Search results for ""carcanet press""

First selection of Andrew Young's best-known short poems and the long mystical poem Into Hades. The volume is illustrated by Joan Hassalal's powerful wood-engravings.

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This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny, and her nephew James Edward.

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Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) is best known to Anglophone readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.

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The latest novel by acclaimed writer Gabriel Josipovici, encompassing suspense, love, family and the work of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.

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An accessible gathering of work by New Zealand's foremost poet.

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A gathering of work by one of Britain's most vital and well-established poets.

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A colourful new collection by one of the outstanding Caribbean poets of our time.

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Small World tells a story of the changing relationship between a father and his two daughters, one severely disabled, a 'mermaid in a wheelchair', the other discovering the difference of her elder sister, the 'moon' to her 'earth'. Each succeeding poem gathers further telling detail as the father listens and observes with affection and surprise the strange world they inhabit, gradually reflecting on his own contrasting childhood. Finally, the book ends with a shock experience that brings all that has gone before into sharp focus.

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The Selected Poems of one of America's most eminent poets.

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New Selected Poems is a poet's choice of over thirty years' work. Minhinnick's poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes 'An Opera in Baghdad' as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.

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Zig Zag consists of five new sequences by Anthony Rudolf, a poet whose craft has been enriched by his experiences as a translator of French and Russian literature. Poems about memory, time and loss are complicated by humour, lyricism and a light touch.

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With the economy of a proverb and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, circling back to 'my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

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'Rough music' is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampson's characteristic lyric intensity deftly fuses metaphysics and politics with the vernacular of daily life.

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Multi-award-winning poet Capildeo's new collection brings home the delight, frustration, restlessness and continuity of striving to live a connected human life in our fragmenting times.

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These poems are apocalyptic and sensory, coming from a place of hurt and love, of the human spirit struggling to transcend 'base matter' and make sense of the world.

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The highly anticipated second collection from the winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022.

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The March-April 2023 issue An issue of dialogues, with whales, with Rimbaud, with Mexico, Afghanistan, Germany, Canada, with John Lucas, D.H. Lawrence and many more Includes new poems by Colm Tóibín, Claudine Toutoungi, Parwana Fayyaz, Stav Poleg and others Anthony Vahni Capildeo 'Touch and Mourning' Zohar Atkins 'Are Philosophers Normal?' New to PN Review this issue: Fabio Morabito, Sarah Mnatzaganian, Mark Haworth-Booth and Maithreyi Karnoor and more...

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In 1878, in London, a woman served a prison sentence for deserting two of her children, a charge she denied. Almost nothing else is known of her life or that of her husband, a dealer in 'foreign birds and curiosities', who was himself a migrant. The two children vanished from the record. This is where Fleet begins, with elusive histories and lost voices. The title suggests imperial power, conquest, traffic in commodities (which in the nineteenth century included vast numbers of exotic birds). It is shadowed by other meanings: the fleeting glimpse and swift flight; floating memories, enigmatic and insistent. Judith Willson's second book of poems was written during years when migration and displacement have become central facts of the human condition. The collection works outwards from found text – historical documents, archive materials – into other places and times. In the silences of such records, their erasures and omissions, are stories that haunt our present.

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The poems in The Gifts of Fortune, Peter McDonald's seventh book of poems, cover a spectrum of personal history. They go to Belfast, Oxford, and further afield; in time they visit the poet's pasts, his now, his possible futures. Autobiographical detail abounds: McDonald's experiences (as a workingclass boy in Belfast, who dreams of leaving, and a middleaged Oxford don, who dreams of going back) are filtered through a deep instinct for poetic tradition. At the heart of the book are two sequences: one, 'Mud', in which family, professional, and literary histories are combined in strictly formal, but personally unguarded, reflections on poetry, class, and privilege; and another, 'Blindness', where a series of tenline units test poetic form to (and beyond) breaking-point, in a meditation on family and suffering, disappointment and hope. Other poems return to themes of wealth and poverty, love and loss, and the alienation and puzzlement of age. Throughout the book, form is ghosted by the formless, hovering just beyond the frame; and Fortune vies with Fate, quite another force.

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Elegy turns into affirmation, `binding the pulse / back into the body’, in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, `written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows’. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that `he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman’s to his craft’. Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O’Brien writes, `He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants… The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding… an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.’

