Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

Second Place winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds (`technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an `activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'.

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Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinead Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon's horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.

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Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale's Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound's Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into a companion book to the Cantos, running from 1917 to 1972 and including the Cantos he wrote in Italian in 1944-5. An Italian edition was published in 2002 and revised in 2012. This is the first English edition of a crucial part of the Pound canon. Posthumous Cantos is arranged to reflect the eight phases of the Cantos' composition. Pound's writing suffered the consequences of the turbulent history of his century. World War I left the cultural world he came to Europe for in ruins; and the aftermath of the World War II in which he took a contrary side, made his work, like his life, discontinuous, a sequence of brilliant moments and profound ruptures.

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From surrealist fable to traditional folk-tale, from personal anecdote to tribal myth, Popa's poetry embodies in an original form the most profound imaginative truths of our age, precisely located in the reality and history of Serbia, in the heart of Central Europe. This new edition, based on the 1978 edition translated by the late Anne Pennington, revised and extended for the 1997 edition by Francis R. Jones, adds a dozen previously untranslated occasional poems.

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A mixture of stories, poems and autobiography: the donkey survives the fire, and the poet survives in a northern world where the sun does not shine equally or often on all and where Postman Pat pens a suicide note, maddened by his theme tune, but keeps on driving all the same. Ian McMillan is a regular radio and television presenter and contributor to "NMW" and other magazines.

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The title of Kelly Grovier's third collection, The Lantern Cage, conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement, the burning soul and the material body. The poems it brings together are fascinated by a universe whose meaning flickers dimly across the walls of our experience. Prompted by scenes that occur in life's everyday spaces - city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains - these are poems that seek to shine a warm light on the mysteries that underlie our existence. This is a world of 'undeciphered sands', 'lost cathedrals', 'buried books', and 'bone machines' - a land where substance and shadow blur. By turns lyrical and philosophical, romantic and playful, The Lantern Cage is a collection located on the margins of vision, where the invisible calculations of being ('algorithms of rain'; 'the long divisions / of suffering') remain unsolvable - a realm whose secrets are kept 'under lough and quay'.

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"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and dazzlingly strange. Poems materialise from a palimpsest of twenty-first-century cities "Paris and New Orleans, Oxford, Milan" where declarations of faith and disbelief clash and blur. Here, the stars 'think themselves into existence', the bones of Giotto jangle, and the 'hairs on a dandelion fizz'.

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Presents OxfordPoets anthology who are from a diversity of backgrounds and traditions, spanning ages, experiences and purposes, and discuses a commitment to the truth of their experience and an excitement with the possibilities of poetry.

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The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the days immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents' wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child's future growth. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the worlds that Delanty moves among: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial, to evoke the subtle interconnections of past, and future, people and places. Greg Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult world that the child is entering, while affirming the sustaining continuity of life.

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Celebrates the distinctiveness and diversity of poetry in English. This book looks at eleven poets who are variously rooted in Europe, America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia; who write with the imaginative energies less of world travellers than of world citizens.

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In her third collection, one of South Africa's finest poets explores public and personal histories, confronting her nation's continuing, painful dialogue with its own past in poems of poignancy and thoughtfulness.

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This is the third anthology in the series from Comma Press.

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This is an experimental short-story anthology featuring Alan Bennett, Jeremey Dyson and Paul Farley.

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John Gay (1685-1732) was part of the "association of wits" that included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. But though Gay's exposure of weakness and folly is no less acute than theirs, his wit is characterised by a benign and ironic sense of the fallibility of humankind. Gay is a great master of parody and pastiche, and the quality of Gay's poetry, as Marcus Walsh points out in his introduction, lies in its "sense of verbal play". The ironic appreciation of "life as it is" that makes his "Beggar's Opera" enduringly popular is present in his poetry. "Trivia", which Gay's biographer called "the greatest poem on London in English literature", teems with the chaotic energy of the 18th-century city, while "The Shepherd's Week" is a pastoral of comic realism. This selection enables Gay's poetry to take its place alongside his drama as one of the most distinctive reflections of his age.

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A unique opportunity to examine the apprenticeship of a great writer, this selection of poems composed between 1785 and 1790 reveals a precocious and remarkably accomplished early talent and shows that even in his earliest work, Wordsworth was already preoccupied with the themes that would later be explored fully in "The Prelude,"

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This is a comprehensive selection of poetry written over seven decades. Dawson Jackson's style emphasises belief in a unity between inner and outer worlds, between subjective and objective, between the poetry, the philosophy and the private life of the poet. This celebration of this world in verse has a clarity and purity with an uninsistent but subtle drama.

