In her Translator’s Preface, Tiina Aleman explains how closely she and Doris Kareva worked on the poems in this volume. Kareva herself is a well-regarded translator who has translated widely from English into Estonian, so I assume these versions achieve a high level of fidelity to the originals. They certainly read well in English and […]
Books
Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) £7.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) £12.95 Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death. However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; it is the relationship we have with the dead in the transition of dying; what he elsewhere […]
Michael Haslam, A Cure for Woodness, (Arc Publications)
Michael Haslam’s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the ‘Cambridge Axis’ of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys. Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and […]
Jill Bialosky, The Skiers: Selected Poems (Arc Publications)
Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic […]
Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta) £7.99
So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . . he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for all […]
Shanta Acharya, Dreams That Spell the Light (Arc Publications) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, gained a doctorate from Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. She has written a book on Emerson, three books on asset management, and five volumes of poetry. This new collection reflects both the breadth of cultural reference and the rather privileged perspective one might expect […]
Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets, ed. by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce […]
Laila Lalami, Secret Son (Penguin) £9.99
Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel. Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef. He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that […]
James Kelman, If it is your life (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that […]
Don Delillo, Point Omega (Picador)
Foul deeds will arise ere the earth o’erhelm them to men’s eyes. The perspective in Hamlet seems unlikely to be shared by the main protagonist of DeLillos’s new novel, a ‘desert in the woods’ academic policy wonk grinding out the linguistic and idea upholstery to the neocon ideologues of the former Bush administration. Enhanced interrogation, […]
Ian McEwan, Solar (Vintage) £8.99
Ian McEwan is widely considered to be a ‘national treasure’. He is a literary heavyweight whose meticulous research and plot designs deliver novels that capture the zeitgeist of an age and also entertain. His latest offering, ‘Solar’ published by Jonathan Cape, is no exception. It is a reflection on the latest calamity plaguing mankind – […]
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 […]
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
There aren’t many books like Paul Murray’s new novel Skippy Dies. It looks different for a start: instead of the hardback you’d expect for the RRP, you get a boxed set of three beautifully designed paperbacks titled Hopeland, Heartland, and Ghostland and Afterland instead. At about 220 pages long, they’re perfect to slip into the […]
Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums (Granta) £7.99
For a language that bears such a close relation to English, German has been poorly served by translations. Compared to, for example, the ease with which French or Spanish has been rendered, translations of German have often seemed heavy and cumbersome, as if it was being translated into a language that looked and sounded like […]
Carlos Fuentes, Happy Families (Bloomsbury) £8.99
One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations […]
E. L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (Little Brown) £11.99
When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers […]
Sarah Arvio, Sono with Visits from the Seventh (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
For all Sarah Arvio’s obvious intelligence, culture, technical adroitness and articulacy, I struggled with this book. In the end I didn’t feel the struggle brought anything like enough reward. My feeling of a fundamental aridity was at its most acute in Sono. The poem – a sequence of forty-two “cantos” arranged in generally blank verse […]
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) […]
Three New Titles, reviewed by Ian Pople
20 Canadian Poets Take On the World, ed. Priscila Uppal (Exile Editions) $24.95 Anne Compton, Asking questions indoors and out (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $15.00 Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) $18.95 To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what […]
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 […]
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 […]
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (Jonathan Cape) £18.99
For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its […]
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pro Eto – That’s What trans. by Larisa Gureyeva & George Hyde (Arc Publications)
The eyes of Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, Lily Brik, bore out at you from the cover of this important new edition of Mayakovsky’s long poem, Pro Eto. Lily Brik occurs elsewhere in the book; in the text, which she haunts, but also in the astonishing photomontages for the poem by Alexander Rodchenko, which are published […]
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened? One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, […]
James Fleming, Cold Blood (Jonathan Cape) £16.99
Ian Fleming is reputed to have said that he wrote the James Bond books for warm-blooded, heterosexuals to read on trains. In Cold Blood, his nephew James Fleming takes that one step further by writing a book that will not only appeal to the same readership, but whose subject is warm-blooded, heterosexual and actually on […]
John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (Hamish Hamilton) £12.99
The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean […]
Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon & Schuster) £14.99, 241pp
The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in […]
Tobias Hill, The Hidden (Faber and Faber) £12.99
This fourth novel by poet and novelist, Tobias Hill is as illuminated and finely crafted as you would expect from a writer who can move between both forms with equal success. This is a novel that delivers, perhaps too well: one is conscious of the writerly-ness of this, and at times the technical joins and […]
The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews
The Flying Troutmans is a quest novel in which the narrator, dysfunctional Hattie, takes her dysfunctional niece Thebes, and dysfunctional nephew Logan, on a journey in a van across America in a bid to find their dysfunctional father Cherkis, because their dysfunctional mother Min, has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. That’s a lot […]
Six Lithuanian Poets, ed. Eugenijus Alisanka (Arc Publications) 2008, reviewed by Ewa Stanczyk
This anthology of contemporary Lithuanian poetry is a must-read for anyone interested in East European literature. The collection introduces six contemporary Lithuanian poets who mostly made their debuts after 1991 in the years of independence. It opens with Eugenijus Alisanka’s informed introduction on the development of Lithuanian literature from nineteenth century onwards. Here the editor […]
Ross Raisin, God’s Own Country (Penguin)
Ross Raisin’s debut novel takes its title from the not always ironic way that Yorkshiremen of a certain age refer to their own county. Set in the wilderness of the North Yorks Moors and narrated by Sam Marsden, a nineteen-year-old whose reliability we are never entirely certain of, it combines elements of comedy, suspense and […]
Six Polish Poets, ed. Jacek Dehnel (Arc Publications), reviewed by Ewa Stanczyk
Six Polish Poets is the second bilingual anthology of Polish poetry, published by Arc. It is also the fifth volume in the series ‘New Voices from Europe and Beyond’ which brings contemporary world poetry to the English-language readers. The book features a selection of poets who made their debuts in the past two decades; mostly, […]
Mourid Barghouti, Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications)
Mourid Barghouti’s first full length collection to be published in the UK is a wonderful book, sprawling, elegiac and elegant. The translation from the Arabic by Barghouti’s wife, Radwa Ashour, is mellifluous and adept, full of lovely felicities in the English, which make the poems come alive in the language they were not written in. […]
Chris Woods, Dangerous Driving (Comma Press), reviewed by Lynne Taylor
This is the second collection from Chris Woods following Recovery. In Dangerous Driving, he continues to observe, looking inwards as well as out. In his pared-down style, Woods journeys using unassuming vocabulary. The reader is a happy passenger: has a feeling of being in the safe hands of someone who is confident of his vehicle […]
Anne Rouse, The Upshot: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books)
Anne Rouse’s The Upshot comprises poems from her first three books, presented in reverse order of publication. At the front of the book, there is a group of new poems that she has called ‘The Divided’. Rouse has always been a miniaturist; her poems seldom stray over the page, and this tendency has become more […]