Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from `Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. `The words are only the words,' he writes, `which is more or less everything.' Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a `genial smuggler of surprises': `his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)

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Jenny Lewis relocates Gilgamesh to its earlier, oral roots in a Sumerian society where men and women were more equal, the reigning deity of Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk, was female (Inanna), only women were allowed to brew beer and keep taverns and women had their own language – emesal. With this shift of emphasis, Lewis captures the powerful allure of the world’s oldest poem and gives it a fresh dynamic while creating a fastpaced narrative for a new generation of readers.

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Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials, links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.

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The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) writes in direct response to the Holocaust. She is uniquely a 'prophetic' poet, one of the greatest of that species in the twentieth century. Her first book appeared in the immediate wake of the Second World War, in 1946. Since that time, Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, 'she has been writing fundamentally a single book'. That book is represented in this volume which reveals her whole progression rendered into English. Unlike earlier translators, Andrew Shanks calls his versions 'translations/imitations', moving away from the doggedly literal to render more faithfully the sense and intention of the originals. Sachs escaped Berlin in May 1940. She found refuge in Sweden. Her major work is an evolving response to the trauma of the Holocaust. In 1966 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes. Her poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust. Other themes develop: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, personal bereavement, mental breakdown. And there are reflections on poetic vocation in the darkness of recent history.

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Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019. Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2018. Gabriel Josipovici's The Cemetery in Barnes is a short, intense novel that opens in elegiac mode, advances quietly towards something dark and disturbing, before ending with an eerie calm. Its three plots, relationships and time-scales are tightly woven into a single story; three voices - as in an opera by Monteverdi - provide the soundtrack, enhanced by a chorus of friends and acquaintances. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris and then to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader's darkest intuitions. The Cemetery in Barnes reaffirms Josipovici's status as `one of the very best writers now at work in the English language, and a man whose writing, both in fiction and in critical studies, displays a unity of sensibility and intelligence and deep feeling difficult to overvalue at any time' (Guardian).

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After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

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With `Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His `I’, like theirs, makes space for a reluctant `us’. Dear Pilgrims includes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a `new testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his `Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God’.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, `revving on a wish'.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in 'Mask', are both 'themselves and strangers'. 'That's all they wanted.'

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`The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manque: I make no other pretensions ...' (Anthony Burgess). Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man's Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess's journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable. Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material.

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Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Rebecca Watts's debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry. In assured style, Watts positions herself where Wordsworth, Frost and Hughes have stood; with an original point of view and an openness to the possibilities of form, she retunes the genre for modern ears. From the wide-open plains of ecology and social history to the intimate enclosures of dreams, homes and bodies, these poems approach their often-unusual subjects with the clarity and matter-of-factness of Simon Armitage and with humour that recalls Stevie Smith, spinning memorable scenes and vivid images from the material of ordinary language. Animals, as familiars and omens, abound. Weather anticipates and directs human drama, under the analytic and tender watch of a poet influenced as much by science and realism as by Romanticism. As landscaper, orienteer and companion, Watts finds new ways of negotiating the complex territories of our physical and emotional worlds.

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'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' -embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage.' Cliche', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity. 'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'

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R.F. Langley is known for his meticulous observation of the natural world and his highly original voice. This volume brings together his two previous Carcanet collections, Collected Poems (2000) and The Face of It (2007), along with his celebrated but uncollected late poems, including 'To a Nightingale', which won the 2011 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The book includes a biographical introduction and a rare note by the poet on his own compositional practice. Langley kept a careful record of the reading and writing which inspired his poems; this edition is fully annotated with these sources, making it an invaluable guide for readers wanting to explore the visionary imagination of this master craftsman.

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First published under the title "An Unofficial Rilke", Hamburger's translations have been critically acclaimed for their contribution towards a more complete understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century. While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the "New Poems" volumes, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus". Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a definitive statement.

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Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) now takes a place among the English poets. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private, the passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire, and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he made a poetry unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his poems, was made by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the "Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney". It is reissued now, with a few corrected readings, and with a Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life, by P.J. Kavanagh.

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Written with a keen awareness of both climate change and the situation in the Middle East, this work features poems that draws upon the poet's travels in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Argentina, and his 25 years in the environmental movement. It also includes politically-charged poems such as An Opera in Baghdad and An Isotope, Dreaming.

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The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of "Ticks and Crosses" are an account of a farcical summer afternoon spent floating down a French river on a lilo in the company of Shirley Williams; an alarming trip up the wrong (and by no means dormant) volcano in Guatemala; meeting Nabokov; taking part in Any Questions with Enoch PowellA...The eminent are caught off-guard; aphorisms sparkle, and throughout, Raphael's love of French life and culture, his delight in the human comedy of social life, illuminate his unfolding chronicle.

