Carcanet Catalogue 2014
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Transcript of Carcanet Catalogue 2014
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N e w B o o k s2 0 1 4
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Carcanet Celebrates 40 Years...
Chinua Achebe John Ashbery
Sujata Bhatt Eavan Boland
Joseph Brodsky Paul Celan
Inger Christensen Gillian Clarke
Donald Davie Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Iain Crichton Smith Elaine Feinstein
Louise Glück Jorie Graham W.S. Graham
Robert Graves Ivor Gurney Marilyn Hacker
Sophie Hannah John Heath-Stubbs
Elizabeth Jennings Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Mimi Khalvati Thomas Kinsella
R. F. Langley Hugh MacDiarmid
Over forty years of great poetry from Carcanet...
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L e t t e r f r o m t h e
e d i t o r Don’t mention the War. With Benjamin Britten’s Poets, we start with an anthology and a requiem. During 2014 wars are with us willy-nilly. Jon Stallworthy’s War Poet and Jenny Lewis’s Taking Mesopotamia look at war’s recurrences through contemporary eyes. A new edition of Edmund Blunden’s war writings evokes the Great War from the inside. Sujata Bhatt’s Poppies in Translation touches on the theme, and in his first collection, Call Waiting, David Ward considers more recent wars and their depredations.
Other first collections include books by Helen Tookey, Caoilinn Hughes, Lucy Tunstall and Karen McCarthy Woolf. New to the list is Gabriel Levin with Coming Forth By Day, a book of challenging sequences. Andrew McNeillie too explores new formal zones.
The Anglophone world in its diversity is amply represented. Kei Miller, Bill Manhire, Togara Muzanenhamo, Thomas A. Clark and Rowan Williams speak from Jamaica, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Scotland and Wales, respectively. Eavan Boland presents A Poet’s Dublin and a new collection, A Woman Without a Country. Mimi Khalvati spins The Weather Wheel. In translation the list ranges from the modern German poet Sarah Kirsch back through a contemporised Dante to a metred Catullus. Among the big books: two volumes of John Ashbery’s French translations, the second volume of Christopher Middleton’s Collected, Jon Silkin’s long-awaited (and long) Complete Poetry, and Tom Pickard’s resourceful Hoyoot. From the West Country sounds the lyrical voice of P.J. Kavanagh; and, a gruffer note, the C.H. Sisson Reader marks the centenary of a writer who has meant more to Carcanet than any other.
Marius Kociejowski joins the prose list with God’s Zoo, compelling profiles of writers and artists; and Gabriel Josipovici’s new novel shares the light with Muriel Spark’s dazzling Golden Fleece. The Brontës are present, too, thanks to Miss Spark, Arthur Hugh Clough compliments of Anthony Kenny. Arthur Symons recalls Symbolism and its origins.
And do remember to mention the e-books, and Comma Press, and PN Review… We welcome comments and suggestions and invite you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. You can most easily contact us via email, at [email protected].
Michael Schmidt, Editorial & Managing Director
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Calendar 2014
January page
Bill Manhire Selected Poems 6Christopher Middleton Collected Later Poems 7Helen Tookey Missel-Child 8
February pageThomas A. Clark Yellow & Blue 9Andrew McNeillie Winter Moorings 10Caoilinn Hughes Gathering Evidence 11Sarah Kirsch Ice Roses: Selected Poems 12
March pageJenny Lewis Taking Mesopotamia 13Muriel Spark The Golden Fleece ed. Penelope Jardine 14The Best of Poetry London ed. Tim Dooley and Martha Kapos 15
AprilAfter Lermontov: A Bicentenary Celebration ed. Peter France and Robyn Marsack 16John Ashbery Collected French Translations: Poetry 17John Ashbery Collected French Translations: Prose 18
MayP.J. Kavanagh New Selected Poems 19Gabriel Josipovici Hotel Andromeda 20Eavan Boland A Poet's Dublin 21Kei Miller The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion 22
JuneTom Pickard Hoyoot 23Arthur Symons The Symbolist Movement in Literature ed. Matthew Creasy 24Gabriel Levin Coming Forth By Day 25Philip Terry Dante's Inferno 26
JulyKelly Grovier The Lantern Cage 27Arthur Hugh Clough: Mari Magno, Dipsychus and Other Poems ed. Anthony Kenny 28 Jon Silkin Complete Poetry 29Marius Kociejowski God's Zoo 30
AugustJon Stallworthy War Poet 31Edmund Blunden Fall in, Ghosts: Selected War Prose ed. Robyn Marsack 32David C. Ward Call Waiting 33
SeptemberMuriel Spark The Essence of the Brontës 34 Eavan Boland A Woman Without a Country 35Lucy Tunstall The Republic of the Husband 36
OctoberTogara Muzanenhamo Gumiguru 37Mimi Khalvati The Weather Wheel 38 A C.H. Sisson Reader ed. Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness 39 Karen McCarthy Woolf An Aviary of Small Birds 40
NovemberRowan Williams The Other Mountain 41Sujata Bhatt Poppies in Translation 42 Catullus Carmina Trans. Len Krisak 43
InformationEbooks 44-45Comma Press 46-47PN Review 48Selected Backlist 49-50 Order Forms 51 Trade Information 52-53Online with Carcanet 54
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Benjamin Britten was a great reader of poetry, and poetry profoundly affected his musical genius and style of composition. Friendships and collaborations with writers - Auden and Forster among them - left their mark. No other composer of songs, not even Schubert or Schumann, set poems of such range and quality. All the 360 poems Britten set are included in this book. They range from Donne’s complex ‘Holy Sonnets’ to the deceptive simplicity of Blake’s ‘Oh rose thou art sick’. They include anonymous ballads, modern work and poems in other languages (with translations). Full details of the source and use of each poem are given.
JANUARY 2014
PRINT 978 1 85754 240 0
EBOOK 978 1 84777 690 7
328pp PAPER £14.95
World
ed. Boris Ford Benjamin Britten’s Poets
An excellent idea, brilliantly and meticulously edited... this is a superb, eclectic anthology, a commonplace book dedicated to Britten’s soul –
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
BORIS FORD commissioned Benjamin Britten to write the children’s opera Noye’s Fludde. He was Head of Schools Broadcasting for Independent Television.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945) and the War Requiem (1962).
