Search results for ""ARC""

Arc International PoetsWith eleven collections of poetry to her name (not to mention short stories and novels), and until earlier in 2003 Te Mata New Zealand poet laureate, Elizabeth Smither writes with such skill and assurance, is so comfortable in her own voice, that it is easy to take her gifts for granted. But as this, her first UK publications demonstrates, no other contemporary New Zealand poet could produce such harmonious and engaging work.

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Fate's Little Pictures is a bilingual poetry pamphlet by Larissa Miller, published by Arc Publications. Larissa Miller (b. 1940) is a major Russian poet and essayist, a member of the Union of Russian Writers since 1979, and of Russian PEN since 1992. Author of 23 books of poetry and prose, she was short-listed for the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and Art in 1999, and in 2013 was awarded the Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky Prize. Her autobiographical novel Dim and Distant Days was published in English translation by Glas in 2000, and a volume of selected poems entitled Guests of Eternity was published by Arc in a bilingual edition in 2008. A further bilingual poetry pamphlet, Regarding the Next Big Occasion, was published by Arc in 2015. Larissa Miller is also a teacher of English, and of a musical gymnastics system for women named after its creator, the Russian dancer Lyudmilla Alexeeva. She is married, with two sons, and lives in Moscow with her husband Boris Altshuler, a physicist and human rights advocate.

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This is Gerður Kristný's third collection from Arc and the third of the trilogy which already comprises the highly-acclaimed Bloodhoof and Drápa. In all three poetic sequences, the poet employs the archaic form of the saga to conjure up razor-sharp dark and bewildering images of the fates of women in a world where the boundaries between life and death and what lies beyond are unclear. In this particular sequence, Gerður Kristný gives a voice to a woman whose story was one that society was not ready to hear at the time, a woman who was abused as a child but who committed suicide before her own account of what had taken place was published. At its heart is the very notion of articulation, of how our language and culture determine what stories we can tell and what words we can use.

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Love poems and not-love poems: fierce and gentle, passionate and bitter, pushing at the boundaries of minimalist language, Michelene Wandor's latest poetry collection from Arc certainly packs an emotional punch despite the brevity of many of the poems and the economies of space on the page. As the poet urges us: Read and feel.'Technically, there's nothing startlingly modernistic about Michelene Wandor's poetry it's the whole focus of attention which places it alongside an older achievement in Anglophone poetry from Eliot and Pound to Thomas and Graham and those who have survived the so-called revival' in the 1960s. These poets were not willing to accept the singular view of human experience there is a restless searching extension towards greater boundaries, a multiplication of significance at any point allowing units of meaning to float' off towards glimpsed affinities.. In Wandor's poetry, these units of meaning stand alone, contributing to the continuing address but separable and re

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Atlantic Drift publishes twenty-four poets from the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada in an exciting partnership between Arc Publications and Edge Hill University Press. This anthology seeks to highlight new and existing writing and to define/redefine the discussions between poets from both sides of 'the pond'. By developing a dialogue between English-speaking traditions, Atlantic Drift will include some of the most exceptional poetry and poetics written in the twenty-first century, featuring Claudia Rankine, Jerome Rothenberg, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Bernstein, Bhanu Kapil and Allen Fisher. Edited by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard.

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A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern and Central EuropeArc Publications Translations Series (parallel-text)A bilingual anthology, with a preface by Václav Havel, published by Arc Publications in association with the UK-based international organisation Literature Across Frontiers, presenting the new poetic talent from ten Eastern and Central European countries.The poets included in the anthology are as follows:Georgi Gospodinov and Nadezhda Radulova (Bulgaria)Petr Borkovec and Katerina Rudcenkova (Czech Republic)Kristiina Ehin and Akso Künnap (Estonia)János Térey and Krisztina Tóth (Hungary)Karlis Verdins and Sergeij Timofeyev (Latvia)Daiva Cepauskaite and Rimvydas Stankevicius (Lithuania)Agnieszka Kuciak and Edward Pasewicz (Poland)Emilian Galaicu-Paun and Ioana Nicolaie (Romania)Katarina Kucbelová and Martin Solotruk (Slovakia)Primoz Cucnik and Taja Kramberger (Slovenia)"This is wonderfully sovereign poetry. These writers were mostly students or even at school when their Communist regimes perished; the war and the post-war Stalinist terror happened to their grandparents. Their poise and their self-possession are startling; they seldom lament and have no interest in preaching. The encounter with Western abundance gives them fresh imagery, but also grounds for amusement and irony.""From their part of Europe, they bring a special joy in the natural and physical world, and also glittering metaphysical brilliance. This is a poetry of wit and complexity, never raw but always glowing with human feeling. As for the translators, it's impossible to praise them too highly. Imaginative, sensitive and yet loyal to the texts, it is they who have delivered this treasure intact to new readers."- Neal Ascherson

