Poetry

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

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Dannie Abse

Hutchinson ISBN 0091796970
April 2006

Dannie Abse's distinctiveness as a poet lies in his clarity. His distinction lies in his imaginative and feeling responses to a variety of different worlds - work as a doctor, the experience of life in Wales and North London, the mysterious nature of creativity, the Jewish and bardic traditions. His new collection draws on all these strands and is divided between personal experience and more general reflections, often prompted by an urgent awareness of the passing of time, counterpointed with transcendent moments of joy in ordinary things.

Dannie Abse was for many years a chest specialist in a London teaching hospital. A poet, reviewer and playwright, he has written and edited more than sixteen books of poetry, as well as books about medicine and also fiction. He is the author of Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve and several autobiographical volumes, Goodbye, Twentieth Century and The Presence. His most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas, was published in 2002.

Poems of Paul Celan

Paul Celan

Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger

Anvil Press ISBN 9780856463990

2007

Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945." He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952.

Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970.

This third Anvil edition of Michael Hamburger’s selected translations now includes the previously uncollected longer poem “Wolf’s Bean”, several additional short poems, and the essay “On Translating Celan” in which he discusses the challenges faced over many years in his engagement with Celan’s poetry.

The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC’s inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and came to Britain in 1933. He was known both as a distinguished poet and as the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. He has received many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the first edition of Paul Celan: Poems in 1981 and the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for his services to German literature.

The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492

Translated, Edited & Introduced by Peter Cole

Princeton University Press, ISBN13: 978-0-691-12195-6

Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time.

Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."

Peter Cole is a poet and translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry. He has received numerous awards for his work, including prizes from the Times Literary Supplement and the Modern Language Association, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Winner of the 2004 PEN-America Translation Award, he lives in Jerusalem, where he coedits Ibis Editions.

Moon Wheels

Ruth Fainlight

Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 742 8

Each poem is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men.

Images of the moon, however interpreted – whether as stern and stony presence or protective maternal symbol – recur throughout Ruth Fainlight’s work.

Moon Wheels includes 33 new poems, as well as poems resurrected from her sequence Twelve Sibyls (1991) and from her out-of-print collection This Time of Year (1993), and translations of leading modern Latin American poets, including César Vallejo and Sophia de Mello Breyner.

Ruth Fainlight has published eleven collections of poems as well as short stories, translations and libretti. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, and now divides her time between London and Somerset.

Talking to the Dead

Elaine Feinstein

Carcanet ISBN 978 1 857549 02 7

March 2007

Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much-loved husband - sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous - to invoke his solid presence; it is the man rather than her grief which is the centre of the book. Many lyrics recall the closeness of their last months together; others confess the ambivalence of a long marriage. Theirs was never an easy relationship, and she is not afraid to register the differences between them. With wry humour, she questions her own life before their meeting, and looks steadily at a future without him. As she imagines that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets and her dependence on friends and children. Always in complete control of rhythm and tone, these beautiful lyrics explore the most intimate thoughts with a clarity and tenacity Ted Hughes once described as 'unique'. It is Elaine Feinstein's most passionate book of poetry.

'Talking to the Dead is arguably Elaine Feinstein's best collection. Beautifully crafted, deeply felt, totally earned, these poems of love and bereavement, and more, will expand her readership well beyond the readers and writers of contemporary poetry who have long loved and treasured her exemplary contribution to the art.' - CarolAnn Duffy

'These are more than elegies, they are alchemy; the emotional force of the book is so strong that the dead come walking out of the pages'. - Jo Shapcott

Elaine Feinstein was born in Liverpool. She has worked as a University Lecturer, a subeditor, and a free-lance journalist. Since 1980 she has lived as a full-time writer . In the same year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has written fourteen novels, of which The Border, Loving Brecht, Dreamers, Lady Chatterley's Confession and her most recent, Dark Inheritance. She has written radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies; Ted Hughes: The Life Of A Poet, was short listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. She received three translation awards for her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias, was published in July 2005.

The Lost Notebook

Jenny Feldman

Anvil Press ISBN 9780856463817

2005

These visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into lamplight in “Moth”, the poems are on the wing, “sourcing the radiance of things” in response to the dark. A lost notebook inspires a sequence that interweaves themes of sea, music, memory, love and the charge of language. This is a distinguished first collection.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. Her translations from Jacques Réda, `Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975’, are also published by Anvil. A former award-winning radio producer and presenter, she is married with two children and lives in Jerusalem, Israel.

Allen Ginsberg

Mark Ford

Faber ISBN 9780571238101

May 2008

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian émigré mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When Howl and Other Poems was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His Collected Poems 1947-1997 appeared in 2006.

Mark Ford’s collections of poetry are Landlocked and Soft Sift. He teaches at University College London.