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Hugh MacDiarmid hailed William Dunbar (1461?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve, wit, metrical skill, malice and elegiac power made him one of the great poets of the 15th century, and a defining Scottish poet of all time. Although he was a priest for most of his adult life, Dunbar saw himself as a professional writer and took an outspoken pride in his craft, never failing to remind the king, his employer, of the unwisdom of neglecting to reward poets. Close to the European traditions of Francois Villon and troubadour lyrics, and inheriting the vigorous rhythms of Piers Plowman, Dunbar revitalised the conventions of medieval poetry, excelling in his mastery of the short satirical and lyrical poem. He can be bawdy, savage and romantic. Above all, more than any other poet of his time, Dunbar speaks directly in a voice that is vivid and challenging. This fully annotated edition makes the richness of Dunbar's language accessible to the modern reader.

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An anthology of Portuguese writer Tamen Pedro's work, here translated into English by Richard Zimmler.

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This collection opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice. This is the first of 12 narratives in the book interspersed with lyric moments such as one involving Samuel Beckett's telephone, a narrative ending with two blue dogs, "The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Deer", and a metaphysical narrative bringing a Christmas message from the Vatican.

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Collection by Iain Crichton Smith begins as a holiday in Italy and is transformed into an exploration of the founding myths of Classical Rome, the poems explore the violence and cruelty of Roman society and contrast it with the world of nature.

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This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language. The mapmaker, in this case," she adds, "is a notable locus on the map." His poetry is an abiding source and a resource for readers and other writers."

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Published to mark C.H. Sisson's 80th birthday, this collection of his work provides summary insights into the nature and meaning of the mental and physical worlds.

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Certain Windows is Dan Burt's second chapbook collection. It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among others, the poet's father comes alive here and in the poems, a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action. Dan Burt is a master of traditional forms, memorable lines, which continue accruing sense and pleasure with each reading. The scale of his concerns is matched, in the sequences, by a substantial formal architecture, and an answerable narrative informs each poem. In Certain Windows the dominant notes are elegiac and philosophical and he is rigorously unsentimental in his retrospects and unillusioned in his sense of the natural and social worlds.

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A playful and enquiring first collection by a new poet of real promise.

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"All Just', David Herd's second Carcanet collection, makes poems from the fractured phrases and competing idioms of contemporary movement, its translations between public and private spaces. Conversations start and are broken off. Public announcements intervene in private situations. In the background, an emergency is about to unfold. Taking bearings from Dover and London, from elegy and protest, from official structures that determine where people can go, and the futures that cross them, "All Just" explores the social spaces in which we all move. It asks what it means to be at large in the world, and what language we have to document the journey.

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"Paralogues", which takes its title from the Greek word for 'ballads', is the British debut of an original Canadian poet and editor. Evan Jones explores Greek mythology, Roman and Byzantine history, art and travel, from contemporary perspectives. The myth of Actaeon is re-imagined in three ways, and "Paralogues" concludes with a sequence retelling the Byzantine folk ballad "Constantine and Arete". Translation is central to the collection, from the modern Greek of Miltos Sachtouris to the Austrian German of Raoul Schrott. Readers encounter people and places real and imagined: the lonely figure of the poet Cavafy in Victorian Liverpool, God in post-war Paris, the landscapes of Europe and North America at once familiar and unfamiliar.

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In The Crossing Fee Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five years as a health consultant), the poems sound the 'plummet and allure' of life on both worlds. Grounded in myth and also in close observation, The Crossing Fee records a momentous exploration of space and history: 'For the tides are always bringing / news of something strange.'

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Arguing with Malarchy is full of voices: tender, sinister or angry, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther's poems are alert to the ways a life can be briefly snared in the turn of a phrase - or in the moment when lanaguage fails. She explores silence, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the pauses and boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten or invented, the living and the dead. In the book's first part, a chronicle of mourning writes out of the silence into 'the bare threads of tunes', to begin a new story. In the second part, Luther's characters live in their language: 'Keep talking,' the old man tells Malarchy. We travel through elemental landscapes of sea and sky, shadows and wide savannahs that exist beyond language and sustain when words are silenced.

