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De laatste s
Het hart zij zuiver binnenin, niet meer door
dwaze trots verteerd, het lichaam matig,
afgekeerd van overdaad en rein van zin. Sint
pura cordis íntima, absístat et vecórdia: carnis
terat supérbiam potus cibíque párcitas. Hij houdt
van het doorsissen van de laatste s, van geloven
tegen de draad in. Hij ziet zijn mensen graag.
De hostie kleeft hen in de mond. Ze zijn zo zeker
dat ze niet meer weten van welke parochie ze zijn.
Bert Bevers
Gedicht: De laatste s
Uit Andere taal, Uitgeverij Litera Este, Borgerhout, 2010
Bert Bevers is a poet and writer who lives and works in Antwerp (Be)
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More in: Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Bevers, Bert
From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bells Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski’s talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction.
An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and chaotic tales, revealing the hidden hand of the master at the top of his form.
Born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. He died of leukemia in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited three previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Absence of the Hero, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
The Paris Review:
“Bukowski’s The Bell Tolls for No One, recently released in a comic-book-like paperback, follows the hardboiled genre bent that reached its surreal apotheosis in his final novel, Pulp. The obvious influence is to Hemingway—see: the title—but perhaps more interestingly, the editor David Stephen Calonne notes Bukowski’s debt to the crime writer James M. Cain, who had also, unbeknownst to me, shaped the style of Camus’s The Stranger. The book includes some of Bukowski’s roughly drawn illustrations, which fall somewhere close to pornographic Ziggy or adult-themed New Yorker cartoons. One features an asthmatic customer at an adult bookstore asking the cashier to inflate his blow-up doll for him; another shows an expressionistically drawn party girl surrounded by gawking men with the caption “God, a woman could get bored.” The subject matter is a more amplified version of the usual Bukowski fare—stalwart, sleazebag protagonists; spectral, deathly women with emphatically described upper legs. As always, the most one can hope for in Bukowski’s universe is “a grim yet comfortable isolation.”—Casey Henry in The Paris Review
“He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned
up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when
it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed
very tender and concerned and serious about my smashed-
in face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.
Anyhow, the drinking got to Mick, and it gets to each
of us differently. With him, the body swelled up, doubled,
tripled in size in various places. He couldn’t zip his pants
and had to cut slits in the pant legs. His story was that they
didn’t have a bed for him in the vet’s hospital. My feeling
was that he didn’t want to go there. Anyhow, one day he
made a foolish move and tried the General Hospital.
After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ,
they’re killing me! I’ve never seen a place like this. No doc-
tors anywhere and nurses don’t give a damn and just these
fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that
everybody’s sick and dying. What the fuck is this place?
They’re carrying the dead out by the dozens!”
-Charles Bukowski
Title: The Bell Tolls for No One
Author: Charles Bukowski
Edited by David Stephen Calonne
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872866823
ISBN-13 9780872866829
Publication Date 14 July 2015
308 pages
Price $14.95
short story writer books
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More in: - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Art & Literature News, Bukowski, Charles
“Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.”
Following the success of Cataract, John Berger, one of the great soothsayers of seeing, joins forces again with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel. This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking. A subtle and beautifully illustrated prose poem, Smoke lingers in the mind.
This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society’s attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind.
“A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It’s like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.” – John Berger (in interview)
In contemporary English letters John Berger seems to me peerless. Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.
—Susan Sontag
In his ceaselessly inventive work, Selçuk often uses parts of the body in ways that are characteristically Turkish…as if the comedy of the human condition were there in the human body, in the melancholy of anatomy.
—John Berger, on Selçuk Demirel
Smoke
by John Berger (Author)
and Selcuk Demirel (Illustrator)
Hardcover, $18.95
Available in Hardcover on May 8, 2018
ISBN10 1910749478
ISBN13 9781910749470
From Notting Hill Editions
70 pages
new books
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More in: - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Archive C-D, Art & Literature News, Illustrators, Illustration, John Berger, Susan Sontag
Domburg
Villa Carmen Sylva: een lang geleden koningin
heeft in haar woning nog haar naam bewaard.
