Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgamesh's quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and 'disappeared' political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester--and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss. Received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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"The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troubled 1970s, is developed and transformed by the book's other strands: poems on the contemporary Middle East, and poems drawing on Greek and Latin sources (including translations of Pindar and Virgil) build together into a moving and complex meditation on personal and historical loss. McDonald is one of the most widely-known (and most controversial) critics of modern British and Irish poetry; his poetry builds into itself the critical intelligence and anger of that context, along with the visionary intensity of an original, and impassioned imagination. "The House of Clay" creates a new and uncompromising kind of Irish poetry, in which the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Northern Irish Protestant, find a piercingly clear register.

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Petronius lived during the reign of the notorious emperor Nero, a writer in a decadent empire, and in Frederic Raphael he finds a translator who brings his words vividly alive. Petronius' Rome is not the noble civilisation of classical ideals; his Romans are lascivious, amoral and stylish, inhabiting a louche world of ostentatious, nouveau riche extravagance and flirtation with the seductive menace of the Roman underclass. In Raphael's hands, the "Satyrica" becomes a modern novel, Petronius a contemporary. Freed of the weight of classical decorum, the "Satyrica" is racily subversive, scandalously entertaining. This work, writes Raphael, has always been excluded from the curriculum: it offers no improving pieties. Petronius' - and Raphael's - ancient Rome is recognisably the city of Pasolini and Fellini as much as of Virgil.

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The Instruments of Art uses poetry to explore the lives and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and others, the personal sacrifice involved, the singular vision and inspiration that set them in motion. God's creation, some argue, is a work of art, and Christ's life and death an expression of it. Deane follows this thread in a series of sonnets based on the Stations of the Cross. Another series of poems takes John the Evangelist, 'the one whom Christ loved', as the voice of a poet expressing the hard love and personal commitment demanded by Christ; Deane conducts this exploration experimentally, contrasting and complimenting it with his personal experience of faith through suffering and love. The Old Testament story of Jacob's search for meaning is retold through the poet's own memories of family and becomes an emblem of the universal search for truth and peace. This is a collection written by the light of faith yet shadowed by doubt; it develops an instinctive approach to art that offers an understanding in terms of the highest reaches of suffering humanity.

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A collection of poems exploring the interdependence of earthly things and heavenly mystery.

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Approach places, times and states of mind in a mosaic of knowledge, invention, memory and entertainment with this collection of poems. The personal and the public interact in many poems and others address personal histories and their creative consequences, alongside mythological motifs.

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Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in A Place in the World are about home and antipodes, identity as a shibboleth and institutions as leviathans, Pacific islands and raised beaches, Edens and new Jerusalems, the critical spirit and the need for continuity. Cradling Scotland's stony myths in his palm, the poet sets off for Europe, an old civilisation that can barely reconcile itself to having become a colony of its own Utopia. In his pocket is a battered copy of the civil philosophy, also out of Scotland, that lends the book its punning title. Somewhere in the looming shadow of the cities is the poet, still looking - like the Greek philosopher - for human beings. A Place in the World, Iain Bamforth's fourth collection, is his most lyrical, challenging and considered work to date.

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"Book Of Stones" is very much made out of the things around the author - living in the new South Africa, being part of a continent and its life and history and processes.

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This famous cross between poetry and philosophy follows Lucretius' enquiring, scientific mind as he investigates the workings of mirror images, thunderstorms and magnetism, and the significance of sleep. The poem's power lies in the tension between the brief, sensuous richness of life and Lucretius' overarching belief in an empty universe of eternally recurring elements.

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Sidney Keyes was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. He was 20 years old. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is one of the oustanding poets of World War II. His dramatic monologues, his poems of landscape, of the weird and macabre, his mastery of blank verse, set him apart.

