Search results for ""carcanet press""
Carcanet Press Ltd Fur Coats in Tahiti
Shortlisted for the 2020 Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group and the New York school. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary. Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Zivojinovic; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with 'O', an openmouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet: '&'.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd A Few Interiors
Full of playful glitches and malfunctions, this debut collection from an alumnus of Carcanet’s New Poetries series and a recent favourite in the pages of PN Review is a poetry of misses and near-misses, distortions and uncertainties. The poems capture a feeling of déjà vu, a sense of something not quite right, out of place, though hard to put your finger on. They are filled with pop-cultural references and registers, responding with a collagist’s eye to music, painting, photography, television and film. Frequently funny and even more frequently fun, Bagnall’s poems cut across continents, memories, dreams and rooms.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd The Hotel Eden
'Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight...' With these words Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through – Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast – in the spirit of a flaneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety and mystery of human experience: the soup kitchens, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Latin Quarter, the refugees, works of art and areas of damage. The title poem pays a debt to Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, whose 'The Hotel Eden' discloses a stuffed parrot and other objects under glass. The eye – the poem – assembles them but cannot tell their intended story. It tells a story all the same. 'On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.' This is a book of revelatory indirections, of unexpected moons, creatures, passions, rituals and histories, of days rich in disclosures and in hints of revelation.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Beowulf
Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the monstrous. This version renders the original in readable contemporary English but also keeps as close as it can to the older, alliterative metrical system, so that readers may experience something of the textures and formal properties of the original. An `Afterword’ explains the translator’s formal choices and explores the nature of this epic, with its emphasis on tribe, location and mortality. `McCully captures the special magic and power of the Beowulf poet’s word-pile and life-thoughts.’ (Martin Duffell, Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London)
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd On Bunyah
'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Blotter
Oli Hazzard’s Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. In `Graig Syfyrddin’ notes on hillwalking in the Welsh marches – the poet’s former home – alternate with found text taken from an online walking forum. `Blotter’ is a shepherd’s calendar of sonnets composed of Russian spambot script – a mix of lifestyle advice, gaming tips, authoritarian propaganda, bucolic fragments and apocalyptic messages. `Within Habit’ is a series of prose poems collaged from numerous sources. `March and May’ comprises parallel columns of verse. `Or As’ is a family of 81 seventeen-syllable poems, each one an erasure of the corresponding page in a different book the poet was writing alongside Blotter. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed: the working day, the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd’s calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a Twitter feed. The title, Blotter, connects these concerns, suggesting at once a police blotter, a journal, a thing for drying wet spots, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, or out of focus.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Grimspound and Inhabiting Art
Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. Grimspound is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a `wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary. Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.
£16.99
Carcanet Press Ltd On Trust: A Book of Lies
Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack's second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the `I' of a poem with the `I' of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have `really' happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity. Serious questions of being and belonging, as well as frivolous themes such as the Marquis de Sade, Siberia, genitals, the Fates, and death, are picked up in play, prodded at, then put down in new and sparkling configurations.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems - Alain Fournier
Alain-Fournier's poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses - and young love reaching out 'in the frightening dark, with timid fingers'. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier's verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Sarajevo Roses
Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move. On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma’s Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where `selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar’. Sarajevo’s `neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete’ is twinned with the `church spires and rain-bright roofs’ of the poet’s former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book’s title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems
Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems.The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Commotion of the Birds
A crackling, moving new collection from one of Americas greatest living poets. In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashberys mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric agility: wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humour, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems Without Irony
Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Shortlisted for The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017. Poems without Irony is Alex Wong's first collection. In subject, tone and form it ranges widely. The book as a whole does not address any one paticular theme, but much of it is concerned with the experience of particularity, with the bounds of moral calculation, and with the need for precision - of thought and of speech - as an aim or obligation. Tensions between the 'natural' and the artificial, intention and expression, good faith and bad, are recurrently felt as the poems negotiate their various kinds of ambivalence. The style is governed by a desire for simplicity almost equal to the lure of extravagance, and by the tendency of its subtly differentiated voices towards an elusive playfulness in the face of serious matters. The poems are designed to be read aloud, or at least 'using the mouth'. Wong's patient and sympathetic listening to the sounds of English poetry in all periods has enriched the patterns of his own. The poems, therefore, enfold many memories of earlier styles - revived, or still vital, but also gaining new tonal energy in a functional strangeness.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Midnight Letterbox
One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.
