Search results for ""arc publications""

From both revered, established writers and exciting contemporary poets, the work in this anthology offers a broad picture of Māori poetry written in English. The encounter between Māori writers and the English language has been one of creativity and innovation, with poets choosing to use the language of the coloniser as a tool for their own ends, expressing the beauty and robustness of the Māori spirit when confronted with difference and dislocation. There are laments for koro (elders), hopes for mokopuna (grandchildren); celebrations of the land and anger at its abuse; retellings of myth and reclamations of history. In all its variety, and on every conceivable subject, witness the vitality and intensity of the Māori poetic voice.

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The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin.

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House Arrest, comprising poems selected from Alizadeh’s two collections, Diary of a House Arrest,1956-1967 (2003) and Blue Bicycle (2015), takes as its central theme the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, during an American and British-led coup in 1953. After being removed from power, Mosaddegh was forced to live in exile in Ahmadabad castle near Tehran, and in these poems, Alizadeh imagines himself in Mosaddegh’s place, in exile, and allows his imagination to take him wherever it pleases. In the dream-like atmosphere of his poems, times and places melt into each other like magma, blending Greco-Roman mythology, ancient Iranian folklore, the Christian New Testament, the Old Testament, European fairy tales and Persian Sufism. Yet his work is thoroughly modern; mythical figures live alongside contemporary humans, and classical forms are transformed into modernist experiments.Hasan Alizadeh was born in 1947 and embarked on a literary career, initially as a short story writer, but since the 1990s, he has focused mostly on poetry. His talent is widely recognized in Iran, as shown by his having won the Modern Iranian poetry Prize in 2002, but very little is known about him personally as he declines to give interviews or talk about himself.

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Acres of Light, Katherine Gallagher's 6th full collection and her first since her new and selected, is a rich and evocative exploration: a sensuous celebration veined with echoes of travel and displacement, with identity and belonging, as she reaches into her different worlds. Along the way, her relationship with Australia in particular, has changed. Austere and elegiac, occasionally tongue-in-cheek and playful, these poems encompass Gallagher's enthusiasms for the worlds of Australia and Europe, and where they have taken her. As poet Penelope Shuttle said when speaking of Gallagher's Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems, 'Gallagher inhabits her poems with ease and confidence.'

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The master of pulsing, post-modern poetic rhythms, Menno Wigman's reputation is assured as one of the Netherlands' leading poets. And as perhaps his country's most exciting poet in terms of form: "a craftsman who knows what he wants" in the words of poet Alfred Schaffer. Wigman's second collection won him the Netherlands' coveted Jan Campert ......

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Detailing the lives of Syrian women living in Paris, these poems, capturing the unheard voices of women whose lives are suppressed in unimaginable ways, allow us to explore moments never mentioned in the news reports. Potent and never failing to capture the essence of the feminine experience with a remarkable amount of insight.

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Brian Johnstone’s third collection from Arc, to be published as the poet turns 70, is full of memories, from the poet’s own past and from the lives of the people he has encountered over the years. Family, friends, places, landscapes, photographs, events emerge from these pages with a clarity informed by a humanity and understanding as the poet looks back. This is a highly accessible book that will have a wide appeal, especially for newcomers to poetry.

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Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection travels in many directions. There is geography: Italy, Palestine, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, France, Egypt, the Lebanon, and, of course, the UK. Embarked personnel include Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence, Marlon Brando, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, George Bernard Shaw and the Gonzagas. Thematically, the poems alight at Greek mythology, gender, the evergreens of love, anguish, power and tragedy. The first and final touchpoints lie in the language itself, which is both guide and sustenance. Lyrical and narrative, startlingly evocative, elisions and connections, thrilling, satisfying and demanding, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces. The travel metaphor is only a beginning. Original and exciting, this collection resonates in mind and memory.

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A requiem for all the losses of the living throughout history, seeking to bridge the centuries by echoing another poem created in the tenth century by an Armenian mystic monk, Grikor Narekatsi. Unsurprisingly, it also touches upon the theme of the Armenian Genocide as a vivid example of loss for mankind as a whole. And yet Requiem is not simply an outpouring of tragedy and grief: throughout, there is a sense of resilience, a desire for life and faith, and a joyous optimism that goes far beyond the boundaries of Davoyan's native Armenia.Requiem is the first publication in English of one of the most extraordinary long poems published in Armenia in the last century. Written over fifty years ago, and originally blocked from publication in Armenia for five years by the Soviet regime, Requiem now appears in the author's revised and shortened version, offering the English-language reader an opportunity of encountering this monumental yet highly personal work by Armenia's best-known and most highly-regarded poet.

