Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,over the girl with her first electric, how her high,thin voice, amplified many timesover by the loudspeaker, is like a giant'sin the green grass of the festival site.from 'Poetry rejoices...'Dog Star Notations collects highlights from almost two decades of Hakan Sandell's poetry. Drawing on seven collections and completed by a selection of new work, this volume is the unrivalled Anglophone introduction to one of contemporary Sweden's finest poets. The poems are Retrogardist, a term Sandell first used in the nineties to signal his rejection of Post-Modernist styles and a return to the perennial resources of symbol, metre and rhyme. Since then he has developed, as his translator puts it, 'a verse music very much his own, at once improvisatory and incantatory'. A sometimes withering critic of contemporary society, Sandell is also a compassionate, even reverent observer. In his adopted Oslo, 'New Babylon cruises in its subdued/Nordic Social Democratic vein', mixing with 'the remains of the Norwegian working class' and the new arrivals of the past two decades, from Africa, Asia, the Middle East.In love with the material world, yet inspired by the mysticisms of the world's religions (great and small, orthodox and heterodox), Hakan Sandell comes across in these poems as a streetwise theosophist, alive to beauty and cruelty everywhere, compelled to make music of both.

Read more less

An anthology of poems by members of Trinity College, Cambridge from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This landmark anthology celebrates six centuries of poetry from Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the years, Trinity may have harboured more great poets than any other comparable institution: Herbert, Marvell, Dryden, Byron, Tennyson, Housman, and Nabokov all feature in these pages. In the modern period the college has welcomed poets including Thom Gunn and Sophie Hannah, Rebecca Watts and Jacob Polley. Readers will find here old favourites ('To His Coy Mistress', 'She Walks in Beauty', 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam', 'In Memoriam', poems from Winnie-the-Pooh) and much that is startling - old and new.

Read more less

"Rejoicing" is a magnificent, celebratory gathering of Stanley Moss' poetry from six decades. He is one of America's finest poets and this collection demonstrates why. Marilyn Hacker wrote of his work, 'Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it integrates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight', and in Britain John Fuller wrote: 'Stanley Moss' poems are fresh and unpredictable, full of colour and wisdom. As a poetry that engages the philosophical mind it seems characteristically American in its scope and cultural engagement, but there is also the generous warmth of a mind at ease in its body, open to surprises and possibilities'.

Read more less

With Jerusalem as its epicentre, "The Maltese Dreambook" extends Gabriel Levin's quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary.

Read more less

Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. His serious gift for humour permeates poems by turn lyric and narrative, satirical, rebellious, ribald, uncompromising and honest. Too idiosyncratic and various a poet to belong to any poetic grouping, he is simply, in the late Donald Davie's phrase, 'consistently entertaining and intelligent'.

Read more less

"Things Unsaid" is the author's own choice of poems from a writing career that spans nearly half a century. It draws on seven published collections and includes many uncollected and new poems. Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. His poems - often, as he terms it, quasi-autobiographical - combine memory, experience and imagination with firm craftsmanship. The results are remarkable for their precision, their wry humour and broad human sympathies.

Read more less

Martina Evans' third collection of poems begins and ends in the dentist's chair. In between come stories ranging from an Irish childhood to present-day London, featuring voices from the poet's own to those of her family, her cat, and a supporting cast of hectoring lawyers, born bores and rambling mothers. Evans combines a novelist's gift for creating compelling narratives and capturing conversational idiosyncracies with a poet's ability to condense and refine, making "Can Dentists Be Trusted?" a book that will delight the many who enjoyed its acclaimed predecessor "All Alcoholics Are Charmers" (1998).

Read more less

Peter Levi's final collection contains the moving lyrics he composed, often while walking round the green in the Gloucestershire village where he lived, as well as other poems written since 'Reed Music' (1997). Despite his increasing blindness, his poems retained their vivid delight in the natural world and its relationship with both the social and spiritual dimensions of life.

Read more less

Yehuda Halevi, who wrote both secular and devotional poems, is considered one of the finest poets in post-biblical Hebrew literature. Suffused with warmth, moving easily between the mundane and the otherworldly, and, above all, delicately elegiac, the poet's voice cuts across all the literary genres and religious modes on which he drew. Born in the second half of the 11th century, Halevi wandered in his youth between Muslim and Christian Spain before settling in Cordoba around 1110. Towards the end of his life, to the amazement and consternation of his friends and admirers, he set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, at the time under Crusader rule. He arrived in Alexandria in 1140 and recorded his perilous sea voyage in a celebrated sequence of poems, remarkable for their fusion of startling realism and religious longing. Months later Halevi embarked for Palestine. The exact date, location and circumstances of his death have remained a mystery.

