Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

The July-August 2020 issue. Robyn Marsack celebrates Edwin Morgan's centenary. Frederic Raphael's polemic about the pandemic. Kirsty Gunn on Lockdown. Interviews with the great American poet Douglas Crace, with Forward Prize 2020 shortlisted poet Caroline Bird, and the major Irish poet John McAuliffe. New poetry by Sean O'Brien, Jane Draycott, and John Birtwhistle. New to PN Review this issue: Rachel Spence, Edmund Keeley, Maya C. Popa, and Hugh Haughton. And more...

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The May-June 2019 issue. Memoirs of Brodsky in Leningrad and Ginsberg in Prague; News: Colombia arrests man for trafficking in poetry; Andy Croft deconstructs the poetry industry; East meets West in `A New Divan’; Vahni Capildeo considers shipwrecks; New poetry from Lisa Kelly, Sean O’Brien, Joe Carrick-Varty and others; New to PN Review this issue: Charles Bernstein, Jennifer Edgecombe, Michael Farrell and Samira Negrouche; and more...

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Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur `A.C.’ Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK. A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the `right language’, which `exists somewhere / Like a country’. His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual’s struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.

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stack is a book-length poem, and the début Carcanet title of one of the UK’s rising poetry talents. Described by its author as a document of `minimalist interventions’, the small descriptions that make up stack capture seemingly – and actually – everyday scenes, `found’ images from walks, tabletops, cafés, bus stops, and the conveyor belt of still-lives that is the poet’s imagination. Following in the footsteps of minimalists such as Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier and Robert Lax, Davies has dedicated much of his life as a writer so far to finding innovative ways of saying less. Resisting the poetic trend of showing why ordinary things are magical, his writing shows why ordinary things are ordinary: a packet of beef, the roof of a shed, computer stuff in a computer bag. Yet there is a philosophical aspect to stack. The uncanny precision of its images, the tiny disruptions in grammar and syntax, feel like symptoms of language’s attempt, and failure, to reflect the world. Each time words move in to capture it, reality slips: something is added, or something is lost. stack can be read as a list of discrete compositions, a series of connected images, or a set of modular combinations. What binds the poem is Davies’s flair for slow, disinterested inspection. The result is a poem that invites its readers to linger, to dally – a welcome curative for our rapid-fire world.

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The centrepiece of 'Silent Highway' is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the 'Windrush' bringing immigrants from Jamaica, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi and the 'Marchioness' disaster, via the Fire of London and many incidents in which the river has been spectator or participant. Howell's mix of verse styles and skill with cameos ensures that interest never flags. In other poems he demonstrates his pleasure in avoiding the predictable and in writing on a wide variety of subjects. Among the many poems of place, in which he excels, are some disturbing descriptions of modern Britain; in the final section, poems inspired by a winter spent in Brazil, he has surprises in store, such as the witty (and true) poem 'In Praise of Shopping'.

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Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks 'What is worthwhile?' His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they 'at least promise to be about the important things in everyone's life.'

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Gabriel Levin's fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ('The Fathers are Watching') navigate between the depredations of war and the mind's need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

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'Les Fleurs du mal' (1861) was the first great modern work of poetry and one of the few books of poems to become an international bestseller. This edition contains all of Baudelaire's poetry in verse with Francis Scarfe's scrupulous and inventive prose translations at the foot of the pages. Together with his detailed and authoritative introduction, this presentation makes an ideal edition both for the student and for the general reader who wishes to tackle the French original with a reliable prose guide at hand. The companion volume, 'Paris Blues', contains Baudelaire's prose poems ('Le Spleen de Paris' or 'Petits Poemes en prose') and the short novel 'La Fanfarlo' (1847), a charming extravaganza written in his early twenties.

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Memory, including the tricks it plays, is this book's overriding theme. The poems seek to revive happy, confusing, sad and celebratory times over more than half a century, from affairs in distant youth to the credit crunch. They recall friends now beyond known life, misinterpretations giving rise to comedy, epiphanies like a newborn calf or the shock of a painting, and hours dedicated to translation or literary experiments. The book, which also includes translations of some favourite modern poems, tries to come to terms with time itself.