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TBC

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Thaw is a book length sequence of short (all 10 lines long) poems. Like haiku, at first glance these seem simple meditations on nature, that, when given time, open out into larger reflections on human experience, emotions and how the three interact. They shine as small gifts of visions or place that envelop the reader with their sensuous immediacy. Nunez enjoys playing with symbols, allowing images to break out to offer intellectual puzzles and literary references. As such the poems dance between literal metaphorical and physical worlds, upending what you may have previously perceived or thought. A rich and peculiar sequence that is both shadowy and illuminating, tender and insistent, broad and deeply personal.

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Six Finnish Poets, the eleventh volume in this series, features six writers whose work is symbolic of the connection between the life of poetry in Finland and the life of the poets who write it. In Finland, poetry is a part of everyday life, a way of living, founded upon a do-it-yourself attitude that is independent of the approval of critics, publishers, or the popular masses. The poets selected here exhibit the vast range of Finnish poetry, from experimental prose to image-rich surrealism, and from sparse, stark minimalism to ironically melancholy pop-culture references.

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These poems are wide ranging and passionate. Linguistically thrilling, they explore the world of snakes, swallows, valleys and skyscrapers, weariness and love. Reading through the eclectic subjects, provokes a sense of searching, a sense of chaos from which ultimately grows a unification of all things, so the dung beetle, scribe and feet are all part of one entity. Just as he enjoys presenting both image and concept in his poems, he gives the reader the space in these slowly unraveling poems to immerse fully in his particularly intense worldview.

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The poems in Tony Curtis's new collection are woven out of his fascination with the everyday, the quirky, and the downright extraordinary. These are poems wrapped up in love and death, friendship and memory, madness and music – from the blind man singing in a field, to his three Cistercian uncles singing plainchant. There are people at the heart of everything he writes. Curtis is a born storyteller, and these are poems crafted by a poet with a wonderful ability to express great depth of feeling with deceptive simplicity."Curtis lives on the borderline between our world and the world of the Spirits."The Irish Times"His humour and charm, and ability to turn a poem with the seemingly simplest of images, and that understanding of how words will play over the listener's ear, are hallmarks which are pleasingly brought to the fore on the page in this hefty new collection. His greatest skill is to make readers go "yes, of course"; he reminds us of what we've known all along though perhaps not recognised, and reading his poems is therefore an uplifting experience."The Warwick ReviewTony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied Literature at Essex University and Trinity College, Dublin. An award-winning poet, Curtis has published six warmly received collections, the most recent of which was The Well in the Rain: New & Selected Poems (Arc, 2006). In 2003 he was awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia. He is a member of Aosdána, and a recipient of the Irish National Poetry Prize.

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Linda France's seventh full-length collection is concerned with the dualities of our inner and outer worlds – the seeming paradoxes of self and society, language and experiment, ideal and reality. At the heart of the book is a section look at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of the landscape gardener Capability Brown. Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian's Wall, not far from where she has lived for the past 30 years. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. Her wise and generous poems seek a place of oneness amidst inner and outer worlds, riven with dualities – the seeming paradoxes of self and society, language and experience, ideal and reality.At the heart of the book is a section looking at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of Capability Brown, who was born in Northumberland in 1716. These poems consider some pressing questions: how much control do we have over our environment? How does our state of mind reflect the world around us? What, in the end, will endure?A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured France's spine and cracked her pelvis. This injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation."There is a restless energy about her work, a fascination with the paradoxes of people, the lives we lead and the society in which we live those lives, as well as a sense of the profound sadness of the passing of time, and of people.... She writes with warmth and wit of 'windows hooked with flamingo beaks'; 'the small room where all your geese are cooked' and, enamoured as she is by the work of Capability Brown, of 'landscapes erased / by tarmac and railway, time and weather.'"Keith Richmond, Tribune"One thing I liked about France's collection, and this is something one hopes to find in a poet, is that many lines and stanzas stand alone as memorable and worth rereading."Stride"France's enthusiasm for her topic shines through, her poetry bursting with flora and fauna. However, France is also able to tame that burgeoning natural world into a series of neatly trimmed poems, as she similarly controls the excesses of physical pain."The Warwick ReviewLinda France was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, and for the past 16 years has lived close to Hadrian's Wall, near Corbridge in Northumberland. She works as a poet, tutor, mentor and editor, often collaborating with visual artists, particularly in the field of Public Art. Since 1990 her poetry has won many awards and prizes as well as being carved into stone and wood, cast in metal, etched in glass, stitched onto fabric and printed on enamel. Her recurring themes are landscape and history, flora and fauna, love and identity.