£19.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Was and Is: Collected Poems
Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Writers 'Book by the Cover' Award. There are two kinds of Collected Poems, one of which presents an author's work exactly as it first appeared volume-by-volume. This is the other sort. Neil Powell has re-examined his poems of the past fifty years, arranging them as nearly as possible in chronological order of completion while adding a rather larger handful of hitherto uncollected work. The resulting book is, on one level, the narrative of a lifetime in which certain themes, seen in changing lights, recur: landscape and seascape, music and poetry, friendship and the deaths of friends. Ranging from the playful to the elegiac, these poems are now able to resonate with each other in new and unexpected ways.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Chance of a Storm
For Rod Mengham sculpture and painting exist in the world the way poems do. He invokes the Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who believes that sculpture must be understood as part of the world around it. In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. 'Poems should be finished, but be still hot to the touch, giving a vivid sense of the thinking and feeling that went into their creation,' he says. Drew Milne speaks of the poems' 'beautiful, belligerent laconicism'. While the lyric is central to his work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these prose poems, a species of modernist fable.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd White Plains: Pieces and Witherlings
Lish's latest work of exquisitely crafted fiction sees a narrator - variously Gordon, I, He - approaching the precipice of old age. White Plains is Lish at his sharpest, tackling his perennial subject - the memory of memory itself - with spellbinding mastery.
£10.34
Carcanet Press Ltd To Each His Own
This is a short, powerful novel dealing with the complicities and accomodations of power within Italian politics.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems Guillaume Apollinaire
Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his 'calligrammes'. Subtle and complex, yet often direct, his poetry is still fresh and memorable.
£11.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Mr. Dineen's Careful Parade: New and Selected Poems
Memory, love, history and ideas: Thomas McCarthy has a uniquely direct and engaged approach both to the private and the public, which are inseparable in his poetry. His special blend of wit and lyricism is shown to the full in this selection which draws on his five previous books and adds a large group of new poems.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Cousin Bazilio
Returning from Brazil, Bazilio tells his cousin Louisa of the brave new world. His revelation leads to a evastating conclusion. O Primo Bazilio has a far deeper tragedy than Madame Bovary wrote Roy Campbell, because the girl involved is ... a most loveable character. One of the most tragic novels of the nineteenth century.
£29.95
Carcanet Press Ltd There is an Anger That Moves
There is an Anger That Moves is written by a poet from the Caribbean.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd This is Yarrow
The poems in Tara Bergin's debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous energy, a troubled state of mind: 'I am unwell, little crow, / I am unwell and far from home / where longing lives in my house'. In This is Yarrow Bergin gathers language from a wide range of sources and places to create a music and vision entirely her own.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems 19351992
The Collected Poems of a remarkable modern poet is reissued to celebrate his centenary.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Hat-Stand Union
Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd The Silence
The poems in Gillian Clarke's The Silence begin during lockdown, whose silences Clarke listens so attentively that other voices emerge.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Thousandfold
