Search results for ""Carcanet Press""
Carcanet Press Ltd The Canals of Mars
The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structures the tree within the leaf, the series of recurrences that unfold to create a fugue add an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, modulating and rendering strange these musings on what is ostensibly human. "
£8.92
Carcanet Press Ltd Drawings
One area of Sarah Raphael's work that has so far been inadequately displayed is her drawing. Frederic Raphael draws from over 25 years of work in her notebooks and sketchbooks. She did justice to every model and had amazing sense of setting, economy of perspective, and ability to create presence.
£29.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Letters of Introduction: An A-z of Cultural Heroes and Legends
In Letters of Introduction Kevin Jackson invents a new genre, the Alphabet Essay. Always inventive, scholarly and sometimes zany, Jackson approaches ten writers and two 'themes', building an alphabet around each: 'A is for' to 'Z is for'. The alphabet touches on his subjects' history, their culture, their private and intimate lives, their anxieties, and most importantly their achievement. The Alphabets are introductory and exploratory. Jackson picks his way through the worlds of Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, Dante, Duke Ellington, Freud, Goethe, the Harlem Renaissance, Paul Klee, Friedrich Nietzsche, Surrealism, Andy Warhol and Marguerite Yourcenar. As he goes he finds out more and more, by association, through legend and gossip, in imagination. It is a wonderful process, an approach which imposes wonderful juxtapositions and elicits delicious ironies. The form is redolent of childhood, the content is remote from childish things.
£12.04
Carcanet Press Ltd Colour for Solitude
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.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Your Name Here
In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living.
£8.92
Carcanet Press Ltd Champion of the Poor: Political Poetry and Prose
This text brings together Clare's longest poem, "The Parish", and his satires, "The Hue and Cry" and "The Summons". Other poems, some previously unpublished, are included. They reveal his reactions to political and social conditions and events of his age. There are also prose works and fragments in which he reflects on the issues of the day included in the collection. A detailed introduction evokes the larger context of Clare's writings and the difficulties he faced as a labourer trying to voice the concerns of his class in a period when such matters were regarded as the exclusive province of the educated and propertied classes. The book is part of Carcanet's "John Clare Programme".
£18.99
Carcanet Press Ltd War Prose
Ford's novel, "Parade's End", has been acknowledged as one of the great British novels about World War I. This book features a selection of Ford's other writings about the war, and should shed light on the tetralogy. It includes reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories, and excerpts from letters.
£18.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems: Anne Ridler
'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Second Best Moments in Chinese History
"The 501 quatrains of Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984)". But it isn't: 'Please note that this is a completely different work, although it is formally identical and very similar in its preoccupations.' Its tone is different - something to do with maturity and cadencing, which make the laughter and heartbreak more intense, more political.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Can You Hear Bird
After John Ashberry's "Flow Chart" (1991), "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for "T" when "Tuesday Evening" occurs.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Hero and the Girl Next Door
The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colors. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd The Sin of Father Amaro
Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications. Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he rediscovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life, but there are doubts about this perfection he finds.
£29.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Ends and Beginnings
"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Golan Heights, he conceived a major poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using an unaccustomed Biblical idiom. He considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture-scholars, writers, lovers, the old-whose need for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd The Rose of Toulouse
The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing where the poet has lived and taught, their histories, and his history as he travels away from who he was.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Complete Poems - Jon Silkin
Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin's books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poems demands a new perception of Silkin's language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.
£29.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Bevel
"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of daily life: work and love, seasons and cities, and his writing is alive with the wonder and comedy of the mundane. Bevel is filled with voices - 'an he says / A love the summer / it's hoat / ye kin wear yer shoarts...' - and with the knowledge that becomes engrained in the body: 'The weight of a drill. The texture of rust.' Letford works as a roofer, a trade that gives him a particular perspective on life at ground level. 'Be prepared', he writes: pay attention to the moment, know which way to fall. His poems are sure and strong, the words dance.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Cities
Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi - and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems and Translations
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Painting Rain
"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Sidetracks
Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 276
The March-April 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 277
The May-June 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Ambush at Still Lake
Caroline Bird's new collection charts marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery: the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness, after the happy ending.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd The Strongbox
The Strongbox, a modernist poem, is an extended work that develops elements of Greek mythology, epic literature and the cultures of wars, both ancient and painfully recent.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Sleepers Awake
The third Carcanet collection from award-winning Glasgow-based poet and novelist Oli Hazzard.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 263
The January-February 2022 issue. Major essay by Alberto Manguel on translating Dante. Sasha Dugdale's radical new translation of Osip Mandelstam, with an important commentary by Andrew Kahn. Jenny Lewis on translating from languages one does not know first hand. Frederic Raphael pens one of his Last Post letters to Vladimir Nabokov (Mes hommages, cher Volodya, si j’ose dire. Frederic.). New to PN Review this issue: Romulo Bustos Aguirre, Armando Uribe, Kerrin P. Sharpe and Amy Crutchfield. And more...
