I wrote this book about ten years ago, partly as a response to the sudden death of my mother-in-law, who’d just turned sixty. Time, then, to get something down. But what? I’d studied Keats closely at university, including the letters and Robert Gittings’ biography and had even written a poem about Keats’ arrival in Naples: to have gone through all that, only to be quarantined for another month. So, after a bit more research, I had my plot and also the ending, which I knew would steer clear of Rome, because Anthony Burgess had written a novel about Keats dying there already. Over a period of two years, in cafes and classrooms [empty ones], I gradually put together a series of scenes describing the journey to Italy. I chose third-person focalised narrative because that offered me both descriptive luxuries and the ability to explore voice/point of view. The hardest part was settling on dialogue that didn’t sound like botched Beau Brummell, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible, in contrast to some lusciousness over river-bank and ocean-wave. In particular, I found I enjoyed writing about the Thames [five years’ hard labour in Grays, Essex helped] and about…
Red Hand Books are please to announce it has entered Jack Alun’s stunning new poetry collection for the Forward Arts Foundation Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. This prize is sponsored by the Estate of Felix Dennis and offers the winner a prize of £5,000.
This is a ground-breaking and ambitious attempt to collect the best of modern poetry from all over the Balkan region in its broadest sense together and in translation to allow access to a huge variety of extraordinary modern writing for speakers of English. Writers from Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Rumania, Moldova, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia have all contributed their work with the help and guidance of Tom Phillips, a writer, poet and translator now residing in Sophia, Bulgaria. This is an amazing and daring venture bringing the very best of modern poetry translated by some of the finest translators across eight or nine languages together into one volume. And this is the second and even more successful version of last year’s outstanding debut. With particular focus on the poetry of Romania and Moldova in this edition there is a feast of unknown and first class writing to be enjoyed by some of the biggest names of Eastern Europe who are hardly known at all in Britain and the English-reading world. BUY NOW
For every father, poems that reveal the gut-wrenching love and fears and insights at producing something similar to themselves. For every son, portraits of inadequacy, unlovedness and the strange fun of observing parents. For every family being part of a team not like any other team…all coloured by Richard Boden’s wry, challenging and expert scalpel The English Disease digs deep into the DNA of being a quietly English Dad and poet. And more than that – the Englishness of all that past, all that literature and all those vivid ghosts – Byron, Shakespeare, Malovolio, the French – that wander into our particular ordinariness A startling, warm and witty first collection. Review ‘Whether he’s writing about the birth of his son, Byron in Greece or, as in the series of inter-related poems in the second half of the book, Richard Boden’s poetry explores its subjects and occasions with both imaginative flair and wry humour. An acute eye for detail and a felicity of diction combine in poems which offer a fresh and insightful take on the everyday business of living in an England whose default setting often seems to be little better than ‘underwhelming’. This and the frequent moments of bathos…
Featuring the work of more than 30 poets from across SE Europe, Balkan Poetry Today 2017 offers insight into the rich and diverse poetries of a region that has only sporadically emerged onto the literary radar in the English-speaking world. Established writers sit alongside those from the latest generation to add their voices both to the region’s poetic traditions and world poetry in general. This volume also includes an excellent section devoted to contemporary poetry from Bulgaria, an introduction to contemporary poetry from Macedonia and an essay looking at other recent translations of poetry from SE Europe. Balkan Poetry Today is edited by Tom Phillips, a poet, playwright and translator from Bristol in the UK who has worked closely with writers and artists across SE Europe for much of the last decade and is a published poet in Bulgarian. BUY NOW
This is the fifth volume in the Turkish Poetry Today series and presents once again an exciting array of the very best from Turkey’s rich poetic culture and heritage. “Trying as always to break new ground, we invite you in this issue to accompany us on a journey through Turkish poetry that will include many voices never before heard in English translation…ˮ from The Editors’ Introduction Presented here in this edition’s Featured Poet section is Gülten Akɪn, whose intellect and writing have made her “the greatest living Turkish poet” according to a majority of Turkey’s leading poets, writers and critics. Selections from the work of nearly twenty other Turkish poets in original translations alongside biographical notes make this a superb introduction for readers new to Turkish poetry or a further treasure chest for those who have come to appreciate how rich a vein of poetry there is to explore. “Turkish Poetry Today brings us the unique flow, imagery and timbre of Turkish poetry, with translations that enable the works to sing for us in English. Truly memorable reading.ˮ Dr. Robyn Rowland, poet BUY NOW
In recent decades Turkish women have risen to extraordinary prominence in a literary culture once dominated by men. Contemporary Turkish Women Poets is the first comprehensive survey of these startling, vibrant developments. In his landmark anthology, poet-translator George Messo gathers twenty-two of Turkey’s leading, award-winning poets, writing at the very height of their creative powers. Collectively, they represent more than half a century of innovation and change, embodying one of the most sustained and compelling re-visionings of contemporary poetry for many years. With an introduction by the translator-scholar Saliha Paker, Contemporary Turkish Women Poets offers a uniquely challenging and irresistible encounter with some of the most dynamic poets writing today. From Saliha Paker’s Introduction: In Sennur Sezer’s ‘documentary narrative’ Mihrî Hatun, a Turkish Sappho the author reconstructs the life and times of Mihrî (c.1460- 1506), an Ottoman woman who achieved unusual recognition as a poet in the late fifteenth century, but who was only brought to the modern reader’s attention within the last few decades. In The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (2005) Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı too discuss Mihrî, focusing on ‘the problem that the woman poet presents…
The Secret Domain sequence reads like an extended minimalist monologue, in which the poet induces rather than works the language, inscribing the physical limits of the page while summoning and invoking imaginative space beyond it. Turan speaks of, and out of, the profoundest silence – what Harold Bloom called the ‘dumbfounding abyss between ourselves and the object.’ The frequent dichotomy of being and non-being, signaling presence and absence, belays the intricate metaphysics, the flowing of becoming and disappearance, union and separation that give definition to Turan’s unique place in contemporary Turkish verse. BUY NOW
Scott Andrew Christensen’s debut collection the boundaries of return is a compelling exploration of passage in and through the natural world. Richly symbolic and formally experimental, Christensen’s poems create worlds at once uniquely perceptive and recognisable, in patterns of verbal play that are distinctive and memorable. ‘Scott Andrew Christensen’s poetry haunts the borders between the physically detailed and the metaphysically mysterious, or between Nature – in its beautiful particulars – and the Spirit, what is ineffable… Although the boundaries of return represents a debut, Christensen is already preternaturally skilled in edging toward Wisdom or Faith via witnessing everyday doings and the beings of persons, creatures, and things. Welcome – with joy – the boundaries of return.’ GEORGE ELLIOT CLARKE BUY NOW
Letters & Sounds is a multi-voiced selection of some of İlhan Berk’s finest love poems, elegies and lyric prose. Brought into English by poet-translator George Messo, these poems dance and sing with the energy and experimental daring of their dazzling Turkish originals. ‘Poets of our time in any language ignore Berk’s poem—its treasure trove—at their own peril.’ MURAT NEMET-NEJAT ‘One of Turkish poetry’s most distinctive and necessary voices.’ WORLD LITERATURE TODAY BUY NOW