Search results for ""arc publications""

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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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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"Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in ‘The Creations of Sound’, that poems should ‘make the visible a little hard / To see’ […] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life..."- Mark Ford, from the Introduction to Invisible.

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"Crowe knows just how much to give and how much to hold back, offering fleeting glances and sometimes strange images... These are sinewy, questing poems, alive with memory and attentive to the interior landscape." PBS selectors on Figure in a Landscape "Words which come to mind when reading Anna Crowe's wonderful poetry are 'honest', 'affectionate', 'elegiac', 'skilful', 'natural', 'lucid'. Douglas Dunn on Punk with Dulcimer With their inviting blend of elegance and musicality, and captivating breadth of cultural reference, Anna Crowe's poems offer an illuminating insight into the marvels of and uncanny links between the natural world and its creatures, and the shifts of light and shade in our own lives – most touchingly, when vulnerable and bereft. Not on the Side of the Gods, constantly demanding a pause for reflection or gasp of wonderment, is both celebratory and – as in the opening poem, “The Gecko” – imbued with a heart-stopping tenderness and sense of loss. Stewart ConnI read Not On The Side Of The Gods with growing admiration. It was like wandering through a fabulous living museum, filled with places and plants, birds and other creatures and, often, most movingly, with the people they call to mind. Anna Crowe does exactly what the caddis-fly larva does in her poem, 'Jeweller in the Galerie Électra, Paris' - building for each vulnerable creature a house of jewelled words. What I came away with was not just the richness and precision of her descriptions but a cornucopia of sounds, not least the wonderful music of her voice.. Vicki Feaver

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These poems were written to accompany the Los Caprichos images, originally published by Francisco Goya on February 6th, 1799. The images are part of the original `Prado' manuscript, republished by Dover Publications in 1969. Excerpts from this sequence first appeared in Ambit, Buenos Aires Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Granta, The Common, Long Poem Magazine, Morning Star, Poetry Review and on University of Liverpool's `Citizens of Everywhere' blog. The author is grateful to the editors of these publications. A brief selection also appeared in Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo Press, 2015).

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Manuel Forcano, the outstanding Catalan poet, is a great traveller, and the poems in this, his first full-length book in English translation, embrace the cities, the landscapes and the people of the Middle East. Drawn from his four most recent collections, these poems use geographical and historical references to deepen and inform the narrative, and also to lay before the reader the idea of the continuity, over many centuries, of human love and desire. The beauty, joy, grief and tenderness in these poems are universal and belong to every kind of human affection – indeed Forcano has been described by the Catalan journalist and academic Pere Ballart as ‘our foremost love poet’.Anna Crowe’s beautiful translations demonstrate a remarkable understanding of, and sensitivity to, Forcano’s poetry, so much so that one might say that Maps of Desire represents the perfect union of poet and translator.

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“The Rohingya poets gathered here for the first time in English hold a mirror to the light for the rest of humanity, flashing their poems of misery and warning from the genocidal zone and refugee camp of Cox’s Bazaar. Their songs are more accurate than news reports for word of the plight of the most oppressed. These are poems that begin with the fragrance on the bird’s handkerchief and end by walking among the mass graves. They write from a dire present to a possible future, wondering in their peril if the world outside was too quiet to hear them. Let the world not be quiet, let the world listen to these poems.” Carolyn Forché“I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These poems have no alternative but to speak out, they are from a crisis that must be addressed. There is brilliance in here!”John Kinsella

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Matilda Olkinaitė was only 19 years old when, in 1941, she was murdered by Nazi collaborators in her native Lithuania. Many of the poems in this chapbook were written in a notebook that, prior to Matilda’s death, had been given to the Catholic parish priest, Father Juozapas Matelionis, for safekeeping. Shortly before his death, Matelionis revealed its hiding place to organist and political dissident, Alfredas Andrijauskas who, in his turn, kept the notebook safe for more than three decades until 1987, when he handed it to Holocaust survivor Irena Veisaitė; at around this time, Veisaitė also acquired Matilda’s diary from another source and this too contained poems. Both notebook and diary came to the attention of the poet and translator, Laima Vincė, who, working directly from Matilda’s handwritten poems, translated all 34 poems in the notebook, plus those jotted down between diary entries. The poems included in this chapbook span Olkinaitė’s short life and Vince’s powerful, yet sensitive, translations, together with her illuminating introduction, allow the English-language reader access to the work of a remarkable and prescient young writer who, had she lived, would undoubtedly have become an important poet.