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 262
The November-December 2021 issue Includes 'Scattered Snows, to the North' by Carl Phillips, shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem Award 2022 Major spread of poems by Carl Phillips, one of America's leading contemporary poets, essayists and translators Jee Leong Koh's erotic lyrics Poet-editor Rachael Allen in conversation Raymond Williams remembered Francesca Brooks's 'Love Letters of the Hampstead Modernists' New to PN Review this issue: Subha Mukherji, Charlie Louth, Joyelle McSweeney and Michelle Penn and more...
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Midnight in the Kant Hotel: Art in Present Times
Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: 'There is no more productive engagement with someone else's artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curator's job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements.' This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving and re-moving the objects: 'nothing compares to living with art'. The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 261
The September-October 2021 issue; PN Review has a ‘soft relaunch’ with a new cover design, new internal design and layout; Dutch supplement: outstanding new writing from Holland; Major essays:; Colm Tóíbín on Thom Gunn; David Herman on ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’ – Edward Said; Gwyneth Lewis on Gillian Clarke’s The Gododdin; New to PN Review this issue: Alice Hiller, Theodore Ell, Jane King and Joshua Weiner; and more...
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Birdsong on Mars
The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poems in this collection before his wife's sudden death from cancer in 2019. He developed the themes and fragmenting style of his previous book, Glass is Elastic (2012), where language was always quizzing itself and how it might relate to the actual and the historical world. Intense, playful, unpredictable, the poems surprised. Here, in the disturbing environments of Upstate New York, Calgary Bay or his Bolton front room the poet confronts illness (his own), hospitals (his visits) and wonderful ambulances (his transports). He resists attempts to see hints or destinies. Then bereavement throws up an actuality of a different order. The collection ends with a mock-sonnet sequence, written during the pandemic, in which the poet tries all the doors and windows to find her, to speak with her - love poems where love has not changed but its circumstances have. 'Will I want ever to get out of this place - the past of the poems in this book?' the poet asks. There are no answers, yet.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Tenderfoot
A Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Vital Stream
A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. with a preface by Richard Holmes PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUST
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Heroines from Abroad
Shortlisted for The 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Translation. Heroines from Abroad introduces a vibrant new voice to the English language. Christine Marendon's enigmatic, meditative poems, translated here from the German and collected for the first time, draw on dreams, fairy tales and childhood memories to tap into a world beyond conscious reach. Marendon's poems do not present ideas so much as embody states of mind. Something is realised through the poem, rather than said within it. Here, the voice is more important than the particularities of what is said - language, not words. For the translator, Heroines from Abroad is the fruit of seven years' steady work. The poems' clarity and subtle force, the `crystalline, precise quality of their lyricism' (Sasha Dugdale), are testament to that humble, unhurried collaboration in words.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd The Little Sublime Comedy
In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas – our millennial Dante – is taken under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the course of 147 `songs’ we accompany the pair on their journey through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas’s Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems
Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer's four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m' ami - set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer's central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the 'intermittences of the heart', frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme. Romer's New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for 'refuge' or 'higher things', and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends. Derek Mahon singled out Romer's first collection Idols for its 'emotional candour and intellectual clarity', and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Long Pass
'Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this ...' In Long Pass, Joey Connolly's first collection, the poet - in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy - keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say things simply. But nothing is as simple as it seems at first. Nothing strikes the interlocutor quite as he intends. Ach! He goes back. Deflections, tangents: the long pass, the long unfolding sentence, the growing sequence, move away from what they intend to say in order at last, wittily, angrily, ironically, to swerve in and say it.Translation, too, is hard. There are often competing versions - of Lorca, for example, and Cavafy. ' The painter is frustrated to be always / painting onto something, to be / concealing precisely as he displays.' Words reveal and at the same time conceal, yet what they conceal is part of what they want to say.The poet throws the poem for someone who isn't always there to catch. The fortunate reader intercepts.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Smoothie
Smoothie is Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off despair – fulfilled. Smoothie plots the wayward wanderings of a beguiling cast of misfits – hotel eavesdroppers, city interlopers, lone wolves, phantom bird-watchers, disaffected language robots and triumphant piano-swallowers – as they try to express themselves. The poems are candid without being confessional: the poet’s `I’ encompasses the reader. Language’s smooth surface bubbles up as Toutoungi’s characters reveal their peculiarly twenty-first-century disorientations, riffing off loneliness, authenticity and heartbreak as they go.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd The Third Mandarin
Frank Kuppner’s The Third Mandarin contains 501 quatrains in five `books’. It collages an alternative Imperial China of drunk poets, grumpy sages, and sex-starved emperors. The poems riff on a variety of forms, from prophecies and love letters to drinking songs and graffiti. As a storyteller, Kuppner sticks faithfully to the path of least significance. His is a poetry of things that might happen in a minute or two, to people we don’t really care about, for reasons too complicated to go into. His characters have a habit of turning up late to their own poems, as the poet rushes off to find them so that he can get started. Half riddling philosopher, half drivelling idiot, Kuppner’s speaker has the air of someone who has forgotten why they came into the room, 501 times. Funny, ridiculous, and beautiful, The Third Mandarin confirms Kuppner as a poet `of immense intellectual and comic power’ (Poetry Review), `one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry (LRB).
