Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

This seventh anthology in the series includes nineteen poets, new writers and some more widely known.

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"Yellow Studio", Stephen Romer's fourth book of poems, is furnished with the poems of that middle of the life where amorous bewilderment, rueful satire and the bitter-sweet memory conduct their urgent dialogue. Exploring the mystifying link between sacred and erotic love, Romer identifies the source of art itself, a place of creation and refuge, the yellow studio of the title poem. It is the lighted room of childhood, a vulnerable private place the adult tries to recreate. Formal acts of remembrance are attempts to identify what lies ahead as much as to preserve the shadows. Here Romer, with innocence and urbanity, takes stock of past and future.

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Nigel Forde is fascinated by things in the process of change: music, the momentary epiphany, the precarious balance of twilight rather than night or day. The poems, written over a period of years, meditate on memory and landscape: in the unremarkable and evanescent lives can find their greatest clarity. Two central sequences, 'A Map of the Territory' and 'Touchstones', express ways of remaking memories in language. 'Touchstones', a Hungarian sonnet sequence, explores the creative possibilities of strict poetic forms. 'A Map of the Territory' attempts both truth to events and to what distance has made of them. The collection maps a landscape and the mind that it has shaped.

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This is the second Oxford poetry anthology which represents works of the Oxford poetry list.

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By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging and exploratory, Fiona Sampson's poetry remakes the spiritual and physical metaphors by which we live.

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This second volume of extracts from Frederick Raphael's notebooks (never a diary) covers the first five years of the 1970s. It describes and analyses a variety of experiences which are always opportunities for the precise definition of people, places and events.

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The "Contes et nouvelles en vers" are the fruit of the author's wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccacio's "Decameron", Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso", Rabelais and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females, addled males, proved the inspiration for some richly inventive plotting.

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Some of the speakers in this poetry collection are ancient, some modern, and all ask questions dictated by their situations in life and history. The characters are for the most part stoical and pessimistic, but their pessimism is remote from the cynicism and irony of our age.

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From the author of "Time Signatures", this is a collection of love poems which explore the cultural and individual difficulties of desire and loss.

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These sometimes savage, sometimes wry and rueful, always inventive stories evoke the reality of the South Pacific Zealand and environs - with its "more market economy" tourists and its wacky national pride. Several of the pieces, first collected in "The New Land", won the 1990 Buckland Award for the best work of literature published in New Zealand. To "South Pacific" Bill Manhire adds new tales and other work. There's a do-it-yourself murder mystery, the story of an assassination attempt on the Queen, the hilarious account of a Writers' Congress in Kuala Lumpur, and an unsettling, futuristic tale set in 1999. A vein of satire runs through Bill Manhire's stories. Yet, rooted as many of them are in a particular place and time, the laughter they generate is anything but local.

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In his poem 'Modern Painters' Dan Burt looks at the twentieth century and its aftermath through the shattered lens of Ruskin's famous book and the work of certain modern painters. 'We look like this after things fall apart;/The painting is the autopsy report,' reflecting on two World Wars, stepping over the corpse of the Enlightenment. His poems are steady, hard, truth-telling in the way of the painters he most admires, and proof against sentiment. He matches the scale of his concerns with a substantial large- and small-scale poetic architecture, lyrical, philosophical, elegiac or satirical as appropriate. Dan Burt, a master of traditional forms, has published two chapbooks and an art book. This is his first full collection and includes poems, sequences and his celebrated prose memoir 'Certain Windows'.

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"Glass is Elastic" is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see - what do we know - in a world experienced through lenses and screens? 'Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing'. Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye's lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling. A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial. In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple every day, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world. Cover photograph Paul Maddern, Keel 14. Copyright A[copyright] Paul Maddern, reproduced by permission.

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From his first wartime collection evoking a generation's experience of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the 'vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar', to the consolatory wisdom of the Last Poems of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poet of the familiar and ordinary made extraordinary. Mundane details, observed with Fuller's tolerant humour and acute eye, reveal depths and dissonances from which a civilised life may be created: the unremarkable year 'of painting the shed ...Is also that of harmonies / That have made one's life and art for evermore off-key'. On the centenary of Fuller's birth, this generous selection, introduced by John Fuller, the poet's son, and with an afterword by Neil Powell, Fuller's biographer, brings to a new generation of readers the work of one of the essential twentieth-century poets.

