NEWBOOKS A u t u m n 2 0 0 9 – S p r i n g 2 0 1 0 Chinua Achebe John Ashbery Sujata Bhatt Eavan Boland Joseph Brodsky Paul Celan Inger Christensen Gillian Clarke Donald Davie Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) Iain Crichton Smith Elaine Feinstein Forty years of great poetry Carcanet Celebrates 40 Years... Louise Glück Jorie Graham W.S. Graham from Carcanet... Robert Graves Ivor Gurney Marilyn Hacker Sophie Hannah John Heath-Stubbs Elizabeth Jennings Brigit Pegeen Kelly Mimi Khalvati Thomas Kinsella R. F. Langley Hugh MacDiarmid L ETTER FyfieldBooks FROM THE E DITOR About forty years ago, in the village of South Hinksey P.N.Review just outside Oxford, Carcanet published its first seven poetry booklets. Since then we have published more than 1500 books; and our authors have received most of the major awards from the Nobel to the Pulitzer and Griffin, the Queen’s Gold Medal to the T.S. Eliot. Our commitment to outstanding writing in English and in translation from Carcanet celebrates forty years every period has been unwavering. This season’s list offers the full Carcanet range. Here are great innovators and new voices; Roman classics – Apuleius and Suetonius in Robert Graves’s celebrated translation – and modern classics of New Zealand and Catalan poetry. A radical anthology of American poetry challenges the European reader; an important historical collection traces a century in poetry; and If it were not for Carcanet, my library there are delightful, unexpected prose titles, FyfieldBooks and new collections by some of the outstanding younger writers in the Anglophone world. would be unbearably impoverished. We have devised many ways for you to keep in touch with Carcanet: join us - Louis de Bernières online at www.carcanet.co.uk and on Facebook, Twitter and Issuu, or subscribe to our popular e-letter for regular literary news and a poem of the week. It is impossible to imagine literary life As always we welcome your comments and suggestions. in Britain without Carcanet. - William Boyd Michael Schmidt, OxfordPoets Editorial & Managing Director Contents September 3 Antony Dunn, Bugs 4 Jeremey Over, Deceiving Wild Creatures 5 Thomas Traherne, Select Meditations 6 Robert Wells, Collected Poems and Translations October 7 Frank Ormsby, Fireflies 8 Richard Price, Rays 9 Fiona Sampson (ed.), A Century of Poetry Review November 10 Caroline Bird, Watering Can 11 Thomas A. Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places 12 Sinéad Morrissey, Through the Square Window 13 Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography December 14 John Ashbery, Planisphere January 15 John Ash, In the Wake of the Day 16 Ernest Farrés (trans. Lawrence Venuti), Edward Hopper 17 Robert Graves, Tranlsating Rome February 18 James K. Baxter, Selected Poems 19 Sarah Broom, Tigers at Awhitu 20 Andrew McNeillie, In Mortal Memory March 21 Edward Hirsch, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems 22 Patrick McGuinness, Jilted City 23 Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck & Robert Pinsky, Five American Poets Information 24-25 Trade Information 26 Online with Carcanet 27 Order forms 28 PN Review ANTONY Bugs OxfordPoets DUNN He’d like the creature cocooned in his chest Poems which, Brodsky-like, take to stop turning over – to burst from his mouth the reader somewhere new, jinking on unspeakable wings. He’d like to say something that she’d understand, but can’t pin it down. round the corners of places we think we know into imagined from ‘Lepidopterist’ elsewheres POETRY WALES Bugs are the insects we live alongside, necessary and unsettling; they’re the fears, the ailments and spies that keep us wide awake at night. The stories in An often unique voice...subtle, Antony Dunn’s third collection range from the microscopic lives of parasitic thought-provoking and enormously worms to the lives of the planets themselves. We go from the miniature world readable. of the flea circus to the invisible pervasiveness of electronic surveillance. In an uneasy world, Dunn’s characters face down their terrors and find in science, in faith, in love, the courage to go on. POETRY REVIEW ABOUT THETHE AUTHORAUTHOR SEPTEMBERISBN 9781903039953 2009 AnthonyANTONY Dunn DUNN was was born born in in1973. London He inwon 1973. a NewdigateHe won the Prize Newdigate in 1995 Prize and inan 1995 Eric ISBNSEPTEMBER 978 190303 20099953 Gregoryand received Award a Societyin 2000. of Authors’His first Eric collection Gregory of Awardpoems, in Pilots 2000. and He hasNavigators, published was publishedtwo collections in 1998, of poems,making Pilotshim theand youngestNavigators poet (Oxford on Poets,the OxfordPoets 1998) and Flyinglist. FishHis 6464 pp pp PAPER PAPER £9.95 £9.95 second(Carcanet book, / Oxford Flying Poets,Fish, was2002). published He has byworked Carcanet on a/ numberOxfordPoets of translation in 2002. projects Antony World Dunnand was lives Poet in Yorkin Residence where he at workds the University for York ofTheatre York forRoyal. 