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Edward Lear set out to administer mirth to thousands. Jeremy Over is an heir of the nonsense tradition, genially assaulting everything that "appears" to be fixed and serious. His poems celebrate surprise and synergy, discovering new forms of order in the riotous disorder of the world. Anarchic pleasures: he makes mischief, running words off their expected tracks until they come to rest in new postures, pleasures, meanings. The book opens in Lorca's New York and ends on the road to John Clare's Essex. Nostalgia for home, for a lost time and place shadow the collection, as does an undertone of grief, corrected by slapstick and sharp wit. The poems are restlessly acquisitive, gathering curiosities like old sideboards and closets crammed full of birds, beasts and fruit, and visited by an unlikely cast of walk-on characters, including Walt Whitman, Dante, Mata Hari and the Pope. "A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese" is a gallivant through an absurd, abundant world, reminding us of the pleasure and happiness to be drawn even from the most makeshift constructions and in the face of negative emotions.

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Edwin Morgan returns to the stage with an examination of the life of Jesus as a man among men. Jesus is portrayed as a human figure in an inhuman time. A declaration of love from his closest disciple, John, described in his own Gospel as the "Disciple who Jesus loved", comes to the fore in Morgan's efforts to explore the character of the real man.

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Number 20 in Thomas Kinsella's series, "The Familiar" is a sequence of poems concerning the solitary but connected passions of lovers. It includes several prints of Celtic engravings.

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This is a volume of celebratory, vivid and witty poems from a poet whose blindness has never severed his links with the sensual world. Fables, fairy tales and fun only heighten the serious concerns which underly his work. He has a rich sense of humour and a wry turn of phrase.

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A collection of John Heath-Stubbs's major literary essays. The earliest essay was written in 1945, and each piece reveals the insights of a practitioner in the poetic genre. In engaging his chosen writers, Heath-Stubbs employs his understanding of the poetic process.

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For nine years, John Dowell and his wife spend the summer season at a German spa town in the company of the respectable Ashburnhams. Behind the placid exteriors lie the destructive passions of men and women. This text includes biographical and critical apparatus.

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The title poem is accompanied by the 24-part sequence "Free Rein," with its broad political and human perspectives. The author has also written "Heart's Desire" (1978) and "Selected Poems" (1985).

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This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or emigres displaced from their cultural and geographical origins.

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"We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr - ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, and put on his specs." It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael's notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain's cities under Margaret Thatcher's government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael's reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.

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An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision to bear sceptical witness to - what? As much to the touching ordinariness of human needs as to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about desire: sacred and profane, frantic and serene, refined and grubby. Often traduced by cussedness and always complicated by external events, desire is here constructed less in the present than in anticipation and memory; loss is resistant to the balm of forgetting. An Ordinary Dog returns repeatedly to those times of crisis when history is lived and reinvented, when myth degenerates into faith, reason falters. The poems' moods veer between cheerful equanimity and desperation; their focus between detachment and intimate involvement. In the end, as events take their course, it is always chance that prevails.

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Launched in 1979 by Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert, with the support of Harold Pinter, the Greville Press has quietly established itself as indispensable to those who love poetry. Its pamphlets have built a reputation for discoveries of the new and recoveries of the neglected; for championing translations of great world poets and delighting in the classics of English literature - above all, for their manifest enthusiasm for the enriching pleasures of poetry in all its variety. "A Field of Large Desires" offers a sampler of poems that have been published by the Greville Press: it is both a treasure trove and a celebration of a remarkable venture.

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In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era. Her exploration was shadowed by intimations of unease; as economic collapse gathered pace, recurrent concerns gained a new urgency. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Irish tradition? In journeys across political divides and between languages, from Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, deeply rooted in Irish inheritance, to the African-Irish writer Joyce Akpotor; from Gerry Adams for whom 'when our future is settled, we will agree on our history', to the artist Dorothy Cross who brings an international perspective to her redefinitions of traditional Irish imagery, Close to the Next Moment captures the conversations that are remaking a culture.

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The stories are familiar: family disharmony, mourning the loss of a loved one, vengeance, national tyranny, international war, a desire for justice. This new translation by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, an independent scholar and novelist, preserves the artistry of the original while deploying a clear speech that directly addresses a twenty-first century temperament. The Oresteia, first performed in Greece in 458 bce, has been celebrated as an example of the highest literary art. The murder of King Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, the bloody vengeance their son Orestes wreaks upon his mother, and the appearance of the goddess Athena to sort matters out, tells a foundation narrative of world drama. The trilogy traces a progression from personal blood feud to institutionalised justice, and in doing so celebrates, by the end, the triumph of democracy among the citizenry.