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"Cold Eye" is a collaboration between an artist and a poet to examine the creative process. The work yokes ten images with ten poems and in so doing one explores the other: text uses apposition to excavate image and its genesis, and image illuminates text and its content. Image and text share a sense of doubt which permeates the work and its subjects. The drive to present a clear, cold view of them is always paramount.

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Archimedes enjoyed from childhood a natural communion with Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and protector of his city-state. This book takes us on a pilgrimage to Eleusis, to Thermopylae, and to Alexandria and the Egypt of the Ptolemies. It demonstrates that the wisdom of the ancients is central to the search for truths about ourselves and our cosmos.

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Constellations, Ian Pindar's second collection, begins with a celebration of sunlight, but ends with the appearance of the moon, the coming of winter, snow and 'perpetual night'. There are as many poems as there are constellations in the celestial sphere, although Pindar never abandons what he calls 'the Plane of Matter'. In poems of haunting beauty the poet takes us from a summer love affair by the sea to the coming of war and its aftermath. The work as a whole is a profound meditation upon sex, love, parenthood, the power of dreams and memory, and the passing of time, as well as being and mortality, literature and language, and the place of poetry in the modern world.

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Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. 'Do you mean to say you've married / an apprentice fitter and come all this way?' an official asks the poet's grandmother who, trusting to luck, emigrates to a new life in South Africa after the First World War. An ironic and grateful presence, Powell observes the lives that he inherits. Perspectives shift with time: an old photograph shows his mother 'more beautiful and happier than I remember her', his father 'looking for once the statesman he should have been'. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by Powell's grandmother of her life in South Africa: a feckless husband, a 483-mile trek with horse and covered wagon, violence and poverty. There's also a shorter, teasingly fictional narrative and a sequence about the life of a grand piano. Other poems deal with childhood, leaving home and first love; a park in Kent and a wood in Suffolk; an old photograph of the Strand and Louis Armstrong's first solo; the London bombers of 2005; and, finally, two old friends recalled in very different elegies. Meditative, wry, melancholy and celebratory, this is Neil Powell is at his most versatile and memorable.

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"Eye of the Hare" affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of "The Psalms", John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towards the planet and the needs of society. Deane revives the language of sacrament and celebration with raw and tender grace; in sonnets, narratives and lyrics Eye of the Hare advances towards redemption. In the book's final section. Deane honours the places and landscapes of Achill, that beautiful, demanding island off the west coast of Ireland.

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Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age shaped by the Suez crisis and the Cold War. The barbarities of the twentieth century haunt the shadows; there is comfort in the graces of domestic life, in friendships and long memories, in cats and gardens and eccentricities. A sequence of poems honours the life of a scholarly father-in-law who fought in the Great War. In a parallel autobiographical sequence, 'Playtime in a Cold City', three undergraduate years in the 1950s become a touchstone for a lost pastoral, before the 'fields of youth' fade to memory, 'the lit faces of dead friends, /laughing'. Generous, witty and shrewd, Borrowed Landscapes affirms Scupham's belief that when a 'murderous crew' of sorcerer's apprentices 'turn is to was', there is 'only a pen to turn was to is'.

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Clive Wilmer's New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Hagia Sophia', where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer's poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer's work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred's Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which - conversational in tone and formal in composition - make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer's translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

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Emporium, Ian Pindar's first collection, is stocked with curiosities, jokes and horrors. Step through the door and discover Big Bumperton on his bicycle, Mrs Beltinska in her bath, Monsieur P. on holiday, a transfixed girl in blue jeans, a wasp, two lascivious figs and a god who wanders shopping arcades 'enhaloed in black flames of longing and dread'. A chain letter travels across centuries of poetry, from Langland to Maxine Chernoff; deep in a snowy forest, seen only by wolves, a mysterious machine is resonating - Pindar maps a surreal hinterland where the dark humour of absurdity lies in wait.

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The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across 'all the empty places' of the world.

