This is to announce a forthcoming event publicising Amos Weisz’s posthumous selected poems, Worksongs. There’s an event at i'klectik near Waterloo on November 4 as a launch. Great Works has just been refreshed, with the translations and original work by him published some year ago on it foregrounded, and some information on him. More of his poems will follow on a weekly basis until the launch event, and the book will be available from Great Works and possibly Amazon shortly.

You are unlikely to know Amos Weisz’s work – in his lifetime he had a small self-published booklet, some texts (mainly translations) on Great Works, and a few of his Celan translations published in a New York-based magazine. I’ll put up an Amos Weisz Facebook page shortly, do an event page for the reading etc, as well as more of his writing on Great Works.

It is a serious poetry, written through his life, and with engagement with a range of contemporaries and other influences. It also is situated in Amos's own psychological space, one of woundedness and extremes, in which a birthright is fought with and fought over. It is never easy or something as stupid as seductive, but can switch from the finest gallows humour to disgust and abjection in an instant. The verbal creativity and level of semantic activity is constantly astonishing.

I'll, I'm afraid, keep youse all updated on what is happening with the launch, and my making available of specimens of Amos's writing. (This sentence my contribution to the current debate on posthumous recognition (unlikely, I'd say) which has segued into dialect: I use youse because I likes it, and it's an available choice in British English; no claims of some originating ur-sprache inspiring my utterances - make it up as you go along is best.)

best wishes

Peter Philpott