The poet writes: 'I'm always interested in the possibilities of change, moving through forms and aesthetic modes, and I'd like to think this Selected Poems epitomises these kinds of shifts'.
This chapbook by Ro Mehrooz is the first time that the work of a single Rohingyan poet has appeared in print in a bilingual edition. The Rohingya people continue to experience genocide at the hands of the Myanmar military, so it is not surprising that Ro's poems are full of anger, anguish and despair, although there are moments of light as he reflects upon the traditions and customs of his people. James Byrne's informative introduction, together with Ro's deeply-affecting poems, paint a stark and unforgettable picture of this war-torn, torture-ravaged and largely forgotten area of Myanmar.
The Conjurer is Pedro Serrano's second book from Arc, and includes work drawn from his three published collections in Mexico as well as unpublished work. These are powerful poems which explore the natural world in all its wonder with a close and meticulous attention that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Serrano's rich and complex lexicon and his mastery of poetic form, metaphor and diction are perfectly captured in Anna Crowe's sensitive and compelling translation - for those who have not encountered Serrano's poetry before, this is an unmissable introduction to the work of one of Mexico's leading contemporary poets.
Dilawar Karadaghi is one of the most important contemporary Kurdish poets and his work is marked by the long years of persecution, marginalization and struggle that are part of the Kurdish experience. The poems in this short selection are full of longing, sadness, loss and, in the final poem, anger, as the poet remembers the devastating chemical attack on Halabja in 1988 in which his 'country's hair turned white'.
Vanishing Points is Lucia Stupica's fourth book of poetry and comes after a decade of silence in which her poetic voice has become more complex and sensitive to the cracks in time and in the world through which she observes fragments of life - imperfect, painful and real. Her expression has retained its tenderness, establishing a deep dialogue with the world, the past and the present, and with appearances and the things they conceal. In her attempt at a new understanding of the world, Stupica is not writing the story of her own role, but of the role of women as the hidden movers of history, and the role of those, be they a man, a child or a random stranger, who see the experience of the other, and are open to it. These poems of love, loss, mystery and what lies beyond our understanding make for a haunting and memorable collection in Andrej Peric's beautiful translation.
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 deal with farming and animal husbandry 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 translation from the Latin by the poet Fred Beake makes for very entertaining reading.
Michelene Wandor's fifth book from Arc is a book of love poems - and not-love poems. By turns fierce and gentle, passionate and bitter, they push at the boundaries of minimalist language and pack an emotional punch that will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.
Prize-winning poet Kevin Crossley-Holland has been described by Philip Pullman as 'a master, a magician and commander of the language', a view that this eagerly-awaited Collected Poems will undoubtedly support.
In this poignant new poetry collection, one of New Zealand's most significant voices reflects on home, on away, and on friends living and dead. 'I lead a life of quiet medication', the poet claims, 'longing for foreign shores, adventure and death.' But whether swimming to the yellow buoy or remembering an encounter in Belsize Park, in the thick of it or asking, 'what next?', Stead's voice is intimate, amusing and always compelling.'This Side of Silence resounds with intimations of mortality, compounded with reactions to a contemporary world of pandemic, climate change and war, but this collection is not in the least morose. Rather, the poetry is enlivening - concrete, particular, detailed and often playful. There is a wealth of sensory content, and each poem has its own satisfying shape, with easy idiomatic speech forming its special kind of rhythm. In this book a major modern poet continues to "live and sing".' - MacDonald P. Jackson'Stead has his usual quick wit and steely eye for his world and, at 90, has the linguistic dexterity that many thousands of aspiring writers can only dream about.' - Chris Reed, NZ Booklovers
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
For Gilles Ortlieb, the dayâ¿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 âvisionariesâ?. 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 RÿDA"Reading the poems of Gilles Ortlieb, oneâ¿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
Aneta Kaminska is a Polish poet, author of eight volumes of poetry. She has a wonderful ear for language and her specialty is poetry brimming with linguistic games. She is also a prolific translator of contemporary Ukrainian poets. This chapbook presents a selection of Kaminska's own poetry from across the years. "Through the fracturing of language, with word and sound-play or othertimes a deceptive simplicity, Kaminska's poems pull us up short with their visceral honesty. Whether she is writing about the female body, a Jewish cemetery, the pandemic or the invasion of Ukraine, her poems are at once fierce and intimate. She is a unique voice which cannot be ignored, its freshness and immediacy discovered and relayed to us in ingenious ways by her translators." - Maria Jastrzebska
Katherine Gallagher has a loyal readership both in the UK and in her native Australia and her latest book from Arc will not disappoint. Ranging in time and place from her childhood in the Australian outback to heady youthful days in Paris of the '60s, to slower-paced recent years in the gardens and open spaces around her north London home, these poems are full of a colour and energy that paint a picture of life lived to the full, and also a reflectiveness, a gentle humour, and occasionally a sense of loss, as the poet looks back on times past.
