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Dyad (Paperback)
Richard Berengarten, Will Hill
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R374
R327
Discovery Miles 3 270
Save R47 (13%)
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Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1,000 years. But a
sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time ever in
English, is a suite of twenty-four of them. The delicate instrument
of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao
Yuanming, Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine,
who lived more than 1,500 years ago. "In these beautiful, lucid
poems, Richard Berengarten exploits the scope of the villanelle in
a profound engagement with nature and mortality, in which past,
present and future voices resonate across East and West.
Accompanied by 'old friends', he fills the wine jug and considers
existential realities of love and loss, imagination and creativity,
where his thought and form are testimony to a life-long intimacy
with Daoism and the I Ching." -Lucy Hamilton "Poetry inspired by
wine is almost a genre in Chinese literature. The Chinese pastoral
poet Tao Yuanming (365?-427) pioneers what may be called
'alcoholyricism'. Berengarten's drinking songs are not just a
fitting tribute to and admirable emulation of Tao Yuanming's poetic
theme and art, but their evocation of idyllic rural scenes and deep
reflections on humanity's relation to nature entitles him to be
called a Tao Yuanming in English garb." -Ming Dong Gu "There is an
elegiac if not valedictory tone abroad and at home in these
beautiful poems. We are in the aural territory of an ageing
song-bird - the most musical of our older poets - gathering his
forces to sing, like Shake-speare's lark, at heaven's gate. He is
our host and guest, as we age along with him." -Anthony Rudolf
This first volume of essays and prose-pieces by Richard Berengarten
reflects his sustained involvement in the Balkans over a period of
more than thirty-five years. By focusing on his experience of
Yugoslavia before, during and after that country's dissolution,
Balkan Spaces locates, tracks and celebrates aspects of history,
folk tradition, literary culture, educational practice, politics
and poetry, while also including affectionate memoirs of many
friends, most of them writers. Through intimate explorations and
careful research, Berengarten discovers some of the patternings,
varieties and bounties of the Balkan and Yugoslav heritage. While
his keen eye questions and explores what William Blake called the
"minute particulars", his overall vision is panoramic and
multi-faceted. This book embodies a commitment to the values and
varieties of Balkan civilisation, to the poetic imagination, and to
the poet's vocation and craft.
"I'm not a prophet, but I believe you have written a great poem..."
--Octavio Paz (from a personal letter) "The note on the back cover
of the first edition of Avebury describes the book as 'a series of
lyrical meditations, in which man's roots are rediscovered in the
modes of perception of earlier cultures'. This is true; but it is
also true to say that 'love defeating death' is a universal theme."
--Jeremy Hooker "Avebury freely moves through time, from
pre-textual history to descriptions of art and civilisation, in the
same way that Olson's Maximus Poems and all of Eliot's poems in
Four Quartets envision history as an event that is taking place now
and always, past and present simultaneously existing." --Neli Moody
"It was a welcome surprise to find Avebury, where I have walked
among the stones so often, placed back meaningfully on the
spiritual map." --Charles Tomlinson
Spanning a period of fifteen years, these five 'Inter-views' with
Richard Berengarten explore the many facets of his writings.
Hospitably and expansively, they yield insights into the work of a
poet of our time, his methods, motives, and patterns of thought.
Based in dialogue, an interview is always a collaborative venture.
It discovers difference and clarifies commonalities between writer
and reader. By working closely together in composing, editing and
revisiting transcripts for each interview, Richard Berengarten and
his five interlocutors reveal the potential of the literary
interview itself, as they articulate and test its reticent
boundaries."The sheer range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's
oeuvre responds has enabled him to put down 'multiple roots' in a
number of literary traditions." - Norman Jope"Berengarten's poetry
invites readers to glimpse at the mechanics of multivocal,
multilingual poetry: its attraction works by bringing one closer
not simply to what is not one's own, but also to what is." - Maria
Filippakopoulou"Richard Berengarten is a poet for 'a time of need'.
His poetry witnesses, commemorates, laments, affirms and blesses."