Nina Bogin’s Thousandfold is a journey through seasons and landscapes, a journal of ordinary life punctuated by extra-ordinary people and moments – the births of grandchildren, the physical decline of a husband, relationships with family and friends. Her poems connect the unknowable past of ancestors to the equally unfathomable future of descendants, between which there fluctuates a present that is no less elusive, even as the poet gives it a structure in language. If life is full of uncertainties, our world at once threatened and threatening, then what brings constancy, hope, solace? Bogin’s intimate, exploratory poems take on greater poignancy as the author faces the subject of her husband's dementia and begins to find her way into a life both with and without him.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Two decades ago a critic characterised Marius Kociejowski as a poet `whose imagination prowls the geographical boundaries of western culture'. He has a Polish name, was born in Canada, and lives in London where he collects other exiles, listens to their lives and writes them up. God's Zoo (Carcanet, 2014), Evan Jones describes as `a world journey through London's exiled and emigre artists, writers, poets and musicians'. He likes middle-length forms, less the lyric than the epylion, the epistle, dramatic monologue and eclogue. One of his tutelary spirits is the great Leopardi. Music is everywhere, notably Chopin and George Sand: music seems to propose some of the forms he chooses and how he modulates them. `All parts give meaning to the whole,' he says, and proves it again and again. Kociejowski has produced over the last five decades a fine, refined body of work which this book celebrates.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Windows of Graceland
The Windows of Graceland gathers the cream of the crop from Martina Evans's five previous collections of poetry, brought up to date by a selection of new and unpublished work. The earliest poems date back to 1998 and Evans's expatriation from Ireland. A complex nostalgia for her Catholic childhood establishes a central and enduring thread in the writing, the bloody shadow of sectarian conflict commingling with a child's pastoral of pleated mustard kilts and corduroy paisley dresses, the 'sighing country roads', the 'blue Burnfort evening'. The later poems, written from London, develop a fascination with Americana as the poet's own cultural displacement takes on substitute forms, the Irish traveller Elvis O'Donnell finding his unlikely double in that other Elvis, of Graceland. Early poems on childhood come full-circle across the selection's twenty-five year span in more recent poems on motherhood. When the poet's teenage daughter returns home missing a shoe, 'I don't share her grief. / I feel relief / as if the shoe is a coin / paid to the wild / for her safe return.' From story-teller to free-verse fili, memoirist to satirist, daughter to mother, The Windows of Graceland distils Evans's full poetic range and power.
£12.99
Carcanet Press Ltd At the Brasserie Lipp
Seated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in- / fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely present, spots of time which vivify him and his past. Through memory and poetry he experiences revelation of a Christian depth. England is a familiar yet now a foreign country: the author having written for years in French. 'English becomes / a strange tongue echoing readily with names / gainrising with the new-born world they name.' Distinct recollections open into one another, restored and changed in language. Music and painting, too, are evoked as windows on this world. The book includes ninety poems organised into thirty sections, each with three poems which are free-standing yet connected, speaking together. His English takes its bearings from the stress patterns of Anglo Saxon prosody. Not only the poet but his language itself returns to its beginnings.
£10.33
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
In this career-defining book, the poems of Dennis O'Driscoll are gathered together for the first time. Beginning with Kist in 1982 and ending with the posthumous Update in 2014, the selection was made by O'Driscoll himself before his death in 2012 and includes revised, authoritative versions of some older poems as well as thirtythree hitherto uncollected: the definitive poetic ouevre.
£25.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Complete Poems: Muriel Spark
In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different challenges of freer verse. Spark's poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark - and light - music beneath the mundane.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems Robinson Jeffers
Selections from Jeffers' major works, including BE ANGRY AT THE SUN, HUNGERFIELD, THE DOUBLE AXE, and ROAD STALLION.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Object Lessons
'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in "Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time.Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them. He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.