Known as a poet who spoke of the history and suffering of the Jewish people, Nelly Sachs was, at the time she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, highly regarded in her native Germany, frequently being described as a poet of reconciliation and healing, although whether she was is open to debate.
Osip Mandelstam's second collection of poems, Tristia, astonished Russian readers in 1922 with its daring verse forms and meditations on revolution, exile, death and rebirth. Thomas de Waal's new translation gives English-language reader the chance to experience the entire collection for the first time.
When Columns, a slim volume of poems written by an unknown young Russian poet named Nikolai Zabolotsky, appeared in 1929, it took the literary world of Leningrad [St. Petersburg] by storm.
In its geographical sweep ¿ from Israel-Palestine ("Where a hillside's being shaken /out of the dream") westward across Europe ¿ No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of estrangement, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean ("Sea Between the Lands") that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West."A beautiful and extraordinary piece of work, written with such attentiveness to the world, to sound, to the poetic legacy. Many of the poems are touched with sharp sadness, a deep and philosophical awareness of how things are. Human politics, especially in the potent opening poems, speak through the natural world. Finely crafted, meticulously written and trimmed down to the essence of observation and emotion ¿ I don¿t read much in contemporary poetry that is so hard won. Time and time again I was struck by the power of individual poems, but simultaneously by their lightness and wryness."- Sasha Dugdale"Jennie Feldman¿s writing has an exactitude of word to thought, thought to feeling, that makes her poetry entirely her own, fed as it is by so many different cultures and traditions. As a translator and as a citizen of the world, she travels between languages, histories and places. But her poetry brings something into English that was not here before."- Patrick McGuinness
¿The world of Little's poems is a dark one, for sure, where "the harm / the damage" we humans inflict ¿ on the environment, on one another ¿ is rendered unflinchingly. Her poems about family, for instance, make it clear that 'social distancing' is not just a phenomenon of the past two years. Love is present too, often inextricably bound up with the pain it can cause ("I keep loving you like an old bruise / still tender") but expressed in such rich and startling language, it is its own reward.¿ Esther Morgan ¿Opening a book by Pippa Little I know I will find the kind of directness one can trust. There will be images that make the world of a page real¿ That is what Pippa Little does so well. And she does it with wide range, with different modes, various poetics¿ we find that the landscape therein is our solitude: however inventive it is also bare, like a person who cannot sleep and stares and stares all night at a blank wall. Which is to say, we recognize ourselves in these pages, our days, our questions. And the pages fortify. Why? Because they are honest.¿ Ilya Kaminsky
Presents a cycle of poems in which the protagonist, Wolf One-Eye, finds himself in 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.
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.
"Forrest Gander knows that the poet's first duty is "to see what's there and not already patterned by familiarity" - and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today."John BurnsideYour Nearness is the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander's most recent collection, and his first to be published in the UK. Throughout the book, in poems of emotional intensity, delicacy and tenderness, Gander addresses the relationship of the personal and the environmental; the opening poems link human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens, while some later poems focus on the emotional and ecological trauma resulting from the devastating wildfires in California where the poet lives. This is a collection that illuminates the tangled interrlations that bind us to others and the natural world, celebratory in tone and charged with exultation. Forrest Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and in 2019, he was awarded The Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He taught at Providence College and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
James Byrne is a widely-travelled poet and editor, and in this, his 4th book from Arc, he reflects on the places, their histories and people that have made a lasting impression on him. So vivid are his descriptions of his travels that the reader is enveloped in colours, sounds, scents and surrounded by people.
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