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

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

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

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'Shape of Time' is Doris Kareva's eleventh collection and, as with all her books, its publication was hailed as a major literary event in Estonia. In style, it is more restrained than her earlier collections but its themes are the same - love and its great enemies, death and time - and the poems still retain the romantic bravado and recklessness that make her work so compelling. Doris Kareva is arguably Estonia's leading female poet. Born in Tallinn in 1958, she studied English Language and Literature at Tartu University and from 1978-1993, and from 1997-2002, she worked for the cultural weekly Sirp. From 1992-2008 she was the Secretary-General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO in Estonia, and from 2009 Chief Editor of the family journal Meie Pere. Since 1978 she has published 14 collections of poetry, which have been translated into over 20 languages, and one collection of essays.

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"Crowe knows just how much to give and how much to hold back, offering fleeting glances and sometimes strange images... These are sinewy, questing poems, alive with memory and attentive to the interior landscape." PBS selectors on Figure in a Landscape "Words which come to mind when reading Anna Crowe's wonderful poetry are 'honest', 'affectionate', 'elegiac', 'skilful', 'natural', 'lucid'. Douglas Dunn on Punk with Dulcimer With their inviting blend of elegance and musicality, and captivating breadth of cultural reference, Anna Crowe's poems offer an illuminating insight into the marvels of and uncanny links between the natural world and its creatures, and the shifts of light and shade in our own lives – most touchingly, when vulnerable and bereft. Not on the Side of the Gods, constantly demanding a pause for reflection or gasp of wonderment, is both celebratory and – as in the opening poem, “The Gecko” – imbued with a heart-stopping tenderness and sense of loss. Stewart ConnI read Not On The Side Of The Gods with growing admiration. It was like wandering through a fabulous living museum, filled with places and plants, birds and other creatures and, often, most movingly, with the people they call to mind. Anna Crowe does exactly what the caddis-fly larva does in her poem, 'Jeweller in the Galerie Électra, Paris' - building for each vulnerable creature a house of jewelled words. What I came away with was not just the richness and precision of her descriptions but a cornucopia of sounds, not least the wonderful music of her voice.. Vicki Feaver

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Manuel Forcano, the outstanding Catalan poet, is a great traveller, and the poems in this, his first full-length book in English translation, embrace the cities, the landscapes and the people of the Middle East. Drawn from his four most recent collections, these poems use geographical and historical references to deepen and inform the narrative, and also to lay before the reader the idea of the continuity, over many centuries, of human love and desire. The beauty, joy, grief and tenderness in these poems are universal and belong to every kind of human affection – indeed Forcano has been described by the Catalan journalist and academic Pere Ballart as ‘our foremost love poet’.Anna Crowe’s beautiful translations demonstrate a remarkable understanding of, and sensitivity to, Forcano’s poetry, so much so that one might say that Maps of Desire represents the perfect union of poet and translator.

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This selection of Kim Seung-hee’s most recent poems is drawn half from her ninth collection, Hope is Lonely, and half from her tenth collection, Croaker on a Chopping Board. Focusing on humanity’s utter fragility through, among others, the themes of death, hope, depression and love, often seen through the lens of sorrowful womanhood, these poems, be they modernist or romantic in idiom, also comment on political and social issues, and Korean society and culture in general. Brother Anthony’s deeply sensitive translation, and his informative preface, make the work of this major Korean poet available for the first time in the UK.

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Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on the Poetry International website, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote's metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaced experience."

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Emery brings an unusually wide-ranging poetic vocabulary to the encounters in Modern Fog, depicting wildlife on the Norfolk Broads or a multi-storey car park with equal fluency. These are elegiac, tough-minded poems of marked originality and scope."It's as if these attentive, atmospheric, musical poems can light up everywhere: seascapes, edgelands, interiors, even a carpark. Chris Emery's art is at once earthy, spiritual, dreamlike and exact. So often, the language is irresistible: 'Above us, in its immaculate empire, / a bird whirrs up and saves / its eyes for the militant hour.'"-Moniza Alvi

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

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Karl Marx was born in Germany but spent most of his life as a stateless exile in Paris, Brussels and London, where he died in 1883. As a student, he had dreamed of following a literary career and worked on poems, a novel and a play, before realising that his future lay elsewhere. Some 120 of his poems from 1836-7 survive and this chapbook contains a selection of poems in the tradition of German Romanticism, love poems to his future wife Jenny and satirical verse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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TBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A volume of poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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