Search results for ""carcanet press""
Carcanet Press Ltd Egress: New Openings in Literary Art
A magazine of new writing featuring fiction, essays and art by NICOLE TRESKA, GARY LUTZ, VICTORIA LANCELOTTA, JASON SCHWARTZ, KATHRYN SCANLAN, RUSSELL PERSSON, CATHERINE FOULKROD, ROBB TODD, ROSIE SNAJDR, DARYL SCROGGINS, JULIE REVERB, STEPHEN MORTLAND, KATE WYER, GORDON LISH, WAYNE HOGAN, LILY HACKETT, MICHAEL CUGLIETTA, CATHY SWEENEY, BRAD PHILIPS, CARRIE COOPERIDER, CHRIS KOHLER, NICOLETTE POLEK, BABAK LAKGHOMI, NATALIE FERRIS
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Ethiopia Boy
Chris Beckett grew up in 1960s Ethiopia, a country he describes as a 'barefoot empire, home of black-maned lions ...old priests decked out like butterflies and blazing young singers of Ethio-jazz'. "Ethiopia Boy" plunges the reader into praise poems that sing and boast and glory in the colours and textures of this extraordinary country. Here is a world of feasting on spicy kikwot and of famine sucking the water from rivers, of lion buses and a prayer child, where Earth sings greetings to the feet that walk on her. Haunted by the memory of his friend Abebe, the cook's son, Beckett celebrates and laments a lost boyhood in poems of vivid immediacy. Cover painting: "Isao Miura", "Crossing the Water" (oil on canvas). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd The Observances
Winner of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Award. In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking debut collection explores perception, the poet's eye and ear trained on distances that stretch beyond comfort zones. This is a book full of movement: even quiet reflections on home and family life are rarely still. Throughout the collection Miller dwells on the unfixed and restless image and shows herself as subject to it - to the difficult illusion of physical energy in sculpture, to the changeability of skies and the insistent rhythm and presence of the sea.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Taking Mesopotamia
Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis's search for her lost father - the young South Wales Borderer who fought in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements, formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq wars. It also includes translations of a number of the poems into Arabic, and photographs taken by Lewis's father on campaign in 1916. Woven throughout the book is a strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in four thousand years.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd To the War Poets
In To the War Poets John Greening sends dispatches across the decades. In a sequence of verse letters he addresses the poets of the First World War directly, making connections yet always aware of distance: 'No larks, / just the passing of traffic.' Greening explores 'Englishness', but also, in his translations from German poets, goes beyond it. From the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial in 1939 to the security forces' shut-down of Heathrow airport in 2006, the presence or threat of conflict underlies Greening's precise, unsentimental writing.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Bugs
Both heartening and heartbreaking, this collection of poems tells the stories of life of all sizesfrom microscopic parasitic worms to the lives of massive planets. Full of characters facing the guilt and terror of life, this examination embraces literary influences from all over the world, learning from the cultural difficulties and legacies left behind.Revealing the far-reaching effects of everyday occurrences, this remarkable compilation follows people as they go about their lives and find themselves caught up in astounding public and private events."
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems in English
Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this "Collected Poems in English" for the first time gathers all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. His own efforts to translate his work, and the poems he wrote directly in English, are ambitious: the poetic "conceit" is for him functional, as it was in the 17th century, a tool for prising open difficult truths, making vertiginous connections. Susan Sontag speaks of the poems' "extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry's 'job' (a much used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is accelerated thinking".
£30.00
Carcanet Press Ltd New Collected Poems
The first "Collected Poems" of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was published by Carcanet in 1982. Since then, more of her work has come to light, including some of the most moving and personal poems she ever wrote. This work presents her poems, with expanded notes, a chronology and an authoritative introduction.