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
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Bill Manhire, by trade a medievalist and by vocation a poet, has – like those writers who invented and developed English poetry – helped to make something charged and original out of his landscapes (including Antarctica) and his language. He was New Zealand’s first Poet Laureate and is one of its most popular and entertaining writers. This book traces his evolution over more than four decades, from The Elaboration (1972) through to The Victims of Lightning (2010) and new poems. It is the story of a love affair with the planet: ‘The world is a constant amazement, / always on the move’.
JANUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 247 3
160 pp PAPER £14.95
World exc. US, Canada,
Aus. & NZ
Bill Manhire Selected Poems
A poet of considerable subtlety and strength, a ‘dangerous writer’...
Charles Causley, Landfall
ABOUT THE AUTHORBILL MANHIRE was born in New Zealand’s southernmost city, Invercargill, in 1946. He has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He is Professor Emeritus at Victoria University of Wellington, where he founded the celebrated Creative Writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.
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August Kleinzahler says, ‘Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. One hardly knows where to begin...’ There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language.
JANUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 152 0
440pp PAPER £25.00
World exc. US & Can.
Christopher Middleton
His work is at once rich and sparse, elegantly economic in its subtle shifts from discrete object to discrete object.
Terry Eagleton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King’s College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
Collected Later Poems
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According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a ‘missel-child’ is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, ‘whereof many strange things are conceived’. In Helen Tookey’s first collection, the missel-child is a point of access to various archaeologies of identity, place and language. The poems deploy syllabics and collage techniques, explore elegy and myth. Each poem is a space in which language works to enable something not only to be said, but also to be shown.
JANUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 218 3
72 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Helen Tookey
The poems in this collection resonate and ring true, tugging at thoughts and feelings just beyond the fully conscious mind. A beautiful book.
Carola Luther
Missel-Child
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN TOOKEY was born near Leicester in 1969. She studied Philosophy and Literature at university and has worked in academic publishing, as a university teacher, and as a freelance editor. Her short collection, Telling the Fractures, a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, was published by Axis Projects in 2008. Her verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011).
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The poems in this book form part of an ongoing project of reparation: a series of small acts of attention, repeated attempts to step outside the circle of human concern and into a wider responsibility to the natural world. The spaces between poems suggest the quietness around words and things; the poems are momentary associations, pauses on a walk. ‘To move among / crashing pines’, Clark writes, ‘is spacious / and exact’. Yellow & Blue invites us to share precisely this experience: the spaciousness of a book-length journey, the exactness and clarity of Clark’s perception.
FEBRUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 205 3
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Thomas A. Clark
Praise for The Hundred Thousand Places (2009):
Thomas A. Clark has produced a book-length poem of genuine visionary intent.
Tom Chivers,Poetry London
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS A. CLARK has published five previous collections, and numerous small books and cards with his own Moschatel Press. He runs Cairn, a project space for minimal and conceptual art with the artist Laurie Clark. His work often appears as installations or interventions in galleries and public spaces. A large collection of such work has been installed in New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow.
Yellow & Blue
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Andrew McNeillie’s sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago (‘For which read a figure for my heart. / For which read too a figure for time’s hurt’), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides. The natural world is seen here in both its beauty and its indifference to human beings (‘There’s many a thing more lasting than a person’). From a version of ‘The Seafarer’ to an elegiac play ‘for sounds and voices’ retelling the story of an English airman drowned off Aran in World War II, these poems speak of lives and deaths across the reaches of history.
FEBRUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 248 0
64 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Andrew McNeillie
McNeillie’s special gift is for providing the pleasure that comes from recognition: we can see ourselves in his poems.
Rory Waterman,Times Literary Supplement
Winter Moorings
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREW McNEILLIE was born in North Wales and read English at Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Emeritus at Exeter University, he is the founding editor of the magazine Archipelago and runs Clutag Press. His poetry collections are Nevermore (OxfordPoets, 2000) and Now, Then (OxfordPoets 2002), Slower (Carcanet, 2006), In Mortal Memory (2010), and Losers Keepers (Agenda Editions, 2011). His memoir, An Aran Keening, was published by Lilliput Press of Dublin in 2001.
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This is an outstanding debut collection from the winner of the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award. Combining precise attention to detail with linguistic virtuosity and a dry humour, Caoilinn Hughes traces the parallels between scientific exploration and poetic venturing, evoking the pioneering spirit of Marie Curie, whose wedding-dress gives off radiation ‘as if she did not heed the warning: /“Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers” ’. This is poetry at the heart of science, science at the heart of poetry: ‘Gathering the data and deciphering / inference is how I stay alive’.
FEBRUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 262 6
64 pp PAPER £9.95
World exc. Australia & NZ
Caoilinn Hughes is a remarkably gifted young poet. Her work is intellectually challenging, effervescent and witty. She has a future of great promise.
Brian Lynch,
Judge of the 2012
Patrick Kavanagh Award
Gathering Evidence Caoilinn Hughes
ABOUT THE AUTHORCAOILINN HUGHES was born in Galway. With a BA and an MA from Queen's University, Belfast, she moved to New Zealand. She later enrolled in a PhD at Victoria University. A selection from this book won the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award, and poems from the book also won the 2013 Cúirt New Writing Prize, the 2012 STA Travel Writing Prize and the 2013 Trócaire / Poetry Ireland Competition.
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Sarah Kirsch, who died in May 2013, was one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary poets. Having lived and worked first in East Germany, then (following political persecution) in the West, finally making her home in rural Schleswig-Holstein, Kirsch provides a writer’s-eye perspective on Germany’s varied post-war existences. In its free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning, her poetry bespeaks her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes’s fresh translations seek above all to capture the characteristic sounds and rhythms of Kirsch’s writing, and to bring the full range of her poetry, from her early East German volumes to her last books, full of the strange beauty of the Schleswig-Holstein landscapes, to an anglophone readership.
FEBRUARY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 151 3
296 pp PAPER £14.95
World
Sarah Kirsch
From a pitch-black sea the moonIs rising. You should nowSeek cover dearHeart. Otherwise longing will howlYour lost dreamOf the beauty of the world…
from ‘Cold’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH KIRSCH was born Ingrid Bernstein in 1935 in East Germany. She later changed her first name in protest against her father’s anti-Semitism. She studied at Halle and Leipzig and married Rainer Kirsch, from whom she later separated. She was openly critical of the East German socialist regime and eventually left East Germany. In 1976 she was awarded the Petrarca-Preis. She died in May 2013.