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The eighth in Arc's New Voices from Europe and Beyond series of anthologies, Six Macedonian Poets features the work of three men and three women – Elizabeta Bakovska (b. 1969), Lidija Dimkovska (b. 1971), Bogomil Gjuzel (b. 1939), Igor Isakovski (b. 1970), Jovica Ivanovski (b. 1961) and Katica Kulavkova (b. 1951) – who have helped to shape the face of contemporary Macedonian poetry over the past five decades. Translated by a range of highly-regarded translators, and introduced by the editor of Macedonia's leading online literary magazine Blesok, this volume is a window on the poetry of one of Europe's least-known and most intriguing 'corners'.This is a bilingual edition, with the Macedonian original and the English translation on facing pages."Such books - such poets - are I suppose a kind of immigration, welcomed by Arc, voices on the page free to come amongst us. Welcome."StrideIgor Isakovski is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. He was born in 1970 in Skopje, Macedonia. He received a BA in World and Comparative Literature from St. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje and an MA in Gender and Culture from the Central European University in Budapest. From 1991 to 2003, he worked as a presenter at various radio and TV stations in Macedonia. He is the founder and director of the cultural institution Blesok, where he works as editor-in-chief.

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Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Summer 2010Arc 'Visible Poets' translation series, no. 29My soul is like these threads of spider silk tensed criss-cross between two apple treesRooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Kristiina Ehin's poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader's own. These poems, beautifully translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and selected from her most recent collection, were written over two years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son."Here is a generous, honest imagination: visceral, shamanistic and wise. Kristiina Ehin is a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirts and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life. There is a refreshing lightness and originality to her poems, which are nonetheless poignant. She is able to express strong emotions without being sentimental. Her work has truly haunted me; it has entered the deepest layer of my being with its rare combination of directness and subtle nuances, ancient traditions and modernity." Sujata Bhatt"Ehin's poems are deeply personal, but not in a way that excludes the reader: quite the opposite, they draw the reader in, so that Ehin's life feels like our own, a fascinating glimpse into a different, simpler life lived close to nature. Reading these poems is like a holiday of the best kind: eye-opening, relaxing and different. Ehin's work is rooted in Estonian folk tradition, and music permeates both the forms and the language. I particularly relished her poems about parenthood, for their beauty and tenderness."StrideKristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She received an M. A. in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from Tartu University in 2004. She has published five volumes of poetry in her native Estonia and has won a number of prizes there, including Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for her fourth volume, written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. She has also published a book of short stories and has written a play as well. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007. Her other books in English translation are Põletades pimedust – Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, 2009), A Priceless Nest (short stories, Oleander Press, 2009), Päevaseiskaja – South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik – New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, 2007). She is often invited to take part in international arts and literary festivals and her work, poetry and prose, appears regularly in English translation in leading Irish and British literary journals. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. Kristiina's reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival (July 2010) was one of the highlights of the Festival.Ilmar Lehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin's The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English. His own poetry has appeared in Estonian and Irish literary journals.Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, and grew up in Pune, India and in the United States. To date, she has published seven collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. The recipient of numerous awards, such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and the Cholmondeley Award, her latest collection, Pure Lizard, was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize and received the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a frequent guest at literary festivals throughout the world. Currently, she lives in Germany with her family.

