Search results for ""Arc Publications""

In this masterful first book of original poems, Iain Galbraith explores how people’s actions and experiences shape not only their own lives but the world around them. His poems are full of sharp observations and a level of detail which ground the reader in whichever world he presents, and while the settings vary from the mundane to the epic the language never fails to retain a sense of the fantastical. Through his words Galbraith is able to to take us on an emotional journey through love, grief, hope and discontent. After years of experience writing and translating poetry, The True Height of the Ear acts as evidence of Galbraith’s comfort in writing in a variety of different styles, creating a book of poems which consistently entice his readers.

Read more less

Celebrated Icelandic writer Gerdur Kristny's Drapa is a novel-poem which takes its form from Old Norse shield poetry and its mood from modern Nordic crime. But the poem is no fiction: it is about a real woman's murder in the city of Reykjavik, and, through this lens, about all women's deaths. This is Viking poetry at its most contemporary.

Read more less

Referred to as `the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language', the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has been published in the original Spanish and in translation throughout the world. So it is remarkable that some of this Nobel Prize-winner's verse has never been published in English and this book goes a long way to filling this extraordinary gap. Edited and translated by Neruda's acclaimed biographer, Adam Feinstein, these brand-new versions begin in 1919, when the fifteen-year-old boy, still called Neftali Reyes, was feeling his literary way in Temuco, in southern Chile. The book follows him to the capital, Santiago, and to his first published collection, Crepusculario, in 1923, then on through many of his further collections up to his final works in the early 1970s. Neruda's poetry is a fusion of beautiful love poetry and politically engaged verse, lyrical and apocalyptic by turns, and in few poets can life and work be so intimately interwoven: Adam Feinstein provides an illuminating introduction which puts these poems in the context of a man of memorable actions as well as words.

Read more less

It is hard to imagine a time when coffee drinking was not part of every-day life and yet it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that it became widespread in Europe. The visit of the Turkish Ambassador to Louis XIV’s court in 1669 helped to make coffee-drinking fashionable in France, so it is not surprising that it was a Frenchman who chose to extol its delights, not to mention its health-giving properties, in a long poem written in Latin, a popular language for verse throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. L’Abbé Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore’s masterly translation.

Read more less

The Herring Lass explores human and animal migrations: how animals and birds survive extreme climate and resist assailants can provide reflections on our global engagements, the exodus of refugees. These poems consider the threshold between wilderness, history and social order where landscape becomes a place of violence, dispossession and loss. A woman's experience of fragmentation, exile, divorce, motherhood, is an undercurrent, her words wrestling with the consequences of these events.

Read more less

This chapbook presents not only a variety of moods and colours in Heine’s poems about the North Sea but also a loose narrative which takes us from the shore, to scenes aboard ship, and the return to harbour, ending with a pastoral scene in which the sea has been truly left behind. Written in free verse rather than the rhymed quatrains Heine usually used, these poems explore the intersections between myth and everyday life in vivid scenes which mirror the fluid motions and moods of the sea.

Read more less

“Like a great photographer, MARA BERGMAN celebrates the moment and detail at the core of memory. Together, her poems show the great changes families experience – the free and fearless life of a young woman set alongside a dying mother hanging on so she can hold a great-grandchild, the one-sided conversations we have with the dead. Her dynamism is infectious – you are drawn into this family’s wonder, love, compassion, grief and happiness. Bergman’s poems remind me of Pablo Neruda’s belief in the driving force of love: ‘Hold on to that, don’t let it get away …’ and one of the fi nal poems, ‘The Happiness’, delivers the book’s message: ‘Before it leaves, I will bury it deep enough to save.’ After reading these poems, you’ll feel braced and ready, you’ll feel wiser and more generous, you’ll want to hold on to moments that contain your own astonishment.” JACKIE WILLS

Read more less

Reading the Flowers began during Linda France's 2010-11 Leverhulme Residency at Moorbank, Newcastle University's Botanic Garden (now closed). This led to a tour of Botanic Gardens in the UK and abroad. Here nature and culture meet in poems looking at flowers cultivated and wild, trees in the garden and the rainforest, plants and creatures that live alongside them under the microscope of memory and imagination.

