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Gustave Roud, perhaps the most beloved poet of Swiss Romandy, is widely considered the founder of modern francophone Swiss literature, along with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz.
Roud lived at his grandfather’s farm in Carrouge, Canton Vaud, for his entire life. In Air of Solitude, the first section of this two-part book, he stalks the structures and fields of his youth, composing memories out of his landscape.
The narrator appears homegrown, expressing nostalgia for what is already in front of him. Yet, like an outsider, he remains distinctly elsewhere, unable to participate in the workday rituals of the men around him—a stalking shadow of unfulfilled yearning for affection and belonging. Air of Solitude explores the rural bodies and lives of the Vaudois, returning again and again to the desired male laborer Aimé.
Between each section of Air of Solitude, Roud inserts short vignettes that provide fleeting and lyrical images that resemble allusions to half-forgotten memories. However, Roud leaves the relationship between the titled sections and the interludes ambiguous.
As the book concludes with Requiem, the remnants of narrative shatter, leaving behind only the spectral tatters of memory as Roud confronts the enigma of loss in peerless, jewel-studded elegiac prose. With these two tales, Roud revives the pastoral tradition and injects it with distinctly modernist anxiety and disillusionment.
‘Gustave Roud made all of French-speaking Switzerland dream poetically upon itself, the land that welcomed European Romanticism from Rousseau to Byron, from Lamartine to Shelley. His poetry could seem idyllic, sustained by an ethereal figure of constantly conflicted desires (more or less unspeakable, always displayed), and a moral, sacrificial figure inspired, above all, by Novalis and Hölderlin.’—Antonio Rodriguez, University of Lausanne
Gustave Roud (1897–1976) was a major Swiss poet and photographer whose neoromantic poetic prose influenced a generation of poets including Maurice Chappaz and Philippe Jaccottet. His works include Ecrits (1950) and Campagne perdue (1972). He also translated German writers including Rilke, Hölderlin and Novalis.
Gustave Roud
‘Air of Solitude’ Followed by ‘Requiem’
Translated by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds
ISBN: 9780857426871
Pages: 172
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: 2020
Format: Hardback
Size: 5″ x 8″
Publisher: Seagull Books
£16.99
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The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, the volume widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of this period of radical thought and practice.
The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977.
Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced.
The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.
Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019) was an Italian poet, experimental writer, visual artist and founding member of both the avant-garde Gruppo ’63 and the revolutionary organization Potere Operio.
Primo Moroni (1936–1998) was an Italian writer, activist and archivist. Founder of the Calusca bookshop in Milan, for decades he was a point of reference for radical movements and subcultures across Italy.
Richard Braude lives in Palermo, Italy. His translations include works by Nanni Balestrini, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri and Rossana Rossanda.
The Golden Horde
Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977
by Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni
Translated by Richard Braude
ISBN: 9780857427465
Pages: 690
Publication Year: May 2021
Size: 6″ x 9″
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Seagull Books
£35
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To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage.
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents 73 of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-colour reproductions of the originals.
Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in colour, font and type size.
Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.
Herta Müller was born in a German-speaking community in western Romania in 1953. She published her first collection of short stories in 1982. In 1987, she left Romania for West Berlin, where she continued to write and publish. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Herta Müller
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies
A Selection
Translated by Thomas Cooper
ISBN: 9781803090450
Pages: 200 pages
73 colour plates
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Rights: UCP
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£11.99
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To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical.
To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season.
This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.
Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.
This Alaska
by Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
15 september 2021
Poetry
English
Paperback
76 pages
ISBN-10: 1945588926
ISBN-13: 978-1945588921
€ 21,36
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An evening of poetry and art with celebrated local author Vincent Berquez.
Vincent Berquez is an Anglo-French Balham based artist and poet. He has exhibited his artwork worldwide and is published in Britain, Europe, America and New Zealand.
Vincent will be reading from his latest book, ‘The Sound of Blossom Falling’.
Thu, 15 September 2022
19:00 – 21:00 BST
Location
Balham Library
16 Ramsden Road
London
SW12 8QY
United Kingdom
more information on website:
https://allevents.in/london/meet-author-and-artist-vincent-berquez/10000394228948397
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Awake! Young Men of England
OH! give me the strength of the Lion,
The wisdom of reynard the Fox
And then I’ll hurl troops at the Germans
And give them the hardest of knocks.
Oh! think of the War Lord’s mailed fist,
That is striking at England today:
And think of the lives that our soldiers
Are fearlessly throwing away.
Awake! Oh you young men of England,
For if, when your Country’s in need,
You do not enlist by the thousand,
You truly are cowards indeed.