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In this poignant new poetry collection, one of New Zealand’s most significant voices reflects on home, on away, and on friends living and dead. ‘I lead a life of quiet medication’, the poet claims, ‘longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.’ But whether swimming to the yellow buoy or remembering an encounter in Belsize Park, in the thick of it or asking, ‘what next?’, Stead’s voice is intimate, amusing and always compelling. "This Side of Silence resounds with intimations of mortality, compounded with reactions to a contemporary world of pandemic, climate change and war, but this collection is not in the least morose. Rather, the poetry is enlivening – concrete, particular, detailed and often playful. There is a wealth of sensory content, and each poem has its own satisfying shape, with easy idiomatic speech forming its special kind of rhythm. In this book a major modern poet continues to “live and sing”." - MacDonald P. Jackson "Stead has his usual quick wit and steely eye for his world and, at 90, has the linguistic dexterity that many thousands of aspiring writers can only dream about." - Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers

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In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people’s actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith’s comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.

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JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE was a monumental European presence - dramatist, impresario, novelist, essayist, scientist, administrator and extraordinarily prolific poet. This selection from his early and middle years includes the 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' (the title of which became famous a hundred years later through Dukas' well-known orchestral piece) and also highlights the dramatic element in Goethe's poetry (a speech from Faust and a monologue from an unfinished play about Prometheus). Several poems set to music by Brahms and Schubert are also featured. John Greening's ingenious translations offer refreshing new angles for those who are already familiar with Goethe's poetry and are an excellent introduction for those coming to it for the first time.

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On the Edge of a Sword is a selection of Kristiina Ehin’s latest work – deeply personal, unflinchingly honest, autobiographical poems which, at the same time, are also a heartfelt defense of the right of the Estonian language to exist and flourish in our increasingly anglicised world.

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This sequence of poems (taken from Florczyk's full-length collection From the Annals of Krakow, published in the USA in 2106) is based on the testimonies of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. Florczyk, who was born and raised in Krakow, wanted to retell their story of persecution and perseverance and luck so that, with the passing of time, it wouldn't be forgotten; he wanted to keep their memory alive. These sensitive, closely observed and deeply moving poems do just that.

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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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Subterranea is a first collection of poetry by Jos Smith that explores the relationship of our human world to the earth that underpins it. At times delicate and curious, at times painfully unbalanced, it is a relationship of always precarious intimacy, and one that is often most vividly apprehended in the imagination. Subterranea is a collection that measures its own poetic form against the earth's resistance, knowing full well that if there is to be any relationship at all something must give in us; that perhaps there might even be an art to this giving.

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It is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Törne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement - Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Törne's collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Törne's powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.

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In The Arrow Maker, D.M. Black's sensitive attention to emotional states of mind, sometimes his own, sometimes those of others such as St. Augustine, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan or Jacques Brel, also extends to more public themes of war and climate change. As always, his forms are various, but there is a predominance now of poems spoken in a thinking voice that remembers the iambic pentameter without being subdued by it. In a final section, versions of two Dante cantos, from the Purgatorio and Paradiso, focus in particular on Dante's qualities of thoughtfulness and intellectual precision.

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With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.

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Hugo Mujica is one of Argentina's top intellectuals and a leading poet in Spanish. His award-winning poetry has been published in 15 countries. This bilingual edition offers the English-speaking reader for the first time a representative selection of all of his poetry, where idea and feeling, synthesis and eloquence, truth and beauty come together.