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Lane's third collection attempts a reality check on the myths and dreams that permeate our world. It attacks the culture of political and corporate mendacity in Britain today and considers the more ambiguous myths that sustain our personal lives. It also explores the human experience of time, the lessons of grief and the evocative power of music

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Translated By Donald GardnerFaded Days It was late in the eveningrain caught in lamplight beat down on the cobbles of the Old Mechlin Road you were wearing an off-white dress I'd have guessed you were fifteen you were walking down the street as I was crossing cars passed by braked rode on you asked me the way to the Muse Café the bar where that singer was on singer you said of your song voice that had found you you were on your way there 'Just follow the tram lines' I let you go Antwerp girl you're still on my mind what have I done with my lifeIconoclastic, experimental, bohemian and anti-establishment, Remco Campert – who came to prominence in the 1950s – has survived to become something of a national institution in the Netherlands: as a chronicler of alternative Amsterdam life in stories and novels; as a columnist in a national newspaper; as a script-writer and film-maker; and above all as a steadily productive, if not prolific, poet. For many Dutch people, Campert remains first and foremost the writer of such classics as Alle dagen feest (Party, Party, 1952), Een ellendige nietsnut (A Useless Layabout, 1960). Hopefully, this new translation of Campert's quiet and quirky work (reminiscent of Brian Patten's or Roger McGough's) can help gain a new audience in the Anglo-Saxon world. "Influenced by jazz, Campert's dry, almost dead-pan voice could be difficult to convey in English but Donald Gardner's versions capture both the lightness and the underlying intensity of the originals: 'Doors are open,' as 'House in Antwerp' wryly observes, 'that will never close again'."Modern Poetry in TranslationDonald Gardner, born in London in 1938, is a poet and freelance Dutch translator. He has lived in Holland since 1979. He was originally a translator of Latin American literature and his published work includes an acclaimed translation of Octavio Paz's long poem, The Sun Stone (Cosmos, York 1968), and Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity (Cape, 1970). He also published translations of poems by Ernesto Cardenal and contributed to Con Cuba, an anthology of Cuban poetry (Cape Goliard, 1969). He translated the notoriously difficult novel Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in collaboration with the author (Harper & Row, 1971). He is the author of several collections of poetry, the most recent of which are: How to Get the Most out of Your Jet Lag (Ye Olde Font Shoppe, New Haven, 2001) and The Glittering Sea (Hearing Eye Press, 2006). He is known for his performances of his poetry -- in Amsterdam, London and New York.

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Fast Talking PI reflects the poet's focus on issues affecting Pacific communities in New Zealand, and indigenous peoples around the world including the challenges and triumphs of being afakasi [mixed race]. The book is structured in three sections, Tusitala (personal), Talkback (political and historical) and Fast Talking PIs (dialogue). She writes as a calabash breaker, smashing stereotypes and challenging historic injustices; also exploring the idea of the calabash as the honoured vessel for identity and story. Her aesthetics and indigenous politics meld marvellously together

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TRANSLATED BY MARA ROZITIS An extraordinary cycle of poems – magical, mysterious, sinister, funny – about exile, in which the protagonist, Wolf One-Eye, finds himself an exile from an ancient mythological landscape in a new realm of quarks and expanding and alternating universes. Dislocated and alone, he travels through totally unfamiliar territory, closely observed by the other voice in these poems, that of the poet / narrator. Kronbergs is himself an exile, having grown up as a refugee child in Sweden after the Second World War, and this gives an edge to his poetry that is both distinctive and resonant. He is a poet, freelance journalist and translator. Kronbergs was born 1946 in Sweden, in an exiled Latvian family. He studied Literature, Nordic and Baltic languages at the University of Stockholm, as well as Translation theory and 20th Century poetry at Cambridge. He has been the President of the Latvian PEN centre, and received the Latvian Three Star order, the Swedish North Star order, several scholarships and prizes for poetry and translation in Latvia and in Sweden; among them the prize for best poetry collection of the year in Latvia (1997) for the collection Wolf One-Eye . He has published ten collections of poetry, one in Swedish and one bilingual, as well as poetry on CD. Arc Visible Poets series – The translators working on this series aim to reveal the original language in all its manifestations and make it 'visible'. By this process, they invite the reader to develop a deeper understanding and enjoyment of, both the original and the translated poem.

