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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New Selected Poems

Dannie Abse

Arrow Books 9780091931155  

May 2009

The year 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Dannie Abse's first poetry collection, After Every Green Thing, and since that time he has published an astonishing range of books, including poetry, fiction, criticism and autobiography. He remains a writer of great distinction who is at the height of his powers - his memoir, The Presence, won the Wales Book of the Year in 2008. But it is as a poet that Dannie Abse is best known, and to mark this extraordinary milestone he has compiled a new and definitive volume of selected poems which includes new work combining both passion and maturity.

Running Late

Hutchinson ISBN 9780091796976  
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.

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai

University of California Press ISBN 9780520205383

Yehuda Amichai is Israel's most popular poet as well as a literary figure of international reputation. In this revised and expanded collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved and enduring poems, including forty new poems from his recent work. from Tourists:Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

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.

Words of Love and Hate: The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen

Omnibus Press ISBN 9781847728029

When his first album made him an unlikely star in the late 1960s, Leonard Cohen was hailed as the new poet of song. His melodies were hauntingly melodic but his lyrics were like no one else's - poignant, romantic, mystical and darkly comic. Already a poet and a novelist, Cohen had found another calling in song..."The Songs of Leonard Cohen", "Songs from a Room" and "Songs of Love and Hate" were the titles of his first three albums. Eight more would follow over the next 40 years. In this collector's edition, can be found the lyrics to over 100 of those classic songs, many of them now recorded by new generations of singers that include U2, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright and Teddy Thompson. This unique collection demonstrates why.

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

Translated, Edited & Introduced by Peter Cole

Princeton University Press, ISBN13: 9780691121956

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.

New and Collected Poems

Ruth Fainlight

Bloodaxe ISBN 9781852248857

Nov 2010

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Her poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each 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 her work. Peter Porter described one of her collections as having 'the steadiness and clarity of the moon itself'.

This substantial New & Collected Poems covers work written over 50 years, drawing on over a dozen books as well as a whole new collection. It also includes her translations of Sophia de Mello Breyner, Jean Joubert, Sophocles, and several leading modern Latin American poets, including Cesar Vallejo, Blanca Varela, Elsa Cross and Victor Manuel Mendiola, and two of her opera libretti, The Dancer Hotoke and The Bride in Her Grave.

Moon Wheels

Bloodaxe ISBN 9781852247423  

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.

Cities

Elaine Feinstein

Carcanet  ISBN 9781847770615

June 2010

Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi – and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later.

'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics. 

Talking to the Dead

Carcanet ISBN 9781857549027

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

Jennie 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.

Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg

Penguin Modern Classics ISBN 9780141190167

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

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: 9780141026077  

‘                             ‘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.

The Living Fire

New and Selected Poems 1975-2010

Edward Hirsch

Carcanet ISBN 9781857549829

March 2010

The Living Fire brings together a rich selection of the poetry of Edward Hirsch, from seven books of poetry spanning thirty-five years of writing. A poet who is also a passionate advocate of poetry, and avoracious reader, Hirsch infuses his poetry with a powerful blend of formal skill and emotional intensity, exploring his inner life, which is also a reading life, from childhood to middle age. In poems of graceand passion, The Living Fire struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, with the power of art to redeem human transience, the complexity of relationships. In the poem which gives this book its title, Hirsch writes with tender observation of his cat, recalling the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart’s cat Jeffrey, in an affirmation of the continuing meaning of poetry. ‘It is Jeoffrey—and every creature like him—/who can teach us how topraise…Wreathing themselves in the living fire.’

Edward Hirsch has published seven books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and, most recently, Special Orders (2008).  He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a US bestseller, and Poet’s Choice (2006).  He has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years and now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

This Room in the Sunlight

Bernard Kops

David Paul Publishing ISBN 9780954848262

November 2009

This is a major collection of poetry from Bernard Kops. He has included celebrated poems from his seven previous volumes and many new poems. The poems cover his preoccupations with love and death, reflecting his early breakdown and drug addiction, family life, growing up in London's East End, growing old and his Jewish identity.