Read more less

Distinctive and innovatory, contemporary Galician poetry has a strong presence on the literary scene of Spain, continuing a centuries-old unbroken line of literary creation in the language of the region. In the thirteenth anthology in this series, we are presented with work written in the last thirty years by six talented and highly individual Galician poets. Two of them, Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo and Chus Pato, already have established literary careers, while the four younger writers are rapidly gaining recognition through recently published collections and prize awards. Having chosen six poets who are characterized by their constant examination of literary forms and exploration of new conceptual worlds, the editor, Manuela Palacios, has asked the poets themselves to make a choice from their own work for the anthology. The result is a collection of poems that grow from roots firmly planted in home soil but which reach out and flourish beyond the boundaries of a single literary tradition. Keith Payne's accomplished translation allows English-language readers access to this unfamiliar but infinitely exciting territory.

Read more less

Evocative, spiritual poems from a Pakistan-born poet living and working in the Scottish Highlands. Latif's work captures the moments of beauty, alienation, distance and intimacy he finds in the wilderness and remote towns of a region so often associated with emptiness, but which the poet shows us is rich with vivid life.

Read more less

An unsentimental, forensic account of the breakup of a marriage, told without rancour and with a humanitarian resolution. An exceptional first book.

Read more less

Hanoch Levin's poetry stands alone as a single volume in his collected works, which run to fifteen volumes of drama and prose. Levin's poetic voice - mordant, witty, irreverent, erotic and highly satirical, yet also whimsical and delicate - is arresting, distinctive and unusual. When this volume was published in Israel, it proved to be enormously popular and went through three editions in its first year and has continued to be reprinted since. This bilingual edition makes his poetry available to an English-lanugage readership for the first time - to date Levin is only known in the UK as a playwright.

Read more less

A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with all 33 of Rognvaldr's verses from the Orkneyinga Saga. While full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, the poems convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original.Rich narratives and old Norse mythology blend with familiar place-names and landscapes to create a peculiarly alluring, sometime comic, world that never quite settles around the reader, as if time travel is possible from a favourite armchair.

Read more less

Lucid narratives of family dramas, global warming, and conversations with Death make a riveting new collection from this prize-winning poet. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home - their engagement with the church, art and natural beauty provide sure-footed travelling companions. In an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with people and culture. This is not to suggest the poems make for comfortable reading: each poem's subject provides an opportunity to challenge and question its integrity. By turns mischievous and assured, this collection becomes more engrossing the more you read.

Read more less

Using this poetic form (of five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain) throughout to great effect, John Kinsella's latest collection is a work of ecological and political passion. The birds and animals of Western Australia, its landscape of vibrant colours and panoply of sounds are described in vivid detail, so much so that the reader almost feels part of this antipodean environment. And it is the ecological destruction of the environment and the politics behind it that are the target of the poet's rage and frustration. This is indeed a powerful and necessary work from a powerful and necessary poet who believes that poetry is one the most effective activist modes of expression and resistance we have.

Read more less

When Michael O'Neill senses 'gangs / of shadow' half-beckoning from twilit water, the moment is eerily alluring as well as scary. Fusions of feeling recur throughout a book that has something of the 'dash' and 'darkness' praised in 'Louis MacNeice', along with a strong responsiveness to the physical and visual experience of living. Formally adventurous and alert to change and movement, combining memorable phrasing with a reaching towards the unsayable, Gangs of Shadow brims with imagery of past, present and future; its poems 'seek to bear witness, and above all sing'.

Read more less

This extensive and wide-ranging selection is taken from three collections of the poetry of one of France's most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos. Hailed as the 'prophet' of the Surrealist movement by André Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work is completely underrepresented in the English language. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.

Read more less

This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.There is a reaching for the unsayable throughout this collection, whether it is thinking about the future, people's inner lives or the shadows of place, O'Neill is wholeheartedly engaged with the unfathomable nature of living. To read these poems is to be part of his exuberance for the physical and visual experience of living, be that lying in a field, being with loved ones or watching the movement of light through a day. Each moment is brimming with imagery of its past and future, so these poems bring out the mutability and movement that both blurs and pinpoints events.Michael O'Neill has lectured at Durham University since 1979, where he is a Professor of English. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. His critical studies include The All-Sustaining Air (OUP, 2007), an exploration of Romantic poetry's influence on poets since 1900. His first collection The Stripped Bed, was published by Collins Harvill in 1990, Arc published his second collection, Wheel, to critical acclaim.