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Paradise Empty brings together a wide selection of poetry from eleven collections by Hugo Mujica, one of Argentina's most renowned and respected poets. Mujica's work might be described as the poetry of thought. There is nothing superfluous in his poems - his images are crystal clear, his rhythms simple, his language precise - and their impact, in terms of both words and the silences between words, is powerful. Although his poetry is already well-known throughout South and Central America and in many European countries, Paradise Empty is the first collection of Mujica's work to be published in the UK, and in this beautifully modulated translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and the poet Victor Rodriguez Nunez, it is sure to resonate with English-language readers.

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56 is a collaboration between two poets from very different literary traditions whose ears are tuned to a mutual music. With a painting by Jenny Saville as a starting point, this collaboration grew into a sequence of 56 poems which, by coincidence, was begun fifty-six years after 1956, the year in which George Szirtes came to England.

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This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.Using true stories from her own family annals, Wioletta Greg makes a literary journey through the last century, from Poland at the outbreak of the First World War to present-day Britain. In her own selection of verse and prose poems, set mostly in the geographical heart of Europe, she charts two world wars, life under Communism and the ensuing liberation, and her own experiences as a migrant living in the Isle of Wight.

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Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia's great 19th century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and literary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.

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This anthology of versions by 16 contemporary poets from around the world of the 33 Cantos of Dante's Purgatorio is published to mark the 700th centenary of Dante's death in 1321. With an absorbing Introduction by Nick Havely tracing Dante's influence on countless poets over the centuries, and detailed explanatory notes, canto by canto, this volume is both an outstanding work of scholarship and, for the poetry lover, a superb way into the world of this extraordinary medieval masterpiece.

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The Play of Waves is a collection of poems written over the period of five years by Malta’s most distinguished poet, Immanuel Mifsud. It falls into six sections: the first consists of mainly lyrical poems; the second explores mental instability and the fluidity of the Self; the third is a sequence of travel poems; the fourth focuses on the dialectic of body-spirit; the fifth consists of poems about sex and sexuality; and the sixth and final section is a short cycle about Medusa. Throughout all six sections, the theme of ‘waiting’ runs as a leitmotiv – waiting at airports, at the psychiatric clinic, at railway stations, sex-workers waiting for clients, lonely people waiting for imaginary lovers.This is a powerful yet tender collection from a writer whose name may be familiar as winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 but whose unique poetic voice is little-known outside Malta.

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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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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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A bilingual introduction to the work of one of the leading poets on the Belarusian scene today – lyrical, surreal, political poetry, written in Belarusian (classified by UNESCO as a vulnerable language) and superbly translated by Annie Rutherford.

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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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Antonio Moura's third collection has the clarity and urgency of a black and white woodcut. A playful collusion of experimental and traditional poetic styles, this collection has both a powerful mythic reach and a bizarre neo-Baroque flavour. Life appears as uncanny, mysterious, something to be faced by the individual. There is a tension between spiritual insight and the sordid realities of life, between the world of today and that of previous eras, between the wider picture and the intensely personal. Moura's rhythms and his questioning of contemporary assumptions about poetry and our lives make this a powerful and distinctive - and one might say a very 'Brazilian' - book.

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This collection draws work from 5 of Gallagher's previous collections, together with a substantial body of new work. Born in Australia, Gallagher moved to Paris before settling in London. She draws on a rich inheritance from these different worlds in her poetry, which is always rooted in a passionate sense of discovery and attention to place.

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This selection charts the civil war in Sri Lanka, a war which has raged for more than three decades, and left a once idyllic landscape devastated. Together these works encapsulate the Tamil story of exile and displacement, of love overshadowed by uncertainty and loss. Introduced by Sascha Ebeling.Translated by Lakshmi Holmström.Amma, don't weep.There are no mountains to shoulder your sorrowthere are no riversto dissolve your tears.The instant he handed youthe baby from his shoulder,the gun fired. (from 'Amma, don't weep', 1985)Cheran was born in Alaveddy in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. His two early collections, A Second Sunrise (1982) and God of Death (1984), and an anthology of Tamil resistance poems, Amidst Death, We Live (1985), are all landmarks in contemporary Tamil poetry. He currently teaches at the University of Windsor, Toronto.Lakshmi Holmström recently co-edited The Rapids of a Great River: the Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (2010). From 2003 to 2006, she was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of East Anglia.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