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The January-February 2021 issue.; Editorial considers the British Library's controversial Printed Heritage Provenance Research report and its negative impact on their welcome anti-racism policy.; Jason Allen-Paisant considers blackness and landscape.; Vahni Capildeo on trees and the poetry of ecology.; John Clegg's 'Marianne Moore Buys Some Bananas'.; Jonathan E. Hirschfeld sculpts Czeslaw Milosz (illustrated).; New poetry by Tara Bergin, Miles Burrows, and Nina Bogin.; New to PN Review this issue: Colm Tóibín, Daisy Fried, Alexey Shelvakh, and Camille Ralphs.; And more...

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The July-August 2020 issue. Robyn Marsack celebrates Edwin Morgan's centenary. Frederic Raphael's polemic about the pandemic. Kirsty Gunn on Lockdown. Interviews with the great American poet Douglas Crace, with Forward Prize 2020 shortlisted poet Caroline Bird, and the major Irish poet John McAuliffe. New poetry by Sean O'Brien, Jane Draycott, and John Birtwhistle. New to PN Review this issue: Rachel Spence, Edmund Keeley, Maya C. Popa, and Hugh Haughton. And more...

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The May-June 2019 issue. Memoirs of Brodsky in Leningrad and Ginsberg in Prague; News: Colombia arrests man for trafficking in poetry; Andy Croft deconstructs the poetry industry; East meets West in `A New Divan’; Vahni Capildeo considers shipwrecks; New poetry from Lisa Kelly, Sean O’Brien, Joe Carrick-Varty and others; New to PN Review this issue: Charles Bernstein, Jennifer Edgecombe, Michael Farrell and Samira Negrouche; and more...

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Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur `A.C.’ Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK. A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the `right language’, which `exists somewhere / Like a country’. His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual’s struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.

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stack is a book-length poem, and the début Carcanet title of one of the UK’s rising poetry talents. Described by its author as a document of `minimalist interventions’, the small descriptions that make up stack capture seemingly – and actually – everyday scenes, `found’ images from walks, tabletops, cafés, bus stops, and the conveyor belt of still-lives that is the poet’s imagination. Following in the footsteps of minimalists such as Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier and Robert Lax, Davies has dedicated much of his life as a writer so far to finding innovative ways of saying less. Resisting the poetic trend of showing why ordinary things are magical, his writing shows why ordinary things are ordinary: a packet of beef, the roof of a shed, computer stuff in a computer bag. Yet there is a philosophical aspect to stack. The uncanny precision of its images, the tiny disruptions in grammar and syntax, feel like symptoms of language’s attempt, and failure, to reflect the world. Each time words move in to capture it, reality slips: something is added, or something is lost. stack can be read as a list of discrete compositions, a series of connected images, or a set of modular combinations. What binds the poem is Davies’s flair for slow, disinterested inspection. The result is a poem that invites its readers to linger, to dally – a welcome curative for our rapid-fire world.

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The centrepiece of 'Silent Highway' is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the 'Windrush' bringing immigrants from Jamaica, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi and the 'Marchioness' disaster, via the Fire of London and many incidents in which the river has been spectator or participant. Howell's mix of verse styles and skill with cameos ensures that interest never flags. In other poems he demonstrates his pleasure in avoiding the predictable and in writing on a wide variety of subjects. Among the many poems of place, in which he excels, are some disturbing descriptions of modern Britain; in the final section, poems inspired by a winter spent in Brazil, he has surprises in store, such as the witty (and true) poem 'In Praise of Shopping'.

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Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks 'What is worthwhile?' His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they 'at least promise to be about the important things in everyone's life.'

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Gabriel Levin's fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ('The Fathers are Watching') navigate between the depredations of war and the mind's need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

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'Les Fleurs du mal' (1861) was the first great modern work of poetry and one of the few books of poems to become an international bestseller. This edition contains all of Baudelaire's poetry in verse with Francis Scarfe's scrupulous and inventive prose translations at the foot of the pages. Together with his detailed and authoritative introduction, this presentation makes an ideal edition both for the student and for the general reader who wishes to tackle the French original with a reliable prose guide at hand. The companion volume, 'Paris Blues', contains Baudelaire's prose poems ('Le Spleen de Paris' or 'Petits Poemes en prose') and the short novel 'La Fanfarlo' (1847), a charming extravaganza written in his early twenties.

