Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

Josep Carner's "Nabi" is a masterpiece of modern Catalan poetry. Based on the biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of rationality, it is a triumph of language - of a language which Carner helped to establish as a vehicle for serious poetry. This bilingual edition is introduced by the noted Catalan expert Arthur Terry.

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Sir Thomas Wyatt, "the first great English lyric poet", remains one of the most popular writer's of Henry VIII's court, and the most romantic, given his entanglement with Anne Boleyn, which resulted - legend has it - in some of his most passionate and vulnerable poems. This book contains a representative selection of his work: all the best-loved poems and many lesser-known pieces which illuminate a complex and sophisticated sensibility. Hardiman Scott sees Wyatt as a modern poet before his time and demonstrates the impact he and his younger contemporary the Earl of Surrey had on the development of English poetry. Wyatt introduced the sonnet, terza rima and other Italian verse forms into English and invented forms and processes of his own. Hardiman Scott's introduction and notes illuminate Wyatt's importance as "a modern poet before his time", "at a crossroads in English poetry", and provides a detailed outline of the social and literary context in which Wyatt worked and the impact he had on the development of English poetry.

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Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that's based on human memory.

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In "Red House", her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry. Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in "Red House" proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.

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The title poem of this volume describes the vineyards of an area of Italy which has been the subject of many of Tomlinson's poems since his earliest work. In the Cinque Terre, vines are cultivated along the cliffs, within precarious sight of the sea beneath. These are the poems of a traveller, exploring the personal through the sense of place - Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the West of England.

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Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of "Edward Thomas' Poets": Judy Kendall's gathering of poems and letters embeds that brief period of intense poetic creativity within the wider narrative of Thomas' life. For the first time, letters by Thomas about writing and publishing are set alongside his poems, revealing the occasions of their composition, illuminating the processes of recollection, revision and development that transformed him into a poet. Interleaved with Thomas' own poems and letters are works by the literary friends whom he criticised and admired, and whose influence he absorbed: Walter de la Mare, W.H. Hudson, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others. Many of the letters included here have not been collected before or are out of print.Enhanced by Judy Kendall's detailed notes and bibliographies, "Edward Thomas' Poets" provides a new perspective on Thomas' reading and writing of poetry, illuminating specific poems and revealing the complex sources of his mature verse.

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In 1939, following her marriage, the poet Lynette Roberts went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh village in wartime with a poetic intensity: communal harvest, the arrival of evacuees, a frozen water pump, the cadences of voices and the effects of light and rain. Seven haunting stories weave modernist myths of Wales, while her magazine articles explore Welsh life with an anthropologist's eye.Roberts' restless intelligence never limits itself to the local. She writes about Picasso and Le Corbusier, about a visit to Spain on the trail of Lorca, the solemn drama of afternoon tea with the Sitwells, the comic disaster of taking her young children to visit T.S. Eliot. Enquiring, unsentimental, wryly humorous, Roberts engages us with her speaking voice. The publication of Lynette Roberts' "Collected Poems" in 2006 restored her to her place in twentieth-century poetry. This collection of her prose writings, most published here for the first time, accompanied by evocative family photographs, discloses the world that she transformed into poetry.

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Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak, an acclaimed poet and translator, provides a close metrical translation of the four books of the Odes and the Centennial Hymn, the first for many years. He translates for the modern reader, combining linguistic precision with an ebullient sense of the possibilities of these inexhaustible works as poems in English. Printed alongside the Latin text, Krisak's translations provide a line-for-line sense of the Latin rhythms, while rendering them in a living English that captures both the wit, tenderness and the occasional irascibility of the great Roman poet. Supporting notes clarify allusions and historical and mythological names. Here Horace's world is made luminously accessible to eye and ear.

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The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.

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A collection of bold and original poems by Grevel Lindop which navigate the boundary between the sexual and the erotic with imaginative insight and verbal virtuosity.

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The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structures the tree within the leaf, the series of recurrences that unfold to create a fugue add an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, modulating and rendering strange these musings on what is ostensibly human. "

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One area of Sarah Raphael's work that has so far been inadequately displayed is her drawing. Frederic Raphael draws from over 25 years of work in her notebooks and sketchbooks. She did justice to every model and had amazing sense of setting, economy of perspective, and ability to create presence.