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In her follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Cold Spring in Winter, Valérie Rouzeau presents a language that is a hybrid of liberty and constraint. There are omissions and contractions, colloquialisms and archaisms, alongside wordplay, child-speak, exploded cliché, and a heightened awareness of the poetic tradition.Also available in limited-edition hardback: ISBN 9781908376176 (£12.99)Valérie Rouzeau was born in 1967 in Burgundy. Her most recent collection, Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2009; ISBN 9781904614593), was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Prize, the world's largest poetry prize. She lives in Saint-Ouen, near Paris.Susan Wicks also translated Cold Spring in Winter. She is the author of three Faber and three Bloodaxe poetry collections, most recently House of Tongues (Bloodaxe, 2011; ISBN 9781852249069), and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Forward Prizes. She lives in Tunbridge Wells.This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

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Bones Will Crow is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets in any language, and includes the work of Burmese poets in exile, in prison and undercover. Introduced by Zeyar Lynn, with a Preface by Ruth Padel.The poets featured are Tin Moe (1933-2007), Thitsar Ni (b. 1946), Aung Cheimt (b. 1948), Ma Ei (b. 1948), Maung Chaw Nwe (1949-2002), Maung Pyiyt Min (b. 1953), Khin Aung Aye (b. 1956), Zeyar Lynn (b. 1958), Maung Thein Zaw (b. 1959), Moe Zaw (b. 1964), Moe Way (b. 1969), Ko Ko Thett (b. 1972), Eaindra (b. 1973), Pandora (b. 1974) and Maung Yu Py (b. 1981).James Byrne's second poetry collection, Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc in 2009. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Ko Ko Thett left Burma following detention for his role in the Rangoon student uprising in 1996. His first collection in English, The Burden of Being Bama, is forthcoming.

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This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.The latest anthology in Arc's 'New Voices from Europe and Beyond' series features the work of six of Armenia's poets – three men, Anatoli Hovhannisyan, Khachik Manoukyan and Hrachya Saroukhan and three women, Violet Grigorian, Azniv Sahakyan and Hasmik Simonian. Together they have all helped to shape the face of contemporary Armenian poetry.Of the six, Grigorian and Hovhannisyan originally began writing in the age of Stalin, only becoming more visible and appreciated since independence. Saroukhan, Sahakyan and Manoukyan established themselves in post-Stalin Soviet Armenia, while the youngest poet, Hasmik Simonian, is a writer of the new Armenia, out of the shadow of the Soviet past. This is a bi-lingual edition, with the Armenian original and the English translation on facing pages.Razmik Davoyan is the unofficial Armenian poet laureate, and recipient of the President's Prize for Literature (2003). Widely published in Armenian, Russian and Czech, his collections in English are Selected Poems (Macmillan, 2002) and Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc, 2010).

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This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.The third full collection by Brian Johnstone, and his second to be published by Arc in their Poetry from the UK & Ireland series.A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back to allow us into the physical and emotional rigour that forms the show's backbone. Elsewhere poems transport you more literally through music, movies and TV history, around Europe and into the distant past, again balancing between illusion and the tension that supports it in the more mundane world. And throughout, the tone and language also plays an ingenious balancing act between the structured, the rhyming and the informal. This is a personal and expansive collection, honest and exploratory."Brian Johnstone appears to have taken to heart, or learned by instinct and experience, Robert Frost's advice to avoid approaching a poem's subject too directly. A consequence of this is that Johnstone's poems establish their own presence, leaving room for mystery and lyricism to emerge with a convincing uniqueness. Dry Stone Work is a robust collection, packed with original strengths, delicacies, variety, and a vivid awareness of life. An impressive collection, then, not just to be recommended, but to be read and re-read." - Douglas Dunn"The use of language is authentic and precise, and the perception of an often-hidden world fascinating and genuine." - David Morley on The Ring Cycle sequenceBorn in Edinburgh in 1950, Brian Johnstone has lived in the Fife countryside since 1972. He has published two full collections and three pamphlets, as well as appearing in anthologies and other publications in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and in Europe and the Americas.

