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Nightwalker's Song
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE was a monumental European presence – dramatist, impresario, novelist, essayist, scientist, administrator and extraordinarily prolific poet. This selection from his early and middle years includes the ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (the title of which became famous a hundred years later through Dukas’ well-known orchestral piece) and also highlights the dramatic element in Goethe’s poetry (a speech from Faust and a monologue from an unfinished play about Prometheus). Several poems set to music by Brahms and Schubert are also featured.
John Greening’s ingenious translations offer refreshing new angles for those who are already familiar with Goethe’s poetry and are an excellent introduction for those coming to it for the first time.
- Chapbook
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Temporary Archives
Latin America is known to be producing some of the most exciting literature in the world today. With the region’s rich intersecting traditions, history of migrations, political movements, and commitment to poetic innovation, the women poets who are currently working there are some of the fiercest and most creative voices in the 21st century. Temporary Archives brings together 24 of the most widely-read women poets working in Spanish, Portuguese and indigenous languages throughout the Latin American continent, who are in dialogue with each other, their traditions, and with the current literatures and political movements in the region. With a vibrant women’s movement gaining increasing traction in countries such as Chile, Argentina and Mexico, this anthology is a timely contribution to the works currently being published in English translation.
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House Arrest
--- SHORTLISTED FOR THE SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE, 2024 ---
Notwithstanding his spare output, with only two volumes of poetry – Diary of House Arrest (Ruznama-ye tab‘id, 2003) and Blue Bicycle (Ducharkha-yi ābī, 2015) – to his name, Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh has left a poetic signature on modern Persian poetry, distinguished by lyricism and colloquialism. In Alizadeh’s poems, a labyrinthine memory, structured by the intricate architecture of old Iranian bazaars and mosques, continually revises itself in spontaneous narrations of love and death. With an informative introduction placing the poet’s work in context, this evocative translation brings Alizadeh’s two collections into English for the first time.
HASAN ALIZADEH is far from being a prolific poet and neither at first sight does he fit within any mainstreams of modern Iranian poetry. And yet there is a very delicate simplicity, a labyrinth of exact, solid language and a sort of genuinely lyrical Sufism that brings an unexpectedly intense charge to his language and that streams right through his words.
As more and more contemporary Iranian poetry comes to be translated, we are lucky to have Alizadeh’s rare poems in such sharp and insightful versions as Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould have provided.
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Time Begins to Hurt
Time Begins to Hurt responds to our extraordinary times of pandemic, refugee migration and species extinction. The poems interweave the intimate and the worldly to explore growing older and the sometimes unlikely or surprising connections which sustain us.
In a book by Pippa Little I know I will find the kind of directness one can trust. So I wasn’t at all surprised when I opened Time Begins to Hurt on a poem called ‘Churchyard’, and immediately found myself confronted with memory and a sense of recognition that was another’s and yet all too real. That is what Pippa Little does so well. And she does it with wide range, with different modes and various poetics… Which is to say, we recognise ourselves in these pages, our days, our questions. And the pages fortify. Why? Because these are honest, very moving and beautiful poems.
I love this book – it’s fierce bright poems with their fierce bright women. Scattered throughout are lines and images I will carry with me as touchstones, reminders of what makes for good poetry… So many of her poems have a physical, visceral quality which lifts them clean off the page and into your palm. The world of Little’s poems is a dark one where ‘the harm / the damage’ we humans inflict, on the environment and on one another, is rendered unflinchingly. Love is present too, often inextricably bound up with the pain it can cause, but expressed in such startling language, it is its own reward.
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No Cherry Time
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.
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.
- Paperback
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The Bestiary or Orpheus' Retinue
Le Bestiaire, charming verse sketches of beasts, fish, birds and insects, together with their guide and mentor, Orpheus, was Apollinaire’s first published book. It appeared in 1911, two years before his ground-breaking modernist collection Alcools. His bestiary – not modernist – harks back to a venerable tradition of animal poetry. What Apollinaire does in these single-stanza pieces is link pithy evocations of the animal world to human foibles.
Martin Sorrell’s translations offer equally pithy English equivalents of Apollinaire’s witty little morality tales, and some of Apollinaire’s own rarely-seen animal drawings are included.
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Evening Hour
Karl Marx is not known as a poet, although as a young law student he had dreamed of following a literary career and worked on poems, a novel and a play, before deciding that his future lay elsewhere. Marx’s major philosophical works include The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology (both co-authored with Friedrich Engels) and Capital.
Some 120 of his poems from the years 1836-7 survive; the poems in this chapbook range from those on the themes and in the style fashionable at that time, love poems to his future wife and satirical verse. Together they offer, along with Philip Wilson’s illuminating introduction, a fascinating glimpse into the mind and times of one of history’s great thinkers.
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Harald in Byzantium
The Viking Harald Hardrada was the greatest warrior of his age. After fighting in Russia and serving in the Varangian Guard in Byzantium, he returned to Norway in 1045 to contest, and win, the crown. He was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.
In this sequence of short poems, Kevin Crossley-Holland assumes the persona of Harald during his formative years in Byzantium and writes about his engagement with warfare, leadership and love.
Chris Riddell’s striking illustrations bring out the drama, passion and wit of the poems to the full. This partnership of poet and artist, already celebrated for their Arthur, the Always King (2021), can be seen at its best in Harald in Byzantium.
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Your Nearness
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.
There’s a deep personal feeling found in Forrest Gander’s desperately beautiful ‘Librettos for Eros’ [in which] feeling masters the poems, and it is feeling about self, desperate, squandered, willful, all but out of control – and ultimately uncivilized….
Your Nearness includes colour illustrations by the author.
- Paperback
£12.99£11.69 available
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Places You Leave
Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.
Places you Leave is relentlessly energetic and politically insistent without ever being pedantic, these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world. The specificity of the details – spindling out over and again – never releases us. We’re yanked along image by image, observation by observation. And, suddenly, it occurs that we’re the angel going backwards with the world collapsing in our wake.
- Paperback
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