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Memory, including the tricks it plays, is this book's overriding theme. The poems seek to revive happy, confusing, sad and celebratory times over more than half a century, from affairs in distant youth to the credit crunch. They recall friends now beyond known life, misinterpretations giving rise to comedy, epiphanies like a newborn calf or the shock of a painting, and hours dedicated to translation or literary experiments. The book, which also includes translations of some favourite modern poems, tries to come to terms with time itself.

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Michael Hamburger's fifth collection since the publication of "Collected Poems 1941-1994" gathers his poems written during 2004-2006, a productive period in which he has set aside translation work to concentrate on his own poetry. His intimate knowledge of the English landscape and wildlife underpins his meditations on mortality and the passing of time in these subtle and compelling poems.

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This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination of lyric and narrative, form a novel contribution to poetry. The story is of an abruptly ended first love affair, an encounter and marriage with another, the joy of birth, the mourning for the infant's death and its aftermath. The voices of the protagonists, rooted in their local habitations, weave in and out of the speech and consciousness of each of them with all the nuances, pleasures and regrets of hindsight and its shifts in recollection.

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In "Walking Out of the World", triolets, quatrains and villanelles are interspersed with finely modulated free verse, culminating in the striking sequence 'The Sentences of Death'. Mead's curiously fascinating poems, with their beguiling echoes of the modern masters and their obsessive focus on uncomfortable truths, are mordantly witty as they confront life and death with eyes wide open. Mead is a poet who, once read, is not forgotten.

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In 'Merchant Prince' Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity and vocation, his flight from Italy, and later his happy marriage and successful career as a Cork merchant. The unusual mixture of verse and prose and the meticulously imagined history - replete with portraits of such great figures as the painter James Barry, and four Italian poets who are strangely reminiscent of certain contemporary Irish poets - gives the book a compelling flavour. Poems and prose combine in a poetic fiction which is, among other things, a meditation on the craft of verse and the artistic calling, and a restoration project on a kind of Irishness overwritten by later history.

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Justo Jorge Padron is one of Spain's leading poets. Born in Las Palmas, Grand Canary Island, in 1943, he is among the most representative poets of the Spanish Generation of the 1970s. The brilliance of his metaphorical imagination provides the Spanish lyric tradition with an incisive, renovating power. Louis Bourne offers here a wide selection from Padron's thirteen Spanish volumes since 1989 and since his last English collection, "On the Cutting Edge" (1988).

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Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has 'drawn together poems that deal with the personal - family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and, poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. Uniting the poems is a common thread: the natural world and its impenetrable presence which, though threatened, remains a source of renewal and, therefore, of faith'.

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Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects from the Rylands plots the lifelong love affair between one particular book worm and the John Rylands Library and its collections in Manchester.

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"When Adam Johnson, a young gay man from Cheshire, arrived in London in 1984, he possessed insatiable curiosity, irresistible charm, and unfocused literary ambition; when he died nine years later, he had become one of the most accomplished English poets of his generation. This collection of his poem

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First published in 1982, this is the factless autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of the 72 literary personae or heteronyms with which Fernando Pessoa created the theatre of his absence. The circular text returns again and again to a protagonist desperate to find out who he is.

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"Select Meditations" is among the earliest works of the poet and mystic Thomas Traherne (1637-74). Written shortly after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the manuscript was not discovered until 1964 and first published by Carcanet in 1997. Traherne, a young clergyman in a country parish at the time, explores his relationship with God and his vocation to 'teach Immortal Souls the way to Heaven'. It is a spiritual journey that involves examination of his doubts and failings (he confesses to 'too much proneness to Speak'), of the political issues that shaped his times, and of the realities of ministering to his congregation. Above all, though, Traherne's meditations celebrate the beauty of the world and the human community transfigured by the love of God, in terms that speak across time. 'Remember', he writes, 'that the world is the beginning of Gifts.' Julia J. Smith's landmark edition, preserving the original spelling, provides a detailed introduction and notes on the text.

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