Search results for ""carcanet press""

Draws on the author's own recovery from alcoholism, his move to the Dutch landscape and the work of famous artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt in dialogues that range from the quizzical to the confrontational.

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Environment at the Crossroads, the theme of the 2009 Gulbenkian Conference, addresses the most urgent crisis confronting the world today.

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A collection which juggles its opposites with panache - heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, it ranges through times, places and viewpoints before homing close in the last poems to family predicaments that are personal in their particulars.

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David Ward started writing poetry in his late thirties. His poems are the work of an historian who knows how environments and events, on a family or a national scale, shape and change us, and how we live with moral and psychological consequences of actions for which we are not ever fully accountable.

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Mary Griffiths' knowledge of war began with her parents' stories and a suitcase full of black and white photographs taken by her father during his service in the Second World War. War remained family history and background news until she began to record, nightly for eighteen months, the images of war flickering across her television screen.

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This is the first collection by Mary O'Malley to be published by Carcanet Press. From the child colonised, to the adult journey, from Ireland to America to Southern Europe, this is a poetic exploration of love and place and the poet's only true home - the language in which he or she writes.

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An elaborate poetic weave of fact and fiction, rich in incident, enigma, wit and feeling - starting with a murder in China in the age of Confucius and ending with a sestina about a difficult family Christmas in front of the TV.

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Antony Dunn's second collection of poems glimpses "the other life" of things caught out of their own element. The poems in "Flying Fish" wrestle with our fascination with the sea, our helplessness in the face of love and loss, and our fear of age and all that lies beyond.

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Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, "The Russian Jerusalem" explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

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Presents a collection that meditates on personal and natural history, nation states and mental states, violence, religion and poetry.

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'The Humphrey Jennings Film reader' tells the story of his brief, varied life in his own words, using many previously unpublished letters, treatments and screen-plays. it reprints all of his unpublished critical writings on literature, painting and other subjects (most of them unavailable in book form since the 1930s), the texts of his radio broadcasts for the BBC, and a selection of his poems.

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Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was 50, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful bell tower and its nesting jackdaws turned to a cry in the air. The bricks go off to salvage and are lost in other streets but the poems remain. Ballads are bare and brief; tried by time. They salvage but they sing, stubbornly. Their stories are sure: a woman in the kitchen, Handel at his illicit feast, the Russian dog heading for space. Shakespeare stops for breath on the stairs. Mithras is the milkman. There are cats and wild cranesbill. The poems nudge us on.

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John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes moral, miniature movies out of the great scripts of old Persian sages, each of the one hundred sonnets returning a proverb to the particular lives, moments and places that made it. These little, colour narratives put Life back up there with its Meaning. Volume two has its mind on different things. If Beckett comes before Oort, and Fellini is next to the Unknown Soldier; if Alfred Schnittke can almost touch the muezzin who was a tape recorder, and William Bees VC is three steps away from a Mongolian marmot-killer, then it must be Excellent Men. Here are the lit-up males of a writer's heart, claimed by admiration, kinship, amazement, love, poetry and a good laugh. Each to his own.

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This sequence of poems takes the reader into the early 20th century, to Northern Germany where a group of artists founded a colony in Worpswede, a rural community near Bremen. Fascinated by the number of self-portraits, Sujata Bhatt imagines the painters' inner and outer worlds.

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Emerging from the practice, art, and magic of translation, this essay collection concerns itself with the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation--literary metamorphosis--extends this process. The syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, is offered as an example of the way visual experience can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet. Demonstrated is how, with a wealth of examples and close readings, poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realized though literary expression and technique. In these essays a major poet reflects on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.

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"Agenda" was established in 1959 by William Cookson in response to a suggestion by Ezra Pound. This anthology is divided into antecedents, modern poetry, criticism, memoirs and polemics.

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Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem, "Our Father". This ten-part meditation broke a seven-year poetic silence. This book contains a body of poems which extend the concerns of his late years, concerns with the "sacred", with England and with our age.

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A collection of poems set in three continents - Asia, Africa and Europe - evoking the peopled landscapes. Music is a central feature in the poems, which travel in time and space. The poems are also set at home in a world of disorderly domesticity with cats and ponies.

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This volume contains the shorter books and monographs of Hugh MacDiarmid, as part of Carcanet's "MacDiarmid 2000" programme. Other titles in the series include "Complete Poems", "Lucky Poet", "Contemporary Scottish Studies" and "Scottish Eccentrics".

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At the time of her death in 1999, Patricia Beer had been planning a collection of her essays. She liked the title "As I Was Saying Yesterday": it caught at once the speaking quality of the essays and the consistency of concern which runs through a body of work disparate in subject-matter.

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'I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.' In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of parents and close friends, explores elements of ancient Celtic culture; poems are inspired by works of art, landscapes rural and urban, and historical figures from Tolstoy to Simone Weil. What connects poem to poem is the poet's vividly sensual language, his formal mastery, and how he can address, specifically and particularly, what matters most intensely. 'Earth is a hard text to read', writes Welsh poet Waldo Williams in a poem translated here. For Rowan Williams, this very reading is the task of the poet.

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