£12.95
Carcanet Press Ltd The Vampyre and Other Writings
'June 18. Began my ghost story after tea. Twelve o' clock, really began to talk ghostly. [Lord Byron] repeated some verses of Coleridge's Christabel, of the witch's breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.' (from the Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816). So John William Polidori (1795-1821) records one of the most famous storytelling evenings in English literature, the stormy night at the Villa Diodati that was the source of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his own tale "The Vampyre", as well as his Gothic novel "Ernestus Berchtold". Polidori's still compelling works, included here in full, created figures of seductive evil that continue to exert a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. In addition, this collection makes available some of Polidori's fascinating lesser-known works such as his medical thesis on nightmares, his pamphlet on the death penalty, his poetry and diary. Many of these have not been republished since the nineteenth century. Now Polidori emerges from the shadows, an impetuous, sensitive writer with a sometimes fierce talent.His encounters with Byron, Shelley and their circle contributed to his fame and notoriety, and to his neglect, since they outshone him. Here he can be read by his own mysterious taper. Franklin Bishop's introduction describes the context in which The Vampyre was written and deepens our understanding of Romanticism and the Gothic.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English
This reprint of Morgan's popular and well-respected 1952 modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic captures a taut expression of the poem's themes of danger, voyaging, displacement, loyalty, and loss. Morgan provides a fluid, modern voice from this medieval masterwork while retaining a clear authenticity, making it highly accessible to the contemporary reader.
£9.01
Carcanet Press Ltd Canzoniere
The "Canzoniere" is among Europe's most influential books of lyrics. The focus of this large collection is Petrarch's lifelong love for the mysterious Laura, but the themes he treats are many and various. Although part of the 14th century world, Petrarch expresses perplexities, uncertainties and hesitancies still understandable at the end of the second millennium. This verse translation of the whole of the "Canzoniere" has notes to suggest the many connections between the poems.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Hilda Doolittle
"Like every major artist she challenges the readers intellect and imagination."--Boston Herald
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Tales and More Tales from the Mountain
These brief and telling stories of rustic life and love are set in the remote and barren Tras-os-Montes - over the mountains - region of North East Portugal. The author speaks of the men and women living there, complex in emotion and thought, and elusive and thrifty with words.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Distance and Memory
This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place - a house in northern Aberdeenshire - and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Davidson reflects on art, place, history and landscape. Distance and Memory is his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north.
£14.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Through the Square Window
Sinead Morrissey's fourth collection explores fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood in poems that are by turns tender, exuberant and unsettling. Pitched against the envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts - from Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll's Alice - that amplify her theme. Infancy is for Morrissey the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems, Stories and Writings
Margaret Tait (1918–1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 273
The September-October 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes celebrating the poetry of Taiwan and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature; Major translations from the poems of the leading German poet Joachim Sartorius, the prose of Alberto Manguel, and introducing the wildly implausible poems of Khan Gazi II Giray; Philip Terry asks 'What is Poetry' and provides provisional answers; Rory Waterman visits Robert Browning in Waco; and Jonathan Hirschfeld remembers Daniel Pearl in stone. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd PN Review 269
The January-February 2023 issue Horatio Morpurgo revisits Bertrand Russell and Jurassic Marble Lesley Harrison and the whalers' diaries, how a language and culture survive Anthony Vahni Capildeo on Islands Basil Bunting's Letters from two perspectives: Don Share and August Kleinzahler Craig Raine being and not being Whitman Anthony Huen on the Hong Kong Moment New to PN Review this issue: Kate Hendry, Petra White, Diane Mehta and Philip Armstrong and more...
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Hell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems
Hell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems by James Tate re-introduces the poet, providing a poem for every week of the year, every mood and season. It includes work from his first publication, The Lost Pilot, a Yale Younger Poets selection (1967) and all his subsequent books. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming, absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. All Tate's poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate was described as a surrealist. If he is, that surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by candour. John Ashbery wrote of 'his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting'.
£14.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Eleanor Among the Saints
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.
£11.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Infinite in Finite
A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year. Infinite in Finite develops the inimitable style of The Multiverse, the author's first collection (2018), praised as showing 'some of the best technical skills of any living poet', the work of 'one who is not afraid of big subjects, whose enthusiastic gaze is directed outward with energy and gladness'. Then Auden and the Romantics lighted his way. To those influences are now added the challenges of a Modernist style, drawing on Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot and Delmore Schwartz. In the long sequence 'Appearance and Reality' and throughout the collection's intricate polymetrical stanzas, readers experience more variation than most contemporary free verse provides. The poems challenge assumptions about the place of form in the modern artistic ecosystem.
£12.99