|
(with apologies for cross-posting)
Harriet Tarlo: Poems 1990-2003 (151pp, paperback, £9.95. ISBN
0-907562-45-0)
Harriet Tarlo was born in 1968. She lives with her partner and two
small children near Holmfirth. She has lived in West Yorkshire since
the mid-nineties, having spent most of the previous decade in County
Durham, and is also a frequent visitor to the North Cornish coast. Her
poetry engages as closely as it can with these places, not in an
attempt to represent them, but to embody the sound and rhythm of human
relationship with the outside. Her Ph.D is a study of the American
poet, H.D., and she has written critically on modernist and
contemporary poetry, gender and language and the concept of “radical
landscape poetry”. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the
University of Leeds.
This volume of poems — the author’s first full-length book— spans over
a decade of writing and includes all the poems and shorter sequences
that the author considers worthy of collection. It is a book in three
parts, each section following a roughly chronological trajectory from
1990-2003. Read in order, the three sections overlap in time and space,
while allowing the reader to follow the development of the writing. The
first two parts of the book include short poems, most under a page in
length, and cover two discrete areas of writing. “Writing outside”
consists of short poems engaged with language and landscape, while
“Voices” brings other perspectives into the work and is concerned with
speech patterns and sounds. The third section of the book shows the
poet’s development of the sequence form in which shorter units of
writing are strung together, allowing for longer patterns of sound and
language. The latter two sections incorporate found or “heard”
fragments of speech, indicated by the use of italics.
Michael Smith: Maldon & Other Translations (154pp, paperback, £9.95.
ISBN 0-907562-60-4)
Maldon & Other Translations is a showcase of the translator’s art, the
contents ranging across three languages, through 1,200 years, and from
southern Spain to the Essex marshes, via Ireland. The title poem, a
version of The Battle of Maldon, is translated from the Anglo-Saxon.
Its surprising companions are two translations from the 18th-century
Irish (Sean O’Dwyer of the Glen, by an unkown hand, and the Lament for
Art O’Leary by Eileen O’Connell) and 250 cantes flamencos (flamenco
songs), as collected in the 19th century by Antonio Machado y Alvarez,
father of the great poet Antonio Machado.
paperback, £9.95. ISBN 0-907562-59-0)
The Purpose of the Gift is a summing-up of Michael Smith’s career to
date as a poet. Better known in Britain as a translator, above all of
Spanish baroque poetry, his own work has been obscured on the British
side of the Irish Sea for too long.
The driving motive of this selection, which extends over thirty-five
years, is a persistent search for the possibility of transcendence,
through the resources of poetry, in a quotidian world, sometimes
beautiful, often not. The poetry is distinguished by the honesty of its
language and a refusal to settle for facile answers. Its techniques
range from the more or less traditional to innovations demanded by an
ongoing search for meaning. As publisher, critic and translator, Smith
has worked to explore territories foreign to the routine properties of
Irish poetry. This book continues and extends that exploration.
Michael Smith lives in Dublin, where he was born in 1942. He founded
New Writers’ Press in 1967, which published a number of neglected Irish
poets, as well as several important younger writers. He was also
co-founder and editor of the literary magazine The Lace Curtain. His
many collections include Times & Locations (Dolmen Press/OUP, 1972),
Selected Poems (The Melmoth Press, 1985) and Meditations on Metaphors
(New Writers’ Press, 1998). A collection of Michael Smith’s recent
translations, Maldon & Other Translations, containing versions from
Anglo-Saxon, 18th-Century Irish, and an Andalusian dialect of Spanish,
is published simultaneously with this volume. He has also edited the
Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan, and Irish Poetry, The Thirties
Generation. Michael Smith has translated extensively from the Spanish,
his published works including versions of Pablo Neruda, Antonio
Machado, Miguel Hernández, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora and
Federico García Lorca. His awards include The European Academy of
Poetry Medal for his services to the translation of poetry.
ISBN 0-907562-56-6)
Rupert Loydell is the Managing Editor of Stride Publications, Editor of
Stride magazine, Reviews Editor of Orbis magazine, Associate Editor of
Avacado magazine and a regular contributor of articles and reviews to
Tangents magazine. He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at
Warwick University and poet-in-residence at Sherborne School. Recent
publications include The Museum of Light and Endlessly Divisible, and
four collaborative works: Snowshoes Across the Clouds, with Bob
Garlitz; A Hawk Into Everywhere, with Roselle Angwin; The Temperature
of Recall, with Sheila E. Murphy; and Eight Excursions, with David
Kennedy. He lives in Devon with his wife and two daughters.
"Rupert Loydell – painter, poet, author – is an artist who champions on
process, a recycler of enormous determination, a finder and re-user, a
poet who has taken Clark Coolidge’s belief that there’s no need to make
more when the racks of words around us already tower to an ultimate
extreme. Loydell’s work spins and clicks and startles. He’s where you
would want to be if only you’d thought of it first. A Conference of
Voices is a magnificent assemblage of some of his best."
— Peter Finch
Coming soon: new books by Anthony Barnett, David Miller and John Muckle.
___________________________________
Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511
http://www.shearsman.com/
___________________________________
|