They are witty, dark, poignant, mournful, celebratory and self-mocking.  He has included well-known poems such as Shalom Bomb, an unofficial anthem for the CND movement in the 1960’s and his more recent Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East which mourns the passing of the old library in the East End of London, where he grew up. Other poems tell of his feelings about encounters with people, ordinary and famous. So there are glimpses of WH Auden, Allen Ginsberg and Henry Williamson alongside those of his friends, neighbours and loved ones.

Kops is one of Britain’s most celebrated and prolific authors. He has also written more than forty plays for stage and radio, nine novels and two autobiographies.

Earlier this year, in recognition of his literary work, he had the rare honour of a Civil List pension being conferred on him by the Queen. Awarded for life, it puts him in the exalted company of poets such as Lord Byron and William Wordsworth.

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

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853036173

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 9781852247379  

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.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems: 2004–2006

Adrienne Rich

Norton ISBN 9780393065657
October 2007

A new volume from Adrienne Rich, recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth is one of Adrienne Rich’s most unpredictable and evocative collections. In the folk/blues tradition behind “Rhyme,” in the incantatory pattern of “Behind the Motel,” in the voices from past and present in “Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send,” in the dystopic scenes and intimate encounters of “Draft # 2006,” in the mysterious negotiations of the title poem, the tempos and moods of this book constantly vary. Here, Rich draws on the artistic means of a lifetime.

A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996–2008

Adrienne Rich

Norton ISBN 9780393070064

April 2009

One of America’s most distinguished poets explores the complex relationship between art and social justice.

Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.

This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.

Adrienne Rich is the recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Foundation’s 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in California.

Zigzag

Anthony Rudolf

Carcanet ISBN 9781847771100

August 2010

Zigzag: five sequences marks the welcome return of Anthony Rudolf - publisher, translator, autobiographer, essayist - to his first vocation, poetry. Apart from collaborations with artists, this is his first book containing poems for more than thirty years. Zigzag consists of five sequences: two verse, one prose and two combining prose and verse. Among the texts are a recitative in the voice of the author's grandfather, a story about Kafka for grownups written according to the conventions of a children's story, and a sequence of prose and verse after Schumann's Kinderszenen. Autobiography, poetry, documentary, fiction: the book zigs and zags with humour and lyrical lightness, compllicating Rudolf's concerns with memory, time and loss.

Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems

Eva Salzman

Bloodaxe ISBN 9781852246617

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 9780299179045

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.

The Burning of the Books and Other Poems
George Szirtes

Bloodaxe Books ISBN 9781852248420

2009

'Any new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre... its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis' pyres: "Because the word is angular and has sharp edges/ That cut you". Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history.' Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

New and Collected Poems

Bloodaxe ISBN 9781852248130
May 2009

George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It is published on his 60th birthday at the same time as the first critical study of his work, "Reading George Szirtes" by John Sears. Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; and, humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter", "Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel", all included here.

Reel

Bloodaxe ISBN 9781852246761  

2004

In 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.

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 9781904614258 

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.

The Music of the Prophets: The Resettlement of the Jews in England, 1655-56

Arc Publication ISBN 9781604614 63 0

March 2007

In 1290 the Jews were banished from England. In 1655-56, Jews once more became a part of British society, returning to the London of Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys and Henry Purcell.

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of this return, Michelene Wandor has written a sensuous dramatic narrative poem, evoking seventeenth-century London, and telling the story of the two men who made this return possible: Cromwell and Menasseh Ben Israel.

Music of the Prophets is the third in a sequence of long poems celebrating the presence of the Jews in England.

The text seduces and challenges with a delicacy and flow, combining open-form experiment with a musical delight in counterpoint, irony and wit.

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.’