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Finger of a Frenchman explores looking, and writing about looking: looking at surfaces and beyond them, at what is depicted and what is hidden in shadow, at how a transient chemistry of light may be fixed in colour and words. Kinloch's poems are portraits of artists and reflections on art through five centuries of the artistic bond between Scotland and France. John Acheson, Master of the Scottish Mint, takes Mary, Queen of Scots' portrait for the Scottish coinage; Esther Inglis paints the first self-portrait by a Scottish artist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau ticks off his portrait painter, Allan Ramsay, and Eugene Delacroix offers David Wilkie a brace of partridge for tea in Kensington. The Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and Charles Rennie Mackintosh bring the gallery into the twentieth century, where Kinloch considers the hybrid art of figures such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alison Watt and Douglas Gordon in analytical prose-poems. In the book's second part, a mini-epic of a seventeenth-century priest's Grand Tour offers a reflection on the nature of Collection itself, whether of paintings or poems, the composing of fragments into a whole.

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'It is the poet's job to invent beautiful falsehoods.' John Gallas's falsehoods are beautiful, ribald and audacious. Made from found language liberated from books, walls, the internet and radio, his forty lies construct an extravagant alternative reality of Russian assassins and magical shirts, Babylonian gardens, flying monks and the mathematics of Omar Khayyam. From Inner Mongolia to outer space, in tanka and sonnet and villanelle, Viking haiku and musical staves, Gallas collaborates with the print-maker Sarah Kirby to beguile the reader with stories and puzzles, and with pictures that create visual false memories of facts that never were.

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The July-August 2021 issue; Major account by Poet of Europe Sinead Morrissey of her experiences in Gdansk, with reflections on the Belfast troubles among which she grew up; Sujata Bhatt breaks a long poetic silence with a suite of new poems; Rory Waterman and Poetry London editor Andre Naffis-Sahely converse, and sparks fly; Caitlion Stobie's amazing tribute to Tony Harrison's V, a new poem entitled W, bridges the gap between his politics and ours; New to PN Review this issue: Padraig Regan, Jordi Sarsanedas, Nuash Sabah and Kare Caoimhe Arthur; and more...

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The March-April 2021 issue; The last interview with the poet John Ash; Major new talent featured: Michael Brett; Novelist Kirsty Gunn reads Henry James during lockdown; Reem Abbas, the young Palestinian poet, explores the Ghazal; Tony Roberts examines the Publisher/Poet relationship (Giroux and Berryman); New poetry by Jane Duran, Yeow Kai Chai, Rebecca Perry & Shane McCrae; New to PN Review this issue: Reem Abbas, Francis O'Hare, John Fitzgerald & Maurice Riordan; And more...

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The long title poem of John Greening’s The Silence is a meditation on Jean Sibelius and the thirty years he spent grappling with an eighth symphony, which in the end he probably burned. The poem is emblematic of a broader concern with the mystery of the creative process, explored here in the work of other artists but also grappled with first-hand, in the composition of poems. The collection is haunted by other kinds of silence too, especially that most emphatic one (notably in Greening’s witty formal verse letter, `Airmail for Chief Seattle’ and an Egyptian sequence based on wall paintings in the British Museum), but at the same time it is open to the bright potentiality of the unknown, the beyond. A tribute to the late Dennis O’Driscoll is a bold meditation on hope, a mood intensified in a series of uplifting Hölderlin translations. Elsewhere, Greening visits the Peak District, Brecklands, chalklands and a lost world of highwaymen and mythology beneath the runways of Heathrow, tuning in to the special music of each place. Along the way are striking individual poems on trees, penny coins, Hilliard miniatures, a coal bunker, a totem pole, the X5 bus route and musical migrating geese.

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Crossing the Mirror Line explores doubleness, the unsettling symmetries of mirrored reflections, the magician’s disorientating art that `makes nothing appear’. Artists’ mannequins and watchful children stand at an angle to the familiar-seeming world; an estuary blurs distinctions between land and sea. Like the eighteenth-century artists’ landscape mirror that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and what is viewed, the poems in Judith Willson’s first collection are concerned with the very act of looking, how it selects and transforms what is seen. Their landscapes are borders and boundaries, places shaped by the persistence of a past which still presses close to the surface, its meanings as unstable as the play of light. Objects disclose stories of their travel through `peopled time’: poems `reach through thick folds into pockets / for a letter or a glove’.