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The May-June 2020 issue. Tributes to the great Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. Phoebe Power’s (Forward Prize winner) National Trust commissioned ‘Once More the Sea’ sequence in full. Walter Bruno’s controversial essay on Value Judgement. Tara Bergin reviews Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology. New poetry from Vahni Capildeo, Carol Rumens, Laura Scott, and Zohar Atkins. New to PN Review this issue: Jenny King, Suzannah V. Evans, Leo Boix, and Christina Roseeta Walker. And more...

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The January-February 2020 issue; New poems by Sasha Dugdale, Sinéad Morrissey, Nina Bogin, and Mina Gorji; Two posthumous poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Selections from two unpublished notebooks by R.S. Thomas; Nyla Matuk tackles diversity in poetry; Alex Wylie critiques contemporary takes on poetry in ‘Democratic Rags’; New to PN Review this issue: Eugene Ostashevsky, Heather Treseler, Hugh Thomson, Annie Fan, and Deirdre Hines; and more...

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The September-October 2019 issue; New poem sequence by Kei Miller about names of places; Don Share’s controversial lecture about Whitman and politics; New poems by Tara Bergin; Anthologist of Black-American poetry, Anthony Walton, looks back 20 years and measures the changes for Black-American writers; Kyoo Lee and Marjorie Perloff in discussion about the nature of identity in poetry; New to PN Review this issue: Jason Allen-Paisant, Jo Davis, Andrew Jordan and Petra White; and more...

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Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,over the girl with her first electric, how her high,thin voice, amplified many timesover by the loudspeaker, is like a giant'sin the green grass of the festival site.from 'Poetry rejoices...'Dog Star Notations collects highlights from almost two decades of Hakan Sandell's poetry. Drawing on seven collections and completed by a selection of new work, this volume is the unrivalled Anglophone introduction to one of contemporary Sweden's finest poets. The poems are Retrogardist, a term Sandell first used in the nineties to signal his rejection of Post-Modernist styles and a return to the perennial resources of symbol, metre and rhyme. Since then he has developed, as his translator puts it, 'a verse music very much his own, at once improvisatory and incantatory'. A sometimes withering critic of contemporary society, Sandell is also a compassionate, even reverent observer. In his adopted Oslo, 'New Babylon cruises in its subdued/Nordic Social Democratic vein', mixing with 'the remains of the Norwegian working class' and the new arrivals of the past two decades, from Africa, Asia, the Middle East.In love with the material world, yet inspired by the mysticisms of the world's religions (great and small, orthodox and heterodox), Hakan Sandell comes across in these poems as a streetwise theosophist, alive to beauty and cruelty everywhere, compelled to make music of both.

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An anthology of poems by members of Trinity College, Cambridge from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This landmark anthology celebrates six centuries of poetry from Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the years, Trinity may have harboured more great poets than any other comparable institution: Herbert, Marvell, Dryden, Byron, Tennyson, Housman, and Nabokov all feature in these pages. In the modern period the college has welcomed poets including Thom Gunn and Sophie Hannah, Rebecca Watts and Jacob Polley. Readers will find here old favourites ('To His Coy Mistress', 'She Walks in Beauty', 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam', 'In Memoriam', poems from Winnie-the-Pooh) and much that is startling - old and new.

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"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss' poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, 'Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it integrates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight', and in Britain John Fuller wrote: 'Stanley Moss' poems are fresh and unpredictable, full of colour and wisdom. As a poetry that engages the philosophical mind it seems characteristically American in its scope and cultural engagement, but there is also the generous warmth of a mind at ease in its body, open to surprises and possibilities'.

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With Jerusalem as its epicentre, "The Maltese Dreambook" extends Gabriel Levin's quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary.

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Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. His serious gift for humour permeates poems by turn lyric and narrative, satirical, rebellious, ribald, uncompromising and honest. Too idiosyncratic and various a poet to belong to any poetic grouping, he is simply, in the late Donald Davie's phrase, 'consistently entertaining and intelligent'.

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"Things Unsaid" is the author's own choice of poems from a writing career that spans nearly half a century. It draws on seven published collections and includes many uncollected and new poems. Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. His poems - often, as he terms it, quasi-autobiographical - combine memory, experience and imagination with firm craftsmanship. The results are remarkable for their precision, their wry humour and broad human sympathies.

