Search results for ""carcanet press""
Carcanet Press Ltd Wow
A Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Recommendation. Bill Manhire's Wow opens with the voice of an extinct bird, a song from anciency, and takes us forward into the present and the darkening future of other extinctions. For Manhire, the reach of the lyric is long: it has the penetration of comedy, satire, the Jeremiad, but also the delicacy of minute detail and the rhythms of nature's comfort and hope, the promise of renewal. In the title poem the baby says 'Wow', and the wonder is real at the world and at language. But the world will have the last word. Writing of Manhire, Teju Cole declared, 'Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: he's unquestionably world-class. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.' Bill Manhire was New Zealand's first poet laureate. He established and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. This is the ninth of his Carcanet books in 30 years. They include a Selected and a Collected Poems.
£10.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Vinegar Hill
Winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2021. From the highly acclaimed author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín's first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion and belonging through a modern lens. Fans of Colm Tóibín's novels, including The Magician, The Master and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a wide range of subjects – politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, memory and a fading past, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-travelled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Tóibín's unique lens. Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion and humour, Tóibín offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder and cherish.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Catullus: Shibari Carmina
A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Carcanet publishes several Catulluses: C.H. Sisson's, Len Krisak's, Simon Smith's. But Isobel Williams's Catullus: Shibari Carmina is different in kind from the earlier versions. 'Translating Catullus has been, for me, like cage fighting with two opponents,' the translator writes: 'not just A Top Poet, but the schoolgirl I was, trained to show the examiner that she knew what each word meant.' The struggle is intensified by the presence of a third element, something that made Catullus come alive, his 'tormented intelligence and romantic versatility'. 'It eventually happened at a fetish venue in South London, The Flying Dutchman - an echo of Catullus's doomed obsessive love? Someone at life class, knowing I like a drawing challenge, had told me about a Japanese rope bondage (shibari) club called Bound. I asked the management if I could draw there; on arrival I was treated like the Queen Mother. Best of all, the schoolgirl was too young to be let in.' The dynamics of shibari released Catullus from conventional constraints and delivered him to new rigours: 'I found context, metaphor and idiom for Catullus - whom one could glibly define as a bisexual switch from the late Roman Republic when such concepts were meaningless: a stern moralist who splits into an anxious bitchy dominant with the boys, a howling sub with his nemesis, the older glamorous married woman he calls Lesbia (here called Clodia, which might have been her real name).' The poet uses the terminology and forms of social media, a very contemporary idiom which is at once subjected to severe scholarship and tight syntactical discipline. All the crucial language knots are firmed up, the sense of the Latin emerges with Catullus's own laughter restored, along with the other registers of love and loss. Isobel Williams's drawings add immediacy to her versions which 'are not (for the most part) literal translations, but take an elliptical orbit around the Latin, brushing against it or defying its gravitational pull.'
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader
Few novelists have taken films as seriously, or been closely involved in so many aspects of the film business all their lives, as Graham Greene. Even at University he was touching on it. His long-term experience of the evolving art included producing, performing, script-writing and adaptation. Not to mention the libel case against him brought by Miss Shirley Temple for some disobliging words. Mornings in the Dark gathers some of Greene's best film criticism with a mass of related material: his film articles, interviews, lectures and radio talks, stories for film, letters and film proposals. With appendices on Greene's own films and unfulfilled film projects, and David Parkinson's introduction, this is an essential collection for readers of fiction and film enthusiasts alike.
£22.50
Carcanet Press Ltd Centenary Selected Poems
This is the third Selected Poems by Edwin Morgan from Carcanet, but the first since 2000 and the first to cover the full range of his poetry from his first collection in 1952 to his last in 2010, the year of his death at the age of ninety. All his different voices speak here - animals, inanimate objects, dramatic monologues by people, (famous people, unknown people and imaginary people) - in a multitude of forms and styles - sonnets, science fiction, concrete, sound, his own invented stanzas - together with his evocations of place, especially his home city of Glasgow, and a wide selection of his deservedly famous love poems. They all illustrate his incurable curiosity and a kind of relentless optimism for humanity.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Squid Squad: A Novel
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. In Squid Squad: A Novel we join Natalie Chatterley, Angus Mingus, Nerys Harris and friends as they make recordings of the doorbell, uncrumple their cash and fling their walnuts from the window. They contemplate the spaces between the spaces between things and compare the rhythm of rhetoric to the rhetoric of rhythm, while around them chickens feed on chestnuts, nuthatches nest in bicycle baskets, and budgerigars sulk themselves to sleep. The second half features shorter stand-alone poems. Here, poetic form is given a playful reworking: a poem to be spoken in a single breath, a poem made entirely of questions, a series of three poems in the form of university mark schemes, and poems that explore the possibilities of the list as a verse form.
