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Always the coolest of doorway
It wasn’t necessarily the best of times
or the best of me, the best of wines
or the best of you, the warmest of nights,
the brightest of moon, the nicest of streets,
the trendiest of bars in the smart part of town.
We didn’t have the cleverest of talks,
sit at the best of tables, with the cleanest of napkins.
My pockets weren’t the fullest, as the moths attested.
I wasn’t at my wealthiest, or my smartest,
or wearing the shiniest shoes with the strongest of laces,
chewing with the whitest of teeth in the kindest of moods.
We certainly weren’t coy about our agenda that night.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t know you or I didn’t want you,
or I wouldn’t try or hadn’t had; I wanted what I wanted
and slowly the alcohol took hold and awoke the desiring,
and you could’ve imagined a better seduction,
as the night could’ve been the dullest ever
without wanting to or trying the making of love to you.
But wasn’t the moon the fullest, and weren’t we the closest,
didn’t we feel the passion and violence of the kissing, the biting,
struggling in a moment of an explosive erotic experience.
Didn’t we search for privacy in the dirty streets that night?
Weren’t we two bellyfuls of red wine in the emptying city,
swaggering and swollen, swaying in a London doorway,
hidden from the pace of hectic pedestrians.
Hadn’t we become the most romantic of couples
in our boozy, breathy pairing, as we locked tight together
and vanished completely in a haze of shaky memories that night.
Vincent Berquez
Always the coolest of doorway
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Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language.
The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain.
At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea—Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Deaf Republic
Poems
by Ilya Kaminsky
Publisher: Graywolf 2019
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 1555978312
ISBN-13 : 978-1555978310
Paperback $10.79
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Schemerlamp
In een ver verleden onder deze schemerlamp
bedacht hij hoe zijn moeder samenspande
met de avondval. Uit radio beneden geluiden
die hij nauwelijks kon duiden. Van alle eeuwenoude
sprookjes in dat bed rook je de oorsprong.
Onder die lampenkap kwam haast vanzelf
een stil geloven. Door het heden schippert hopeloos
versnipperd vroeger, laverend als een oude schuit.
Hier kijk ik aan tegen een wand die alles weigert.
Bert Bevers
Schemerlamp
Eerder verschenen in Eigen terrein, Uitgeverij WEL, Bergen op Zoom, 2013
Bert Bevers is dichter en schrijver
Hij woont en werkt in Antwerpen (Be)
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A fascinating blend of poetry and science, Ben-Oni’s poems are precisely crafted, like a surgeon sewing a complicated stitch, moving through the multiverses of family, religion and discovery itself.
The book culminates in an ancient Jewish Idea about “Efes,” which is Modern Hebrew for “zero” but also in mystical texts, means “nullification” and “concealment.”
Ultimately, Efes becomes a process of transformation for the speaker, revealing as well that the closer humanity gets to understanding this mysterious force, it inevitably changes the riddle– and us along with it.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019).
She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal ,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others.
Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Rosebud Ben-Oni writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She is currently editing a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
If This Is the Age We End Discovery
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Publisher: Alice James Books (March 9, 2021)
Language: English
Poetry
Paperback: 100 pages
ISBN-10 : 1948579154
ISBN-13 : 978-1948579155
$14.89
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As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
As if a phantom caress’d me,
I thought I was not alone walking
here by the shore;
But the one I thought was with me as
now I walk by the shore,
the one I loved that caress’d me,
As I lean and look
through the glimmering light,
that one has utterly disappear’d.
And those appear that are hateful to me
and mock me.
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Poem: As If a Phantom Caress’d Me
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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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Nervenschock
Seht her: In einem Zauberknäul gebannt
schlottert und taumelt er an schwanker Krücke,
bald hart am Pflasterrand und bald zurück
prallt klappernd sein Gebein an rauher Wand.
Und aller Augen sind ihm zugewandt:
der frechen Neugier und des Mitleids Blick – –
ein Kind, das spielt, hält mitten still im Glücke,
als blick’ es plötzlich in ein dunkles Land . . .
Oh, seht ihn an! In graues Tuch gewandet,
der Menscheit Heldentum in torkelndem Zick-Zack
zwei Kreuzchen scheppern und zwei Bänder
fliegen – – –
Im roten Meer von Blut und Siegen
ist des Jahrhunderts stolzes Schiff gestrandet –
und das ist Euer Wrack! . . .
Joseph Roth
(1894 – 1939)
Nervenschock
Prager Tagblatt – 6.10.1918
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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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The Star
Last night
I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea,
Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star,
Containing both as in a trembling cup.
Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
The Star
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Geluksvogels bevat een keuze uit Luigi Pirandello’s Novellen voor een jaar, in een blinkend nieuwe vertaling van Yond Boeke en Patty Krone.
Pirandello schreef deze opmerkelijk hoogwaardige verzameling verhalen tussen 1894 en 1936. Zijn dood belette hem het project – één novelle voor elke dag van het jaar – te voltooien.
De diversiteit van zijn verhalen, die getuigen van groot psychologisch inzicht, een buitengewoon scherp gevoel voor humor en immens mededogen, is exemplarisch voor Pirandello’s enorme veelzijdigheid als schrijver.
Hij voert een breed scala aan markante personages ten tonele: van arme Siciliaanse boeren die tevergeefs strijden tegen de clerus tot wufte stedelingen die verstrikt raken in hun eigen overspel, van een wanhopige patiënt die in een New Yorks ziekenhuis uit het raam springt tot een geëxalteerde actrice die het moet opnemen tegen een vleermuis.
Pirandello laveert virtuoos tussen vlotte dialogen, van weemoed doortrokken landschapsbeschrijvingen en filosofische bespiegelingen over het aardse bestaan. Sommige verhalen blijken ook nu nog verrassend actueel.
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), geboren in een gegoede familie op Sicilië, kreeg in 1934 de Nobelprijs voor de Literatuur. De verfilming van zijn verhalen door Paolo en Vittorio Taviani, Kaos, werd wereldberoemd.
Geluksvogels
Novellen
Door Luigi Pirandello
Uitgeverij Van Oorschot
2022
Gebonden
832 pagina’s
ISBN 9789028213142
Prijs: € 45,00
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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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