Ice Roses: Selected Poemstranslated from the german by anne stokes
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Taking Mesopotamia was originally inspired by Jenny Lewis’s search for her lost father – the young South Wales Borderer who led his troops across the desert by starlight in the ill-fated Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Through reconstructed diary extracts, witness statements and a mixture of formal poems and free verse, the book extends into a wider exploration of the recent Iraq war seen from a woman’s point of view – the horror of sons and daughters being sent into battle, the struggles of widows and orphans. Woven through the personal and geopolitical content is a more ancient strand inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first piece of written literature, whose themes of hubris, abuse of power and fear of death show us how little the world has changed in 4,000 years.
MARCH 2014
ISBN 978 1 90618 811 5
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Jenny Lewis
A truly memorable piece of work. This is more than a poetic documentary – it lives as much in the ear as in the imagination, so well acoustically arranged that we cannot forget any of the voices in it.
Jane Draycott
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNY LEWIS trained as a painter before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and gaining an M.Phil in Poetry from the University of Glamorgan. Lewis currently lives in Oxford, where she teaches poetry at Oxford University. She is also a Writing Tutor at Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, working with the Youth Theatre Companies.
Taking MesopotamiaOxfordPoets
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‘Good literary essays have sustaining and stimulating qualities, like deep wells and clear rivers.’ The essays, reviews, memoirs and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. Muriel Spark’s companion, in her preface, remembers how, ‘In the long-ago summer of 1991 Muriel rented a house for the month of July on the German island of Sylt in the North Sea, off Denmark […] Here, in Kampen, I spread out a lifetime of Muriel’s essays and reviews.’ Here The Golden Fleece (which takes its title from Spark’s first published essay) began. Its four sections (Art & Poetry; Autobiography & Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics & Philosophy) ‘tell many things, mainly about the author’, forming a kind of oblique autobiography, an evolving confession of a powerful individual faith in the human and what transcends it.
MARCH 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 251 0
256 pp PAPER £14.95
World exc. USA
Muriel Spark
Praise for Mary Shelley (2013):
Spark achieves precisely what she sets out to; no surprise to us now but pretty impressive given that this was her first book.
Zoë Strachan,Scottish Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MURIEL SPARK was born in Edinburgh in 1918. Her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, her biography of Mary Shelley and her complete poems are published by Carcanet. Her novels include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949. Spark was awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in 2006.
The Golden Fleeceedited with an introduction by penelope jardine
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From modest beginnings in 1988, Poetry London has developed into one of the UK’s leading poetry magazines, including the latest work from across the UK and Ireland, but also from Europe, America and other parts of the world, much of it in translation. The Best of Poetry London is a selection by editors Tim Dooley and Martha Kapos of the very best poems, reviews and features to mark the 25th anniversary of its publication. The anthology includes writing by Jo Shapcott, E.A. Markham, August Kleinzahler, Sinéad Morrissey, Daljit Nagra, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Bill Manhire, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Medbh McGuckian, Maurice Riordan and many others.
MARCH 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 249 7
192 pp PAPER £14.95
World
Poetry London has long been essential reading. Try imagin-ing contemporary poetry without it.
Sean O'Brien
The Best of Poetry Londoneds. Tim Dooley
and marTha Kapos
ABOUT THE EDITORS
TIM DOOLEY has taught English since 1974. A poet, editor and reviewer of poetry for the TLS and elsewhere, Dooley has published two poetry collections as well as several pamphlets.
MARTHA KAPOS has been Assistant Poetry Editor of Poetry London since 2001. Her latest collection, Supreme Being (2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of A Hero of Our Time, whereas among Russian readers his poetry is equally cherished. Bursting into print with an impassioned poem on the death of Pushkin, he continued to attract unfavourable attention from the authorities while enjoying a high reputation in literary circles and beyond. His autobiographical lyrics and longer poems could be labelled as Romantic – Brodsky maintains – except for Lermontov’s ‘thoroughly corrosive self-knowledge’. Having served in the Caucasus, and taken part in dangerous engagements against the Chechens, like Pushkin he died in a duel of dubious legality. Lermontov was of Scottish descent, and this bilingual volume celebrates his bicentenary with new translations by 14 translator-poets, mostly Scottish.
APRIL 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 275 6
160pp PAPER £12.95
World
A poet of immense lyric intensity, Lermontov is at his best when on the attack or in his rare moments of serenity… The uniform he wore wasn’t a disguise: he was a fighter in more ways than one, the main enemy being his own psyche.
Joseph Brodsky
After Lermontov: A Bicentenary Celebration
ABOUT THE EDITORS
ROBYN MARSACK is Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. She has co-edited Oxford Poets 2013: An Anthology (2013), Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (2009) and Intimate Expanses: XXV Scottish Poems 1978–2002 (2004).
PETER FRANCE is Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University, an eminent scholar and translator of modern Russian poetry. He is joint general editor, with Stuart Gillespie, of the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.
eds. peTer France
and robyn marsacK
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The first volume of a momentous two-volume gathering of translations by America’s greatest living poet represents Ashbery’s lifelong engagement with French poetry. He spent almost a decade in France from 1955, during which he worked as an art critic in Paris and was close to the poet Pierre Martory. His versions of Martory’s poems (published by Carcanet as The Landscapist) were a 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; a selection of them appears here. His other poetry translations include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Arthur Cravan, Francis Ponge, Paul Éluard and André Breton, and France’s greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. The development of modern French poetry – by way of the movements of Romanticism, Symbolism, Dadaism and Surrealism – emerges through Ashbery’s chronology. This edition also features a sampler of Ashbery’s masterly translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, published to acclaim in 2011.
Collected French Translations: Poetry edited with an introduction by rosanne wasserman & eugene richie
APRIL 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 234 3
480 pp PAPER £19.95
World exc. US & Can.
John Ashbery
Praise for Illuminations:On page after page Ashbery finds the perfect twist to turn the English Rimbaud into something natural and eloquent.
Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, and educated at Harvard and Columbia. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry. He is the recipient of many honours, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. The French government appointed Ashbery as both Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Officier de la Légion d’honneur.