Read more less

Poetry is one of the major forms of expression in both Africa and the Arab World, and this anthology gives a glimpse of the most representative voices of the French-speaking countries of these two regions. The past half-century has confirmed their work as poetry of great literary quality, full of a unique vitality and presence.The Traveller's Tree presents poems from Algeria (Mohammed Dib, Habib Tengour); Cameroon (Paul Dakeyo); Chad (Nimrod); Congo Brazzaville (Alain Mabanckou, Tchicaya U Tam Si); Democratic Republic of Congo (Kama Kamanda); Djibouti (A. Waberi); Ivory Coast (Tanella Boni); Lebanon (Venus Khoury-Ghata); Mauritius (Edouard Maunick, Khal Torabully); Morocco (Abdellatif Laâbi); Senegal (Babacar Sall, Lamine Sall) and Tunisia (Tahar Bekri, Chems Nadir, A Said).Patrick Williamson is an English poet, born in Madrid in 1960. His most recent poetry collection is Three Rivers / Trois Rivières (Harmattan, 2010). He has translated, among others, selected works by Tunisian poet Tahar Bekri and Québécois poet Gilles Cyr. He now lives near Paris.

Read more less

This first major gathering of the younger poets of Hungary witnesses to the poetics of a new post-1989 Europe. The poetics are still in the making but important poets appear and develop. They are writers whose mature work has been produced in the new social, psychological and political circumstances. They include major women poets such as Anna T. Szabo, and Krisztina Toth as well as highly acclaimed figures like Janos Terey and Andras Gerevich. The translators are chiefly poets of the same generation - Owen Sheers, Antony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky, whose work sits alongside writers long associated with the translation of Hungarian poetry: George Gomori, Clive Wilmer, Peter Zollman and the editor, George Szirtes.

Read more less

This collection brings together some of the finest poetry written over more than three decades by Cheran, one of the best known of Tamil poets today. His poetry charts the narrative of the ethnic conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka, bearing witness to the horrors and atrocities suffered by the Tamil people during these years.

Read more less

Almost painfully direct, the poems of 'The Secret History' testify to a new depth and a new tenderness in Michael Hulse's voice. The shadow of his dead father and the light of new love meet here in a collection that is impossible to put down and that lingers in the heart as much as in the memory.

Read more less

Wheel, as the title suggests, is full of revolving perspectives and throughout Michael O'Neill's beautifully modulated second collection, the poetry turns on an axis of opposites: self and others, here and there, childhood and middle-age, the present and the past. In the title-poem, an encounter with a tramp calls to mind the wheel of fortune; another poem depicts a 360° shot of a figure on a bridge; in yet another an adoption application prompts memories of circling a field. Elsewhere, a boy's phantasmal arm brushes his ear as he bowls, the dead form a band of souls, a merry-go-round melts into a hoop of light, and the rings of a tree uprooted in a gale expose its age. The poems often open out on to imagined states and virtual realities, and occasionally glimpse a dimension beyond time's whirligig. Deft in its shifts of tone and formally skilful, Wheel is a powerful and affecting collection.

Read more less

This collection covers the broad vision of mankind's history with a story of an individual journey, in the course of which the poet explores the cosmic and the microcosm, the immensities of Time and Space, of becoming and Being. The poems came during a pilgrimage in south-western Anatolia. Matur has created a personalised iconography based on Islamic references and imagery, and she presenting complex ideas with a simplicity of expression that is perfectly mirrored in Ruth Christie's translation.

Read more less

This selection is drawn from six collections which span Pusterla's poetic career from 1985 to 2011. Pusterla's themes are many and varied, and there is a spareness and austerity about his poetry - which one feels is more 'Alpine' than Swiss - born of the age-old struggle with a harsh natural environment.

Read more less

Ivana Milankov is one of Serbia's best-known poets whose poems question themselves as much as they question the world around them. Distances in space and time are reduced to the size of a line break as the poet searches for meaning in experience; despite this, however, it is a surprisingly transparent poetry, where a world is created in each poem, holding our attention through an underlying drama of reason and feeling. Milankov's poetry allows us to glimpse a modernism that draws part of its reference from the presence of the Roman Empire and surrounding ancient civilisations of the Middle East. In this outstanding translation by Zorica Petrovic and James Sutherland-Smith, we are dazzled by an imagery whose structure and development confounds our expectations.