2006. He He has also worked writes on for a World the theatre and his plays include Dog Blue, Goose Chase and Shepherds’ Delight. POETRY 3 J EREMY Deceiving Wild Creatures O VER The naturalist Gilbert White is at the heart of this collection. Like him, a flamingo taking flight Jeremy Over explores an ecology with meticulous acuity. His poems are or Meryl Streep ‘found in the field’: the beauty and oddity of the language of others is brought into sharp focus. is something you either have Robert Herrick’s ‘sweet disorder in the dress’ is subjected to a series of or you don’t disrobings; a guidebook, instruction manual and catalogue become occasions to celebrate the pleasures of language. Setting out from White’s Natural as the balls go flying History of Selborne, Over embarks on a sequence of poems that, in White’s in all directions. words, lend ‘an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries’ of natural history. A deep seam of Englishness – Stanley Spencer, Samuel from ‘A Common Pitfall’ Palmer, Henry Purcell – runs parallel to an American dimension, and further off in time and space are traces of Tristan Tzara, Rumi and Wang Wei. The reasonable language with which we try to contain the unreasonableness of things here trips, spins and flies into new figurations. ABOUT THE AUTHOR SEPTEMBER 2009 JEREMY OVER was born in Leeds in 1961. He studied law at Leeds University and now lives near Cockermouth in Cumbria, where he works as a policy adviser for the ISBN 978 184777 0042 Department for Work and Pensions. His poetry was included in New Poetries II (Carcanet, 76 pp PAPER £9.95 1999) and his first collection was A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet, 2001). World POETRY 4 T HOM A S Select Meditations TRAHERNE Select Meditations is among the earliest works of the poet and mystic Thomas if Good works be so Rich Traherne (1637?-74). Written shortly after the Restoration of Charles II in and lovly O what Fruitfull 1660, the manuscript was not discovered until 1964 and first published by Trees are they that bear them, O what living foun- Carcanet in 1997. Traherne, a young clergyman in a country parish at the taines! O what Treasure time, explores his relationship with God and his vocation to ‘teach Immortal is Laid up in the Ages for Souls the way to Heaven’. It is a spiritual journey that involves examination God and us to be Delighted of his doubts and failings (he confesses to ‘too much…proneness to Speak’), in… How infinitly are of the political issues that shaped his times, and of the realities of ministering we Exalted as Lords and Kings, in being created free, to his congregation. Above all, though, Traherne’s meditations celebrate the And how infinitly shall we beauty of the world and the human community transfigured by the love of Reign with thee, if we use God, in terms that speak across time. ‘Remember’, he writes, ‘that the world our freedom as we ought is the beginning of Gifts.’ to do! O giv me Grace to remember this, and to feel it always! Julia J. Smith’s landmark edition, preserving the original spelling, provides a detailed introduction and notes on the text. III.54 ABOUT THE AUTHOR SEPTEMBER 2009 THOMAS TRAHERNE was born in about 1637, in the city of Hereford. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford in 1653. After the Restoration he received Episcopal ordination in 1660. He held ISBN 978 184777 0714 the living of Credenhill in Herefordshire until his death in 1674, and was buried in Teddington under 208 pp PAPER £14.95 the reading-desk in the church. Traherne published Roman Forgeries (1673) and Christian Ethicks (1675) during his lifetime but became better known during the twentieth century following a series World of remarkable discoveries, including Select Meditations in 1964 and Commentaries of Heaven in 1982. POETRY 5 ROBERT Collected Poems WELLS and Translations Robert Wells writes poems of memory, a memory so intense it conjures Robert Wells understands places, objects and desires with their original force and freshness. The high how finely man and nature points of a life are celebrated, and personal memories and the common memories of a culture are brought together. are moulded to each other… The healing loneliness of This collection of poetry and translations draws together the threads of his hills and waters, and the work in eight linked sections of sensuous evocation. There are poems set on the coast of Exmoor and in the hill country of central Italy; some concerned solitary figures who move with erotic friendship, with travel and landscape. In the final two sections, among them – bathers, his celebrated translations of Virgil’s Georgics and the Idylls of Theocritus wood-cutters, hay harvesters – fuse lived experience with a deep knowledge of the original texts.