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'I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I didn't live much longer!' "Clarity or Death!" takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of the world, the universe and ourselves is the linking preoccupation of Jeffrey Wainwright's collection. Five poems develop the physicist Richard Feynman's proposition that through scientific study 'we may be able to reduce the number of different things'. Others ponder infinity and number. These poems are both playful and intellectually rigorous, exploring not only ideas but the experience of having and articulating them. They play alongside other aspects of personal experience. Central to Wainwright's writing is a fascination with what Wallace Stevens called 'the uncertain light of single, certain truth', an uncertain light embodied in the sensuousness of language given poetic form.

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Who are the invisible kings? Why do two bears follow them round Britain? And what happens when a gypsy's curse comes miraculously to life? David Morley's new book reveals extraordinary worlds where the real and imagined converge in stories and charms, just this side of science and magic. When David Morley's Romani poems first appeared in the "London Review of Books" and "PN Review", the strangeness of the language and their narrative power convinced readers that here was a genuinely new imaginative world. Partly Romani himself, the poet follows - and remakes - a tradition of weaving stories, from the conflicts in his own culture and that of the Roma. The personal poems that open the collection develop into a traveller's-eye view of England and Europe as stages for war, passion and betrayal. Never before has a writer made such daring and beautiful use of the Romani language as a vehicle for contemporary poetry, nor has a Romani poem achieved the devastating epic scope of 'Kings', the central narrative of the collection. "The Invisible Kings" continues a cycle of poems that began with David Morley's "Scientific Papers" and which will conclude with "An Island Blown Inland".

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Roger Langley's poems explore perception. They take their bearings from forms as diverse as Renaissance hermeticism, a Greek vase, Rauschenberg's painting, Bottom's dream, a green beetle. Here the world may chime, like a building by Palladio, or disappear on a parting wave as in a film by Bergman. Surprise and truth come together. Things are both ordinary and vivid, distinct and universal. Langley's poems take delight in the sound and sense of language: for him, etymology can be revelation. In the interplay of word and object, each poem attempts an epiphany.

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Ditch-crawling has no rules, just aesthetic principles, the most important thing is to travel lightly, leave no legacies, and try to make no sound at all.

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A delightfully wise and playful collection from one of our most senior poets, offering a feast of sensory experience.

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The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832 to seven years' transportation to Australia for stealing a plaid, he survived the brutality of the penal system: his witty, rebellious poems laid the foundations for a new Australian poetry. Les Murray's anthology of poets from the early years of European settlement in Australia reaches back in time from his fivefathers, which collected significant voices from the early twentieth century (Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley, Francis Webb). "Hell and After" contains extended selections from the work of four writers. Francis McNamara (1811-1880) is the only poet whose work has survived from the convict era. Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) was born to a pioneering life in the bush; she became a social reformer and renowned figure in the Australian Labor Party, and her poems are much loved by Australians for their vivid evocations of colonial life. John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942), who spent most of his life as a manual labourer, wrote poems of great lyricism and humour under conditions of poverty and ill-health. Lesbia Harford (1891-1927), a radical activist who was one of the first women to graduate with a law degree from the University of Melbourne, worked as a factory machinist and domestic servant. Her poems give voice to a woman's experience of working life and private desire. Reading these poets is to experience a culture in the process of creating itself.

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Ben Jonson is overshadowed as a dramatist by Shakespeare, his great contemporary. As a poet, however, he stands high. His polished urbanity, direct expression and classicism have been especially valued in modern times. T.S. Eliot says Jonson "incorporated his erudition into his sensibility", creatively assimilating Horace, Martial and Juvenal into his poetry and hence into English literature. Richard Dutton's introduction illuminates the structure and context of Jonson's "Epigrams" and "The Forest". Dutton shows them to be carefully structured poem sequences that display Jonson's command of poetic forms and involve the reader in evaluating a range of shifting perspectives. Jonson's recurrent theme, the nature of truth and virtue, is as pertinent to day as it was in his own time.

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This collection is comprised mainly of new works, previously unpublished by Edward Lucie-Smith, as well as his most-anthologized poem, "The Lesson".

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The title of "Thumb's Width", from the German "Daumenbreite" (roughly equivalent to an inch), indicates the book's preoccupation with the miniature. Sketching the childhood relationship between two brothers, the poems often settle on small objects - shrimps, cigarettes, "cat's eyes", plastic soldiers - to which childhoods may become attached. Beginning with the west coast of Ireland, particularly the tiny islands where human settlement has ceased, the book travels outward, geographically and thematically, through a wide variety of lyric, comic and dramatic forms. These patterns act to include the smaller, remembered patterns of an Irish childhood into the larger shapes of adulthood and the adult world.