Read more less

For thirty years Anvil has championed the idea of poetry as a free space for the imagination and spirit of poet and reader alike. In the process the press has gained recognition as one of the liveliest and most varied publishers of British and international poetry. "The Spaces of Hope" celebrates that endeavour with Peter Jay's selection of the most memorable poetry he has encountered since 1968. Far from being a rollcall of established reputations, the emphasis is firmly on poems that are exceptional, durable and readable. And the result is an anthology that spans centuries and continents to give a fresh and surprising, yet coherent view of poetry, from classic poets of Europe, the Americas and China to some of the finest contemporary poets of Britain and Ireland. Wide-ranging, outward-looking and internationally-minded, "The Spaces of Hope" challenges current preconceptions about poetry and is unafraid to celebrate the pleasure principle.

Read more less

John Clare was a practitioner of the sonnet form at all periods of his poetic career. The sonnets he produced in the last years before his institutionalization in 1837, first at High Beech and then in Northampton General Asylum, are of interest, since he exploited the brevity of the form to express a simultaneous precision of observation and starkness of vision that he rarely achieved either before or after. This volume contains all the sonnets that Clare wrote at Northborough between 1832 and 1837 with the exception of those included in "The Midsummer Cushion" and "The Rural Muse". This collection allows the reader to trace the development of Clare's handling of the form in this period. They constitute vignettes of rural life in the early-19th century and the record of a poetic sensibility. This text is part of the "John Clare Programme".

Read more less

Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante's Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - and relocating it to the modern 'walled city' of the University of Essex.

Read more less

France’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.

Read more less

Crossing the Carpathians is a collection of poems about exile, family, and the survival of love. Carmen Bugan was born in Romania, and her book has its origins in her experiences during the 1980s, as a child of political dissidents and as an exile from her country. Written in America, Ireland, and England, her poems are about crossing countries and languages, recording loss and celebration, reconciling memories with dreams.

Read more less

A book of portraits, experiments and objects made of words; they find their locations between Cape Town and London, between the dawn of the new millennium and the present day.

Read more less

There is a greeting used in urban America, 'What's good?', which seems to go beyond a mere 'How are you?' or 'What's happening?' to demand an optimistic response. This anthology seeks to rectify both these oversights by showcasing established Caribbean poets from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere.

Read more less

Rimbaud called him 'le premier voyant, roi des poetes, un vrai dieu', and the history of modern poetry, which begins with him, has borne out that opinion. This is a comprehensive new translation of all Baudelaire's poetry, excluding only the juvenilia, occasional verse and work of doubtful attribution. It includes all the poems published in the first (1857) and second (1861) editions of the book, as well as those added to the third (1868), published after the poet's death. Baudelaire contemplated a volume of poems that would 'launch him into the future like a cannonball', and here it is in vivid and formally authoritative translation.

Read more less

Features the earliest surviving English poem, "Caedmon's Hymn", as well as one of the last poems to be written in the classical Old English alliterative style; some of the great elegies and epics, and a generous selection from "Beowulf". This title also includes a bibliography and reading list, with a note on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

Read more less

Beginning with his departure from New York to Istanbul, the author discusses a journey, not so much between contrasting cities as 'between different versions of the same city', to a place that is exotic and familiar, spanning West and East, past and present, where cultures and histories intersect.

Read more less

Beginning in America, this is a sensual celebration of the varied relationships that make up lives richly lived: from the subtle, intimate interactions of close family members and lovers, to the mutual rewards and stresses of relationships with friends, therapists, students and housemates.

Read more less

This new collection of poems and translations from the award-winning poet and scholar, Christopher Middleton, subverts accepted truths with dazzling incision and encounters an array of fascinating characters.

Read more less

Asked what problems most perplexed "young men at present" Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) replied "a growing sense of discrepancy". His wry and wise poetry explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political and literary landscape. He had a sharp eye for absurdity. Clough was a writer of wide interests and liberal sympathies, vividly idiomatic and sensuous, delighting in the detail and variety of everyday life. His technical dexterity is a delight: the poems encompass satire and lyric, dialogue, plot and contemporary reference. His narrative poem "The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich" and the epistolary "Amours de Voyage" have the momentum and social precision of novels, capturing a precise image of the Victorian world of the 1840s. This volume includes a selection of the full range of Clough's poetry, with a detailed introduction and annotations by Shirley Chew.

Read more less

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was known to his contemporaries as "the most accomplished gentleman of his age", noble, learned and elegant. A man of his time, at the centre of the dangerous power games of the court of Henry VIII, Surrey was beheaded for his role in a conspiracy over the succession. His poetry reflects that world, in its idealisation of the aristocratic virtues of chivalry and honour, its rich language and formal sophistication. Immensely influential in literary history for his development of blank verse and the Petrarchan sonnet form in English, and as the first modern translator of Virgil, Surrey is revealed in this selection as a subtle and graceful poet, and a translator whose vigorous and faithful versions of the Aeneid continue to enrich the literary tradition.

Read more less

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Read more less

Edwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind to expatiate on a wide range of subjects.

Read more less

An exploration of concepts of art and womanhood, of what it means for Boland to be a woman poet, finding her own voice within a tradition.

Read more less

Donald Davie is a poet of the English perspective refracted through historical meditation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities.

Read more less

To mark John Ashbery's 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962); "Same Trees" (1956); "Rivers and Mountains" (1966); "The Double Dream of Spring" (1970); and "Three Poems" (1972).