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This powerful, unique collection contains poems written not only by members of Jewish communities in Europe (representing the largest group persecuted by the Nazis), but also poems by people who were targeted on other grounds. Some belonged to political or religious groups who openly opposed the Third Reich, or they were homosexual, or members of communities such as Sinti and Roma, or they were perceived by the Nazis as disabled. The work in this anthology originates from across Europe, and has been translated from many different languages. Most translations are specifically for the anthology, or have not appeared elsewhere. This wide-ranging volume gives a sense of the variety of Holocaust victims, and their poetic responses to the Holocaust; from the haunting to the primal. It covers the Holocaust in three distinct time periods; At the Beginning; Life in, Ghettos, Camps, Prisons and the Outside World; Life Afterwards.

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"Pursuing humanity’s redemption to its final interstellar frontier, Flynn delivers an impressive and original epic.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review Experience a truly extraordinary journey aboard a colossal generation ship, where Earth’s brightest minds have forged a strict regime to ensure survival of the human race. The unintentionally-oppressive rules form uniquely distinct societies as the years pass, until differences in ideology, class, and cultural identity stirs up rebellion among the beleaguered crew, igniting the first whispers of revolution. A masterful exploration of humanity’s relentless quest for freedom, In the Belly of the Whale pushes the boundaries of the genre, offering a deeply insightful examination of societal evolution and personal resilience. Each character is so set in their convictions it will make you continuously reevaluate what is right and wrong as you d

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Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years.

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Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation. In the words of her translator: “Esther Dischereit’s poetry offers a visceral pathography of post-war continuities, spectres, amnesia and trauma. Her work builds on the poet’s vulnerability and witness to a previous and ultimately un-sealable dimension – a dimension inhabited in a different way by the poetry of Paul Celan – in which the violations and degradation of the Shoah resonate with harrowing persistence in the detail of contemporary everyday life. At the same time, however, her poems test moments of personal and poetic redress, espousing forms developed in an incessant exploration of speech rhythms and images, celebrating the erotic and quotidian, experimenting with hope, seeking community."

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Stein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing about love and desire, and the despair that often attends them, he weaves together classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of the strongest human emotions.

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Celebrated Icelandic writer Gerdur Kristny's Drapa is a novel-poem which takes its form from Old Norse shield poetry and its mood from modern Nordic crime. But the poem is no fiction: it is about a real woman's murder in the city of Reykjavik, and, through this lens, about all women's deaths. This is Viking poetry at its most contemporary.

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M is the third collection from Antony Rowland, Professor of Literary Studies in English at the University of Salford, whose work has been compared with poets as disparate as John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. Jeffrey Wainwright has described his poetry as "significant and powerful", and nowhere is this more apparent than in M, an ode to Manchester in the present moment and to the world it finds itself in, awash with the movement of peoples, cultures, politics and words. The central sequence in M ('Manchester') responds to the murder in 2013 of Kieran Crump-Raiswell in Whalley Range, and tackles the contemporary themes of terrorism, industrial decline, and Icelandic violence. Ranging from Minorca to Cheetham Hill, Rowland's poetry covers a characteristic range of subjects and forms in what Peter Riley has termed 'an original and thoughtful handling of a major European modernist mode'. This collection also includes the poems that received the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012.

