Search results for ""author w.n. herbert""

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

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Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a ?at overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s de?ning modern disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands – becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy ?ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s ?otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is re?ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Den?ends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s later trade of precision engineer, it ?ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.

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