All books

“Boy Thing is a thing of wonder. These are poems
that negotiate anew the tender, hurt territory
of a boy abruptly unfathered with every fresh
reading; and that travel into the wonderment of
becoming a father of boys. We are given a
boy’s-eye-view of 1970s Cornwall with a
music and detail so meticulous that we yearn with
Clarke for its lost territories. But these are not just
poems of archive or archaeology;
they are revelatory, dynamic and raw.
Clarke is crucially attuned to the secret
messages received in boyhood – its
preoccupations and awakenings, epiphanies
and abuses, and its shames. This book is
unmissable: human and humane,
grimy and sublime.”

“Boy Thing is a beautiful book – sensual,
atmospheric, full of nature and ritual. These poems
while formally precise, possess a rawness that is
startling and utterly compelling.”

“Thomas de Waal offers the English-reading
public a precious jewel box: the gift of an elegant,
supple translation of Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia.
The collection is vividly introduced, and
accompanied by an incredibly helpful – and
never burdensome – set of comments to delight
both those readers new to Mandelstam
and those who, like myself, have long
loved his verse. It is difficult to believe that
we had to wait over a hundred years for the
first complete English translation of a masterpiece
of twentieth century poetry which rivals that
other great product of 1922, T. S. Eliot’s
The Wasteland.”

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.

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.