Read more less

TRANSLATED BY PETER ORAMOn the Century of Anna Akhmatova's Birth(Joseph Brodsky, July 1989)The page and the fire, the millstone, the grain,the blade of the axe, the hacked crop of hair –God cares much for these, yet, as were they his own,for two words – Love, Forgiveness – still fonder's his care.In them beats a broken pulse, cracking of bones,the knock of the spade; and even-paced, soft(since life comes once only), more clear ring their tonesfrom the dead's mouths than from soundproofedheavens aloft.Great soul, over oceans my reverence I'm sendingfor finding them for us; to you, your remainsin our native soil sleeping, I give thanks for findingthe blest gift of speech in earth's deaf-mute domains.An anthology of poems by the major literary figures in Russia, writing to, about, or in memory of other poets, following a tradition which started in the early years of the twentieth century and continued through the subsequent decades, more or less until the millennium.With the great names of Russian poetry represented – among them Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bloch, Nabakov and Brodsky – this is a unique approach and promises to be a publication of great significance both in the UK and in Russia.Peter Oram is known both as a translator (from Russian and German) and as a poet, novelist and short story writer. He has had two novels published – Maddocks (Gomer Press), and The Rub (Starborn Books) and a collection of poems, White (Starborn Books).

Read more less

Born in San Sebastian, and still living and working there, the Basque poet Eli Tolaretxipi has published two collections of poetry in Spanish - "Amor muerto naturaleza muerta" ("Past Love Still Life") and "Los lazos del numero" ("The Loops of the Figure"). Although translated into French and Italian, she has had to wait until the publication of this volume for her poetry to appear in English in a fine translation by Philip Jenkins; Robert Crawford's excellent introduction to this volume helps to set her work in context.Eli Tolaretxipi's poetry has a rich sense of unease, the sense of unease we feel about love and perception. Her first collection draws on the language of the visual arts to portray the end of a failing relationship, while her second reflects on the nature of perception and poetry. "Still Life with Loops", as its title suggests, is made up of work from both these collections. Her poetry is similar in texture to that of some of the English-language women poets she has translated into Spanish, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath among them.

Read more less

The seventy-seven poems that form Meta KuA'ar's "Ljubljana" pay complex homage to her home city, the Slovenian capital. Although her vision of Ljubljana begins with places, buildings, bridges - the city the visitor sees - the poet very soon takes us to the insider's Ljubljana, a personal space alive with associations and images, rich with references. As she senses the depths and inter-connections under the city's skin, the city becomes a place of mind and memory, almost an extension of her body. At the same time, KuA'ar leads us into a wider meditation on the links between who and where we are, and between present experience and cultural heritage. In this beautifully modulated translation, and with introductory material that guides us through unfamiliar territory, the English-language reader can savour and enjoy the work of one of Slovenia's most individualistic and highly-regarded poets for the first time.

Read more less

Love StoryThey played games with each other –he with her head,she with his legs.Then he gave back her head,a little worn out,and she – I'm not surewhat she did with his legs,this is as much as I know.Kristin Dimitrova (translated by Andy Croft)This anthology is the result of an exciting cross-cultural 'experiment' in which four well-known British poets who live and work in the North-East of England – Andy Croft, Mark Robinson, Linda France and W. N. Herbert – worked collaboratively with four leading young Bulgarian poets – Kristin Dimitrova, Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and the male poet who goes under the name of 'VBV'. On a number of visits to Bulgaria, and working in a totally unfamiliar cultural environment on the very edge of Europe (the 'Near East'), the British poets got to know, and began to translate, the work of their Bulgarian counterparts. The Bulgarians visited Newcastle, embarking upon a relationship with the home-territories of the British poets (the 'North East'). The eight poets painstakingly refined their translations of the Bulgarian poems and the British poets contributed their own poems about visiting Bulgaria – not touristic notes but rather maps of the type of engagement found in the translations. "It seemed to me", W. N. Herbert writes, "that this project was as much about an encounter between people and places as it was about an encounter with texts. It was about the collisions and interactions of cultures, not just the friendships formed but the shifts in our historical imaginations."

Read more less

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 2Six Basque Poets is the second volume in a new series of bilingual anthologies which brings the work of contemporary poets from Europe and beyond to a wider English-language readership, a series which aims to keep a finger on the 'here and now' of international contemporary poetry.The six poets included in this collection have played a defining role in the development of Basque-language poetry in the last thirty years, since the arrival of what we have come to refer to as the 'democratic age' in Spain and the Basque Country. They represent the diversity of voices and poetic schools that populate the contemporary Basque literary scene, where a variety of tendencies has emerged in the recent decades: a range of different poetics, use of various narrative styles, a preference for a non-aesthetic approach that dwells within the quotidian and an emergence of female voices that reclaim other codes and other universes.Direct, moving and thought-provoking, the poetry in the present volume gives us insight into the preoccupations of a literary milieu which may be marginalized by its use of an ancient language not spoken outside its territory but which is as powerful and original in its production as any of the literary centres in today's Europe.The featured poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia.