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Michael Hamburger's fifth collection since the publication of "Collected Poems 1941-1994" gathers his poems written during 2004-2006, a productive period in which he has set aside translation work to concentrate on his own poetry. His intimate knowledge of the English landscape and wildlife underpins his meditations on mortality and the passing of time in these subtle and compelling poems.

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This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination of lyric and narrative, form a novel contribution to poetry. The story is of an abruptly ended first love affair, an encounter and marriage with another, the joy of birth, the mourning for the infant's death and its aftermath. The voices of the protagonists, rooted in their local habitations, weave in and out of the speech and consciousness of each of them with all the nuances, pleasures and regrets of hindsight and its shifts in recollection.

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In "Walking Out of the World", triolets, quatrains and villanelles are interspersed with finely modulated free verse, culminating in the striking sequence 'The Sentences of Death'. Mead's curiously fascinating poems, with their beguiling echoes of the modern masters and their obsessive focus on uncomfortable truths, are mordantly witty as they confront life and death with eyes wide open. Mead is a poet who, once read, is not forgotten.

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In 'Merchant Prince' Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity and vocation, his flight from Italy, and later his happy marriage and successful career as a Cork merchant. The unusual mixture of verse and prose and the meticulously imagined history - replete with portraits of such great figures as the painter James Barry, and four Italian poets who are strangely reminiscent of certain contemporary Irish poets - gives the book a compelling flavour. Poems and prose combine in a poetic fiction which is, among other things, a meditation on the craft of verse and the artistic calling, and a restoration project on a kind of Irishness overwritten by later history.

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Justo Jorge Padron is one of Spain's leading poets. Born in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island, in 1943, he is among the most representative poets of the Spanish Generation of the 1970s. The brilliance of his metaphorical imagination provides the Spanish lyric tradition with an incisive, renovating power. Louis Bourne offers here a wide selection from Padron's thirteen Spanish volumes since 1989 and since his last English collection, "On the Cutting Edge" (1988).

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Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has 'drawn together poems that deal with the personal - family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and, poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. Uniting the poems is a common thread: the natural world and its impenetrable presence which, though threatened, remains a source of renewal and, therefore, of faith'.

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Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects from the Rylands plots the lifelong love affair between one particular book worm and the John Rylands Library and its collections in Manchester.

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"When Adam Johnson, a young gay man from Cheshire, arrived in London in 1984, he possessed insatiable curiosity, irresistible charm, and unfocused literary ambition; when he died nine years later, he had become one of the most accomplished English poets of his generation. This collection of his poem

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First published in 1982, this is the factless autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of the 72 literary personae or heteronyms with which Fernando Pessoa created the theatre of his absence. The circular text returns again and again to a protagonist desperate to find out who he is.

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"Select Meditations" is among the earliest works of the poet and mystic Thomas Traherne (1637-74). Written shortly after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the manuscript was not discovered until 1964 and first published by Carcanet in 1997. Traherne, a young clergyman in a country parish at the time, explores his relationship with God and his vocation to 'teach Immortal Souls the way to Heaven'. It is a spiritual journey that involves examination of his doubts and failings (he confesses to 'too much proneness to Speak'), of the political issues that shaped his times, and of the realities of ministering to his congregation. Above all, though, Traherne's meditations celebrate the beauty of the world and the human community transfigured by the love of God, in terms that speak across time. 'Remember', he writes, 'that the world is the beginning of Gifts.' Julia J. Smith's landmark edition, preserving the original spelling, provides a detailed introduction and notes on the text.

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'The only end of writing,' Dr Johnson said, 'is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.' "Misprint" offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently 'real' virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. 'Eurydice', the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together. We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: 'I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.'