£25.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Elementary Morality
Raymond Queneau (1903-76) was born at Le Havre in 1903, where he was educated before studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Between 1924 and 1929 Queneau was active in the surrealist movement and composed its manifesto, "Permettez!". Queneau collaborated with a number of Nouvelle Vague film directors, most successfully with Louis Malle's 1960 adaptation of his novel "Zazie dans le metro". Also, Juliette Greco made popular his song "Si tu t'imagines." In 1951, Queneau was elected to the Goncourt Academy. He died on October 26, 1976.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Goldengrove
Presents a varied selection of poems from "Travelling Mercies" (2001) and "Controlling the Silver" (2004), together with twenty other poems. Moving between standard English and the speech of her guinea woman grandmother, and between story and song, the author aims to bring dignity to the everyday and grace to all our experiences.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Life End of
Explores the meanings and non-meanings to which, in the end, life and art lead us.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd In My Father's House
A quick-tempered grandmother is singing; The Mikado is performed in an African village: David Kinloch explores his relationship with his father in unexpected and affectionate terms. An extended sequence of poems moves from personal memory to reflect on the values embodied in such cultural father figures as the explorer David Livingstone and the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Translations of poems by Paul Celan and others into vivid Scots weave through the sequence, illuminating the disturbing connections between patriarchy and twentieth-century violence. In contrast, moving and humorous 'dissections' of adult relationships evoke images of the body both scientific and spiritual. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father "and then/I let him go,/but this moment/which is far the hardest pain/remains". But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; [...] and a most impressive long poem, 'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked Middle East of the seventeenth century.'
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Making the Beds for the Dead
The title sequence of Making the Beds for the Dead charts the journey of a virus in 'the plague year'. Come from outer space, it travels - on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard - into the very heart of our lives. The poet includes personal, verses and stories from farmers in her family and neighbourhood. The open structure allows the Gillian Clarke to include her seven rock poems, written for the National Botanic Garden of Wales; her poems based in archaeology; and her poems about war, and urban violence. There is an instinctive and a deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book. The poet remains true to her landscapes and her nation. The sequence 'The Physicians of Myddfai', nine sonnets for Aberglasne, and much else is included in this characteristically generous and engaging volume by Wales' best-loved poet.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd God's Breakfast
After four long silent years - his last poetic utterance in volume form having been his millennium What? Again? Selected Poems - Frank Kuppner breaks our poetic fast with a major new compendium, effectively three heaped servings in one. Kuppner is renowned as a superior Glaswegian wit and Man of Feeling. The qualities he displays he also imparts. In The Uninvited Guest we encounter Kuppner the Classicist. A new classical world emerges in a strangely edited riot of epigrams - 782 of them, and annotations. Then, in West Aland, a massively important writer and thinker is put firmly, if great-souledly, in his place; the poem is subtitled 'Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil'. Finally he heaps on our plate a dazzling collection of individual new poems. Such abundance is humbling: it is difficult to describe in advance what is in posse a God's breakfast.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) published 13 volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1936 - crucial transitional years in the evolution of modern poetry. His early poems were written under the shadow of the Rossettis, Swinburne and William Morris, but Ford outgrew their heady late-Victorian lyricism, developing a voice that was natural, impressionistic and ironic. This selection of his verse traces his development from the haunting poignancy of his early poems to his later style, which was to be so influential in the development of Modernism. Ezra Pound considered him to be the best lyric poet in England, and it was Ford who taught Pound that "poetry should be as well written as prose". He transformed Pound's style and, through Pound, the styles of Yeats and Eliot.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Manhandling the Deity
These poems of religiously shaped place and passion follow three offices of the church, leading toward a world blessed by reason. The voice is that of an Everyman fallen from grace who has the boldness to trust in the possibility of belief. Single poems and sequences, metered and free verse, make up this collection, in which the Psalms have taken flesh with the passion that King David knew and the grace that the Catholic mystics attest to.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd First of the Last Chances
Poet Sophie Hannah returns with a collection of poems that explore and celebrate strong feelings: love, hate, anger, hope - and which strip away the veils of hypocrisy and pretence from all aspects of everyday life.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Anatolikon
This book is two in one: "The Anatolikon", published in Great Britain for the first time, and a collection of new poems entitled "To the City". John Ash remains a savage wit, an elegist, a poet of celebration, and one who refuses to let his work be assimilated into orthodoxy or predictability.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
This edition of Burns Singer's poems reprints most of the Collected Poems of 1970, adding uncollected and unpublished material from the interim period. The work is arranged chronologically as far as possible and includes notes.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Swarm
"Swarm", Jorie Graham's eighth volume of poetry, is a book-length sequence which sets out to encounter destiny, Eros and law. She negotiates passionately with those powers that human beings feel themselves subject to: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love.