Read more less

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 1The first volume in Arc's New Voices from Europe, a series of anthologies featuring the work of contemporary poets written in what might be described as the 'small' languages of Europe. The six young Slovenian poets - three male (Uros Zupan, Peter Semolic and Gregor Podlogar) and three female (Vida Mokrin-Pauer, Maja Vidmar and Natasa Velikonja) - who contribute to this anthology are from the post-postmodernist generation, the generation that came of age in the 1990s and that takes the freedoms of an independent nation-state as a given. Although their work may have more in common with that of poets in wider Europe (even North America) than with their predecessors in the Slovenian cultural tradition (as described in the illuminating introduction to this volume), they write with a distinctiveness and originality that, to quote from the introduction, "traverses the hitherto neglected terrain of colloquial speech, hybrid identities and cultural sensibilities of an urban capitalist milieu". This is a fascinating introduction to contemporary Slovenian poetry. "This is the first in a new series of bilingual anthologies from Arc, with the admirable aim of bringing the work of a younger generation of poets across Europe to a wider English-language readership. Six Slovenian Poets fulfils this endeavour with a varied selection of poets under forty, all published for the first time within the past decade and all, in their various ways, breaking with Slovenian literary tradition. These young poets reference the Beckhams, Dolce & Gabbana, Sinead O'Connor and Gilbert and George as well as Paz, Yeats and Auden: poems, as Gregor Podlogar comments in Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts' fine translation, for when '54 TV programmes / just aren't enough'."Modern Poetry in Translation

Read more less

In the Temple of a Patient GodTranslated by Ruth Christie with an introduction by Maureen FreelyVisible Poets series no. 12, parallel-text edition"To read Bejan Matur is to walk into a windswept desert strewn with bones and broken bodies and stones stained red by absent gods. Nothing is whole; nothing explains itself; nothing lasts. Horsemen gallop out of the night only to fade into the mountains on the horizon. Gravestones line the roads. Ruined houses howl with wind while shepherds sing dirges about a shattered, scattered tribe left to wander in the dark. It is a haunted, desolate and fragmented landscape in which every stone glows with a grief beyond words...""[Matur's] poems are jagged shards that stand together only to expose history as a myth. But it is still possible to see them as children of her childhood (she comes from a Kurdish Alevi family and grew up in south-eastern Turkey at a time of virtual civil war). And it is possible, when reading her poems, to imagine what that might mean. It is evident in their very shape, for Matur carves away at her images until she's stripped them down to the anguish at their heart. She claims no literary ancestors, drawing instead upon the oral traditions of her childhood...""It is almost as if her words are themselves gods, animating everything they inhabit. And here we come to the central paradox of Matur's poetry. Matur does not write in Kurdish, the banned, and therefore private, language of her early childhood. She writes in Turkish, the language in which she was educated — one might almost say exiled... She talks on the one hand of her Turkish being stronger than her Kurdish. And then she talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages. Words never forget their spiritual histories... She speaks of cutting her poems back and back, shaving them down to the bone until she has found the old word inside the new word, the Turkish poem that owes its haunting power to Kurdish.""So she is chipping and carving for a reason. Her dedication to this cause is absolute, and it takes her far beyond the questions raised by her own history. And it's this that makes her a world poet of the highest order."- Maureen Freely (from her Introduction to In the Temple of an Ancient God)

Read more less

"One of the most powerful recent achievements of the poet who has been called 'the chronicler of the 20th century', and recognised as one of Europe's outstanding artists. I am haunted by the vision of history and politics which I draw from Rózewicz." Tom PaulinIntroduced by Adam Czerniawski.Translated by Tony Howard and Barbara Plebanek.

Read more less

This anthology breaks new ground in the English speaking world by publishing translations of poems by Polish writers all under the age of forty five. It reflects the range of different writing practices that have flourished in various parts of Poland over the last fifteen years, and tries to acheive a balance between them.Practically all the work in this selection was written in the post-Communist period but in cultural historical terms it reflects the evolution of a sensibility that began to emerge in the mid 1980's when Polish poetry was being realigned contentiously with newly visible traditions of European and American writing.

Read more less

Born in Victoria, Katherine Gallagher now lives in London. 'Tigers on the Silk Road' is her third collection of poetry and has been described as '...a powerful, personal journey through contrasting landscapes...'. Gallagher's previous collection of poems won the Brisbane Warana Poetry Prize.