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A magazine of new writing featuring fiction, essays and art by NICOLE TRESKA, GARY LUTZ, VICTORIA LANCELOTTA, JASON SCHWARTZ, KATHRYN SCANLAN, RUSSELL PERSSON, CATHERINE FOULKROD, ROBB TODD, ROSIE SNAJDR, DARYL SCROGGINS, JULIE REVERB, STEPHEN MORTLAND, KATE WYER, GORDON LISH, WAYNE HOGAN, LILY HACKETT, MICHAEL CUGLIETTA, CATHY SWEENEY, BRAD PHILIPS, CARRIE COOPERIDER, CHRIS KOHLER, NICOLETTE POLEK, BABAK LAKGHOMI, NATALIE FERRIS

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Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions ...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. "Ethiopia Boy" plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy. Cover painting: "Isao Miura", "Crossing the Water" (oil on canvas). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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Winner of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Award. In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking debut collection explores perception, the poet's eye and ear trained on distances that stretch beyond comfort zones. This is a book full of movement: even quiet reflections on home and family life are rarely still. Throughout the collection Miller dwells on the unfixed and restless image and shows herself as subject to it - to the difficult illusion of physical energy in sculpture, to the changeability of skies and the insistent rhythm and presence of the sea.

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Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis's search for her lost father - the young South Wales Borderer who fought in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq wars. It also includes translations of a number of the poems into Arabic, and photographs taken by Lewis's father on campaign in 1916. Woven throughout the book is a strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in four thousand years.

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In To the War Poets John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: 'No larks, / just the passing of traffic.' Greening explores 'Englishness', but also, in his translations from German poets, goes beyond it. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial in 1939 to the security forces' shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening's precise, unsentimental writing.

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Both heartening and heartbreaking, this collection of poems tells the stories of life of all sizesfrom microscopic parasitic worms to the lives of massive planets. Full of characters facing the guilt and terror of life, this examination embraces literary influences from all over the world, learning from the cultural difficulties and legacies left behind.Revealing the far-reaching effects of everyday occurrences, this remarkable compilation follows people as they go about their lives and find themselves caught up in astounding public and private events."

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The first "Collected Poems" of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was published by Carcanet in 1982. Since then, more of her work has come to light, including some of the most moving and personal poems she ever wrote. This work presents her poems, with expanded notes, a chronology and an authoritative introduction.

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Presents a varied selection of poems from "Travelling Mercies" (2001) and "Controlling the Silver" (2004), together with twenty other poems. Moving between standard English and the speech of her guinea woman grandmother, and between story and song, the author aims to bring dignity to the everyday and grace to all our experiences.

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Explores the meanings and non-meanings to which, in the end, life and art lead us.

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A quick-tempered grandmother is singing; The Mikado is performed in an African village: David Kinloch explores his relationship with his father in unexpected and affectionate terms. An extended sequence of poems moves from personal memory to reflect on the values embodied in such cultural father figures as the explorer David Livingstone and the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Translations of poems by Paul Celan and others into vivid Scots weave through the sequence, illuminating the disturbing connections between patriarchy and twentieth-century violence. In contrast, moving and humorous 'dissections' of adult relationships evoke images of the body both scientific and spiritual. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father "and then/I let him go,/but this moment/which is far the hardest pain/remains". But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; [...] and a most impressive long poem, 'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked Middle East of the seventeenth century.'

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The title sequence of Making the Beds for the Dead charts the journey of a virus in 'the plague year'. Come from outer space, it travels - on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard - into the very heart of our lives. The poet includes personal, verses and stories from farmers in her family and neighbourhood. The open structure allows the Gillian Clarke to include her seven rock poems, written for the National Botanic Garden of Wales; her poems based in archaeology; and her poems about war, and urban violence. There is an instinctive and a deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book. The poet remains true to her landscapes and her nation. The sequence 'The Physicians of Myddfai', nine sonnets for Aberglasne, and much else is included in this characteristically generous and engaging volume by Wales' best-loved poet.