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In Letters of Introduction Kevin Jackson invents a new genre, the Alphabet Essay. Always inventive, scholarly and sometimes zany, Jackson approaches ten writers and two 'themes', building an alphabet around each: 'A is for' to 'Z is for'. The alphabet touches on his subjects' history, their culture, their private and intimate lives, their anxieties, and most importantly their achievement. The Alphabets are introductory and exploratory. Jackson picks his way through the worlds of Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, Dante, Duke Ellington, Freud, Goethe, the Harlem Renaissance, Paul Klee, Friedrich Nietzsche, Surrealism, Andy Warhol and Marguerite Yourcenar. As he goes he finds out more and more, by association, through legend and gossip, in imagination. It is a wonderful process, an approach which imposes wonderful juxtapositions and elicits delicious ironies. The form is redolent of childhood, the content is remote from childish things.

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This sequence of poems takes the reader into the early 20th century, to Northern Germany where a group of artists founded a colony in Worpswede, a rural community near Bremen. Fascinated by the number of self-portraits, Sujata Bhatt imagines the painters' inner and outer worlds.

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In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living.

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This text brings together Clare's longest poem, "The Parish", and his satires, "The Hue and Cry" and "The Summons". Other poems, some previously unpublished, are included. They reveal his reactions to political and social conditions and events of his age. There are also prose works and fragments in which he reflects on the issues of the day included in the collection. A detailed introduction evokes the larger context of Clare's writings and the difficulties he faced as a labourer trying to voice the concerns of his class in a period when such matters were regarded as the exclusive province of the educated and propertied classes. The book is part of Carcanet's "John Clare Programme".

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Ford's novel, "Parade's End", has been acknowledged as one of the great British novels about World War I. This book features a selection of Ford's other writings about the war, and should shed light on the tetralogy. It includes reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories, and excerpts from letters.

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'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.

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"The 501 quatrains of Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984)". But it isn't: 'Please note that this is a completely different work, although it is formally identical and very similar in its preoccupations.' Its tone is different - something to do with maturity and cadencing, which make the laughter and heartbreak more intense, more political.

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After John Ashberry's "Flow Chart" (1991), "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for "T" when "Tuesday Evening" occurs.

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The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colors. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.

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Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications. Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he rediscovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life, but there are doubts about this perfection he finds.

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"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Golan Heights, he conceived a major poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using an unaccustomed Biblical idiom. He considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture-scholars, writers, lovers, the old-whose need for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history.

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The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing where the poet has lived and taught, their histories, and his history as he travels away from who he was.

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Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin's books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poems demands a new perception of Silkin's language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.

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"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of daily life: work and love, seasons and cities, and his writing is alive with the wonder and comedy of the mundane. Bevel is filled with voices - 'an he says / A love the summer / it's hoat / ye kin wear yer shoarts...' - and with the knowledge that becomes engrained in the body: 'The weight of a drill. The texture of rust.' Letford works as a roofer, a trade that gives him a particular perspective on life at ground level. 'Be prepared', he writes: pay attention to the moment, know which way to fall. His poems are sure and strong, the words dance.

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Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi - and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.

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"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.

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Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language.

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The March-April 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.

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The May-June 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.

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Caroline Bird's new collection charts marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery: the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness, after the happy ending.

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The Strongbox, a modernist poem, is an extended work that develops elements of Greek mythology, epic literature and the cultures of wars, both ancient and painfully recent.

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The third Carcanet collection from award-winning Glasgow-based poet and novelist Oli Hazzard.

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The January-February 2022 issue. Major essay by Alberto Manguel on translating Dante. Sasha Dugdale's radical new translation of Osip Mandelstam, with an important commentary by Andrew Kahn. Jenny Lewis on translating from languages one does not know first hand. Frederic Raphael pens one of his Last Post letters to Vladimir Nabokov (Mes hommages, cher Volodya, si j’ose dire. Frederic.). New to PN Review this issue: Romulo Bustos Aguirre, Armando Uribe, Kerrin P. Sharpe and Amy Crutchfield. And more...

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The November-December 2021 issue Includes 'Scattered Snows, to the North' by Carl Phillips, shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem Award 2022 Major spread of poems by Carl Phillips, one of America's leading contemporary poets, essayists and translators Jee Leong Koh's erotic lyrics Poet-editor Rachael Allen in conversation Raymond Williams remembered Francesca Brooks's 'Love Letters of the Hampstead Modernists' New to PN Review this issue: Subha Mukherji, Charlie Louth, Joyelle McSweeney and Michelle Penn and more...

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Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: 'There is no more productive engagement with someone else's artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curator's job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements.' This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving and re-moving the objects: 'nothing compares to living with art'. The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.