Read more less

"In a time when western culture generates most of its symbols through the distortions of television, Mila Haugová retains the remarkable ability to sing of the symbolic heights and depths of experience. Bold, iconic, and revelatory, these translations do great services to the poems of a major Central European writer." Andy BrownIntroduction by Fiona Sampson.Translated by James and Vera Sutherland.

Read more less

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 6The sixth in a much-praised series of bi-lingual anthologies which focus on the 'smaller' languages of Europe, and an ideal introduction to the 'here and now' of Slovak poetry.The sixth anthology in Arc's acclaimed series, this book features the work of six of Slovakia's leading poets: Ján Buzássy, Mila Haugová, Kamil Peteraj, Daniel Hevier, Peter Repka and Ivan Štrpka. With an introductory essay by translator Igor Hochel which sets the poets within a wider literary context, this bi-lingual edition features the Slovak original and the English translation on facing pages.

Read more less

'Salvatore Quasimodo was born-and lived-through historical tragedies which impressed his mind for ever. What one hears in his lines are the tears of mankind and its wail. Sonzogni and Dawe have captured the singular strength of Quasimodo and heard the penetrating voices of humanity. Their translations of this particular poet are a beautiful work of rendering history in rhyme and do more than justice to the art and the feelings of Salvatore Quasimodo. "The Night Fountain" should be read and re-read, learned and re-learned, and must be at hand to every reader who can only gain from its penetrating elegy' - Allen Mandelbaum, Kenan Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University, USA.'"The Night Fountain" discloses a great poet in the making, now veering into Expressionism, now surreal, but always with an imaginative prosody and a voice that admits us into its intimacy. There is at once abundance and refinement here, and many of the elements that go into his great work. The translations are resourceful and inventive, keeping faith with the movement of the originals' - Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry, University of Glasgow.

Read more less

Jan Baeke, the award-winning Dutch poet, has, in Greater than the Facts (Groter dan de feiten, 2007), created an intriguing filmic world in which tensions are rife and nothing is quite as it seems. It is a world whose elements keep recurring, coalescing little by little into dreamlike leitmotifs – a bus journey, a hotel room, dogs, cigarettes, fire, a blind man, a canary, a man and a woman in love. And love, however fragile it may be, is a major theme of this collection, for “where there’s fire, there’s warmth for two”. Antoinette Fawcett’s poetically sensitive translation gives a clear sense of Baeke’s style and poetic drive, and enables the English-speaking reader to explore in full this key collection in Baeke’s œuvre.

Read more less

Egill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Erikr Bloodax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill's poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve.

Read more less

Bloodhoof is a compulsively modern recasting of the ancient Eddic poem Skírnimál – a minimalist epic telling of the abduction of Gerður Gymisdóttir from a land of giants and her eventual return from the court of Freyr with her beloved son. The journey is full of iron-hard rocks, ice and serpents, and fields of corn whispering in the breeze.Bloodhoof is a story of "ghosts and long-dead heroes" – a game of thrones that will linger in the memory. Parallel-text verse in Icelandic and English.Gerður Kristný was born in Reykyavik in 1970. She has produced 18 books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as children's books and poetry. Her work recently featured in the anthology Best European Fiction 2012, and in the October 2011 issue of Words Without Borders. She has also been a Featured Poet in Eyewear magazine. Her numerous prizes include the Icelandic Literature Prize in 2010 for Bloodhoof.Rory McTurk is Emeritus Professor of Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds, and the editor of the Blackwell's Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (2007).This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

Read more less

There has always been an intense physicality to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for geographic groundedness and a biographical perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest writers of his generation. What is most striking about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of the relentless violence to which we have all become far too inured. There is hardly a Black British writer working today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable debt, whether they know it or not.

Read more less

Lucid narratives of family dramas, global warming, and conversations with Death make a riveting new collection from this prize-winning poet. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, a Staffordshire village and home, their engagement with the church, art and natural beauty provide sure-footed travelling companions. The second section is an extended sequence, in which Death relates stories of her encounters with people and culture.

Read more less

Yannis Kondos is one of the most notable and representative of a generation of Greek poets (the 'Generation of Contention') born at the end of the Second World War, in whose poetry the themes of social protest, existential anguish, death, life's absurdities, technology and consumerism are presented through vivid images which link the real and the imaginary, the mundane and the universal, the rational and the ridiculous. Introduction and translation by David Constantine.

Read more less