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`Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, `Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire. This is a book to hold onto for dear life.’ And dear life is what Moss’s poetry has always been about, asking what John Ashbery called `unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.’ Stanley Moss has been part of the American and European scene for seven decades: a defining editor of world poetry, he is a major poet of the generation of Ashbery, Merwin, Wright and Kinnell. This book richly supplements his Almost Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2017) with recovered writings and new-minted poems that address the monsters of the age while celebrating its angels.

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Following his acclaimed Pandemonium, Thomas McCarthy’s Prophecy dwells on childhood memory, romantic love and the varieties of human attachment. Still embodying his distinctive voice and craft, in these poems McCarthy risks more prophetic moods and themes. There are poems on illness and recovery, ageing and creativity. From the community well of his childhood home in County Waterford to the holy well and pilgrim site of St Gobnait’s in County Cork, the poet finds that the act of remembering is an act of making and understanding. `All this / Metaphor and trauma and formal technique / I place in my canvas travel bag’, he writes, beginning his poetic journeys into formal Irish Gardens of Remembrance, field hospitals of the great War, the 1970s university campus of Iowa. `Along with Paul Muldoon,’ suggested Dennis O’Driscoll, McCarthy is `the most important Irish poet of his generation.’

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To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was `shrieking, dumb, defiled’ constantly test a vision of `faith, life, virtue in the sun’. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.

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The Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropics and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. `And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. `Joy.' The `mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Cape Town and Far Rockaway.

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Winner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Ned Denny's Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a `rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about' (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy). The collection opens on a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which - to quote Twin Peaks, a recurrent leitmotif - `the woods are wondrous ... but strange'. Interspersed with original poems in a variety of complex forms is a series of illuminated and darkly erotic `remakes' of other poets' work, from the Old English classic The Wanderer to late Baudelaire via Goethe, Cavalcanti, Li Po, enigmatic troubadour lyrics, and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Politics are never far away: modern man's severance from the earth, the sacred, and his own inner self has grave consequences.

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In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. `Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in `After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

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A Full Cone is Miles Champion's second Carcanet volume. It features a substantial body of new work as well as a selection of earlier writing hitherto unavailable in the UK. 'It has often been noted that the pace at which Miles Champion's brilliantly intelligent poems unfold is rapid. Ideas and images tumble into words and the words become present as moments of conceptual or emotional consequence. But, though high velocity is in the making of the poems, there is no swift taking away. The moments aren't rescinded; the poems are not a demonstration of lyric evanescence. Champion's work, rather, is about phenomenological consequence, and consequence lingers, lasts. This is a collection of monumental significance—and the work is gorgeous.' —Lyn Hejinian

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Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.

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Moss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness. Or putting it another way: here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Mosss ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.

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Joint Winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2018. In Playing the Octopus, her eighth collection of poems, Mary O'Malley's sensitivity to the spirit of Ireland's west coast is as attuned as ever. In a world both earthen and dreamlike, bodily and mythical, a trout is seen to 'swallow light through his skin', a wolf 'howls the great open vowel of his need', and in the emptiness where a tree once stood, 'a tree-shaped brightness dances'. Over the course of the collection, O'Malley twins the Irish west coast with the American east coast, Inis Mor with Coney Island, the parish with the metropolis, the pipes with the axe, each offering its own comfort and wonder. Sylvia Plath, Lois Lane and Antigone feature in an unlikely cast of heroines through which O'Malley tests the mythologies of motherhood and femininity ('no mother is ever good enough until she's dead', writes the poet, with characteristic wit). Playing the Octopus is a body of writing buoyed by the redemptive power and sustaining joy of music, and it closes with O'Malley's translations of the Irish poet Sean O Riordain and the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.

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The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018. The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder’s brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag’s most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the `Sprachpulsate’ (pulses of language): `Evelyn Schlag’s poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.’ Leeder’s selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.

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Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.

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Sophie Hannah is one of Britain's best-loved poets, a disarmingly witty, sharp-eyed chronicler of everyday life and its peculiarities. She is also an internationally successful author of psychological crime fiction, and has written the first new Hercule Poirot novel to be authorised by the Agatha Christie estate. This book collects all of her previous collections of verse and also includes new and uncollected poems.