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John Ashbery is ‘the finest poet in English of his generation’ (The Times), but his prose writings and engagement with prose writers – through translations, essays and criticism – have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book presents his versions of, among others, Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy, Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Eluard. Here are extracts from Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and writings on Havana; Georges Bataille’s darkly erotic first novella, L’abbé C; Antonin Artaud’s correspondence with the poet Jacques Rivière; Salvador Dalí on de Kooning’s art; and key theoretical texts by Jacques Dupin and others. Several of these are previously unpublished or have been long unavailable. Many are modern classics. This book provides insight into the range of French cultural influence on Ashbery’s life and work, and what he has chosen to share in English.
APRIL 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 235 0
432 pp PAPER £19.95
World exc. US & Can.
John Ashbery
Collected French Translations: Proseedited with an introduction by rosanne wasserman & eugene richie
If there’s a modern poet you need on your shelves, and in your head, it’s Ashbery.
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
ABOUT THE EDITORS
ROSANNE WASSERMAN’s poems have appeared in anthologies and journals including Best American Poetry 1988 and Best American Poetry 1994. Her books include Other Selves and Frequently Asked Questions.
EUGENE RICHIE is Director of Writing in the English Department at Pace University in New York City. He has also translated work by Latin American writers including Jaime Manrique and Matilde Daviu.
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P.J. Kavanagh’s ‘revelatory gift is prodigious’, Derek Mahon says. It was Kavanagh who brought the poetry of Ivor Gurney to light, who has done so much to revive interest in British nature writing, and has contributed so much to it himself, nowhere more so than in his poetry. Ian McMillan noted how ‘he appears to be able to grip and hold tight those aspects of nature and aspects of man which would normally be unlikely poetic material’. He understands how contradictions coexist in nature and in us, and out of that vexed coexistence he makes poetry that, formally poised, packs the punch of revelation.
MAY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 252 7
166pp PAPER £12.95
World
P. J. Kavanagh
[P.J. Kavanagh possesses] that quality of sheer readability...
Vernon Scannell
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P.J. KAVANAGH was born in England in 1931, and has worked as a lecturer, actor and broadcaster, as well as a writer. In 1992 he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry. His memoir, The Perfect Stranger, won the Richard Hillary Prize in 1966, and his first novel A Song and Dance was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1968. Carcanet publishes his edition of the Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney.
New Selected Poemsincluding a foreword by derek mahon
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In a house in a quiet street in North London, Helena struggles with her self-appointed task of writing a book about the reclusive American artist Joseph Cornell. At the same time she dreams and thinks about her sister Alice, working in an orphanage in Chechnya. She is certain that Alice despises her for living a life of comfort and privilege, far away from the horrors of war; yet she knows too that her work is more than self-indulgence. How to reconcile these two visions? Enter Ed, a Czech journalist and photographer who claims he has been working in Chechnya and brings news of Alice, along with the request for a bed for the few days he has to be in London… Gabriel Josipovici’s sparkling new novel charts the course of those few days, as Joseph Cornell’s mysterious life and the strange boxes he constructed wage a silent struggle in Helena’s mind and spirit with the imperatives of the present.
MAY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 263 3
152 pp PAPER £12.95
World
Josipovici is one of the UK’s most distinguished and fearless writers.
Deborah Levy,Jewish Quarterly
Hotel Andromeda Gabriel Josipovici
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI was born in Nice in 1940. After graduating from Oxford he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex in 1963, where he remained till he took early retirement in 1998. He is the author of sixteen novels, three volumes of short stories, and many other works of non-fiction, and he is a regular contributor to the TLS. His work has been translated into several languages.
21
Published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this beautifully designed book brings together many of Boland’s best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. It also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph, editor of Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland, and ‘Two Poets and a City’, a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the role it has played in their lives and in their work.
MAY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 447 7
96 pp PAPER £8.95
World
Eavan Boland
She’s a poet of both painterly and worldly engagements, equally attentive to the dance of the intellect and the testimony of the senses.
Boston Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin in 1944, and studied in Ireland, London and New York. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland’s previous works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998), Code (2001), New Collected Poems (2005) and New Selected Poems (2013).
A Poet’s Dublinedited by paula meehan and jody allen randolph
22
In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it (‘I never get involved / with the muddy affairs of land’), is gradually compelled to recognise – even to envy – a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.
MAY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 267 1
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
His tales are the stories that haven’t been told; they call out from the pages to be heard by Caribbean readers and by the wider world.
Jamaica Gleaner
Kei Miller
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEI MILLER was born in Jamaica in 1978. He was educated at the University of the West Indies and Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published two collections of poetry with Carcanet: There Is an Anger That Moves (2007) and A Light Song of Light (2010). He also edited New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2007). He currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
23
For Tom Pickard poetry is a free and freeing space. His pen ‘demands / complete autonomy’, and finds it as it explores both harsh and lyrical realities, attunes itself to northern (and other) city- and landscapes, and always has in mind the political forces that try to hem it in. Pickard is a poet of the present and the future tense, opening spaces and knocking down thematic and formal barriers with a lightness of touch and a clarity which obfuscation cannot withstand: ‘opening a dictionary / between inflict / and inhuman,’ he says, ‘my eye falls / on a flower / placed there / and preserved / by you…’ The lightness of the touch can be informed by love, or anger.
JUNE 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 254 1
496 pp PAPER £19.95
World exc. Canada & US
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered poems that are so hard hitting at one level and so tender and compassionate at another... a big book, and an important book.
Stephen Regan
Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs Tom Pickard
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOM PICKARD was born in 1946 in Newcastle. He became friends with the poet Basil Bunting and encouraged his return to writing. In 1963, Pickard founded the Morden Tower readings with international poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Pickard moved to London in 1973 and started writing radio and documentary scripts. His publications include High on the Walls (1968) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007), which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.
24
First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism, and served to introduce the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Symons’ interest in writers such as Verlaine and Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature; but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for over 50 years. It includes an introduction, chronology and notes, together with appendices presenting the essays added by Symons to later editions of his book and a selection of his translations of French poetry.
JUNE 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 125 4
336 pp PAPER £14.95
World
Arthur Symons
But if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of theFrench symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation. T.S. Eliot
The Symbolist Movement in Literatureedited with an introduction by matthew creasy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND EDITOR
ARTHUR SYMONS (1865-1945) contributed to the Yellow Book, edited the Savoy, and translated works by Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarmé and Émile Zola amongst others. Although he lived until 1945, his career in later life was overshadowed by a mental breakdown he experienced in 1908.