£10.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Songs We Learn from Trees: An Anthology of Ethiopian Amharic Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. This is the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry in English, packed with all the energy, wit and heartache of a beautiful country and language. From folk and religious poems, warrior boasts, praises of women and kings and modern plumbing; through a flowering of literary poets in the twentieth century; right up to thirty of the most exciting contemporary Amharic poets working both inside and outside the country. These poems ask what it means to be Ethiopian today, part of a young fast-growing economy, heirs to the one African state which was never colonised, but beset by deep political, ethnic and moral problems.
£18.99
Carcanet Press Ltd The Revisionist and The Astropastorals
Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work. He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd In Her Feminine Sign
A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix taamarbuta, `the tied circle’ – a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humour reminiscent of Wisława Szymborska, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, tracing new circles of light.
£10.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Apocalypse: An Anthology
Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. This first anthology of 'Apocalyptic' or neo-romantic poetry since the nineteen-forties includes over 150 poets, many well known (Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham), and others quite forgotten (Ernest Frost, Paul Potts). Over forty of the poets are women, of whom Edith Sitwell is among the most exuberant. Much of the contents has never previously been anthologised; many poems are reprinted for the first time since the 1940s. The poetry of the Second World War appears in a new context, as do early Tomlisnon and Hill. Here readers can enjoy an overview of the visionary-modernist British and Irish poetry of the mid-century, its antecedents and its aftermath. As a period style and as a body of work, Apocalyptic poetry will come as a revelation to most readers.
£19.99
Carcanet Press Ltd In Nearby Bushes
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020. Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Discipline
A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation. In Discipline, her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn’t and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art, with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist. The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. They bristle with striking details and observations. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: `Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt’.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Shrines of Upper Austria
Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. A Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendation. Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories. Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria gathers numerous stories and perspectives, such as the fragmented narrative of an Austrian woman who married a British soldier after the Second World War, and the voices of schoolchildren and immigrants. Strange discoveries are made: a grave for two dead goats; a lantern procession on the night of Epiphany; a baby abandoned by a river; a homemade frog-puppet. The poems are a collage of stories and histories, set in a variety of forms and registers. They are attentive to local detail, rich in the names of people and places - Marija, Omegepta, Eck 4 and the Loser Mountain. Mixing poetry and prose, image and narrative, German and English, Power's poems are a celebration of creativity in unlikely places. Against a disquieting backdrop of mild winters and memories of snow, they invite us to question what it means to feel at once a stranger and at home.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd An English Anthology
`I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in `Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity. Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. `We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight’, he writes in the selection’s central sequence `Breach’. Nolens’ poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Diary of the Last Man
Wales Book of the Year 2018. Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Zoology
Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose `heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us `in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. `Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, `where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb `birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby `in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. `Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that `flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: `a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd To Fold the Evening Star: New & Selected Poems
Ian McMillan is among Britain's most treasured living poets. His books of poems, stories and non-fiction have delighted audiences for almost forty years. To Fold the Evening Star gathers work from eight key collections, distilling an essence of McMillan's diversiform poetry and short prose. Hilarity and tenderness, gravity and light, are interwoven into a bountiful poetic fibre. Brought up to date by a series of new and previously unpublished work, To Fold the Evening Star will satisy both the curious newcomer and the familiar reader alike, providing an ample, lively assortment of the work.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems: Shuntaro Tanikawa
Shuntaro Tanikawa has been the most inventive modern Japanese poet, ever since he published Alone in Two Billion Light Years (1952), his first book, aged twentyone. Undamaged by Japan's post-War trauma, he took up the language and ran with it. He has continued running. When in 1968 his first Collected Poems appeared the critics noted at once his popularity and his refusal to compromise with the negative tones that dominated the poetic palette of contemporary Japan. He has published more than sixty books of poetry, lyrics, prose poems, narratives, epics and satires. He has experimented in form and theme, combining clarity with subtlety. This new selection supplements his original Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 1998.
£12.99