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Bigger than the Facts
Jan Baeke, the award-winning Dutch poet, has, in Bigger Than The Facts (Groter dan de feiten, 2007), created an intriguing filmic world in which tensions are rife and nothing is quite as it seems. It is a world whose elements keep recurring, coalescing little by little into dreamlike leitmotifs — a bus journey, a hotel room, dogs, cigarettes, fire, a blind man, a canary, a man and a woman in love. And love, however fragile it may be, is a major theme of this collection, for "where there's fire, there's warmth for two".
Antoinette Fawcett's poetically sensitive translation gives a clear sense of Baeke's style and poetic drive, and enables the English-speaking reader to explore in full this key collection in Baeke's œuvre.
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Eternal Traffic
MILA HAGUOVÁ is one of Slovakia’s most highly-regarded poets, and this, her second full-length collection in English translation from Arc, selects poems from two of her books, the prize-winning Biele rumupisy (White Manuscripts, 2007) and Miznutie anjelov (The Disappearance of Angels, 2008).
Nature, eroticism, memory and loss are inseparably interwoven in these fragile, yet immensely powerful, poems. Haugová’s language is often experimental, yet the emotional thrust of each poem is quite clear. She writes movingly about the end of a love affair, about her childhood experiences (both painful and inspiring), and about the death of her mother; no experience, however distressing, is discarded, since it can only contribute to wider understanding and acceptance.
As James Sutherland-Smith says in the introduction to his finely-crafted translation:
“Mila Haugová writes of the intricacies of human emotions, their revelations and their concealments with an insight very few other poets have ever approached.”
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Sometimes a Single Leaf
Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit's work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today's Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit's poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation.
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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'.
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A Friable Earth
Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years.
Jackie Wills shows a poem remains a
deeply human magic.
A Friable Earth investigates with
compassion memory and time, the ache
of what we can never know, people who
exist in the cracks. Vintage Wills.
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The Caprices
The Caprices is a sequence of poems written in response to Goya's Los Caprichos, a series of aquatints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Each of the 80 poems is illustrated by the etching to which it responds, and shares its title. As James Byrne writes in his introduction: "Goya's Los Caprichos are a series of real-life nightmares that haunt the twenty-first century. [...] Arguably, the world we live in today is more terrifying than Goya's Spain because — in over two hundred years since he created Los Caprichos — we have become more cool about human inhumanity. The echo grows louder, the world becomes more absurd, more criminal and yet, perversely, our collective response all too often verges on the whimsical. Goya, echoing in his deafness, hears our own, capturing all these elements variously throughout his masterwork."
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Not on the Side of the Gods
Anna Crowe writes to rescue obscure stories and give a voice to things that have no voice. Her poems celebrate the mystery and diversity of the natural world while mourning its fragility. Birds fly in and out of poems in which lurk extraordinary invertebrates and strange plants; the vulnerability of human lives and family relationships is another concern. One of the foremost translators of Catalan poetry into English, her appetite for language is rooted in her love of music. The Poetry Book Society selectors described her poems as "sinewy and questing, alive with memory and attentive to the interior landscape.
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The Unknown Neruda
'The greatest poet of the 20th century', Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has been published across the globe. Remarkably, some of this Nobel Prize-winner's verse has never been published in English; this book fills much of that gap. Neruda's poetry is a fusion of beautiful love poetry and politically engaged verse, lyrical and apocalyptic by turns.
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The Iron Flute: War Poetry from Ancient & Medieval China
This anthology contains first-hand accounts from those involved in the conflicts of ancient China. Many of these poems are translated into English for the first time; they invoke powerful, terrible images of ancient warfare, beautifully brought to life. The poetry within this book spans more than sixteen centuries and includes the work of 50 poets.
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Camp Notebook
Camp Notebook is a masterpiece in its own right, a crucial work of European verse. It is one of the greatest pieces of literature to emerge from the Holocaust, and probably the finest volume of poetry born from the horror of the Second World War.
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