MATTHEW CREASY is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published essays and articles on the work of James Joyce, William Empson, and Virginia Woolf.
25
Coming Forth By Day breaks new ground in its formal experimentation as well as in its exploration of remote corners of the Mediterranean. The long title poem is written from the multiple perspectives of the personages in Courbet’s large painting The Artist’s Studio. Courbet’s realism blends with ancient eastern mythologies, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which gives the collection its title. In another long poem, ‘Balthazar’s Field’, the poet walks the length and breadth of Patmos, seeking out the hidden and the heterogeneous: the cave of St John, a Greek priestess’s inscription carved on a stone, ‘the rockrose / nestled in its alms of soil’. The book concludes with an extended meditation on modern music (‘cored marvels of pitch’) written in homage to the composer Alexander Goehr.
JUNE 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 268 8
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
... what stands revealed:a gorge and running stream, a tree where I sought refugefrom the sun, and skies to lose myself in – neither innor out of this world
from ‘Coming Forth By Day’
Coming Forth By Day Gabriel Levin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GABRIEL LEVIN was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published four collections of poetry and translations from Hebrew, French and Arabic. He is one of the founding editors of Ibis Editions, a small press dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant.
26
Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and relocating it to the modern ‘walled city’ of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and ministers for education; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are re-imagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry’s home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time Essex writer-in-residence and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld: ‘I heard the dead, the city dead / The devils that surround us’ (‘Memorial Day’). In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante’s original text.
JUNE 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 220 6
160 pp PAPER £12.95
World
Philip Terry
The lineation speeds along at a nice articulated pace, the Dantesque pitch is right and propulsive, the cast of vil-lains is energising, the balance between language and lingo, the allusive and the obscene just right...
Seamus Heaney
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHILIP TERRY was born in Belfast in 1962. He has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of Creative Writing. His books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (2000), Fables of Aesop (2006) and the poetry collections Oulipoems (2006) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (2010).
Dante’s Inferno
27
The title of Kelly Grovier’s third collection, The Lantern Cage, conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement, the burning soul and the material body. The poems it brings together are fascinated by a universe whose meaning flickers dimly across the walls of our experience. Prompted by scenes that occur in life’s everyday spaces – city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains – these are poems that seek to shine a warm light on the mysteries that underlie our existence. This is a world of ‘undeciphered sands’, ‘lost cathedrals’, ‘buried books’, and ‘bone machines’ – a land where substance and shadow blur. By turns lyrical and philosophical, romantic and playful, The Lantern Cage is a collection located on the margins of vision, where the invisible calculations of being (‘algorithms of rain’; ‘the long divisions / of suffering’) remain unsolvable – a realm whose secrets are kept ‘under lough and quay’.
JULY 2014
ISBN 978 1 90618 813 9
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
...a poet of real humility, who listens to his words and guides them into place.
Times Literary Supplement
The Lantern Cage Kelly Grovier
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KELLY GROVIER was born in Michigan and educated at the University of California, Los Angeles and Oxford University. He has written widely on the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, and The Gaol: The Story of London’s Most Notorious Prison was published by John Murray (Hodder) in 2008. He is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
OxfordPoets
28
‘The true haunts of the poetic powers,’ Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, ‘are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire compulsion of what has once been done… There walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre.’ Mari Magno, written in the last years of Clough’s life, is a modern Canterbury Tales, the travellers on a trans-Atlantic crossing exchanging stories about love and marriage. The unfinished dramatic poem Dipsychus, a Faustian dialogue, was started in Venice when Clough was still a young man, and revisited and revised throughout his life. He described it as ‘the conflict between the tender conscience and the world’. These two unfinished master-works and a selection of Clough’s shorter poems will feed the growing interest in this most lovable and no longer neglected Victorian.
JULY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 255 8
144 pp PAPER £12.95
World
Arthur Hugh Clough
Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved,Of all the creatures under this broad skyWe are most hopeless, that had hoped most high,And most beliefless, that had most believed.
from ‘Easter Day’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE EDITORARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH was born in 1819 in Liverpool. At Rugby School, he made friends with Matthew Arnold. After graduating from Oxford he became a fellow and tutor at Oriel College, but resigned in 1848 owing to religious doubts. He was appointed Professor of English at University College, London. In 1852 he became a tutor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Clough died in Florence in 1861.
SIR ANTHONY KENNY is an English philosopher. He is a former President of the British Academy and Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Mari Magno, Dipsychus and other poemsedited with an introduction by sir anthony kenny
29
Complete Poetry of Jon Silkin brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin’s books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poetry demands a new perception of Silkin’s language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.
JULY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 240 4
1088 pp PAPER £29.95
World
I had no voice, and borrowing one I made English harsh,which is your tender complex English.It is your language, and I must look for mine. from ‘The Jews in England’
Jon Silkin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND EDITORS
JON SILKIN was born in London in 1930. After National Service and time as a manual labourer, he went to the University of Leeds as Gregory Fellow in Poetry. He published poetry, critical works and anthologies. He held writing fellowships and chairs in the USA, Australia and Japan. Jon Silkin died in November 1997.
JON GLOVER worked with Jon Silkin on Stand and they co-edited The Penguin Book of First World War Prose.
KATHRYN JENNER worked as an Archivist at the University of Leeds and catalogued the Jon Silkin archive.
Complete Poetryedited with an introduction by jon glover and kathryn jenner
NortherN house
30
This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or émigrés displaced from their cultural and geographical origins. The subjects include poet John Rety (Hungary), painter Fawzi Karim (Iraq), novelist Moris Farhi (Turkey), poet Martina Evans (Ireland), artist Ana Maria Pacheco (Brazil), actor Andrzej Borkowski (Poland), novelist Brian Chikwava (Zimbabwe), writer Hamid Ismailov and musician Razia Sultanova (Uzbekistan), poet Mimi Khalvati (Iran), filmmaker Rajan Khosa (India), jazz bassist Coleridge Goode (Jamaica) and sculptor Zahed Tajeddin (Syria); the book concludes with an autobiographical account. God’s Zoo is a perceptive and moving enquiry into complex questions of migration, identity and belonging – as well as a tribute to the value of art and creativity in human lives.