George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
Awake! Young Men of England
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Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome.
Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance.
His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light.
Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna’s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life.
There is something ancient in Penna’s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile.
Penna’s city is eternal—a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound—from Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire to Leopardi, D’Annunzio, Cavafy—the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna’s own.
Sandro Penna (1906–77) was an Italian poet. During his life, he was awarded two of Italy’s most important literary awards, the Premio Viareggio and the Premio Bagutta. His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, and has appeared in numerous anthologies of Italian poetry.
Alexander Booth is a writer and translator and the recipient of a 2012 PEN Translation Fund grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler.
Sandro Penna
Within the Sweet Noise of Life
Selected Poems
Translated by Alexander Booth
ISBN: 9780857427878
Format: Hardback
Pages: 96
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: March 2021
Size: 5″ x 8.5″
Publisher: Seagull Books
$19.00
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The definitive edition of selected work from a poet whose influence continues to be widely felt today, introduced by Natasha Trethewey
Engaging closely with the violence, oppression, and injustice that she witnessed in her lifetime, Muriel Rukeyser was one of the seminal poets of the mid-twentieth century.
Closely informed by issues relating to equality, social justice, feminism, and Judaism, her impassioned poetry was often seen as a mode of social protest, but it was also heralded for its deep emotional impact; its personal perspective; forthright discussion of the female experience, particularly sex and single parenthood at a time when these topics were largely taboo; and its wide-ranging exploration of genre and form.
As Adrienne Rich wrote: “Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry is unequalled in the twentieth-century United States…She pushes us…to enlarge our sense of what poetry is about in the world, and of the place of feelings and memory in politics.”
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser represents the curation of Rukeyser’s most enduring and urgent work, gathered in one volume that spans the many decades of her life and career, and with an introduction from Natasha Trethewey, one of our most important contemporary poets.
‘This posthumous collection affirms Rukeyser’s importance as a poet of witness.’ — New York Times
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser
Poems
By Muriel Rukeyser
Foreword by Natasha Trethewey
ISBN: 9780062985491
ISBN 10: 0062985493
Imprint: Ecco
2021
Trimsize: 6x7in
Pages: 224 pages
$16.99
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Dem unbekannten Gott
Noch einmal, eh ich weiterziehe
Und meine Blicke vorwärts sende,
Heb’ ich vereinsamt meine Hände
Zu dir empor, zu dem ich fliehe,
Dem ich in tiefster Herzenstiefe
Altäre feierlich geweiht,
Daß allezeit
Mich deine Stimme wieder riefe.
Darauf erglüht tiefeingeschrieben
Das Wort: dem unbekannten Gotte.
Sein bin ich, ob ich in der Frevler Rotte
Auch bis zur Stunde bin geblieben:
Sein bin ich – und ich fühl’ die Schlingen,
Die mich im Kampf darniederziehn
Und, mag ich fliehn,
Mich doch zu seinem Dienste zwingen.
Ich will dich kennen, Unbekannter,
Du tief in meine Seele Greifender,
Mein Leben wie ein Sturm Durchschweifender,
Du Unfaßbarer, mir Verwandter!
Ich will dich kennen, selbst dir dienen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 – 1900)
Dem unbekannten Gott
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Season of Dares leans into fragments of the scriptures, narratives and mythologies of a Korean adoptee’s childhood in the rural American West.
Fearlessly, it revisits and explores the physical and spiritual landscapes of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them–violence and tenderness, stoicism and sentimentalism, self-reliance and belief in divine providence.
Born in South Korea and raised in Montana and Colorado, Leah Silvieus now travels between Florida and New York as a yacht chief stewardess.
Silvieus is the author of a chapbook, Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press 2016), and a books editor for Hyphen magazine. She is also a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Fulbright, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.
Leah Silvieus holds an MFA from the University of Miami.
Season of Dares
by Leah Silvieus (Author)
Publisher: Bull City Press
2018
Language: English
Paperback: 28 pages
ISBN-10: 149517879X
ISBN-13: 978-1495178795
$23.20
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An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.
“I am the hurting kind.”
What does it mean to be the hurting kind?
To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?
To divine the relationships between us all?
To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?
With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.
These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish.
And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.
Along the way,we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.
“Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”
Ada Limón grew up in Glen Ellen and Sonoma, California. A graduate of New York University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2007), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essays, and a new collection of poems. Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022.
The Hurting Kind
by Ada Limón (Author)
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
May 10, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover: 120 pages
ISBN-10: 1639550496
ISBN-13: 978-1639550494
$17.99
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A Little Poem
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
A Little Poem
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