Circling the Square

Michael Hamburger

Anvill Press ISBN 9780856463921

2007

Michael Hamburger’s final collection of poems was published shortly before his death in June 2007. It was his fifth collection since the publication of Collected Poems 1941-1994 gathers his poems written during 2004-2006, a productive period in which he had set aside translation work to concentrate on his own poetry. His intimate knowledge of the English landscape and wildlife underpins his meditations on mortality and the passing of time in these subtle and compelling poems.

Michael Hamburger OBE was born in Berlin in 1924, and moved to Britain in 1933. In addition to his many books of poetry, he has

published several collections of essays, a study of modernist poetry since Baudelaire, The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography. He has translated from, among others, Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and Celan. His awards include the Goethe Medal of the German Federal Republic for services to German literature and the European Community’s first European Translation Prize for Poems of Paul Celan, now reissued in its third edition.

Selected Poems

Sophie Hannah

Penguin ISBN ISBN: 0141026073

‘The brightest young star in British poetry’ (Independent) published for the first time in Penguin. 

‘Her range is astonishing. Most readers will come away having been changed or delighted’ Daily Telegraph

‘Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS’ Poetry Review

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet and novelist who regularly performs her work both nationwide and abroad. She has won awards for her short stories and for her poetry, including first prize in the 2004 Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition. In June 2004 she was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best twenty poets to emerge in the last ten years.

She has won several awards for her poetry, which is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her work has also been published in America, Germany and Australia.

Anglo-Jewish poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein
Peter Lawson

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 978-0853036173

April 2005

Any book that brings John Rodker out of neglect claims attention. One that puts him alongside Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon upholds a challenge. A new biography of Sassoon was published last year and Rosenberg’s reputation has been appraised and raised afresh as new editions and studies have appeared. Peter Lawson’s approach sees these three early twentieth-century poets in the light of an Anglo-Jewish consciousness that brings them out from the critical shadows where, in particular, Rodker’s style and character as an English poet languish under the reputation of his contemporaries and semblables. By seeing how these writers display all the varieties of transition, inter-connection and contrast of a Jewish consciousness (regardless of whether grounded in Yiddish or even Hebrew at all) became grounded within the English tradition, Lawson refreshes the understanding of what these writers achieve within converging traditions and the strategies they use.
 
The other three poets that are the subject of Lawson’s approach are John Silkin, Karen Gershon and Elaine Feinstein. Karen Gershon (née KaetheLoewenthal) alone of the six writers was not born in England so as immigrant, refugee, and displaced person her work exemplifies most graphically the disparities and interconnections shared in different ways with the other subjects of the book. By working out how these writers assert themselves as Jewish writers in English, Lawson rescues them from the marginalisation that general criticism accords them and suggests how the Anglo-Jewish writer can stand unprompted.
 
The great question of identity that overshadows this book is the hyphen of the ‘Anglo-Jewish’ label. As in other areas this ‘hyphen’ represents diplomacy, negotiation and the braiding of cultures, and suggests that the ‘English’ with which the ‘Jewish’ is integrated is the better understood because of the negotiation achieved. It is a subject dear to Anthony Rudolf who contributes an introduction to the book. Peter Lawson’s credentials are grounded in his earlier project as editor of Passionate revival: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945 (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2001) and as a poet in his own right.

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Stranger to Nothing

Philip Levine

Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 737 1

Philip Levine is the authentic voice of America’s urban poor. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he spent his early years doing a succession of heavy labouring jobs. Trying to write poetry ‘for people for whom there is no poetry’, he chronicled the lives of the people he grew up with and worked with in Detroit: ‘Their presence seemed utterly lacking in the poetry I inherited at age 20, so I’ve spent the last 40-some years trying to add to our poetry what wasn’t there.’

Much of his poetry addresses the joys and sufferings of industrial life, with radiant feeling as well as painful irony: ‘It took me a long time to be able to write about it without snarling or snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward those who maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had touched and blessed me.’

Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine has continually written poems which search for universal truths. His plain-speaking poetry is a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit and the persistence of life in the face of death.

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he studied at Wayne University. After working as a labourer, he settled in Fresno, California, and also lived in other countries for some time, including Spain. He taught at Fresno until his retirement, and now divides his time between Fresno and Brooklyn, New York. Levine has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award (1980 & 1991), and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He has published 16 col-lections of poems and two books of essays.

Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems

Eva Salzman

Bloodaxe ISBN 978-1852246617

May 2004

Eva Salzman is a thoroughly modern, urban poet who writes with equal wit and precision about the natural - and unnatural world. In her sceptical, restless poems, irreverent muses and relentless twins take on sharply contemporary subjects: society, the unreliability of memory and - especially - identity, gender and love, sexual or otherwise. Born in New York, Eva Salzman moved to Britain in 1985, and four books later has firmly established herself as one of our most irrepressible and necessary poets. Double Crossing includes many new poems as well as selections from collections including The English Earthquake, Bargain with the Watchman and One Two.

