Search results for ""Don Paterson""

Fifty writers on life, art and writing from twenty-two years of Brick, A Literary Journal.Founded in 1977, Brick, A Literary Journal features a great many of the world’s best-loved writers, and has readers in every corner of the planet. The magazine prizes the personal voice and celebrates opinion, passion, revelation, and the occasional bad joke.This anthology, which collects some of the very best work to appear in Brick over the last twenty-two years, is an essential collection of some of the finest writers at work today including, John Berger, Fanny Howe, Don DeLillo, Elizabeth Hay, Colm Tóibín, A.L. Kennedy, Alistair McLeod, Tim Lilburn, Jane Rule and Jeffrey Eugenides to name but a few.Full of invigorating and challenging literary essays, interviews, memoirs, travelogues, belles lettres, and unusual musings, The New Brick Reader is the perfect introduction for those new to Brick and an ideal treasury for the magazine’s many fans.Contributors include Rob Fyfe, Alistair Macleod, Michael Ondaatje (interview with Malouf), Annie Proulx, Brand, Creeley, Rushdie, CD Wright, Atwood, Gibson, Russell, Banks (what I'd be if not a writer), Peter Harcourt, Jane Rule, James Wood (interviews W G Sebald), Helen Garner, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Helm, Jeffrey Eugenides, Roo Borson, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Lilburn, Robert Creeley, Michelle Orange, Fanny Howe, A. L. Kennedy, Semi Chellas, Don DeLillo, Alistair Bland, Dionne Brand, Esta Spalding (interviews David Sedaris), John Berger, Clark Blaise, Jim Harrison, Clayton Ruby, Robert Hass, George Toles, Stephan Bureau (interview with Mavis Gallant), Roberto Bolano & Forrest Gander, Leon Edel (Craig Howes), Paule Anglim (interview with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia), Colm Toibin, Don Paterson, Albert Nussbaum, W.S. Merwin, Sean Michaels, Charles Foran, Colum McCann & R. Chandran Madhu, Melora Wolff, and Eleanor Wachtel (with Anne Carson).

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This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies – with their vast lists of poets summoned up to serve a critic’s argument or to illustrate a journalistic overview. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points up the connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Edna Longley draws the poetic line of the century not through culture-defining groups but through the work of the most significant poets of our time. Because her guiding principle is aesthetic precision, the poems themselves answer to their circumstances. Readers will find this book exciting and risk-taking not because her selections are surprising but because of the intensity and critical rigour of her focus, and because the poems themselves are so good. This is a vital anthology because the selection is so pared down. Edna Longley has omitted showy, noisy, ephemeral writers who drown out their contemporaries but leave later or wiser readers unimpressed. Similarly there is no place here for the poet as entertainer, cultural spokesman, feminist mythmaker or political commentator. While anthologies survive, the idea of poetic tradition survives. An anthology as rich as Edna Longley’s houses intricate conversations between poets and between poems, between the living and the dead, between the present and the future. It is a book which will enrich the reader’s experience and understanding of modern poetry. The anthology covers the work of 70 poets: Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Edwin Muir, T.S. Eliot, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Hugh MacDiarmid, Wilfred Owen, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Robert Graves, Austin Clarke, Basil Bunting, Stevie Smith, Patrick Kavanagh, Norman Cameron, William Empson, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, Henry Reed, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, W.S. Graham, Keith Douglas, Edwin Morgan, Philip Larkin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Douglas Dunn, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, Tom Leonard, Carol Rumens, Selima Hill, Ciaran Carson, James Fenton, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Jo Shapcott, Ian Duhig, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie, Simon Armitage and Don Paterson.

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Scotland, like so many other nations, has produced poetry that is patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of Scotland has long been played out in verse, through Celtic devotional works, Catholic works, Protestant works, and not forgetting satires on the Puritanism in Scotland's post-Reformation identity. Language and culture have been equally multifarious in the nation so that three major languages: Scots, English and Gaelic (examples of which are translated in this anthology) compete and co-exist in poetry. The fifteenth century poet, William Dunbar, joked that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and there speaks something of the historic lowland attitude to the Gaidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking Scotland, principally the highlands). Hostility and eventual harmony is a marker of the Scottish highlands/lowlands divide as much as for that between Scotland and England. Historic tension is not to be dismissed but, certainly, the poetic palette of Scotland is one of multilingual richness, and shows an enduringly high quality whatever the cultural vicissitudes that play a part. The medieval Makars, most prominently Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, are often taken to represent a golden age when poetry in Scots ran the full range of mood, mode and subject matter. If this has, perhaps, never been bettered, the sixteenth century lyrics and sonnets of Alexander Montgomerie, Alexander Scott and other poets around the court of James VI, and the eighteenth century vernacular 'revival' of Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns represent at points equally brilliant periods; and the twentieth century 'modern renaissance' of Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob and William Souter proved that Scots remained a viable poetic currency, as a living poet such as Tom Leonard continues to demonstrate. Poetry in Gaelic too has its tradition of peaks where the flame seems to burn more visibly at certain times than others. Alexander Macdonald (Alasdair Mac Mhaghstir Alasdair), Rob Donn (Rob Donn MacAoidh) and Duncan MacIntyre (Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir) make the eighteenth century a high point in achievement, while Sorley Maclean, George Campbell Hay and Iain Crichton Smith do similarly for the twentieth century: the latter three, arguably, making Gaelic verse the most able variety in Scotland during the last sixty years. Historically as many successes are scored in Scottish poetry in English. James Thomson, author of The Seasons, joins James Macpherson translator/creator of the poetry of 'Ossian' in promulgating works that are seminally iconic and influential right across the artistic genres, painting and music as much as literature, in western culture. The romantic, patriotic poetic image of Scotland is sounded in English as much as in any other language, as the writing of Walter Scott or Lady Nairne attests. James (B.V.) Thomson, John Davidson, Edwin Muir, Norman MacCaig, W.S. Graham, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson are all deeply Scottish poets speaking through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the worldwide audience that exists for creative utterance that both emanates from but is never limited by the particularity of place. Scotland's story is one that is never certain, but, enduringly and importantly its poetry is.

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