Met haar verzen is zij door de mazen van het net
des tijds reeds verdwenen. Dit dorp heeft zich
sedertdien schrap gezet in langzaam blijven.
Vloeden laten zich gedwee door palen breken,
dwars zitten duinen tussen bosch & zee.
Wij kuieren hier, in al ons wonen Scheldetrouw,
de drempel tussen jeugd en ouderdom omver.
Staren op die westenwind een meeuw na,
of vergeten van dit gezicht ons was verboden.
Weten in de kermis van de kennis in ons hoofd
zat oude tijden: met schip en vruchtenmand
als storm gilt uit alle hoeken fluistert Nehalennia.
Bert Bevers
Gedicht: Domburg
Eerder verschenen in De Vrije Domburger, 2001
Bert Bevers is a poet and writer who lives and works in Antwerp (Be)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Bevers, Bert
Sonet
Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,
Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.
Twa gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,
Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.
Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throw the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.
Mark Alexander Boyd
(1563-1601)
Sonet
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A look back at the cultural and political force of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in celebration of her hundredth birthday
Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander.
Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of black American life she observed growing up on Chicago’s Southside—a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets. From the desk in her bedroom, as a child she filled countless notebooks with poetry, encouraged by the likes of Hughes and affirmed by Richard Wright, who called her work “raw and real.”
Over the next sixty years, Brooks’s poetry served as witness to the stark realities of urban life: the evils of lynching, the murders of Emmett Till and Malcolm X, the revolutionary effects of the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning power of the Black Arts Movement. Critical acclaim and the distinction in 1950 as the first black person ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize helped solidify Brooks as a unique and powerful voice.
Now, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, fellow Chicagoan and award-winning writer Angela Jackson delves deep into the rich fabric of Brooks’s work and world. Granted unprecedented access to Brooks’s family, personal papers, and writing community, Jackson traces the literary arc of this artist’s long career and gives context for the world in which Brooks wrote and published her work. It is a powerfully intimate look at a once-in-a-lifetime talent up close, using forty-three of Brooks’s most soul-stirring poems as a guide.
From trying to fit in at school (“Forgive and Forget”), to loving her physical self (“To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals”), to marriage and motherhood (“Maud Martha”), to young men on her block (“We Real Cool”), to breaking history (“Medgar Evers”), to newfound acceptance from her community and her elevation to a “surprising queenhood” (“The Wall”), Brooks lived life through her work.
Jackson deftly unpacks it all for both longtime admirers of Brooks and newcomers curious about her interior life. A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun is a commemoration of a writer who negotiated black womanhood and incomparable brilliance with a changing, restless world—an artistic maverick way ahead of her time.
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
from ‘The Children of the Poor’
Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the National Book Award–nominated And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New. Her novel Where I Must Go won the American Book Award in 2009. Its sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads, was published in 2017. Additionally, Jackson was longlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and a longlist finalist for the PEN Open Book Award for her 2015 poetry collection, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize, Academy of American Poets Prize, TriQuarterly’s Daniel Curley Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. Jackson lives in Chicago.
A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun
The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks
By Angela Jackson
Paperback – $18.00
ISBN 9780807059128
Published by Beacon Press
208 Pages
May 29, 2018
new books
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More in: - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Archive I-J, Archive I-J, BIOGRAPHY, REPRESSION OF WRITERS, JOURNALISTS & ARTISTS
To the Fringed Gentian
Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And coloured with the heaven’s own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.
Thou comest not when violets lean
O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.
Thou waitest late and com’st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.
Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue—blue—as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.
I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.
William Cullen Bryant
(1794-1878)
To the Fringed Gentian
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The Pity of It
I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”
“Ich woll,” “Er sholl,” and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird
At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: “Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between folk kin tongued even as are we,
“Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.”
Laurence Binyon
(1869 – 1943)
The Pity of It
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive A-B, CLASSIC POETRY, WAR & PEACE
A powerful new collection of poetry from the National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and recipient of the Forward Poetry Prize.