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This text draws on six previous collections published between 1978 and 1994. The earlier poems are diverse, ranging from descriptions of work in heavy industry to observations of wildlife around the writer's childhood home in Wales. Later poems deal with travel in Brazil and the United States, and also deal with schizophrenia. The book celebrates the life and characters of a close-knit community. It then breaks away from the peopled landscape to consider history and culture from wider persepectives.

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This is a collection of Robert Graves' essays, written between 1922 and 1972, on areas of culture which engaged him. They are organized around the thematic categories of literature, history and religion. The collection chronicles Graves' intellectual development by presenting the essays chronologically to show how ideas begin and evolve over half a century. At the same time, the essays demonstrate his eclectic knowledge over a vast range of topics and confirm not only his insights, but also his humour and famous "leaps of logic".

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This book holds that a revolution took place in literary criticism in the 1980s. The author examines this revolution and assesses its consequences. He analyzes deconstruction and post-structuralism and investigates the relations between literature, society and politics.

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An investigation into the art of "Lit Ed-ing". Describing the qualities needed to run the literary pages of the broadsheets, this book recalls the work of literary editors and reviewers over the past 100 years.

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The poems in this new collection combine a lyrical grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love.

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In DARKNESS INSIDE OUT Rodney Pybus takes the reader on a series of excursions within real and imagined, beautiful and barbaric worlds. From Suffolk to Cape Town, from comedy to elegy, Pybus's poems explore the collusions of language and memory, the layerings of time and loss. A sequence set in the new South Africa closes this absorbing collection. Pybus shows that it is finally the work of the imagination that best turns darkness inside out.

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The poems in Owen Lowery's first collection speak in a range of voices, offer glimpses into many lives and many worlds. At the same time, we hear in all of them Lowery's own voice. Incorporating elements from English, Welsh, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Italian poetic traditions, he develops form deftly, giving his work a beautiful, risky movement and musicality. Many of his poems pay tribute to poets writing in the face of war: he enters the worlds of Paul Celan, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Edward Thomas, and - in a powerful sequence based on IF THIS IS A MAN - Primo Levi. Other poems are more directly personal, the poet's confessions both wry and tender: 'Your trademark switching the light on / from the bottom of the stairs / wakes the open secret of his / thank you prayer.' The poet was a British Judo champion but suffered a spinal injury in 1987, as a result of which he is now a ventilator-dependent C2-level tetraplegic. With OTHERWISE UNCHANGED, Owen Lowery embarks on a momentous

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In Visible Voices Nicolas Barker traces the history of the 'translation' of poetry from a spoken medium to a written, or printed, medium.

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For two decades "New Poetries" has been a proving-ground for new poets in English from around the world. Here readers first encountered, in generous selections, work by, among others, Caroline Bird, Stephen Burt, Sophie Hannah, Emma Jones, Nicole Krauss, Patrick McGuinness, Kei Miller, David Morley, Sinead Morrissey, Togara Muzanenhamo, Matthew Welton and Jane Yeh. Published from Manchester, the anthologies overlook national borders, instead providing vistas across a worldscape. This fifth "New Poetries" anthology presents twenty-two new writers, organised in such a way as to highlight their variety, the 'irreducible plural' of poetry today. It includes work by poets ranging from their early twenties to their late sixties, and harking from Canada, England, Iran, New Zealand, the Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, the United States and Wales. Their forms and themes are wonderfully various. What they have in common is intelligence, curiosity and a willingness to take risks. This book's surprises remain fresh, the writers promise major things.

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'When I saw Drenthe, in deep February snow, I knew I had to write about it,' says Julith Jedamus. Each of her poems is necessary, a passionate dialogue with a subject and a form. She is a poet of extraordinary technical resourcefulness that matches a precision and integrity of vision. Once read we cannot forget her snowflakes, landscapes or the dramas of relationship - familial, romantic, historical - which provide the living pulse of this collection. She is not a religious poet, but in her embodiments a religious instinct finds expression. Her relationship with the Thames, where she is an avid rower, is of a piece with her relationship with the stories of Hans Christian Andersen: her poems include her, and us, in a wider, flowing world.