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When Sometimes all I can Imagine are HandsThere is a winter within me,a place so cold, so covered in snow,I rarely go there. But sometimes,when all I can imagine are hands,when trees in the forestlook like they're made of wood,then I know it's timeto take my photograph of Akhmatovaand sling it in a bag with socks and scarves.My neighbours must think it strangeto see me strapping on my snowshoes,to hear me roar at the huskiesas I untangle the harness.But when all you can imagine are handsit's best to give a little wave and move out into the whiteness.Bicycles, famines, ghosts, grannies, Tibetan Buddhists, Beckettian sighs and Lucian Freud's nudes are all revealed with a rare and loving simplicity in this selection from Tony Curtis's six published poetry collections, which concludes with a body of new work. Life-giving, life-affirming poetry, full of loss, love and longing. "Underpinning the lyrical narrative is a writing style as graceful as the author's thought." Poetry Ireland ReviewTony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of six warmly received collections of poetry. His most recent, What Darkness Covers, was published by Arc in 2003. In that year also, he was the recipient of the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship in Australia. Curtis has been awarded the Irish National Poetry Prize and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts.

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Translated from the German by Jenny Williams. Introduced by Mary O'Donnell. THE FISHERMEN The fishermen sleep.In their sou'westers sea foam evaporates from their eyes the scales fall onto the pale bodies of the fish who dream that the fishermen sleep. "I'm not a political poet… I'm more interested in the landscape of the soul ['Seelenlandschaft']". Sabine Lange "Jenny Williams' utterly respectful translations … reaveal the rhythms and tones of the originator's distinctive voice and convey these with enromous skill. The poems are accessible, yet complex and foreign, in the very best sense of that word." Mary O'Donnell. Sabine Lange has been in print in Germany since 1987 and this, her first full collection, appeared in 1994 under the title Immer zu Fuß. Her poetry explores the human – particularly the female – condition in the light of her personal experiences as a musician and poet, and is set against the backdrop of the beautiful Mecklenburg countryside in which she has spent most of her life. Written in deceptively simple language with short lines and striking images, her poems – often about love, music, the seasons, the landscape – are full of a meditative beauty which is sometimes peaceful, sometimes dark. But she can be upbeat too, funny, whimsical, exultant. The Fishermen Sleep is the first English translation of Lange's poetry, and the English-language reader is the richer for it. SABINE LANGE was born in 1953 in Stralsund , then in the German Democratic Republic. A trained musician, she has worked most of her life as an archivisit, since 1984 at the Fallada Archive in Feldberg. JENNY WILLIAMS teaches at the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University and is author of a biography about Hans Fallada. This is her first published volume of translation. MARY O'DONNELL is a poet, novelist, translator, critic and broadcaster, based in Co. Kildare, Ireland. She is a member of Aosdaná.

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POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDED TRANSLATION in a translation by Daniel Weissbort that Elaine Feinstein describes in her illuminating introduction as 'clean, clear and … amazingly felicitous'. Lisnianskaya, an intensely lyrical poet, is first and foremost a love poet, and the love that she and her late husband, the celebrated poet Semyon Lipkin, had for one another colours – without the least sentimentality – many of Lisnianskaya's more recent poems. Indeed, her most recent collection consists partly of an elegy to him."Always – intensity of feeling, and a tranquillity(rare) of the most profound sort. No artificiality,no posing – total sincerity."Alexander Solzhenitsyn (of Lisnianskaya's poetry)INNA LISNIANSKAYA was born in Baku in 1928 and her first poetry collection appeared in 1957. She is now recognised as one of Russia's leading female poets, a recipient of both the State Prize and the Solzhenitsyn Prize for her work. She lives in Moscow. DANIEL WEISSBORT founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965 with the late Ted Hughes, and editedit until 2004. He is Research Fellow at Kings College, London and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century. Here are political poems from the '70s and '80s which speak openly about the horrors of the Soviet system, others which comment directly on purges and torture, and yet more which convey the struggle to grow and mature with one's soul intact in a world of suffering.Yet throughout this book, as Sasha Dugdale points out in her introduction, there are moments of hope, of a spiritual - even religious - dimension that afford glimpses of a transcendent world and bring peace of mind to the beleaguered soul. Larissa Miller is a consummate technician, combining simple words with complicated and intricate rhythms to produce apparently effortless poetry which succeeds in elevating the ordinary and commonplace to a higher plane. Described by her translator Richard McKane as 'a poet of all seasons, not only of the natural world, but of the soul', Larissa Miller writes with an intensity and a lyricism that is compelling, mesmerising and unforgettable.

