomplished,' as John Kerrigan has written, 'his work displays the kind of internal "itinerary" which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry'. This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a journey through worlds exotic, domestic, surreal and psychic, explored with visual sharpness and linguistic acuity. This is above all a poetry of colour and celebration, of strangeness blossoming inside familiarity, nurtured with a meticulous patterning of language and form. Eavan Boland has called Lindop's 'a lyric voice that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace, draws you in, reminds you of an ordered and structured world the voice of a happy spirit with, maybe, a measure of regret and an interesting intimation of waste.'

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Keith Douglas enlisted when World War II began, to fight and to try to make sense of history from within its turbulence. Like the major poets of World War I, his art was tried and tempered, and then curtailed. His letters tell the story of a man fully engaged by his art, his times and his loves.

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The poems in Gillian Clarke's Five Fields break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences. There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.

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This text gathers together all Robert Pinsky's poetry, including 21 new poems. The verse essay "An Explanation of America" (Carcarnet, 1980) remains at the heart of this work. The book also includes "Ginza Samba", a history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell", a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), "History of My Heart" (1984) and "The Want Bone" (1990). Also included are some of Pinsky's translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's "Inferno" (1994).

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Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishingly popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borgese and Vladimir Nabokov. This selection of Carroll's verse serves as an introduction to his work. It includes the best-known Alice poems as well as "Sylvie and Bruno", "The Hunting of the Snark" and pieces from Phantasmagoria. The text is illustrated with a number of the evocative original Tenniel drawings.

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This 16th collection by the author contains 59 comic and lyrical poems, including the 13-part title-poem. John Ashbery was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

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Features five key figures of Australian poetry - Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb. Les Murray's introductory essays to the poets evoke the writers' circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work and suggests why their accomplishment have been generally eclipsed.

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