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Shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021. Fawzi Karim's poetry has been widely translated, among other languages into French, Swedish, Italian and English. Carcanet published Plague Lands and Other Poems (2011), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This new selection, translated by Anthony Howell working from the author's own versions, explores the experience of becoming at home in London, passing from a sense of exile to a sense of uneasy belonging. In his introduction the poet is tactful, candid, touching on some of the most urgent themes of our time including exile and the possibilities of home. Between the poet, a major literary presence in his language, and his translator, a poet of many talents and skills, a kind of dialogue exists. The accommodations between two traditions formally uneasy in one another's company is compelling to read. The poet's and the translator's contrasting memories meet and confer at the level of language and image.

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The latest edition of PN Review, one of the outstanding literary journals of our time

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Tony Connor's tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor's abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman.

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This is John Birtwhistle's first collection of poems since 'Our Worst Suspicions' (1985), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In the meantime much of his writing has gone into libretti, including 'The Plumber's Gift', performed by English National Opera. He has not, however, been neglecting poetry - as can be seen from the energetic variety of form and tone displayed here. Birtwhistle accepts from modernism the duties of visual clarity, concision, and originality of phrase; but he unites this with a romantic commitment to feeling and to organic form. His subject matter is wide-ranging as ever, but shows a new intensity about the the life cycle.

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The spare and subtle poems of Nina Bogin's third collection map personal territory - places of memory and love as much as of language and geography. An American writing in her adopted France, in the eastern border region close to Switzerland and Germany, she examines - sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly - the traces history leaves on the land and its inhabitants, while also exploring her own, sometimes uneasy, relationship to time and place in a mother tongue that has undergone French and German influences, connecting her historically to the Middle Europe of her ancestors.

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In Jennie Feldman's second collection, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, "Swift" ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters - with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society's margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem cafe. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

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Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Aptly described by Gavin Ewart as 'a writer of great intelligence and vitality who can command a very powerful wry political comment', E.A. Markham was a leading light in British Caribbean writing. He was a poet, novelist and short story writer, essayist and anthologist. He completed this selection of poems from his previous books, together with an opening section of nearly fifty new poems, shortly before his death in Paris at Easter, 2008.

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At the heart of many of these poems lies an apprehension of things being lost or destroyed, and with this a need for consolation. The question of how we look for, or create, such solace - whether in faith or the rain, by doing a puzzle or watching TV - is one that threads through the book. In this work - her second collection - there is an increasing scope and depth to language as Stoddart seeks to explore paradoxes: poems of motherhood are double-edged celebrations, grief must come to some good. The ambivalence at work in her first book comes to intriguing fruition here in a collection of original and distinctive poems.

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In this delightful homage to the now unfashionable Neapolitan poet, two contemporary poets who share a fascination with his work present their selection of fresh versions from his best-known collection. In their introductions they explore the background to his work and the qualities, literary and human, which drew them to him.

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Many tensions are at work in the playfully unconstrained poems of Stanley Moss: ordinary and mythical lives, the political and the personal, high art and low comedy intermingle, achieving an effect that is often surreal and always striking. Here, God and Death are not matters for detached speculation but constant and vivid presences, whether centre-stage or waiting in the wings. An engagement with history is brought to bear on legend and on current affairs: a poem addressing 9/11 summons up the figure of Walt Whitman, whose exuberance and resolute faith in humanity Moss echoes throughout the book. Serious and optimistic, light and dark, "Songs of Imperfection" is an uplifting and celebratory book.

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"The Anvil New Poets" series has built up a reputation for introducing ground-breaking work from the best new poets. The names included in previous volumes are testament to the quality of the series: Kate Clanchy, Colette Bryce, Alice Oswald and Mimi Khalvati were all first published here. For the third volume in the series, Roddy Lumsden and Hamish Ironside have tracked down ten outstanding poets from all over Britain, and beyond. They have read through several hundred manuscripts, as well as soliciting work from the best new poets appearing in magazines and elsewhere. The result is an anthology both cohesive and various, by turns musical, formal, observational, witty and surreal.

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The poetry of Sappho, who was born around 620 BC and lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, has inspired and fascinated readers and poets for two and a half thousand years. Today, as in antiquity, she is regarded as Greece's supreme lyric poet. Yet apart from a few near-complete poems, her poetry survives largely in tantalizing fragments. This book traces Sappho's reception in English-language poetry through translations and poems about her. From Donne and Pope via Swinburne, Bliss Carman and Pound to contemporary poets such as Michael Longley and Olga Broumas, it both celebrates and illustrates our changing image of Sappho.

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