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Rainer Maria Rilke's work spans the divide between turn-of-the-century Europe's decadence and its post First World War revolutionary modernism, always struggling to develop, to seek and reach beyond itself. This selection of poems from throughout Rilke's creative output is arranged chronologically, placing poems of similar themes and / or modes of expression close to one another, making bed-fellows of poems rarely seen together. Each poem is to a greater or lesser extent conscious of others. The aim is to illuminate the underlying themes which Rilke said he had arrived at very early in his life. In his powerful new translation, skilfully shaped into current English, Ian Crockatt succeeds in catching Rilke's blend of crafted sensuality and inward-focused spiritual searching, while his comprehensive introduction and notes to this selection are both informative and enlightening.

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In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government officially announced the end of a civil war that had been ravaging the island for almost three decades. During all these years, Tamil poets have commented on the war and its vicissitudes in what constitutes an extraordinary body of poetry. We find poems on violence and trauma, loss and exile, as well as courage and hope. Together these poems can be read as an alternative history of the war. This collection of up to 50 poems translated from the original Tamil, comes with an afterword that will provide readers with the historical and political context of Sri Lanka's war, while also mapping literary developments during that period. Among the poets included are internationally acclaimed poets, such as Cheran, V. I. S. Jeyapalan, M. A. Nuhman, and S. Sivasegaram, less well-known voices, such as Balasooriyan, S. Vilvaratnam, or Solaikili, as well as a significant number of women poets, such as Sivaramani, Urvasi, Avvai, and others. Both Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling have previously published translations of these poets, which we plan to include in addition to a number of new translations made specifically for this volume.

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Wheel, as the title suggests, is full of revolving perspectives and throughout Michael O'Neill's beautifully modulated second collection, the poetry turns on an axis of opposites: self and others, here and there, childhood and middle-age, the present and the past. In the title-poem, an encounter with a tramp calls to mind the wheel of fortune; another poem depicts a 360° shot of a figure on a bridge; in yet another an adoption application prompts memories of circling a field. Elsewhere, a boy's phantasmal arm brushes his ear as he bowls, the dead form a band of souls, a merry-go-round melts into a hoop of light, and the rings of a tree uprooted in a gale expose its age. The poems often open out on to imagined states and virtual realities, and occasionally glimpse a dimension beyond time's whirligig. Deft in its shifts of tone and formally skilful, Wheel is a powerful and affecting collection.

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Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) who, along with his contemporaries Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Albert Mockel, Charles van Lerberghe and Max Elskamp, helped to define the Symbolist movement, is one of Belgium's most venerated and admired francophone poets. Dubbed the 'European Walt Whitman', he was a pro-European idealist whose poetry explores his all-consuming notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and new technology could combine to produce a more progressive humanity, a hope ignominiously swept away by the industrial brutality of the First World War.This sympathetic modern translation by Will Stone at last allows the English-speaking world to return to, and reappraise, a major poet whose influence was felt throughout European literary circles during his life-time. Not only does this selection contain some of Verhaeren's most passionate and visionary outpourings but also some of the most tender and beautiful love poems ever written."My heart is a burning bush that sets my lips on fire..."- Emile Verhaeren

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A collection of poems of the author who is one of the most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked outside of the island for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA.