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"Commandments", Jackie Wills' fourth collection, is arguably her strongest to date. Here are poems of love and disenchantment, poems about landscapes, both familiar and unfamiliar, poems in which the poet, with her acute powers of observation, looks at the 'ordinary' and redraws it in an extraordinary, even a disturbing, way. "Commandments" is divided into two distinct parts. The first part has two main points of focus: one is the Ten Commandments, each of which Jackie Wills re-states with such sensitivity and understanding that the impact is sometimes overwhelming; the other is the poet herself in poems which look inward but which have a universal relevance. The 'commandment' poems and what the poet refers to as the 'me' poems interweave in this first section to extraordinary effect. By contrast, the second part of the book consists of a cycle of landscape poems, largely about Wills' home territory, Brighton and its environs.

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An extraordinary collection of sonnets composed while the poet was in solitary confinement and deprived of writing materials in a Vichy prison between December 1941 and February 1942, in a new prize-winning translation.Introduction by Alistair Elliotwith an original introduction byLouis Aragon

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'Sitters', Tony Roberts second collection of poetry, is a portrait gallery of well-known and lesser known figures from the nineteenth centuries. Among the wide range of artists (and their models) whose voices we hear are Degas, Munch, the Bonnards and Henry James, all under the presiding lens of the fashionable Victorian painter John Singer Sargent.

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A volume of poetry.

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This anthology features the work of six of Estonia's most celebrated poets. They write from their oral tradition and folklore, explore new forms of poetry through music, marginalia and note-making.

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Volker von Torne was the Director of a German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered through no fault of how own, from terrible guilt after the war.

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Kit Fan's As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones. There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival. Divided into three parts, the book weaves back and forwards between East and West, past and present, art and memory, pivoting around a central sequence called `Genesis', an uncanny re-telling of Chinese creation myths in the language of the Authorised Version. The first part of the book is a brilliantly chromatic travelogue, while the collection ends with a more grounded sequence, `Twelve Months', focusing on a kind of diurnal poetic house-keeping, based on the poet's migrant life in Yorkshire.

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The latest in Arc's Translation Series brings poems from Sigurður Pálsson's ten collections written between 1980 and 2008 to a UK audience.Swirling with imagery, they reveal a poet committed to unearthing the joy of living and its connections to the natural world. This is a thrilling sweep across Pálsson's work: chronologies are upset, ideas run amok, views out onto the world close and open.Also available in limited-edition hardback: ISBN 9781906570590 (£12.99)This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.Sigurður Pálsson was born in 1948 in Skinnastadur, Iceland. A writer, translator, professor and film producer, he won the Icelandic Literary Award in 2007, the same year he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite by the President of France. Martin Regal lives in Reykjavik and teaches at the University of Iceland. His translation of Gisli Sursson's Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri was published by Penguin Classics in 2003 (ISBN 9780140447729).

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An intriguing set of short, deceptively simple poems, "The Book of the Snow" meditates on our relation to the austere beauty and elemental power of the midwinter scene. It is also a subtle, witty, occasionally savage critique of our philosophical and artistic complacency. While pretending to literary defeatism, Francois Jacqmin captivates us with the deft touch of an accomplished poet. Philip Mosley's beautifully modulated translation of the last collection to be published in the poet's lifetime, only two years before his death in 1992, makes available to English-language readers for the first time the work of one of Belgium's foremost francophone poets of the twentieth century.

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Six Georgian Poets brings us the work of the most outstanding literary representatives of what has been dubbed 'the Gagarin Generation". Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut who died tragically young, was an international celebrity and a hero of the Soviet Bloc. His space journey could be subversively interpreted not as one of the victories in the Cold War competition between two ideologically opposed superpowers, but as a daring breakout towards freedom. This generation of people born in an era of a growing resistance against the strictures of Soviet rule, a generation characterised by challenging the entrenched conformism of thought and action, is represented here by a diverse set of voices, each of which speaks out of an experience both personal and collective, giving us a rare insight into a culture and literature we need to know more about. The majority of the poems in this volume were translated in two workshops, the first of which was held in September 2014 in Tbilisi, Georgia, supported by the Georgian National Book Centre and the British Council, and the second in March 2015 in Aberystwyth, Wales, supported by Literature Across Frontiers. The workshop participants were: Alexandra Büchler, translator and director of Literature Across Frontiers; Nia Davies, poet, translator and Editor of Poetry Wales; Adham Smart, poet and translator; Stephen Watts, poet and translator; and Angela Jarman, editor at Arc Publications. The translators initially worked from literal translations supplied by the poets and others, but at both workshops they received help and advice from the playwright and translator, Davit Gabunia, whose contribution was invaluable. There are other poems included in this volume that were translated by individual translators outside the workshops. One such translator is Donald Rayfield, who was not part of either workshop; Stephen Watts and Adham Smart also completed a number of translations outside the workshop setting. Where this is the case, their names appear under the relevant translations. Poems where individual translators are not named were translated collaboratively by the workshop participants.