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Raking Light
Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017. Raking Light is Eric Langley's debut collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of 'raking light', in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays. Under raked light, paint reveals its damage and deterioration, its craquelure and canvas-warp, and discloses a backstory of abandoned intentions. With his attentiveness to resonance and echo, Langley picks up on lost meanings and buried contradictions in language, probing its abandoned significances. Finding traces of obscured sense or inarticulacy, his verse picks at words to test their efficacy and authenticity, feeling out their substance, proving their worth. These are poems - elegies, love lyrics - concerned with miscommunication, with intentions gone astray, with loss and the uncertainties inherent in interaction. They are excited and exciting, defusing and detonating by turns the 'hectic honeyed hand-grenades / in amongst your alphabets'.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Moon for Sale
Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakanyova, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Pandemonium
Written in the wake of Ireland's 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland's south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy's politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon 'where the sun lies down in the west to die' is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet's eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy's subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet's only weapon, the word - 'the ink trail that pain makes on the page'.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Mexico in My Heart: Selected Poems
Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as 'a superb act of restoration'. Borges himself declared, 'Four of the best things in America are Whitman's Leaves, Melville's Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes - ' Mexico in My Heart is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd As When: A Selection
Dubbed 'an immaculate survivor' by Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth has remained steadfastly independent of literary fashions and cliques throughout a poetic career spanning fifty years. As When is the first selection of Raworth's writing to address the full range of his work, from the first poem he ever shared with anyone outside his family, 'You Were Wearing Blue', to his most recently published poem, 'Surfing the Permafrost through Methane Flares'. The book includes prose work and notational pieces that were intentionally left out of his Collected Poems (2003), along with poems that were only published in little magazines or as ephemeral cards and broadsides. Some pieces appear in correct, definitive versions for the first time.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Night Watch
Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the "Battle of Arras", "Kilvert's Diary", and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful fictions explore meeting points and intersections between 'is' and 'was', or 'is' and 'might be'. The centre of the book is a substantial sequence, "The Northern Line", where the poet's double, in his old guise as a National Serviceman, takes a journey by ghost train through the 1950s, that hinge of the century when the trouble of great wars gave way to the troubles of a patchwork peace.
£8.92
Carcanet Press Ltd Material
Ros Barber's second book forms a meditation on human loss; it is a more personal and autobiographical collection than her first, described by Neil Rollinson as 'an honest, unflinching and hugely satisfying debut'. Sarah Law described her as 'a 'traditional' contemporary poet along the lines of Larkin' and it is Barber's sure hand with rhyme and meter that gives the hard material of these poems (both personal losses and those experienced through others) their steady focus and makes them so readable. Throughout, the poetry remains strong, thoughtful and refreshing.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Stone Sleeper
Inspired by tombstones and their inscriptions, Mak Dizdar's rich and haunting poems in "Stone Sleeper", his most famous work, are a journey into the mysterious heart of medieval Bosnia. The poems form a three-way dialogue between the modern poet, the Christian heretics awaiting Judgement Day beneath their enigmatically-carved tombstones, and the heretic-hunters. Beneath the local and temporal, Dizdar explores universal issues: the value of resistance, though it might be futile; of faith, though it might be illusory; and, of life, though it ends in death. Francis R Jones' inventive and beautiful translations convey his deep understanding of Dizdar's purpose. In addition a penetrating analysis of "Stone Sleeper"'s historical, religious and spiritual background is given by the distinguished scholar Rusmir Mahmutaehajia, whose book "Across the Water: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar" is published by Fordham University Press.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Anthony Hecht described Donald Justice as 'among other things, the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.' This memorial volume of his complete poetry testifies to his subtle and enduring brilliance. With painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance he endeavoured to make the local views which his titles often evoke - "Bus Stop", "Men at Forty", "Dance Lessons of the Thirties" - part of the literary heritage from which he so often took solace and inspiration.
£20.00
Carcanet Press Ltd The Peregrination
The Peregrination of Fernão Mendes Pinto, soldier of fortune, trader, pirate, agent, ambassador. During twenty-one years in Ethiopia, Persia, Malaya, India, Burma, Siam, China, Japan, sailing uncharted oriental seas, he was five times shipwrecked, thirteen times captured, sixteen times enslaved. He met a saint, repented his ways, returned home and wrote his story for his children and for posterity. Born around 1510, Fernão Mendes Pinto was the most articulate of the Portuguese trader-adventurers who swarmed through the Orient in the wake of Vasco da Gama. Here his story has been abridged and brilliantly translated by Michael Lowery, and is introduced by Dr Luis Sousa Rebelo.
£29.95