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We may have heard of, or even read, Sunzi's Art of War, but this anthology is the first opportunity that the majority of English-language readers will have to read first-hand accounts from those involved, one way or another, in the on-going conflicts in ancient China. The bleak and barren terrain, the inclement weather - icy blasts of wind, snow-blizzards one moment and sandstorms the next - the music of the steppes, reed-pipes sounding strange melodies across the frozen wasteland, troops setting out from some barracks on the Wall, never to return, the whitened piles of bones they leave behind after their deaths in battle, the widows and orphans pining for them thousands of miles away... these are recurring themes in this anthology which spans more than sixteen centuries and includes the work of 50 poets. Conventional `border poems' (poems about heroism and the lot of the common soldier thousands of miles away from home) sit side by side with eyewitness accounts, and the majority of these poems are translated into English for the first time, which is what make s this anthology so important. The anthology's title is inspired by a famous painting of a poet who fashioned a sweet-sounding flute from an iron sword. As the translator, Kevin Maynard, says: "Out of the discord of war we humans can still conjure up sweet music."

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Twist is a slant look at the connections binding us together - familial, social, political - in poems which range from the curious and disturbing to memories and evocations of the ordinary magic at work in our lives. It meditates on growing into middle age and explores how, obliquely and unseen, grief and loss transform into grace and redemption.

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In 2020, Amanda Dalton participated – for the second year running – in National Poetry Writing Month, a project that challenges the public to write a poem every day throughout the month of April. Each midnight, new instructions are posted informing participants what they should write about in the next 24 hours – anything from an ode to life’s small pleasures to a concrete poem, to a poem from the viewpoint of a figure in Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. This chapbook contains the unedited versions of the thirty poems that Amanda wrote. By turns witty (often very funny), clever, moving and erudite, this short collection represents an astonishing achievement by an outstanding writer.

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It is hard to imagine a time when coffee drinking was not part of every-day life and yet it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that it became widespread in Europe. The visit of the Turkish Ambassador to Louis XIV’s court in 1669 helped to make coffee-drinking fashionable in France, so it is not surprising that it was a Frenchman who chose to extol its delights, not to mention its health-giving properties, in a long poem written in Latin, a popular language for verse throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. L’Abbé Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore’s masterly translation.

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In its geographical sweep - from Israel / Palestine westward across Europe, then circling back to Greece - No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of alienation, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean ("sea between the lands") that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West. It brings back a "world still wide, blissfully unknown".

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The poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway. Seen through the eyes of the refugee poet, the vibrant colours of the Libyan landscape, the horrors and ravages of revolution, and the strangeness of a new life within the Arctic Circle, come into sharp focus in this powerful book.

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Josep Lluis Aguilo's Lunarium, his fifth and latest poetry collection, takes up his recurring theme of the uncertainty of life. In 2008 this book, Llunari (Lunarium) was the winner of the Prize Jocs Florals de Barcelona and Josep Lluis Aguilo was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Barcelona during the period 2008-2009. These poems speak in a multiplicity of voices, often from the fantastic surroundings of myths and legends - labyrinths, secret libraries, mirrors, hell and the devil, smugglers, pirates of the Caribbean, palaces with golden pillars, apocalypses... There is a sense that the poet is constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible in an attempt to explore what it means to live on the edge of his imaginary worlds, at the same time using these 'other worlds' to explore our own world and what it means to be human. Aguilo's language is rich and sensuous, and the beautiful rural and maritime landscapes of the poet's native Mallorca shine through the fabulous worlds he creates.

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"Curtis's humour and charm, ability to turn a poem with the seemingly simplest of images, and that understanding of how words will play over the listener's ear, are hallmarks brought to the fore on the page... His greatest skill is to make readers go 'yes, of course'; he reminds us of what we've known all along." Michael McKimm, The Warwick Review

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A politically charged, hard-hitting and thought-provoking collection by one of Iraq's best-known poets, Adnan al-Sayegh. Throughout this collection, Adnan explores the exhausting struggle for acceptance after being forced into exile. Seemingly innocent and lyrical at first, yet infused with darker undercurrents and nightmarish imagery. A distinct poetic voice; one which refuses to adjust to the expectations of a society, after being humiliated and shamed by its horrifying dictatorship. Passionate, outspoken and incredibly moving, these poems capture the power and resilience which come with mortality.