The Fire Stays in Red

Ronny Someck

Translated by Moshe Dor and Barbara Godberg

University of Wisconsin Press; Bilingual edition  ISBN 978-0299179045

Aug 2002

Ronny Someck is an enormously popular poet and radio host in Israel. Born in Iraq, he spent his childhood in a transit camp for new immigrants. This is his first full-length book to appear in English; his Sephardi voice is rich with slang, hot music, street gangsters and army commandos, and the odors of falafel and schwarma. Someck’s masterful use of Hebrew, rich with allusions to canonical texts as well as slang, mirrors his open and inclusive poetry. Bialik, Yehuda Halevi and Marylin Monroe live side by side, building an image of everyday simplicity as well as the highly politically charged life of Israel. Someck’s generosity of spirit emerges from each poetic line.

Roni Someck, a prominent Israeli poet, was born in Iraq and came to Israel as a young child. His poetry is loved by readers of all walks of life and held in high esteem by academics. It is the combination of the tragic and comic, satirical and earnest, eroticism and tender love, all rendered in a unique language, that has captivated the hearts and imagination of his readers.

Reel

George Szirtes

Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 676 6

2004

George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising. His two Bloodaxe selections The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse bring together his poems on Hungarian and English themes. In his new collection, Reel, the exile’s obsessive quest for the nature of humane truth is the focus of poems of visionary sweep which pan out across a life.

Memory is film in Reel: a film-crew shoot Budapest for Berlin; faces float like light on the sea; names appear and disappear on a search engine. George Szirtes reconstructs childhood from a confusion of memories, photographs and stories in which men and women change places and fathers multiply. There are sequences on love, desire and illusion, poems about political loyalties, and poems that form ghost texts shadowing other writers.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years, he worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Agnes Nemes Nagy, Otto Orban and Zsuzsa Rakovszky. He also co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Collonade of Teeth. After four collections with Secker and five with OUP, he published his Hungarian retrospective The Budapest File with Bloodaxe in 2000. He lives in Norfolk and teaches at Norwich School of Art and Design.

God's Face in your Gazpacho

Adam Taylor

Matador ISBN 9781905886814

2007

Described by one leading poet as "a real quirky wit that doesn't sound like anyone else", Adam Taylor's poems uncover the fine detail of life. His themes range from Messerschmittts to Messiahs, from leadership to gangsters, from Englishness to Jewishness, from nothingness to tea. He comes at his subjects from an unusual angle, and you never know quite where you'll be going!

His wry and offbeat compositions have been acclaimed by seasoned poetry audiences at Ledbury Poetry Festival and other literary events, and he has performed his poetry widely: on BBC TV and radio, at the Royal Festival Hall, comedy clubs and schools. The Dublin-born former Yahoo poet in residence has been published and featured in national newspapers such as the Sunday Times and Independent, as well as poetry magazines including Poetry Review and Orbis.

Musica Transalpina

Michelene Wandor

Arc Publications ISBN 1-904614-25-6

January 2006

Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection excels in the richness of its subject matter, the witty and sensuous language, the musicality of its rhythms and the way in which she is able to combine sophistication with accessibility.

She is as comfortable with Italian Renaissance music as she is with the poignancy of the history of Europe's Jewish populations. Her retelling of the book of Esther is a tour de force of Midrashic free-form poetry, and her speculation on Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a tribute to both Elizabethan poetry and a mischievous imagination.

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, short story writer, reviewer, broadcaster, theatre historian and musician. With degrees from Cambridge and Essex universities and from Trinity College / University of London, she has taught in Britain at the Guildhall School of Drama, London, the City Lit, London, London Metropolitan University and at various universities abroad. At the time of publication, she holds a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Birkbeck College, London. Recipient of many awards and nominations, particularly for her radio dramatisations. Michelene Wandor is a prolific, and widely published, writer. She is also an accomplished musician, performing Renaissance and Baroque music with her early music group, The Siena Ensemble.

All Things Tire of Themselves

Arnold Wesker

Flambard Press ISBN 9781873226988

April 2008

Arnold Wesker, who was knighted in the 2006 New Year’s Honours list for services to drama, is one of the major playwrights responsible for the radical transformation of British drama during the second half of the twentieth century. Born in London in 1932, he achieved considerable critical success at the very beginning of his long career with the three plays known as The Wesker Trilogy (1958–60) as well as The Kitchen (1957) and Chips With Everything (1962). Since then he has written about forty more plays, as well as opera librettos and scripts for film, TV and radio. Much of his output for the theatre has been translated into many languages, and is regularly performed around the world.

In addition to his work for the stage, he has published collections of stories, essays, a book for young people, an autobiography, and most recently his first novel, Honey, but until now he has not brought out a poetry collection even though he has written poems and published them in magazines for many years.

For All Things Tire of Themselves he has selected what he considers to be his best and most characteristic poems. In a Foreword commissioned for this publication, TV writer and producer Michael Kustow describes it as ‘an extended soliloquy about family, love, ageing, anger, Jewishness’ whose ‘predominant tone is one of sadness and disenchantment, but never resignation. . . .  Out of this struggle with despair, the poet delivers a hard-won wisdom, a precarious triumph over thieving time.’