Search results for ""Author Stephen Romer""
Carcanet Press Ltd Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSet Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer's four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m' ami - set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer's central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the 'intermittences of the heart', frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme. Romer's New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for 'refuge' or 'higher things', and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends. Derek Mahon singled out Romer's first collection Idols for its 'emotional candour and intellectual clarity', and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart.Trade Review'Readers open to Romer's scrupulous, passionate music and the conversational intimacy of his address will gather rich rewards.' - Sean O'Brien, Culture; 'Stephen Romer is one of our finest poets of thwarted or impossible love ... Emotional vulnerability is tempered by a wit and formal control that are never obtrusive.' - Adam Thorpe, Guardian; 'Romer is one of our finest contemporary poets because he has made such a distinctive idiom out of such a complicated inheritance.' - Adam Phillips; 'Here is a poet haunted by history, war, and the poignancy of love passing ... He displays a seriousness which is seldom too weighty, and a compassion which never sinks into sentimentality.' - Elizabeth Jennings, Sunday Telegraph
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Yellow Studio
Book Synopsis"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.Trade Review'If Tribute is haunted by aphasia, exile and the loss of continuity, those fears are shadows that give body to the essences more insistently dwelt upon, and these are apprehended with a depth of spiritual resource that is almost mystical.' - Clive Wilmer on Tribute, Times Literary Supplement'Stephen Romer has achieved a breakthrough in these new poems. The death of his father has torn away a veil, releasing a fresh energy and vision.' - Hugo Williams
£14.26
Oxford University Press French Decadent Tales
Book Synopsis''He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.''A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While ''Decadence'' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud''s early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other.This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling,Trade Review[A] beautifully translated anthology * Graham Robb, TLS *Table of ContentsJULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (1808-89) ; Don Juan's Crowning Love Affair ; LEON BLOY (1846-1917) ; A Dentist Terribly Punished ; The Last Bake ; The Lucky Sixpence ; GUSTAVE GEFFROY (1855-1926) ; The Statue ; REMY DE GOURMONT (1858-1915) ; Danaette ; Don Juan's Secret ; The Faun ; On the Threshold ; JULES LAFORGUE (1860-87) ; Perseus and Andromeda ; JEAN LORRAIN (1895-1906) ; An Unidentified Crime ; The Man with the Bracelet ; The Student's Tale ; The Man Who Loved Consumptives ; PIERRE LOUYS (1870-1925) ; A Case without Precedent ; GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850-93) ; At the Death-Bed ; The Night ; A Walk ; The Tresses ; CATULLE MENDES (1841-1909) ; What the Shadow Demands ; GUSTAVE MIRBEAU (1848-1927) ; The Bath ; The First Emotion ; The Little Summer-House ; On a Cure ; JEAN RICHEPIN (1849-1926) ; Constant Guignard ; Deshoulieres ; Pft! Pft! ; GEORGE RODENBACH (1855-98) ; The Time ; MARCEL SCHWOB (1867-1905) ; The Brothel ; The Sans-Gueule ; 52 and 53 Orfila ; Lucretius, Poet ; Paolo Uccello, Painter ; VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM (1838-89) ; Sentimentalism ; The Presentiment ; The Desire to be a Man
£8.54
Seagull Books London Ltd The Red Scarf – Followed by Two Stages and
Book SynopsisAn intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy’s childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.” Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father’s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet’s mother. At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet’s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son—the solitary boy’s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before. Trade Review“With The Red Scarf, Bonnefoy makes a breach in the past. But there is nothing merely nostalgic in this magisterial autobiographical essay.” * Le Monde *Table of ContentsThe Red Scarf An ‘Idea for a Story’ Ambeyrac Viazac Toulouse A Spelling Book A Painting by Max Ernst The Silent Third Danaë, the Hyacinth Girl, Balin, the Mask From New Guinea Pierre Jean JouveTwo Stages and Additional Notes Two Stages First Additional Note: An Aid to Understanding Second Additional Note Translator’s Note
£13.99
Seagull Books London Ltd The Red Scarf
Book SynopsisTrade Review“With The Red Scarf, Bonnefoy makes a breach in the past. But there is nothing merely nostalgic in this magisterial autobiographical essay.” * Le Monde *
£18.04
Carcanet Press Ltd Prose
Book SynopsisYves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.Trade Review'His writings... are an important lighthouse on the contemporary cultural coastline.' - Emily Grosholz
£24.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems: Volume I
Book SynopsisFrance’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.
£16.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Carnac
Book SynopsisOne of France’s most important modern poets, Eugène Guillevic (1907-97) was born in Carnac in Brittany, and although he never learned the Breton language, his personality is deeply marked by his feeling of oneness with his homeland. His poetry has a remarkable unity, driven by his desire to use words to bridge a tragic gulf between man and a harsh and often apparently hostile natural environment. For Guillevic, the purpose of poetry is to arouse the sense of Being. In this poetry of description – where entire landscapes are built up from short, intense texts – language is reduced to its essentials, as words are placed on the page ‘like a dam against time’. When reading these poems, it is as if time is being stopped for man to ?nd himself again. Carnac (1961) marks the beginning of Guillevic’s mature life as a poet. A single poem in several parts, it evokes the rocky, sea-bound, un?nished landscape of Brittany with its sacred objects and its great silent sense of waiting. The texts are brief but have a grave, meditative serenity, as the poet seeks to effect balance and to help us ‘to make friends with nature’ and to live in a universe which is chaotic and often frightening. Introduction by Stephen Romer. French-English bilingual edition. Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets: 9
£10.80
Arc Publications The Day's Ration: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisFor Gilles Ortlieb, the day’s ration is hard won. He takes the art of noticing to a new level, petrifying us with moments of bleakness and ushering us out of them through his humanity. He states things as they are, with exactitude, with authenticity, and with humour and his voice is compelling. Ortlieb is among the very best poets writing in France today, and this bi-lingual selection of his work will cement his growing reputation in the anglophone world."A poet of uprootedness and displacement, with a uniquely gentle and rueful wit" -TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT"It is no disservice to Gilles Ortlieb, not to place him among the “visionaries”. Rather, he is possessed of an eye that can discern, within the thicket of the real, the unnoticed, which may be its accessory or its reject. For the unnoticed is also this: the thing we conceal from ourselves." -JACQUES RÉDA"Reading the poems of Gilles Ortlieb, one’s focus is never blurred. Rather, everything is extraordinarily distinct. One emerges with clearer vision, and with an increased interest in the world." -JEAN-PIERRE LEMAIRE
£10.79
Seagull Books London Ltd The ArrièrePays
Book SynopsisSince the publication of his first book in 1953, the author has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. This English translation of his celebrated work "L'Arriere-Pays", takes us to the heart of his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit.Trade Review"Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime - more than half a century now, and still counting." (Paul Auster)"
£18.05
Faber & Faber Robert Herrick
Book SynopsisIn this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.Robert Herrick was born in London, in 1591, the seventh child of a prosperous goldsmith. He graduated from St. John''s College, Cambridge in 1617, and became a Cavalier poet in the mould of Ben Jonson, mixing in literary circles in London. He was ordained in 1623 and subsequently appointed by Charles I to the living of Dean Prior in Devon, where he lived in the reluctant seclusion of country life and wrote some of his best work. In 1647, under the Commonwealth, Herrick was expelled from the priory and returned to London, where he published his major work, Hesperides, the following year. With the restoration of Charles II in 1660 he was r
£8.53