£9.23
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
A collection of poems by C.H. Sisson. This text shows how the author grounds his work in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and recalls the work of Eliot and Pound, and Hardy and Edward Thomas.
£25.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Severn and Somme
This volume includes Gurney's early small volumes of verse, "Severn and Somme" (1917) and "War's Embers" (1919).
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Translations
This collection includes Edwin Morgan's Mayakovsky translated into Scots, and his Voznesensky, Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the French - Leopardi, Quasimodo, Montale, Guillevic, Prevert and Michaux; and also Heine, Lorca, Cernuda, Brecht, Enzensburger and Braga.
£29.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Mirrorwork
In her second collection of poetry, Mimi Khalvati uses the image of Islamic mirror-mosaic - found in palaces, barber shops and kebab houses. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act a mirror tryptych, their themes of art, nature, domestic life, memory, east and west draw the other poems together. She establishes a voice and questions its integrity. In many ways, it is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.
£9.61
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems
This work draws on John Ash's four collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. Among contemporary British poets he is known for his wit, formal ambition and his Byzantine range.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd King of Britain's Daughter
"The King of Britain's Daughter" has been specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the Mabinogion of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest, the family farm, where the giant's footprint is preserved as a rock pool, and Fforest and Welsh legend have provided the inspiration for this part of the book, which also contains a variety of other vivid and memorable poems.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Carmina
The love poems of one of the most influential writers of antiquity, translated by the award-winning Len Krisak.
£12.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Gumiguru
Gumiguru is the tenth month of the Shona calendar - a month of dryness and heat before the first rains fall and rejuvenate the land. Togara Muzanenhamo's second collection is a cycle of poems distilling the experiences of a decade into one calendar year, framed through the natural and agricultural landscapes of Zimbabwe.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems Eavan Boland
New and selected poems by Ireland's most acclaimed contemporary female poet.
£12.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Her Birth
The death of a baby daughter inspires a candid, piercing study of grief in this Forward Prize-shortlisted collection by Rebecca Goss.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Fall In Ghosts
This selection of Blunden's prose about the First World War includes the complete text of De bello germanico, his first, lively sketch of the war as he lived it in 1916.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Steep Tea
Singapore-born poet Jee Leong Koh's first book to be published in Great Britain.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Ninjas
Delving into new worlds populated by robots, witches, talking pandas, and giant stags, this collection offers funny, haunting, and heartbreaking poems. Highlighting the poet's dazzling lyrical instincts balanced by her stinging wit, it moves between high art, pop culture, science fiction, and detective fiction to produce a series of unforgettable surprises. The characters herein speak from the page, from the lonely android seeking love in the wrong places to Sherlock Holmes's hunting for a Yeti in Tibet. By searching out the heart of every real or fantastical situation, this compilation explores what it means to be human.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Valparaiso
Valparaiso is a book of poems begun at sea on an Irish research ship on which Mary O'Malley was a resident poet. It is a book of searches and discoveries. As the scientists chart a course dictated by the demands of their own researches, as Ireland is careering from boom into bust, Mary O'Malley explores the science of going under and staying afloat. What are the effects of such transformations on the imagination? A key poem, 'Out', escapes from the creative lockdown that the Irish boomtime entailed. She returns to an altered place, and is herself changed by an odyssey that has taken her around the Atlantic and Europe to a kind of homecoming.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Andrew Crozier Reader
Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, 'becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of ...being alive', and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language. Ian Brinton, editor of The Use of English until 2011 and author of Contemporary Poetry since 1990, has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier's poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.
