The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry

The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry

Author: Menna Elfyn

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13:

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Welsh is the oldest surviving Celtic language, and the most flourishing. For around fifteen centuries Welsh poets have expressed an intense awareness of what it is like to be human in this part of the world in poems of extraordinary range and depth. And despite the global tendency towards homogenisation, Welsh poets have fought back, drawing inspiration from both the traditional and the contemporary to forge a new and rainbow-like modernism. This wide-ranging anthology of 20th-century Welsh-language poetry in English translation - by far the most comprehensive of its kind - will be a revelation for most readers. It will dispel the romantic images of Welsh poets as bards or druids and blow away any preconceived mists of Celtic twilight. This poetry is full of vitality, combining old craftsmanship and daring innovation, humour and angst, the oral and the literary. The selection brings together poets of every hue: from magisterial figures like T Gwynn Jones, R Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis to folk poets such as Alun Cilie and Dic Jones; from cerebral poets Pennar Davies and Bobi Jones to popular entertainers Geraint Løvgreen and Ifor ap Glyn. There are Chaplinesque poets, rebellious and subversive ones, lyrical voices and storytellers. The variety is enormous: from Welsh performance poetry to song lyrics; from the wry social comment of Grahame Davies to the contemporary parables of Gwyneth Lewis, who writes different kinds of poems in Welsh and English. This exuberant chorus of voices from the margins of Europe proves that poetry in this minority language is far from stagnant. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.


The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets

Author: Jeet Thayil

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13:

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Jeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.Thayil's starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for "verticality" rather than chronology, Thayil's anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of 'chutnified' (Salman Rushdie's word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. It explains why Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri have said that Indian poetry in English has a longer, more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English. The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala, Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hongkong, Montreal, Melbourne, Calcutta, Connecticut, Cuttack and various other global corridors. While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.


Chaotic Angels

Chaotic Angels

Author: Gwyneth Lewis

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13:

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Gwyneth Lewis is a bilingual virtuoso, publishing separate collections in English and Welsh. Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her first three English collections, Parables & Faxes (1995), Zero Gravity (1998) and Keeping Mum (2003).


A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015

A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015

Author: Wolfgang Gortschacher

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-12-21

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 1118843207

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A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.


The Book of Taliesin

The Book of Taliesin

Author: Rowan Williams

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0141396946

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The great work of Welsh literature, translated in full for the first time in over 100 years by two of its country's foremost poets Tennyson portrayed him, and wrote at least one poem under his name. Robert Graves was fascinated by what he saw as his work's connection to a lost world of deeply buried folkloric memory. He is a shapeshifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; a 6th-century Brythonic bard; and a legendary collective project spanning the centuries up to The Book of Taliesin's compilation in 14th-century North Wales. He is, above all, no single 'he'. The figure of Taliesin is a mystery. But of the variety and quality of the poems written under his sign, of their power as exemplars of the force of ecstatic poetic imagination, and of the fascinating window they offer us onto a strange and visionary world, there can be no question. In the first volume to gather all of the poems from The Book of Taliesin since 1915, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams's accessible translation makes these outrageous, arrogant, stumbling and joyful poems available to a new generation of readers.


Quantum Poetics

Quantum Poetics

Author: Gwyneth Lewis

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Limited

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 9781780370705

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In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Gwyneth Lewis's three lectures explore the connection linking form and politics with the content of poetry while exploring how each of these changes our understanding of time. She argues that the poet steers a path between making music and making sense - not at the level of the line, but in the deep structures of meaning which are poetry's terrain. The accuracy of what they say is just as important as its expression, both for their own well-being and for its worth to the reader. Taken together, her lectures begin to posit not the science in poetry but a science of the art form. 'The Stronger Life': Much has been made of the volatility of poets, which is largely a myth. Because it can be confessional, poetry is often assumed to be therapeutic, but it can, equally, be toxic. The lives and work of poets are distinct but not unrelated. Using examples from Laura Riding and George Herbert, Gwyneth Lewis argues in this lecture that poets are more, not less resilient than the rest of the population. Looking at her own modern epic, A Hospital Odyssey, she questions how form is essential to health. 'What Country, Friends, is This?': Using Illyria in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as a starting point, this lecture explores language politics and writing, describing how far poets will go to negotiate safe passage between one and the other. Fluent in Welsh and English, Gwyneth Lewis reflects on writing in two opposed traditions at the same time and reflects on what light the work of poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Anne Carson, among others, throws on the nature of poetry as a whole. 'Quantum Poetics': Form is the science of poetry. Because of its peculiar relationship with time, poetry's history isn't linear. Language works with a quantum indeterminacy. With special reference to the early Welsh tradition's extreme formalism, Gwyneth Lewis discusses in this lecture how what seems like ornament conjures probability waves into being, adding an extra, unheard, dimension to the sound of metre.


Lumen

Lumen

Author: Tiffany Atkinson

Publisher:

Published: 2021-02-25

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781780375304

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Tiffany Atkinson's fourth collection asks how poetry may help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love.


Blind man's kiss

Blind man's kiss

Author: Menna Elfyn

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13:

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When Menna Elfyn published her bilingual selected poems in 1995, Tony Conran called her 'the first Welsh poet in fifteen hundred years to make a serious attempt to have her work known outside Wales'. Her second bilingual volume, Cell Angel, was hailed by the same critic as the most significant collection of Welsh poetry for forty years. The metaphysical energies initiated in Cell Angel find full liberation in this, her third bilingual collection, whose extraordinary range of subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place Menna Elfyn, effortlessly, among Europe's leading poets. Hers is a poetry of daringly imaginative leaps, exploring both inner and outer landscapes, taking exuberant liberties with language, and presenting her translators with formidable challenges. Her questing eye, affection-ately critical of many domestic presumptions, restlessly interrogates horizons that others have ignored or taken as read, from the mutating social landscapes of home to the concrete cliffs of Manhattan or the culinary byways of Vietnam. But wherever she finds herself - and as a reader in demand all over the world, she is the most travelled of all Welsh poets - Menna Elfyn never loses sight of Wales.


A Hospital Odyssey

A Hospital Odyssey

Author: Gwyneth Lewis

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Limited

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781852248772

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A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: "Dr Who" meets "Paradise Lost". The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill? Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014.