JULY 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 448 4HARDBACK £25.00
ISBN 978 1 84777 266 4PAPERBACK £14.95
384 pp World
I was born into a condition of exile. I say this having no recollection of the word ever being used at home. It was measurable, this whatever, in the inaudible muttering of lips attuned to a language that no longer got a daily airing... Marius Kociejowski
God’s Zoo Marius Kociejowski
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI was born in Canada in 1949 and lives in London where he works as an antiquarian bookseller. He has published four collections of poetry. Most recently he has published The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey (Sutton Publishing, 2004), The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (Biblioasis, 2010) and an anthology, Syria through Writers’ Eyes (Eland, revised and enlarged edition, 2010).
31
Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during schooldays shadowed by the Second World War and a mother’s memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. At school, too, he was introduced to the poems of Wilfred Owen, whose biography he would later write, and to those of others who would eventually be represented in his Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984, 2nd edition 2014). Many of the most anthologised and ambitious of his own poems – ‘No Ordinary Sunday’, ‘A Letter from Berlin’, ‘The Nutcracker’, ‘A Poem about Poems about Vietnam’ – respond to wars that scarred the twentieth century. A recent uncollected poem, from which the book takes its title, sheds piercing light on the dark aftermath of the conflict so bitterly remembered today as ‘the war to end wars’.
AUGUST 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 244 2
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Jon Stallworthy
Our eyes meet, look away – to stare
upstream – at what? We cannot see
for snow, and now an old toast drifts
unlooked-for into memory:
Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts!
from ‘Self-Portrait in Snow’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JON STALLWORTHY was born in 1935 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His biography of Wilfred Owen won several awards, and he has edited Owen’s Complete Poems and Fragments, Henry Reed’s Collected Poems and several anthologies.
War Poet
32
Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, Undertones of War, and his early edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems were just two examples of the ways in which he sought to convey his war experience, and to keep faith with his comrades in arms. His poetry is suffused by this experience, and he was haunted by it throughout his writing life. This selection of Blunden’s prose about the First World War includes the complete text of De bello germanico, his first, lively sketch of the war as he lived it in 1916. Deeply informed by his reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and equally by his knowledge of the countryside, Blunden’s vivid prose summons up for us what was human and natural in that most unnatural of environments, the battlefields of the Western Front.
AUGUST 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 211 4
160 pp PAPER £14.95
World
I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story.
Edmund Blunden, in 1968
Edmund Blunden
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND EDITOREDMUND BLUNDEN (1896–1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. He became Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
ROBYN MARSACK is Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. She has co-edited Oxford Poets 2013: An Anthology (2013), Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (2009) and Intimate Expanses: XXV Scottish Poems 1978–2002 (2004).
Fall in, Ghosts: Selected War Prose edited with an introduction by robyn marsack
33
The first full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward, Call Waiting combines wry meditations on twenty-first-century life, work and family with observation of America – its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward’s poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees (‘Case closed. / No body was ever found’) to Ward’s own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book’s final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 USA and its self-deceptions.
AUGUST 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 226 8
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
He knew what he knew and did not knowwhat he knew wasnot America.
from ‘Colossus’
David C. Ward
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVID C. WARD is Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Educated at Warwick University and Yale, he is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (2004) and (with Jonathan D. Katz) Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010).
Call Waiting
34
First published by Peter Owen in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark’s writings on the Brontë sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems. Perceptively but unsentimentally, Spark considers the Brontës’ lives and works, including their generally disastrous attempts at teaching, and reflects on her own fascination, as a writer and a reader, with Emily Brontë and with ‘the immortal Wuthering Heights and its nightmare hero’. This edition features a new foreword by Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor at the Independent newspaper.
SEPTEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 246 6
328 pp PAPER £12.95
World exc. US
Muriel Spark
Praise for Mary Shelley (2013):
Muriel Spark shows herself to be as fearless and original a biographer as she was a novelist.
Katherine Hughes,Times Literary Supplement
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MURIEL SPARK was born in Edinburgh in 1918. Her autobiography Curriculum Vitae, her biography of Mary Shelley and her complete poems are published by Carcanet. Her novels include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949. Spark was awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in 2006.
The Essence of the Brontës with a foreword by boyd tonkin
35
The poems in Eavan Boland’s new collection seek out the delicate intersections between generation, identity, and the deep losses inflicted by history on those who can bear them least. Exploring questions of inheritance (from mother to daughter, from generation to generation), the poems look closely at the ways in which we construct one another, and the ways in which – even without country, or settled identity – a legacy of connection and consolation can endure.
SEPTEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 217 6
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World exc. USA & Can.
Eavan Boland lives in a different world, one from which she can see not only ‘the Dublin mountains’, but a looming poetic tradition and the wastes of European history…
The New York Times
Eavan Boland
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin in 1944, and studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She is currently Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland’s previous works include The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1994), The Lost Land (1998), Code (2001) and New Collected Poems (2005).
A Woman Without a Country
36
Lucy Tunstall’s striking début collection features a cast of characters ranging from Paul Muldoon and Marianne Moore to Aunt Jane, who fell in love ‘in 1956, or thereabouts’, and Cousin Gillian, who keeps the family’s long-case clock in her caravan (‘Some people do not think this is an appropriate arrangement’). Using a variety of registers and forms, including dramatic monologue, lyric, collage and found text, Tunstall explores poetry’s negotiations of truthfulness and theatricality, accuracy and artifice. Perceptive and humorous, but never sentimental, she reaches into the deep emotions that lie beneath inhibition and the conventions that govern ordinary and extraordinary lives.
SEPTEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 256 5
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Lucy Tunstall
In one of these charming buildings, the penof a general is scratching something elaborateand carefully worded; it is a treaty or an abdication,he forgets which. Twice a day his boots soundin the portico. The marble is spotless. from ‘The Republic of the Husband’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LUCY TUNSTALL was born in London in 1969. A selection of her poems appeared in the anthology New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). She has an MA in English Poetry and its Contexts from the Renaissance to the Present Day from the University of Bristol, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Exeter on colour theory and visual art in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
The Republic of the Husband
37
Gumiguru is the tenth month of the Shona calendar – a month of dryness and heat before the first rains fall and rejuvenate the land. Togara Muzanenhamo’s second collection is a cycle of poems distilling the experiences of a decade into one calendar year, framed through the natural and agricultural landscapes of Zimbabwe. The book stands as both an elegy for the poet’s father and a hymn to the veldt, the farms and villages, and the men and women whose lives are interwoven with the land and the changing seasons.
OCTOBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 257 2
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Togara Muzanenhamo
Quiet on the wing, a pearled rush of pochard gaze on troutturning fat on wishing stars, the evening air running brisklythrough guinea grass hazed pink with the coming drought.Waterbuck draw in, all ghostlike, genuflecting to kiss a skywild with constellations… from ‘Oxbow’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOGARA MUZANENHAMO was born in 1975 in Lusaka, Zambia, and grew up on his family’s farm in Zimbabwe before studying in the Netherlands. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals. His first collection, Spirit Brides, was published by Carcanet in 2006.
Gumiguru
38
In these new poems, each of them written in couplets and contained within the space of sixteen lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. An oblique elegy for her mother, the book is also a series of meditations on the small details of animals’ lives, and on the vulnerable animal within the human being.
OCTOBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 258 9
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Mimi Khalvati
This open and generous readiness to engage with all realities and see their worth gives Khalvati her power... graceful accomplishment is always in the service of a fundamental seriousness.
Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry London
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIMI KHALVATI was born in Tehran and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She worked as a theatre director in London and in Tehran. She is the founder of The Poetry School where she now teaches. Carcanet publish her six previous collections, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991–2011. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2006 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The Weather Wheel
39
The great English, Anglican and modernist poet and writer C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol a hundred years ago. This Reader draws on his poetry, fiction, translations, and his literary, political and religious essays. It justifies what his peers and critics said of him. Writing of his essays Louis Simpson notes ‘his fearless views’. Jasper Griffin in the Times Literary Supplement dubbed him ‘one of the great translators of our time’. As a writer he was always starting anew, rejecting ‘whatever appeared with the face of familiarity’ and referring the present to those defining periods of English and European history and culture that tried men and languages most harshly: the seventeenth century, for example, and the twentieth.
OCTOBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 265 7
352 pp PAPER £19.95
World
[His poems] move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France, they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through [...]; they move in love of the old lost life by which the new life is condemned.
Donald Hall, New York Times Book Review
A C.H. Sisson Readeredited by charlie louth and patrick mcguinness
C. H.Sisson
ABOUT THE EDITORS
PATRICK McGUINNESS was born in 1968 in Tunisia. He has published numerous translations and poetry collections, including his most recent Jilted City. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government.
CHARLIE LOUTH is the great-grandson of C.H. Sisson. He is lecturer in German at Queen’s College, Oxford, and has published work on Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
40
An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. The book opens at the birth, which paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after a long labour and an emergency caesarean, the baby’s heart gives out. For the mother, her body flooded with endorphins, euphoria gives way to shock, followed by an intense and visceral grief. However, just as grief itself is not linear, so too the book follows an emotional rather than a strictly chronological arc, lyric rather than narrative. At the same time, McCarthy Woolf ’s formal experimentation allows an intellectual and metaphysical line of enquiry to emerge. Ultimately, it is a closely felt connection with the natural world, particularly with water and birds, that allows the author to transcend the experience and honour the spirit of her son.
OCTOBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 90618 814 6
88pp PAPER £9.95
World
A powerful command of form and rhythm
Alan Brownjohn, Poetry Review
An Aviary of Small BirdsKarenMcCarthy Woolf
ABOUT THE AUTHORKAREN McCARTHY WOOLF was born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father. She is the recipient of the Kate Betts Memorial Prize and an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship from Royal Holloway, where she is a PhD candidate. She is the editor of three literary anthologies, most recently Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014). Her poetry has been published in Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation among others.
OxfordPoets
41
In The Other Mountain Rowan Williams relives moments of intense trial, when women and men are transformed in spirit, and sometimes in body also. He not only reads the signs as they appear in nature and history: he lives them through language. Imagination and language bring us close to our condition. They can witness and relive in all humility the circumstances of others, or witness nature and its revelations. His poems are informed by a sensibility shaped by Wales and by the Welsh language. They prove the reality of ‘the bright, inner freedom’ we can exercise through grace, even in a world whose stark gravity is all about us. He avoids the merely personal: the world exists and his imagination and faith work together to explore and celebrate what is and what might be.
NOVEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 449 1
80 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Rowan Williams
… Split the woodand I am there, says the unfamiliarLord, there where the book openswith the leaves nailed to the walland the silent knot resolved by surgeryinto a mask gaping and staring, readingand being read… from ‘Door’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROWAN WILLIAMS was born in 1950. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012). He spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. Williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 and became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013. Carcanet will reissue The Poems of Rowan Williams in April 2014.
The Other Mountain
42
Sujata Bhatt
Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua – many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt’s many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa’s sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter’s voice in birdsong – and the ‘poppies in translation’ mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the ‘haunted undertow’ of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, ‘with their black souls in the wind’.
NOVEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 020 2
96 pp PAPER £9.95
World
Sujata Bhatt leads the reader through the bright, familiar world and on into the dark until her words pierce that darkness, offering a light that will challenge and reward.
John F. Deane
Poppies in Translation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUJATA BHATT was born in Ahmedabad, India, and grew up in India and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is the author of six previous collections and a Collected Poems (2013), and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. She divides her time between Germany and elsewhere.
43
Catullus is a companion of lovers and of those whom love has disappointed. He is also a satirical and epigrammatic writer who savagely consoles with laughter. Carmina captures in English both the mordant, scathing wit and also the concise tenderness, the famous love for reluctant Lesbia who is made present in these new versions. A range of English metres and rhymes evoke the epigrammatic power of the many modes and moods of this most engaging, erotic and influential of the Latin poets. He left a mark on Horace, Virgil, Ovid and on the lyric and epigrammatic traditions of all the languages of Europe. Of Len Krisak's Horace translations, Frederic Raphael said, ‘[He] enables us both to enjoy a fresh voice and to hear (and see), very distinctly, what lies behind and within his unintimidated rescripts’. Again in Carmina he works his precise magic.