£18.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Continental Shelf
"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing section which gives its title to the book. Fred D'Aguiar celebrates individuals and the histories embedded in places. He conjures up a sensuous childhood world of characters, stories, a loved particularity - a smell of bitumen, the local hero who comes last in a National Cycle Championship, a distant train's incantation of 'greenheart, mora, baromalli' - impressions so distinct and powerful that 'fumes - spin my head/Back whenever I catch a whiff from a car'. In D'Aguiar's Elegies for the thirty-three people who died in Virginia, that loss of unique and particular individuals is mourned, in a scrutiny of what civil and private life has become, and how, alongside grief, we may recover delight in the world. In his first full-length collection since "Bill of Rights" (1998), D'Aguiar celebrates how imagination and memory enable us to cope with violence and death. Love, above all, is the mainstay.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd The Shark Nursery
In Mary O'Malley's new collection, the world's at a precarious tipping point; trust in language is breaking down. The poet gives voices to the wolf, the seal and shark, finding new language against peril.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Not a Moment Too Soon
Frank Kuppner's new book consists of three hilarious, philosophical, existential sequences: The Liberating Vertigo of a Final Passage of Meaning, Not Quite the Greatest Story Never Told, and Not Quite a False Fresh Start.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Coco Island
Coco Island is an integrous first collection from the Jamaican poet and novelist Christine Roseeta Walker, exploring the bittersweet effects of a postcolonial world.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Goddamned Selected Poems
A collection of new and selected poems about life, love, and growing older.
£16.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Come Here To This Gate
Come Here to This Gate is a three-part collection, focusing variously on caring for an alcoholic father with dementia, the personal and global conflicts that shape our lives, and what happens when imps, ghosts and boggarts have to reckon with the modern world.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 267
The September-October 2022 issue. Anthony Vahni Capildeo explores mourning. Stav Poleg travels between languages. Anthony Rudolf evokes being a life model for Paula Rego. Jeffrey Meyers reflects on W.H. Auden. Nicolas Tredell considers computers as poets. New to PN Review this issue: Kyoka Hadano, Fawzia Muradali Kane, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Kudzai Zinyemba. And more...
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd In the Quaker Hotel
In the title poem, the speaker sits at the window of a small hotel room. The room is a holding zone, a temporary stopping-place between memory and possibility. In the Quaker Hotel is full of questions about the world. Rooted in nature, the poems are fearful for it. They move out through identifiable landscapes (Merseyside, north Wales, Nova Scotia, southern France) to off-kilter, tilted places beyond our immediate reality. We are temporary guests in these places and in our own lives. Who will come after us, how will they see things: 'who will tend the bees / in the communal garden'? Helen Tookey experiments with form and theme, as in her earlier books Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize) and City of Departures (Carcanet, 2019, shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection).
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Shadow and Refrain
Alex Wong's first collection, Poems Without Irony (2016), was a book that took nothing for granted, that broke through to the particularity of things and experiences, distrusting and defying generality. Elaine Feinstein celebrated the 'extraordinarily new rhetoric for his love poetry' whilst David Morley commended his 'linguistic finesse'. Shadow and Refrain presses on, less coyly, with similar themes and a tenacious syntax that gorgeously persists until it has secured its quarry, the long sentences - sometimes running through several stanzas - asking to be read aloud to be secured. As the poet insists, 'These poems are designed to be read using the mouth' - for sensation even if not for fully voiced sound. This book, like the first, is troubled by the difficulty of frank expression in the more private nooks of day-to-day life, and is driven to find curious routes into the centres of experiences that resist simpler articulation. Some poems are imagined addresses to inaccessible friends, or engagements with significant places and objects. Intimacy is repeatedly probed, the processes by which it can be attained and lost, the preoccupations it brings with it and leaves behind.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd One, Two
In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd As Best We Can
As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.
£11.03
Carcanet Press Ltd Growlery
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.
£11.03
Carcanet Press Ltd Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.
£16.99