Carcanet Press 4th Floor Alliance House 30 Cross Street Manchester M2 7AQ
October 2015 - March 2016 New Books
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OCTOBER 2015
NOVEMBER 2015
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Posthumous Cantos
W. H. Davies (1871-1940) The True Traveller: A Reader
edited by Massimo Bacigalupo
Posthumous Cantos is a generous selection of drafts and sketches that went into the making of one of the twentieth century’s modernist masterpieces, an essential creative ‘notebook’ running from 1915 to 1970, with an introduction and commentary by the editor. 978 1 78410 120 6 £14.99
Muriel Spark (1918-2000) Complete Poems
with an afterword by Michael Schmidt Muriel Spark is a vivid, modern, satirical voice in poetry, her first love. She does idiosyncratic and witty things with language and form, making audible the dark – and light – music beneath the mundane. 978 1 78410 124 4 £14.99
Shuntarō Tanikawa New Selected Poems
translated by William Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura Since his inventive first collection Two Billion Light Years of Solitude in 1952, Tanikawa has grown into Japan’s best-loved modern poet, a vital and affirmative force. He is also the original translator into Japanese of Mother Goose and Peanuts. 978 1 78410 068 1 £12.99
edited by Rory Waterman W. H. Davies wrote the best-selling Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, a memoir of his experiences as an itinerant in the United States and the UK. Edward Thomas admired his poetry. He is due for re-evaluation as a compelling writer. 978 1 78410 087 2 £14.99
Grevel Lindop Luna Park ‘Every poem shows us more than we have seen with our own eyes’, wrote Elizabeth Jennings of Lindop’s early work. His haunted new poems explore a nocturnal world of imagination where magic and dreams travel into the waking world. 978 1 85754 987 4 £9.99
Rod Mengham Chance of a Storm Mengham’s poems and meditations on language and contemporary landscape find connections in a world of many weathers. He sees from many angles, creating ‘word sculptures’ that respond to environment and reader in a variety of ways. Iain Sinclair describes them as ‘Scripts before films, reportage anticipating history.’ 978 1 78410 083 4 £9.99
DECEMBER 2015 Stanley Moss It’s About Time Stanley Moss dedicates his new book, with the impatience of a nonagenarian, ‘to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian’, and the poems are rich in their sense of a wonderfully peopled and cultivated world that is wild, giving, ephemeral.
Peter McDonald Herne the Hunter This is a book of balanced lyric reflections: body and soul, present and past, possession and desire, death and life in tension, seen in what Yeats called ‘a troubled mirror’. Sonnets, stanzaic poems, short and long pieces compose a complex symmetry of forms, evoking the intimacy between hunter and hunted.
978 1 78410 240 1 £9.99
978 1 78410 172 5 £9.99
JANUARY 2016
Peter McDonald The Homeric Hymns
Vahni Capildeo Measures of Expatriation The British Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo, with her unique style of performance, her unexpected approach to language and audience, is a thoroughly refreshing presence in contemporary poetry: ‘there is no hard contradiction between poet, journalist, Carnival maker, festival programmer, Ministry worker, housewife, judge – only the tensions of everyday survival.’ 978 1 78410 168 8 £9.99
Adam Crothers Several Deer ‘Go, little book. Begone’, says the last poem in Adam Crothers’s first book, as the poet waves off the wily, resourceful and treacherous volume with its riddles, jokes and masked confessions: ‘I’m interested in form as jester or saboteur, in irony as honesty.’ 978 1 78410 244 9 £9.99
Karl Kraus (1874-1936) In These Great Times
translated from the German by Harry Zohn Available in paperback for the first time, this Karl Kraus reader exemplifies his scathing satirical project. Moralist, aphorist, prophet and scourge, Kraus was a major influence on Kafka and Walter Benjamin. Brecht noted, ‘When the age died by its own hand, he was that hand.’ 978 1 84777 264 0 £14.99
In his brilliant, formally resourceful translations, Peter McDonald sets out to ‘return these poems to their remote and many-lived author, and think of them as The Hymns of Homer’. They are part of what readers long accepted as integral to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey. ‘Homer without the Hymns is less than Homer.’ 978 1 78410 176 3 £14.99
MARCH 2016 Alison Brackenbury Skies Landscape and sky-scape are Alison Brackenbury’s commanding theme, her landscapes always historied, the skies always in vivid motion, moving towards elegy. The two World Wars and their poets are present, but also the nearer histories of family, the intimate arrest of older poems. 978 1 78410 180 0 £9.99
John Cornford (1915-1936) Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound. Collected Writings edited by Jonathan Galassi
To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, which claimed John Cornford’s and so many other lives, Carcanet is re-issuing this ‘reader’ that features his essays, poems and other writings, showing him to be a writer of great promise but also solid achievement.
FEBRUARY 2016
978 1 78410 248 7 £9.99
Nicolas Barker Visible Voices
Chris McCully Serengeti Songs
Translating Verse into Script and Print 3000 BC-AD 2000 ‘The movement of the poet’s eye, from line to line, column to column, or even across the page, with the reader in pursuit, has its own poetry.’ Visible Voices traces the history of poetry from a spoken to a written, or printed, medium. The book is richly illustrated. 978 1 84777 212 1 £14.99
Angela Leighton Spills
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The formation of the Serengeti in Africa, the emergence of homo sapiens, the amazing wildlife, patterns of migration and predation are the themes of the fiercely engaged poems and photographs in this unusual book, which brings to life Tanzania and Kenya to our eyes and ears. 978 1 78410 252 4 £12.99
Håkan Sandell Dog Star Notations Selected Poems 1999-2016 translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
In Spills Angela Leighton combines three strands of writing: vivid lyric poems; a prose memoir of her youth divided between Britain and Sicily, music and poetry; and plays variations on Leonardo Sciascia’s poignant elegies for his brother. The book celebrates the bilingualism of then and now.
Sandell founded Retrogardism, believing that poetry had become too arrogant, that poets should revert to techniques and genres rejected by modernism. Sandell’s work, contentious in Swedish, in these translations bring his tonic voice to bear on English.
978 1 84777 225 1 £12.99
978 1 78410 184 8 £12.99
JOHN CORNFORD Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound ColleCted Writings e d i t e d b y J o n at h a n g a l a s s i
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