Read more less

By the winner of the 2013 T S Eliot Prize and the 1990 Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. This book of poems is organized around the theme of the journey: from communism to spiritual affirmation; from life in Ireland to life abroad, and return; and from the security of given structures to independence and security in the self.

Read more less

This collection provides a range of romantic ironies. Sophie Hannah's poems move beyond satire to the heart of modern matter: loves, lusts, losses, and the foibles of contemporary life.

Read more less

This is the first of a two-volume selection of short fiction from Portugal, drawing on late-19th and 20th-century novellas and stories. The text concentrates on writing from before World War II. Included are: Eca de Queiros's "The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman"; Antonio Patricio's "Suze"; Fernando Pessoa's "The Anarchist Banker"; Irene Lisboa's "The Lover"; and Jose Rodrigues Migueis's "Leah".

Read more less

The Communicado Theatre's production of this verse rendering won the Edinburgh Fringe First award at the 1992 Festival, and has gone on to tour Scotland and England in 1992-3. Edwin Morgan provides an introduction, which sets the play in its time and discusses the style of his translation; it aims to provide insight and stimulation to a new generation of readers and playgoers.

Read more less

The definitive gathering of work by a vital figure in the British Poetry Revival.

Read more less

Sergey Stratanovsky's Muddy River is the first comprehensive English-language selection of a contemporary existentialist Russian master. Taken together, the poems express the full range of Stratanovsky's verse, drawing on seven collections that represent half a century of writing. Muddy River is the essential Anglophone introduction to Stratanovsky's oeuvre, its now satirical, now psalmic, ever-searching poetics.

Read more less

The debut collection by a contributor to the acclaimed New Poetries V anthology. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Read more less

The T S Eliot Prize-winning fifth collection of poems by the inaugural Belfast laureate, and one of Northern Ireland's greatest female poets.

Read more less

In "Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. His lyrics and satires dance in the spaces that open up between intention and expression, the moment when the horse attempts to throw its rider.

Read more less

In the five volumes of poetry he has published since 1989, Peter McDonald explores an intimately known territory that becomes strange: pulled out of shape by history, made unfamiliar by distance, made new by the attentive imagination. McDonald's "Collected Poems" is a sustained meditation on place and belonging, loss and love. The classical world is a haunting presence; the landscape of McDonald's poems resonates with past voices, with memories and acts of remembrance. The assured and scrupulous craft that creates the telling detail, the unsettling depth, has made him one of the most important Northern Irish writers of his generation.

Read more less

Each poem in Catalan writer Ernest Farres' "Edward Hopper" is based on a painting by the American artist. Creating a narrative that follows a subject from small-town origins to big-city life, from youth to age, the story is Hopper's, yet it also belongs to Farres. The ventriloquist slips, revealing his larger concerns: Farres is using the paintings to tell a story of modernity. Lawrence Venuti's translations recreate the heterogeneous language of Farres' poetry in an American vernacular that samples Hopper's actual speech and writing. Farres' book becomes in English what it is for Catalan readers: remarkable in ambition, wit, and in its probing interpretations of the visual imagination.

Read more less

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua: many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt's many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa's sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter's voice in birdsong - and the 'poppies in translation' mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the 'haunted undertow' of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, 'with their black souls in the wind'.

Read more less

'We needed coffee but we'd got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we returned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind'. From its title, which runs to 101 words in full, to its wordless concrete poems; from its World Cup fixture list to its transformations of four-letter words, "We needed coffee but..." is audacious, mischievous, even outrageous. As in his award-winning first collection "The Book of Matthew", the poet attends precisely to each detail: the rhythms are musical but unexpected; the brightness control on imagery is turned up high. New in this book is the emphasis on collaboration. Some of this work began in text pieces for art exhibitions or as song-cycle lyrics.Other poems respond to the influences of Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Inger Christensen, dom silvester houedard, Yoko Ono and Gyorgy Ligeti. Matthew Welton turns rigorous control into a dancing display of wit: we become his collaborators in the shared delight that inventive poetry can contrive.

Read more less

The debut English-language collection from a Ukrainian poet reflecting on her experiences of the invasion of her homeland.

Read more less

From Sussex to Mexico, the poems in Rebecca Hurst's debut collection travel far and wide, documenting tensions between embodied and inherited landscapes.

Read more less

Isabel Galleymore's second book is a collection of ecopoetry that explores cuteness, care and commodification in an age of hyper-capitalism and environmental crisis.

Read more less

Four book-length poems respond to the experience of walking in the wild landscapes of the highlands and islands of Scotland.

Read more less

The March-April 2022 issue; Major interview with American poet Carl Philips; Nuash Sabah, editor of Poetry Birmingham, in conversation; Frederic Raphael writes to Wittgenstein; Isobel Williams adds to her Shibari Catullus; John Clegg discovers Mrs Bleaney; New to PN Review this issue: Wendelin Wai C. Law, Alex Macdonald, Nuash Sabah and Colin Bramwell; and more...

Read more less