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"Fresh Air" is an exhilarating, freewheeling ride through landscapes and languages. The poems, all written on the move (tramping the Gobi desert, cycling in Irish drizzle, paddling in Tonga) have the fizz of travellers' tales, the enchantment and the melancholy of the open road. The "Story of Molecule" tells the tale of Molloy Gillies ('Molecule'), a semi-detached twelve-year-old who one night takes his bike from the shed and pedals off to escape Evolution. In Gallas' comical, heartbreaking sonnet-picaresque, Molecule encounters dangers, kindness, police cars and mauri on the roads of the South Island, while his father, his aunt, a bathroom fitter and a police chief wonder what life, and freedom, are all about. Together, these two books explore a world newly discovered in the imagination: 'Imagine: in the atlas of my soul / I could not make a thing so lovely.'

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Waterloo Teeth explores our capacity to articulate the pain and pleasure of lived experience - our own, and that of others distant from us - across different locations in history, culture, and in the difference of species.

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John Gallas, who guided us around the world in his celebrated anthology The Song Atlas, here zooms in on Europe. The poems he perfects in English are chosen from the work of the famous (Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Pasolini) and the still-to-be-known (the Olafsson brothers, Renee Vivien, Yulia Zhadovskaya). Native speakers provide him with literal translations and the poems' sounds. Gallas then 're-poems' them. They constitute an exhilarating poetic journey across a continent and through time. All human life is here: love and despair, wild excess and wistful calm. Gallas understands the many musics of language. His book is a trove of the purest currency of Europe, poetry.

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Torchlight explores the haunting persistence of memories, and the acts of remembrance which preserve and shape them. In his fifth collection, the Northern Irish poet Peter McDonald ranges across a wide poetic landscape, from Belfast in the troubled 1970s to contemporary England, from personal recollection to a fragment of Sappho's memory of her youth, eloquent across millennia; from ancient myth to rock music. At the centre of Torchlight is a major new translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a Greek text which, in McDonald's hands, resonates with the concerns and discoveries of the book's shorter poems, and brings the mystery cult of Eleusis into an unnerving conjunction with the losses, recoveries and revelations elsewhere in the collection. McDonald's powerful lyric poetry is both complex and memorable, light and vigorous. His is an original and distinctive voice in Irish poetry,

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"Searched for Text" is a first chapbook collection of poems by a poet alive to the challenges of traditional form, finding ways of expressing themes that are intensely real and many-layered in time, culture and society. His elegies, poems of love and landscape, are uneasily sharp and political. He allows no sentimentality to blur the deep sentiment of his experiences: the American childhood and youth, his growing love of England and his finding places in which to be, always a little uneasily, at home. In "Un Coup de Des" he says: Chance authors all we do, The plot's contrived in retrospect. Spied once I still look out for you; Chance authors all we do. A sea bird shot, a woman met Ungloving who then strolls from viewAlters to fate as we reflect. Chance authors all we do,The plot's contrived in retrospect.

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"In the Wake of the Day" is a book of memories and journeys; from the chaotic energy of urban life in modern Istanbul, where John Ash lives, to the ruins of vanished civilisations; from personal incident to the narratives and vacancies of cultures. Ash inhabits the fertile and ambiguous territory where East and West meet. We 'know and do not know' the past. In an 'imperial city without empire, place of paradox', time too becomes fluid. The ancient, half-imagined past of Ur, Alexandria, Cappadocia coexists with a contemporary world in which 'tank tracks are driven over Babylon'. At the centre of this collection are John Ash's versions of poems by the great Alexandrian C.P. Cavafy. Working with Cavafy's voice, Ash expresses his own urbane intelligence.

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The naturalist Gilbert White is at the heart of this collection. Like him, Jeremy Over explores an ecology with meticulous acuity. His poems are 'found in the field': the beauty and oddity of the language of others is brought into sharp focus. Robert Herrick's 'sweet disorder in the dress' is subjected to a series of disrobings; a guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White's "Natural History of Selborne", Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in White's words, lend 'an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries' of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness - Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Henry Purcell - runs parallel to an American dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies into new figurations.

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Grand Larcenies features generous selections from the work of ten classic modern Dutch poets: Eva Gerlach, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Hester Knibbe, Hans R. Vlek, Rob Schouten, Willem van Toorn, J. Eijkelboom, H.H ter Balkt, K. Michel, and Esther Jansma. The translator, a notable Welsh poet and writer now living in the Netherlands, takes his bearings from Robert Minhinnick's seminal Welsh anthology The Adulterer's Tongue, which attempts by means of experiment rather than rigid linguistic fidelity to approach the imaginative core of the original. 'These versions take risks,' Evans declares; 'they are no black-and-white photocopy, but they honour the originals' forms and intentions, making audible a wide array of individual styles and voices, and a Dutch sensibility that is both familiar and alien to us.' A dual-language edition.

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