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Martina Evans' third collection of poems begins and ends in the dentist's chair. In between come stories ranging from an Irish childhood to present-day London, featuring voices from the poet's own to those of her family, her cat, and a supporting cast of hectoring lawyers, born bores and rambling mothers. Evans combines a novelist's gift for creating compelling narratives and capturing conversational idiosyncracies with a poet's ability to condense and refine, making "Can Dentists Be Trusted?" a book that will delight the many who enjoyed its acclaimed predecessor "All Alcoholics Are Charmers" (1998).

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Peter Levi's final collection contains the moving lyrics he composed, often while walking round the green in the Gloucestershire village where he lived, as well as other poems written since 'Reed Music' (1997). Despite his increasing blindness, his poems retained their vivid delight in the natural world and its relationship with both the social and spiritual dimensions of life.

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Yehuda Halevi, who wrote both secular and devotional poems, is considered one of the finest poets in post-biblical Hebrew literature. Suffused with warmth, moving easily between the mundane and the otherworldly, and, above all, delicately elegiac, the poet's voice cuts across all the literary genres and religious modes on which he drew. Born in the second half of the 11th century, Halevi wandered in his youth between Muslim and Christian Spain before settling in Cordoba around 1110. Towards the end of his life, to the amazement and consternation of his friends and admirers, he set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, at the time under Crusader rule. He arrived in Alexandria in 1140 and recorded his perilous sea voyage in a celebrated sequence of poems, remarkable for their fusion of startling realism and religious longing. Months later Halevi embarked for Palestine. The exact date, location and circumstances of his death have remained a mystery.

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For thirty years Anvil has championed the idea of poetry as a free space for the imagination and spirit of poet and reader alike. In the process the press has gained recognition as one of the liveliest and most varied publishers of British and international poetry. "The Spaces of Hope" celebrates that endeavour with Peter Jay's selection of the most memorable poetry he has encountered since 1968. Far from being a rollcall of established reputations, the emphasis is firmly on poems that are exceptional, durable and readable. And the result is an anthology that spans centuries and continents to give a fresh and surprising, yet coherent view of poetry, from classic poets of Europe, the Americas and China to some of the finest contemporary poets of Britain and Ireland. Wide-ranging, outward-looking and internationally-minded, "The Spaces of Hope" challenges current preconceptions about poetry and is unafraid to celebrate the pleasure principle.

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John Clare was a practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last years before his institutionalization in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of interest, since he exploited the brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after. This volume contains all the sonnets that Clare wrote at Northborough between 1832 and 1837 with the exception of those included in "The Midsummer Cushion" and "The Rural Muse". This collection allows the reader to trace the development of Clare's handling of the form in this period. They constitute vignettes of rural life in the early-19th century and the record of a poetic sensibility. This text is part of the "John Clare Programme".

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Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante's Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - and relocating it to the modern 'walled city' of the University of Essex.

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France’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.

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Crossing the Carpathians is a collection of poems about exile, family, and the survival of love. Carmen Bugan was born in Romania, and her book has its origins in her experiences during the 1980s, as a child of political dissidents and as an exile from her country. Written in America, Ireland, and England, her poems are about crossing countries and languages, recording loss and celebration, reconciling memories with dreams.

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A book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words; they find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day.

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There is a greeting used in urban America, 'What's good?', which seems to go beyond a mere 'How are you?' or 'What's happening?' to demand an optimistic response. This anthology seeks to rectify both these oversights by showcasing established Caribbean poets from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere.

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Rimbaud called him 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu', and the history of modern poetry, which begins with him, has borne out that opinion. This is a comprehensive new translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only the juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. It includes all the poems published in the first (1857) and second (1861) editions of the book, as well as those added to the third (1868), published after the poet's death. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannonball', and here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.

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Features the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the great elegies and epics, and a generous selection from "Beowulf". This title also includes a bibliography and reading list, with a note on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

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Beginning with his departure from New York to Istanbul, the author discusses a journey, not so much between contrasting cities as 'between different versions of the same city', to a place that is exotic and familiar, spanning West and East, past and present, where cultures and histories intersect.

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