Tag Archives: Arc Publications
Ian Pople

Marcelijus Martinaitus, The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Publications)

Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow and Kukutis […]

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Ian Pople

Razmik Davoyan, Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc Publications)

This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values. In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both […]

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The Manchester Review

Maurice Carême, Défier le destin – Defying Fate, trans. by Christopher Pilling (Arc Publications) £9.99

The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 – 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short (sometimes very short) […]

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Ian Pople

New Collections from Liz Almond and Brian Johnstone, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich

Liz Almond, Yelp (Arc Publications) Brian Johnstone, The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications) Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full. “Rosita Rules […]

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The Manchester Review

Valerie Rouzeau “Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter“ trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications

Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read […]

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