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After the Ottoman empire's entry into the First World War on 29 October 1914, the Armenians were accused – in a few cases justly – of conspiring with the advancing Russian forces to ensure Turkish defeats. The legend of 'Armenian treachery' gave the Ottoman government the pretext to sanction measures designed to remove all traces of the Armenian population from the empire.For someone whose family suffered immeasurably, Requiem is an amazingly measured and considered narrative of loss and survival. In an attempt to answer the moral questions brought about by the event and its aftermath, Razmik Davoyan remembers and commemorates without bitterness.Razmik Davoyan was born in 1940 in Mets Parni, Spitak, Armenia. His first poem was published in 1957 in the Leninakan Daily Worker. Since then he has published well over thirty volumes in Armenian, Russian, Czech and English. His children's poetry book Winter Snowflake, Spring Blossom, published in Russian in 1980, sold 450,000 copies in only two weeks all over the former Soviet Union. Requiem was banned for five years before it was published in Yerevan in 1969. In 1986 he received Armenia's State Prize for Literature. In 1997 he received the Order of St. Mesrop Mashtots, the highest non-military order of the Republic of Armenia, from the President of Armenia for his achievements and services to the country.

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''Write only what pierces and surprises,' says Anna Szabo in this riveting collection that lives up to its own advice. Domestic life is reinvented as the elemental and visceral plane of existence we all secretly know it to be, and the richness of Szabo's work is given full expression by Clare Pollard's unflinching translation. Szabo deserves a wide audience in the UK: Trust is a book to bring it to her.'

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Expanding on themes present in Blood/Sugar, James Byrne refuses one defining aesthetic or mode of writing in his work, instead choosing to fluctuate between the lyric, experimental, confessional and the political. These are poems that explore aspects of childhood, social activism and satire. There are correspondences with existing texts; Philomela finds herself in Nazi-occupied Paris during the Second World War and the villanelle re-tracks Rimbaud through London. Elsewhere Byrne seeks to defy Robert Graves' notion that there is "no poetry in money", preferring to rally against issues of austerity and hierarchical power in society. White Coins rewards the reader with a nomadic poetry for the 21st century; one that mingles personal, social and historical spaces whilst celebrating, at all times, linguistic versatility and innovation.

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The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change - the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann - and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Here we find poems about love (and love-hate), birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people; about spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and far-away places. The poet's voice is by turns ironical, angry and compassionate, his words charged with anguish, desire and rapture. Jan Owen's masterly translation captures all of this in a selection that includes many of Baudelaire's best known poems - including those banned from 1857 edition - as well as some less familiar ones, with the volume leading up to his great long poem, 'The Voyage', and finishing with the much-loved sonnet 'Meditation'.

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A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back.

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History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under a democratic regime. Together, their work could not be more modern, comprehensive or polyphonic: politics and history cohabit with love (both heterosexual and homoerotic), learned allusion and popular image, stanzaic rigour and freedom of form, the song to the land of one's birth and hymn to the voyage. Featuring the work of six of Catalonia's leading poets - Josep Lluis Aguilo, Elies Barbera, Manuel Forcano, Gemma Gorga, Jordi Julia, Carles Torner - translated by a prize-winning translator, and with an introductory essay which sets the poets within a wider literary context.

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This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence."James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger."Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review"His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time."Keith Richmond, Tribune"In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit."Wayfarers "The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems."Paul StubbsJames Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

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"Defying Fate", like most of Maurice Careme's poetry, is marked by its fluency and ease of access. Here are poems that charm at first sight, short, seductive to the eye and ear, satisfyingly metrical and given to rhyme. Their subject matter is generally familiar to us - children, silence, death, God, the troubled mind - and is argued and developed in ways we can follow with sympathy; this is poetry to identify with, poetry of shared emotion and aesthetic satisfaction. In his introduction, Martin Sorrell calls Careme 'a poet of tact. What he says may be disturbing, but the way in which he says it remains well-mannered', and Christopher Pilling, in his sensitive and resourceful translation, conveys this absolutely. "Defying Fate", which, incidentally was published posthumously, is a fascinating introduction to this intriguing Belgian poet.