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Six Polish Poets makes available to the English-language reader the poetry of the younger generation of poets who whose first collections (with one exception) have been published in the past decade. Unlike the poets of the previous generation who, in the period of new-found freedom after the fall of communism, adopted a highly individualistic, anarchic, sometimes brutal style, the poets represented here re-examine and experiment with traditional poetic forms, themes and cultural references in poems that are refined and witty, moving and informed, ranging across every aspect of human existence. This anthology is both thought-provoking and full of warmth and humanity, and while it cannot claim to be representative of contemporary Polish poetry as a whole, it nevertheless provides an insight into today's literary scene in Poland. Parallel text: Polish / English

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Ludwig Steinherr is one of the most compelling new voices to have emerged in Germany since the late 1980s and this selection - the first to appear in English - from his 10 poetry collections published between 1985 and 2005 reflects the breadth and depth of his writing, ranging from its post-Celanian darkness to its insistence on light. "This is an uplifting selection from ten collections over twenty years. Steinherr's calling as philosopher is noticeable throughout. He seeks clarification and meaning always, sees the simplicities within the complexity, shows us the obvious that we had missed." Wawick Review, June 2011

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Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry,is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, Guemar's poems carry all their native force and brusque wit. In her introduction, Lisa Appignanesi writes: "Soleiman Adel Guemar is almost exactly as old as the independent Republic of Algeria. He has witnessed its terrible history, the crimes against humanity which attended its birth and the enduring 'state of emergency' under which life has been blighted ever since. This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times...Where before we had only newspaper headlines, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical - an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history. "

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When Valerie Rouzeau's first poem sequence was published in France a decade ago under the title "Pas Revoir", it met with immediate critical acclaim. These poems are an urgent, stammered lament for her dead father, a scrap-merchant, in which the poet's adult voice and that of the little girl she used to be combine in an extraordinary blend of baby-talk, youthful slang, coinages and puns - a breathless delivery of tremendous power. The influential poet and critic Andre Velter has described Rouzeau's poetry as 'violent in its capacity to exalt and disturb'. This quality comes to the fore in Susan Wicks' remarkable translation, the excellence and ingenuity of which, in Stephen Romer's words at the conclusion of his introduction to this volume, 'make good the transposition of this pure and singular voice into English'.

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Subhadassi's first full-length poetry collection makes an immediate impact. It abounds in exquisitely-drawn images in which family, friends, memories, historical figures and events, and real and imagined locations and landscapes come into sharp focus as the poet savours the detail and 'flavour' of what he holds before him. Indeed, the poet likens this collection to a feast with enough food to keep a person going for at least a week-end...and enough emotional juice and existential questioning to give them something to think about... There is a compassion, honesty, humour, tenderness and sensuousness about these poems which makes them both eminently readable and strikingly memorable.

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Rodenbach is known first and foremost for his famous novel Bruges la Morte. Bruges was his muse and poetic source, the landscape in which he attempted to reveal the significance of what appeared lifeless or unconnected to art. Using the symbolist devices of suggestion and mood, Rodenbach sifts the elements that make up the decaying Bruges which he sees as a medieval corpse laid out for him to 'rescue' through his interpretation of its atmosphere of melancholy, its seductive romantic decline and its lonely atmosphere. With rare beauty and delicacy, Rodenbach's poetry spins its web of tonal impressionism and seems always to exist on the border of silence.

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The late 1980s witnessed two devastating chemical attacks by the Saddam régime on Iraqi Kurdistan. The first of these, in 1988, known as the Anfal campaign, saw the destruction of 3000 Kurdish villages, over 40 chemical attacks launched, and 100,000 civilians buried in mass graces, with hundreds more dying of exposure to chemical weapons. The second attack was on the town of Halabja where over 5000 people died instantly. Thousands of people who had survived the attacks in both Anfal and Halabja but had been mildly affected by the gas later died from cancer and other diseases. Butterfly Valley is Sherko Bekes’ response to these atrocities. Stunned by the world’s silence in the face of this genocide, Bekes – in exile in Sweden at the time – longs to go home and mourn the victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of continuous oppression and suppressed revolutions in Kurdish history, and in his despair speaks to other exiled Kurdish poets (Nali, Hani and Mawlawi among them) from the sixteenth century to the present day. This long poem unfolds in beautifully-drawn images of the poet’s homeland – mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers – which are juxtaposed with scenes of death, destruction and suffering. This is an immensely powerful poem, at once lyrical and heart-rending, and Choman Hardi’s fine translation at last gives the English-speaking reader the most extensive example yet of his outstanding writing.

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