NOVEMBER 2014
ISBN 978 1 84777 259 6
144pp PAPER £12.95
World
GaiusValeriusCatullus
She says there’s no one she would rather wed than me,Even if Jove went down on bended knee.She says. But what a woman tells the one she’s smittenRightly should be wind- and water-written.
from Catullus, LXX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS (84–54 BC) was born in Verona to a wealthy family. He spent his early adulthood in Rome, with time out for service in the province of Bithynia. ‘Lesbia’, the love object of many of his Carmina, may have been notional or based on a real person. He greatly influenced the poetry of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid.
LEN KRISAK was recipient of the Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost Prizes. He has translated the works of Horace, Virgil and Ovid. His work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Hudson Review and PN Review.
Carminatranslated from the latin with an introduction by len krisak
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DIAO DOUPoint of Origin
Winner of 2013 English PEN grant for translation, this is the first major English translation from a leading Chinese author and satirist.
ISBN 978 1 90558 362 1£9.99
ED. JIM HINKSAbout You: New Directions in Short Fiction A must-read for all short story lovers. About You gathers short stories by 15 of the best new and emerging writers in the UK.
ISBN 978 1 90558 347 8£7.95
GREGORY NORMINTONThe Ghost Who Bled
The first short story collection by an acclaimed novelist and regular contributor to BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.
ISBN 978 1 90558 356 0£9.99
FRANK COTTRELL BOYCETriple Word Score
The début short fiction collection by the award-winning screenwriter, children’s author and writer behind Danny Boyle’s Olympics Opening Ceremony.
ISBN 978 1 90558 343 0£9.99
a new generation in short fiction
47
FRANK COTTRELL BOYCETriple Word Score
The début short fiction collection by the award-winning screenwriter, children’s author and writer behind Danny Boyle’s Olympics Opening Ceremony.
ISBN 978 1 90558 343 0£9.99
COMMA PRESS
ED. RA PAGEThought XFixing Science with Fiction
A unique blend of science and fiction, featuring 20 leading scientists including BBC's star-gazing expert Dr Tim O'Brien.
ISBN 978 1 90558 360 7£9.99
ED. RA PAGETodorov's Nightmares
Featuring Frank Cottrell Boyce and A.S. Byatt, this is the sequel to the award-winning anthology The New Uncanny.
ISBN 978 1 90558 359 1£10.99
SEMA KAYGUSUZThe Well of Trapped Words
The first English translation of short stories by one of Turkey's award-winning leading female writers. ISBN 978 1 90558 361 4£9.99
a new generation in short fiction
ED. JIM HINKS AND MASASHI MATSUIEThe Book of Tokyo
A unique anthology featuring Tokyo-inspired short stories by award-winning poets, novelists and scriptwriters.ISBN 978 1 90558 357 7£9.99
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Poésie sans Frontières
One of the best UK poetry magazines.Independent
PN Review is the most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK’s poetry magazines.
Simon Armitage
The most incisive voice of a vision of poetry and the arts as central to national life...
George Steiner
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49
SELECTEd BACKLIST
CHINUA ACHEBECollected PoemsChinua Achebe’s Collected Poems was easily the most powerful book I read in 2005: his poem ‘A Mother in a Refugee Camp’ had me making a fool of myself on a train between Charing Cross and Waterloo East.
MATTHEW SWEET, INDEPENDENTISBN 978 1 85754 843 3 £9.95
CHARLES BAUDELAIREComplete Poems
...one is grateful when the translator turns himself loose and the English serves as a commentary on Baudelaire's modernity.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
ISBN 978 1 85754 939 3 £18.95
SUJATA BHATTPoint No Point: Selected Poems
...a substantial collection of poems, one that allows us to travel, dream and learn, but one that ultimately moves us by the quietude of its stance and its impeccable articulation.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
ISBN 978 1 85754 306 3 £9.95
EAVAN BOLANDNew Collected PoemsThis New Collected Poems is an important document: it is the finest evidence ever assembled of the escape from the grip of a tradition. THOMAS MCCARTHY, IRISH TIMES
ISBN 978 1 85754 858 7 £14.95
GILLIAN CLARKECollected Poems
Gillian Clarke’s poems ring with lucidity and power...her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical... THE TIMES ISBN 978 1 85754 335 3 £12.95
THE NEW YORK POETS John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara & James Schuyler
...a quartet of sublime jokers who imagined a city into ex-istence. Deceptively simple surfaces overlay an intellectual and emotional exuberance of staggering daring.
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
ISBN 978 1 85754 734 4 £14.95
50
SELECTEd BACKLIST
REBECCA GOSSHer Birth
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2013
The poems in Her Birth unfold their story of love, loss and grief for a baby daughter with pared-down precision and scorching intensity. HELEN DUNMORE
ISBN 978 1 84777 238 1 £9.95
JORIE GRAHAMPLACE
For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption – intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic – rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems
NEW YORK TIMESISBN 978 1 84777 193 3£9.95
HUGH MACDIARMIDSelected Poems
Riach has done Scottish literature a great service in masterminding the Carcanet edition of the works of Hugh MacDiarmid...
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ISBN 978 1 85754 756 6 £14.95
SINEAD MORRISSEYParallax
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD ANDT.S. ELIOT PRIZES 2013The outstanding poet of her generation.
THE INDEPENDENTISBN 978 1 84777 204 6 £9.95
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters to a Young Poet
The author wrote of his Sonnets to Orpheus:They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me...the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.
ISBN 978 1 85754 456 5 £12.95
CHRISTINA ROSSETTISelected Poems
[Rossetti’s poetry is] unequalled for its objective expres-sion of happiness denied and a certain unfamiliar steely stoicism.
PHILIP LARKIN ISBN 978 0 85635 533 2 £9.95
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55
Carcanet Celebrates 40 Years...
Bill Manhire Charlotte Mew
Christopher Middleton Czeslaw Milosz
Robert Minhinnick Edwin Morgan
Sinéad Morrissey Les Murray
Frank O’Hara Cesare Pavese
Octavio Paz Mervyn Peake
Laura Riding Rainer Maria Rilke
Lynette Roberts C.H. Sisson
Muriel Spark Edward Thomas
Charles Tomlinson Marina Tsvetaeva
Sylvia Townsend Warner
William Carlos Williams Nikolai Zabolotsky
Over forty years of great poetry from Carcanet...
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