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Armenia's most significant contemporary poet, Razmik Davoyan is one of a handful of names in Armenian literature which define not only an era, but go much further to embody an entire history. Davoyan's work reflects the experiences of an old nation, yet it is fresh and very personal at the same time. It is impossible not to feel the struggles, hopes and aspirations of his native land in his work. "Whispers and Breath of the Valleys" is a book charged with energy - indeed, W. N. Herbert, in his introduction, describes it as being 'saturated with joy'. Davoyan displays 'an equal empathy for the suffering and the exultant, finding for both a voice that implies such oppositions are finally resolved in the poem'. This is accessible, readable poetry from a world, a way of life and a culture unfamiliar to most English-language readers and, as such, it fascinates and enthrals.

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Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful – has steadfastly defied any coherent critical analysis.Will Stone's outstanding new translation, complete with contextualizing essays, promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet.GEORG TRAKL (1887-1914) was one of the most influential poets of his time. Born in Salzburg, Austria, he died at the tragically early age of 27 from an overdose of cocaine whilst being held for psychiatric observation in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. WILL STONE is a poet and translator, whose translations of the work of Nerval, Rodenbach, Baudelarie, Verhaeren and Egon Schiele have been published in books and literary journals. He has published several pamphlet collections of poetry, and reviews by him have appeared in the TLS, Guardian and Independent on Sunday and in various literary magazines.This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

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"These poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.""A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers.Introduction by Jeffrey Wainwright.Translated by Willem Groenewgen.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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Dr Mephisto is in the form of a long sequence of poems. It traces Mephistopheles as he ranges freely through time and space, at times a laconic observer, at others a thuggish participant, but always a presence wherever there is conflict and suffering and whenever there is work to be done.

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Translated by Brian Cole, with an introduction by Peter Dale.Parallel text, Italian / English"Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with skill and subtlety."Translation Review:"This is a subtle book full of those flashes of half-recognition that come 'when the hawk has made his journey / from the fist to a heart.'" Susan WicksVisible Poets series, no. 1. Series editor: Jean Boase-Beier.A selection from over 300 poems in the Collected Works, containing some of poet's finest writing. This collection reflects Cattafi's restlessness and his urge to travel — there are poems about islands, streets, cities, the sea, about places both familiar and unfamiliar to the English reader.But we are also aware of a strong element of spiritual journeying in his poetry, as he probes the truth and meaning behind the existence of the concrete, the ordinary, the everyday. In this new translation, Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with consummate skill that allows the English reader to share the poet's urgency of being "driven by necessity / to a truth clothed in falsehood".Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, Summer 2000

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The title of this book comes from the African proverb - "until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." In this poetic reimagining, Nair writes, for the first time, the history of the women in the Mahabharata, the longest poem ever written and one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India.

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Never published in verse form before, these translations of some of the earliest known German poetry give us a rich glimpse of a life that, while alien in so many ways, was not so different after all. The Minnesang poets, for example, engage in a highly professional ritual, but compose in cognitive metaphors that still ring true: love is a trap; love is a game; love is war. A beautiful, lyrical journey through the passions and fears of pre-Medieval German life, told by some of its finest poetic voices.

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The poets whose work is included in this anthology were born in the 1960s, when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, and mostly started publishing after the country achieved independence in 1991. Unlike their predecessors, the poets of this generation are not concerned with political themes but rather with issues of aesthetics and existential quests. While each follows his or her unique path, they all share a penchant for experimentation and an ironic, post-modern perspective, following European literary trends rather than domestic poetic traditions.

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A collection of poems about regeneration, recuperation, reclamation and retreat, in which the poet reflects on visits, both literal and virtual, to remote parts of Greece, Andalucia and Southern India.

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Caldebroc introduces a range of characters from the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders and beyond, including the Brontes at their naughtiest, and crazed millionaires who try to ban January and pimp their filing cabinets. The title is an old English word for a Manchester district and the book includes a sequence about a friend murdered there in 2013. “Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried histories, public and private… Channelling influences such as Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project uniquely his own to rework history in these ‘measures against outrages’. These are formidable sequences, scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.” Scott Thurston “It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives poetic language and, in doing so, uses the full artistic palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.” James Byrne

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