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After four long silent years - his last poetic utterance in volume form having been his millennium What? Again? Selected Poems - Frank Kuppner breaks our poetic fast with a major new compendium, effectively three heaped servings in one. Kuppner is renowned as a superior Glaswegian wit and Man of Feeling. The qualities he displays he also imparts. In The Uninvited Guest we encounter Kuppner the Classicist. A new classical world emerges in a strangely edited riot of epigrams - 782 of them, and annotations. Then, in West Aland, a massively important writer and thinker is put firmly, if great-souledly, in his place; the poem is subtitled 'Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil'. Finally he heaps on our plate a dazzling collection of individual new poems. Such abundance is humbling: it is difficult to describe in advance what is in posse a God's breakfast.

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Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) published 13 volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1936 - crucial transitional years in the evolution of modern poetry. His early poems were written under the shadow of the Rossettis, Swinburne and William Morris, but Ford outgrew their heady late-Victorian lyricism, developing a voice that was natural, impressionistic and ironic. This selection of his verse traces his development from the haunting poignancy of his early poems to his later style, which was to be so influential in the development of Modernism. Ezra Pound considered him to be the best lyric poet in England, and it was Ford who taught Pound that "poetry should be as well written as prose". He transformed Pound's style and, through Pound, the styles of Yeats and Eliot.

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These poems of religiously shaped place and passion follow three offices of the church, leading toward a world blessed by reason. The voice is that of an Everyman fallen from grace who has the boldness to trust in the possibility of belief. Single poems and sequences, metered and free verse, make up this collection, in which the Psalms have taken flesh with the passion that King David knew and the grace that the Catholic mystics attest to.

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Poet Sophie Hannah returns with a collection of poems that explore and celebrate strong feelings: love, hate, anger, hope - and which strip away the veils of hypocrisy and pretence from all aspects of everyday life.

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This book is two in one: "The Anatolikon", published in Great Britain for the first time, and a collection of new poems entitled "To the City". John Ash remains a savage wit, an elegist, a poet of celebration, and one who refuses to let his work be assimilated into orthodoxy or predictability.

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Carlos is the talented heir to a notable family in fin-de-siecle Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences - French intellectual developments, English trading practices - that trouble and frustrate him and in the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness. Carlos' good intentions decline, amiably, into dilettantism; his passionate love affair itself begins to suffer a devastating constraint. "The Maias" tells a compelling story of characters whose lives become as real and engrossing as any in Flaubert, Balzac or Dickens. This is his masterpiece, a novel of intellectual depth, historical compassion and great wit. Hailed as a masterpiece in the Paris of Flaubert, Balzac and Zola, this remains Eca's most popular novel.

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This edition of Burns Singer's poems reprints most of the Collected Poems of 1970, adding uncollected and unpublished material from the interim period. The work is arranged chronologically as far as possible and includes notes.

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"Swarm", Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros and law. She negotiates passionately with those powers that human beings feel themselves subject to: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love.

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A collection of poems by C.H. Sisson. This text shows how the author grounds his work in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and recalls the work of Eliot and Pound, and Hardy and Edward Thomas.

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This volume includes Gurney's early small volumes of verse, "Severn and Somme" (1917) and "War's Embers" (1919).

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This collection includes Edwin Morgan's Mayakovsky translated into Scots, and his Voznesensky, Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the French - Leopardi, Quasimodo, Montale, Guillevic, Prevert and Michaux; and also Heine, Lorca, Cernuda, Brecht, Enzensburger and Braga.

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In her second collection of poetry, Mimi Khalvati uses the image of Islamic mirror-mosaic - found in palaces, barber shops and kebab houses. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act a mirror tryptych, their themes of art, nature, domestic life, memory, east and west draw the other poems together. She establishes a voice and questions its integrity. In many ways, it is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.

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This work draws on John Ash's four collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. Among contemporary British poets he is known for his wit, formal ambition and his Byzantine range.

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"The King of Britain's Daughter" has been specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the Mabinogion of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest, the family farm, where the giant's footprint is preserved as a rock pool, and Fforest and Welsh legend have provided the inspiration for this part of the book, which also contains a variety of other vivid and memorable poems.

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