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The September-October 2021 issue; PN Review has a ‘soft relaunch’ with a new cover design, new internal design and layout; Dutch supplement: outstanding new writing from Holland; Major essays:; Colm Tóíbín on Thom Gunn; David Herman on ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’ – Edward Said; Gwyneth Lewis on Gillian Clarke’s The Gododdin; New to PN Review this issue: Alice Hiller, Theodore Ell, Jane King and Joshua Weiner; and more...

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The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poems in this collection before his wife's sudden death from cancer in 2019. He developed the themes and fragmenting style of his previous book, Glass is Elastic (2012), where language was always quizzing itself and how it might relate to the actual and the historical world. Intense, playful, unpredictable, the poems surprised. Here, in the disturbing environments of Upstate New York, Calgary Bay or his Bolton front room the poet confronts illness (his own), hospitals (his visits) and wonderful ambulances (his transports). He resists attempts to see hints or destinies. Then bereavement throws up an actuality of a different order. The collection ends with a mock-sonnet sequence, written during the pandemic, in which the poet tries all the doors and windows to find her, to speak with her - love poems where love has not changed but its circumstances have. 'Will I want ever to get out of this place - the past of the poems in this book?' the poet asks. There are no answers, yet.

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A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.

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A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. with a preface by Richard Holmes PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUST

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Shortlisted for The 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Translation. Heroines from Abroad introduces a vibrant new voice to the English language. Christine Marendon's enigmatic, meditative poems, translated here from the German and collected for the first time, draw on dreams, fairy tales and childhood memories to tap into a world beyond conscious reach. Marendon's poems do not present ideas so much as embody states of mind. Something is realised through the poem, rather than said within it. Here, the voice is more important than the particularities of what is said - language, not words. For the translator, Heroines from Abroad is the fruit of seven years' steady work. The poems' clarity and subtle force, the `crystalline, precise quality of their lyricism' (Sasha Dugdale), are testament to that humble, unhurried collaboration in words.

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In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas – our millennial Dante – is taken under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the course of 147 `songs’ we accompany the pair on their journey through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas’s Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.

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Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer's four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m' ami - set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer's central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the 'intermittences of the heart', frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme. Romer's New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for 'refuge' or 'higher things', and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends. Derek Mahon singled out Romer's first collection Idols for its 'emotional candour and intellectual clarity', and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart.

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'Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this ...' In Long Pass, Joey Connolly's first collection, the poet - in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy - keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say things simply. But nothing is as simple as it seems at first. Nothing strikes the interlocutor quite as he intends. Ach! He goes back. Deflections, tangents: the long pass, the long unfolding sentence, the growing sequence, move away from what they intend to say in order at last, wittily, angrily, ironically, to swerve in and say it.Translation, too, is hard. There are often competing versions - of Lorca, for example, and Cavafy. ' The painter is frustrated to be always / painting onto something, to be / concealing precisely as he displays.' Words reveal and at the same time conceal, yet what they conceal is part of what they want to say.The poet throws the poem for someone who isn't always there to catch. The fortunate reader intercepts.

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Smoothie is Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off despair – fulfilled. Smoothie plots the wayward wanderings of a beguiling cast of misfits – hotel eavesdroppers, city interlopers, lone wolves, phantom bird-watchers, disaffected language robots and triumphant piano-swallowers – as they try to express themselves. The poems are candid without being confessional: the poet’s `I’ encompasses the reader. Language’s smooth surface bubbles up as Toutoungi’s characters reveal their peculiarly twenty-first-century disorientations, riffing off loneliness, authenticity and heartbreak as they go.

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Frank Kuppner’s The Third Mandarin contains 501 quatrains in five `books’. It collages an alternative Imperial China of drunk poets, grumpy sages, and sex-starved emperors. The poems riff on a variety of forms, from prophecies and love letters to drinking songs and graffiti. As a storyteller, Kuppner sticks faithfully to the path of least significance. His is a poetry of things that might happen in a minute or two, to people we don’t really care about, for reasons too complicated to go into. His characters have a habit of turning up late to their own poems, as the poet rushes off to find them so that he can get started. Half riddling philosopher, half drivelling idiot, Kuppner’s speaker has the air of someone who has forgotten why they came into the room, 501 times. Funny, ridiculous, and beautiful, The Third Mandarin confirms Kuppner as a poet `of immense intellectual and comic power’ (Poetry Review), `one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry (LRB).

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