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Ellen Hinsey's new book-length sequence, The Illegal Age, is a powerful investigation into the twentieth-century's dark legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. It explores the enduring potential for human beings to set neighbour against neighbour and commit final acts of violence. A book of lyrical reflection and prophesy, The Illegal Age chronicles the arrival of a new, disquieting reality unfolding in our midst. As Marilyn Hacker has written, "In dialogue with Celan, Szymborska, Milosz... this is a daring text - for its political acuity, and for its demonstration of the power in poetry to recount, remember, move the heart while opening the mind." Written in parallel with her first-hand research into the rise of authoritarianism carried out over the last decade, Hinsey's volume warns that - rather than an "Age of Anxiety" - we may indeed be facing the start of the "Illegal Age".

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Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years.

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Virgil wrote The Georgics in the 30s BCE at a time of political uncertainty in the Roman state and although country matters are to the fore in the selections chosen and translated in this chapbook, there is also from time to time an underlying sense of unease. The passages from Books 1, 2 and 3 have an agricultural theme, dealing respectively with raising crops, raising trees, and breeding livestock and horses and from Book 4, with bee-keeping. The chapbook ends with the concluding passage of Book 4, Virgil's beautiful telling of the story of Orpheus and Euridice. This lively and entertaining translation from the Latin by the poet Fred Beake brings Virgil's original poem into such sharp focus for the reader of today that it is hard to believe that it was written over two thousand years ago.

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Mila Haugová has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one’s own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother’s childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugová overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugová’s poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.

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"I close my eyes and see poems written inside my head. I open them to copy them down. Through photos I see the poems with my eyes open. These are the translations and transcriptions of what I see." - John Kinsella

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Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one’s own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother’s childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world?Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugova’s poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.

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Stein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing about love and desire, and the despair that often attends them, he weaves together classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of the strongest human emotions.

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Known as a poet who spoke of the history and suffering of the Jewish people, Nelly Sachs was, at the time she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, highly regarded in her native Germany, frequently being described as a poet of reconciliation and healing, although whether she was is open to debate.Because of the complexity of her later poetry, she is often regarded as a difficult poet, but her work is not difficult to understand if it is read against the backdrop of the events that gave rise to it, and in the context of her own development as a poet. Jean Boase-Beier’s striking translations focus on what she sees as Sachs’ very particular voice, one of outrage, despair, and grief, but also of enquiry, of irony, and often of straightforward anger.This chapbook, by presenting a small number of poems from throughout the poet’s main writing years and providing some general background together with short contextual explanations to individual poems, gives new readers a reason to read Nelly Sachs.

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Michael O'Neill's Return of the Gift is a volume about what is given and what is lost. Writing unsentimentally and with insight about powerful subjects such as the death of his mother, caring for his father, and his own recent diagnosis of cancer, the poet speaks of and to his personal and historical life and also explores themes of elegy and friendship. Memories are woven vividly throughout a thematically varied yet coherent collection, in which a witty and moving pleasure in living and language is always to the fore.

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In Mara Bergman's first full collection, the poet travels from the tenements of New York City to the Sussex countryside, from childhood to motherhood, and beyond. Through a wide range of subjects - steelworkers and young apprentices, photographs and photograms, dolls in a local museum's hidden collection - she writes with a keen sense of time and place. These are probing poems, seeking to discover; poems with a sense of urgency. Here are poems about love, loss, friendship, family, fitting in and, ultimately, acceptance. They are infused with wonder and provide a fresh way of looking at the world.

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In Mara Bergman’s first full collection, the poet travels from the tenements of New York City to the Sussex countryside, from childhood to motherhood, and beyond. Through a wide range of subjects – steelworkers and young apprentices, photographs and photograms, dolls in a local museum’s hidden collection – she writes with a keen sense of time and place. These are probing poems, seeking to discover; poems with a sense of urgency. Here are poems about love, loss, friendship, family, fitting in and, ultimately, acceptance. They are infused with wonder and provide a fresh way of looking at the world.

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