Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

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First published under the title "An Unofficial Rilke", Hamburger's translations have been critically acclaimed for their contribution towards a more complete understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century. While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the "New Poems" volumes, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus". Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a definitive statement.

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Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) now takes a place among the English poets. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private, the passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire, and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he made a poetry unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his poems, was made by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the "Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney". It is reissued now, with a few corrected readings, and with a Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life, by P.J. Kavanagh.

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In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine - never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centres of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture - such as the mysterious 'Stendhal's syndrome', which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalised due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.

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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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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.

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Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgamesh's quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and 'disappeared' political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester--and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss. Received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era. Her exploration was shadowed by intimations of unease; as economic collapse gathered pace, recurrent concerns gained a new urgency. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Irish tradition? In journeys across political divides and between languages, from Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, deeply rooted in Irish inheritance, to the African-Irish writer Joyce Akpotor; from Gerry Adams for whom 'when our future is settled, we will agree on our history', to the artist Dorothy Cross who brings an international perspective to her redefinitions of traditional Irish imagery, Close to the Next Moment captures the conversations that are remaking a culture.

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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.

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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.

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The first definitive collected edition of American poet Edward Dorn s writings, this irrepressibly offbeat volume marries the old West with American counterculture. As it celebrates Dorn s epic poem "Gunslinger, "this collection which is both wonderfully resourceful in tone and idiom puts Edward Dorn on an equal footing with his masters."

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John Ashbery's "Collected Poems 1956-1987" contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from "Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W.H. Auden, to "April Galleons" (1987), and including "The Vermont Notebook" (1975) with the original artwork by Joe Brainard, and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1976), which won the Pulitzer Prize, together with a selection of more than sixty previously uncollected poems. To read Ashbery's work in sequence is to experience the magnitude of his presence in American poetry over these four decades, as innovator and influence. His poetry, 'an exuberant script for survival' (Marina Warner), 'light-footed and delectably irresponsible' (Alfred Brendel), fascinates with virtuosic complexity and delights with wry humour. A restless explorer of the modern world, alive to language and impression, Ashbery enlarges the possibilities of poetry. With a detailed chronology and notes on the poems, "Collected Poems 1956-1987" is an indispensable compilation of the work of one of the essential poets of our time.

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Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, by the language of journalism and spam emails, Philip Terry transforms Shakespeare's sonnet sequence into a celebration of the possibilities of language unleashed. Shakespeare's themes of fading beauty, posterity, immortality and death find their contemporary responses in the world of celebrity gossip, consumer products and the credit crunch. The results spark with energy, as disrespectful and anarchic as a cartoon - and as assured in their control of line. Philip Terry, an acclaimed translator of the poetry of Raymond Queneau, plays language games by the rules of Oulipo in his creation of a Shakespearean chimaera, the hybrid that takes on a life of its own.

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