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Maps of Desire

Manuel Forcano

Maps of Desire

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 Drawn from his four most recent collections, these poems use geographical and historical references to deepen and inform the narrative, and also to lay before the reader the idea of the continuity, over many centuries, of human love and desire.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.

In Maps of Desire, Manuel Forcano deals with gay desire with a whirlwind-like freshness and a passionate imagination that does at times remind me a little of Cavafy with a gale behind him, some of the poems being written in Cavafy's own city, Alexandria. Forcano is a many-sided scholar but he is primarily an outstanding lyric poet, beautifully rendered into English by Anna Crowe. The book begins with two sections of 'The Bagdad Train', a sweeping journey in pursuit of desire. This is a fragment of a shorter poem, 'Checkmate':

..I got drunk just seeing you,
and playing chess was an excuse
for watching your fingers
moving the pieces of your army
towards me. How sweet
it can sometimes turn out to be,
being defeated: on the board
your castle knocking over
my king.
Many nights
you lined up your pawns
to face me.

George Szirtes

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available
  • Hardback £13.99 £12.59 available

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How Abraham Abandoned Me

Bejan Matur

How Abraham Abandoned Me

This collection covers the broad vision of mankind's history with a story of an individual journey, in the course of which the poet explores the cosmic and the microcosm, the immensities of Time and Space, of becoming and Being. The poems came during a pilgrimage in south-eastern Anatolia.

  • Hardback £13.99 £12.59 available
  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available

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Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi

ed. Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella

Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi

This is a groundbreaking new collection of poems presenting the wealth of poetic voices from one of the world's most important literary cultures. The book covers poetry from the early Middle Ages to the Modernists and Postmodernists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

  • Paperback £12.99 £11.69 available

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The Sum Total of Violations

Regina Derieva

The Sum Total of Violations

Regina Derieva is one of Russia's leading poets whose work has been praised by the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky and Les Murray among others. Freed of national and cultural boundaries and addressed to an audience linked by a larger vision of human possibilities, her poetry embodies the new internationalism of the post-Soviet era.

  • Paperback £10.99 £9.89 available
  • Hardback £12.99 £11.69 available

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Midnight and Other Poems

Mourid Barghouti

Midnight and Other Poems

This first UK publication of a full-length bilingual collection by, arguably, Palestine's greatest living poet is a powerful and moving book comprising his long poem 'Midnight' and a series of shorter poems. Hitherto known in the UK only through his autobiography I Saw Ramallah (Bloomsbury, 2004), Barghouti the poet is heard at his best in this collection.

  • Paperback £12.99 £11.69 available
  • Hardback out of print

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