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This title is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. In this generous selection of nearly half of Hauge's poetic work, Robin Fulton displays the range, variety and distinctive qualities of his poetry. Though deeply rooted in the West Norwegian landscape which he evokes so memorably, Hauge's poetry has a kinship in background and temperament with that of Robert Frost, while also sharing the wry humour and cool economy of William Carlos Williams and Brecht, whom he translated. Often epigrammatic, yet lyrical in impulse, his poems have a serenity which makes them unusually rewarding.

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A dual text edition of this work that sets Hilliard's text opposite a modern day translation.

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Features two collections by an American poet.

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Donald Davie's first two prose books (1952, 1955), available now in one volume with a new foreword, set the agenda for 'The Movement' and shaped the critical approach of two generations of readers and teachers of poetry. They have also proven of value to poets finding their way. Intended as 'two stages in one investigation', they provide a brilliantly detailed analysis of the workings of English poetry and remain, with books such as I.A. Richards's "Practical Criticism" and William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity", primary critical texts, reviving attention to poetry at a technical level and, in the process, stirring awake for many readers major (and minor) writers of the late eighteenth century who require special qualities of attention. Davie remains a particularist, proving in insight after insight the deep rewards of close attention. For him poetry is a responsible art; it is not an end in itself but must always 'reek of the human'.

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Talks about failed and (less often) successful relationships, the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake, and the turnip.

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Updating and correcting the earlier book, this edition features previously unknown works by Mina Loy rescued from Dada archives and avant-garde magazines. All of Loy's futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the poems from her Paris and New York periods, and the cycle of "Love Songs".

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First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark's writings on the Bronte sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Bronte's poems.

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The acclaimed poet Christopher Reid distils Charles Boyle's six books of poems into The Disguise: Poems 1977-2001, recovering a notable one-time poet, now known as a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, from poetic neglect. Charles Boyle established a reputation as a sharp, wry, disabused observer of social mores. Paleface, published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Age of Cardboard and String, also from Faber, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award. But in 2001 the well ran dry. Since the first year of the twenty-first century he has not put poetic pen to paper even once. The poems remain vital and fascinating, but they have about them also a kind of archaic cast: here we find the quintessential white male Englishness from the late twentieth century on display as if in a museum. Here too is the excitement of abroad (North Africa especially), and there are ghosts, absences, exile and evasions: in hindsight, these poems offer clues to their own disappearance after thirty notable years spent partly in the sun.

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The memories from which Fred D’Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in which their destinies are unpredictably worked out. D’Aguiar’s concluding translations are of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, masters and remakers of language and form, from whom (among a multitude of others) he takes his bearings. This unusual integration of tributes and the ironies they provoke give Translations a radical colouring: D’Aguiar is learned; he is also wry, alert to the false notes in history and what follows from them. `The world map / Turned from red to brown to black / And blue, drained of empire.’ And he is passionate, responding always to the deep feelings of others, from desire to love, elegy to celebration.

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"The modest size of Jason Schwartz's first collection is misleading, since his fiction turns out to be grandly intrepid. Schwartz writes of family events and historical tragedies, evoking a nameless consciousness whirling through remembered facts, letters, memories - and he does so by recording not the narrative events but the traces of them that pulse within the words and memories and objects left behind ...Unlike much so-called experimental fiction, Schwartz's work contains genuine passion and invention - and an enormous appetite for challenging himself and his audience." - The New York Times

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An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. The book opens at the birth, which paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after a long labour and an emergency caesarean, the baby's heart gives out. For the mother, her body flooded with endorphins, euphoria gives way to shock, followed by an intense and visceral grief. However, just as grief itself is not linear, so too the book follows an emotional rather than a strictly chronological arc, lyric rather than narrative. At the same time, McCarthy Woolf's formal experimentation allows an intellectual and metaphysical line of enquiry to emerge. Ultimately, it is a closely felt connection with the natural world, particularly with water and birds, that allows the author to transcend the experience and honour the spirit of her son.

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This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet's trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and languages of the USA and then Europe. Urgent, compassionate and inventive, Bhatt's work forms a uniquely sustained project of reinvention and rediscovery.

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Inspired by Shakespeare's songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, this collection of songlike poetry is based on the ubiquitous spread of weeds - like the shallow rooting plants, small poems can grow anywhere. In her seventh collection, Khalvati demonstrates a dazzling mastery of traditional forms and experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form comprised of an unrhymed couplet. Evoking three generations and geographies of women, "The Meanest Flower" reinstates the joyful, audible aspect of the lyric.

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