In The Unaccompanied, Armitage gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace.
We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket.
We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite “like a shipwreck’s carcass raised on a sea-crane’s hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones.”
In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its “Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films”–in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, he has published eleven collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars, Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989 – 2014, and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The Shout: Selected Poems, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and his translation of the medieval poem Pearl received the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He writes extensively for radio and television, has published three best-selling non-fiction titles, and his theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and in 2015 was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Simon Armitage
The Unaccompanied
Poems
Published by Knopf
Hardcover
$27.00
Aug. 2017
96 Pages
ISBN 9781524732424
new poetry
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More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B, Armitage, Simon, Art & Literature News, Mermaids
Ontgoocheling
Laat mij niet almaar zinloos lijden,
Zeg niet dat jij nog van mij houdt,
Wat er ook was in vroeger tijden,
Het laat mijn arme hart nu koud!
Nee, ik geloof niet in jouw liefde,
Nee, ik geloof daar niet meer aan,
Sinds jij mijn arme ziel zo griefde,
Kan ik mij niet meer laten gaan!
Vergeet de uren, thans vervlogen,
Vergroot de blinde wanhoop niet,
Mijn zieke hart, zozeer bedrogen,
Zag graag dat jij het rusten liet!
Ik slaap, ben net in slaap gevallen,
Vergeet jouw dromen van weleer,
Wat er ook was, ‘t is ons ontvallen,
Dit hart krijg jij niet wakker meer.
Jevgeni Baratynski,
(1800 – 1844)
Разуверение,
gedicht 1821,
vertaling Paul Bezembinder, 2016.
(Meer over Paul Bezembinder is te vinden op zijn website: www.paulbezembinder.nl)
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La double ivresse
Je reposais sous l’ombrage,
Quand Nœris vint m’éveiller :
Je crus voir sur son visage
Le feu du désir briller.
Sur son front Zéphyr agite
La rose et le pampre vert ;
Et de son sein qui palpite
Flotte le voile entrouvert.
Un enfant qui suit sa trace
(Son frère, si je l’en crois)
Presse pour remplir sa tasse
Des raisins entre ses doigts.
Tandis qu’à mes yeux la belle
Chante et danse à ses chansons,
L’enfant, caché derrière elle,
Mêle au vin d’affreux poisons.
Nœris prend la tasse pleine,
Y goûte, et vient me l’offrir.
Ah ! dis-je, la ruse est vaine :
Je sais qu’on peut en mourir.
Tu le veux, enchanteresse !
Je bois, dussé-je en ce jour
Du vin expier l’ivresse
Par l’ivresse de l’amour.
Mon délire fut extrême :
Mais aussi qu’il dura peu !
Ce n’est plus Nœris que j’aime,
Et Nœris s’en fait un jeu.
De ces ardeurs infidèles
Ce qui reste, c’est qu’enfin,
Depuis, à l’amour des belles
J’ai mêlé le goût du vin.
Pierre-Jean de Béranger
(1780-1857)
La double ivresse
Toutes les chansons de Béranger (1843)
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Früh, eh der Tag
Früh, eh der Tag seine Schwingen noch regt,
Alles noch schlummert und träumet und ruht,
Blümchen noch nickt in der Winde Hut,
Eh noch im Forste ein Vogel anschlägt,
Schreitet ein Engel
Durchs tauweiße Land
Streut ans den Segen
Mit schimmernder Hand.
Und es erwachet die Au und der Wald.
Blumen bunt reiben die Äuglein sich klar,
Staunen und flüstern in seliger Schar.
Aufstrahlt die Sonne, ein Amselruf schallt.
Aber der Engel
Zog längst schon landaus.
Flog wieder heim
In sein Vaterhaus.
Hugo Ball
(1886-1927)
Gedicht: Früh, eh der Tag
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More in: Archive A-B, Ball, Hugo, Dada, DADA, Dadaïsme
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