- Paul Scott Derrick"Berengarten's combination of Englishness,
Europeanness and Jewishness, and thus his sense of himself as an
inheritor of multiple overlapping identities, are core elements of
his poetic constitution." - Anthony Rudolf
Richard Berengarten's Changing is the most ambitious poem ever
written outside the Chinese language in honour of the Book of
Changes, or Yijing [I Ching]. Changing is a homage both to this
ancient text and to Chinese history and culture. The poem takes
direct inspiration from the Chinese classic, as well as its form
and the inter-relationships of its parts. The work is a remarkable
achievement in its own right and a living testament to the enduring
and universal quality of the Yijing. Berengarten has been exploring
the Yijing for more than 50 years.
This sequence of one hundred sonnets was composed between 1967 and
2013. The title, Notness, is an anagram of the word 'Sonnets'. The
word 'Metaphysical' in the subtitle is a pointer to some of the
tendencies and intentions in and surrounding the title. The only
further key - or, rather, hint - that needs to be offered here is
that the so-called 'core' of isness is notness, just as at that of
notness is isnesss: a never-ending dance.
Imagems 1 contains six statements by a European poet who challenges
modernism and post-modernism alike and extends (beyond) both.
Richard Berengarten takes as his twin cues a statement by his
mentor and friend, Octavio Paz, "For the first time in our history
we are contemporaries of all humanity", and a short poem by his
other mentor, George Seferis. For Berengarten, shared humanity is
the demanding, necessary and irreducible core of all poetics. And
its key-of-keys is magnanimity.
Manual, the sixth volume in the ongoing series of Richard
Berengarten's Selected Writings, is an ambitious work-in-progress,
a single poem, whose central theme is human hands. This present
collation is divided into five sequences and subdivided into one
hundred small poems, with two frame-pieces at the start and end.
Numerological patterning, an articulated feature of much of
Berengarten's writing, occurs in each poem's formal structure: ten
lines, ten fingers; two stanzas, two hands.
The Croatian poet Augustin (Tin) Ujevic (1891-1955) is one of the
finest Southern Slav lyric poets and one of the great poets of
Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. While Tin
Ujevic's poems are hardly known in English, they are loved in his
native Croatia and throughout former Yugoslavia. At least until the
break-up of the Yugoslav Federation, many of Tin's lyrics were
known by heart and quoted by people all over the country, even
those who weren't particularly literary, in much the same way as
some of W.B. Yeats's early poems, like 'The Lake Isle of
Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' and 'Down by the
Salley Gardens', are known and quoted all over Ireland and the UK.
Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, In a Time of Drought
explores the images and realities of war, destruction and
dictatorship, and of fertility, nurture and peace. The key figure
is the Balkan rain maiden. This gypsy or peasant girl takes on an
ancient mythological authority and a wholly modern moral presence.
In the wake of waste and war she is the incarnation of hope and
renewal. In a Time of Drought has received the international Morava
Charter Award. It forms the second part of Richard Berengarten's
Balkan Trilogy and is published with the other two parts, The Blue
Butterfly and Under Balkan Light. This edition is also the fourth
volume of his Selected Writings.
Written during and after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, this
book presents a complex vision of the Balkans that flinches from
neither brutality nor beauty but honours dignity and courage. The
book starts with a tour-de-force, the long poem 'Do vidjenje
Danitse' ('Goodbye Balkan Belle'), and continues with a series of
memorial tablets for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp. The
book includes a sequence in memory of the Serbian, Yugoslav and
Mediterranean poet, Ivan V. Lalic. Under Balkan Light forms the
final part of Richard Berengarten's Balkan Trilogy and is published
together with the first two parts, The Blue Butterfly and In a Time
of Drought. It is also the fifth volume in the Salt series of his
Selected Writings. Richard Berengarten used to be known as Richard
Burns. With the publication of this book, he now repossesses the
family name of his father, the cellist and saxophonist Alexander
Berengarten.
The action of this book-length poem unfurls in the public and
private worlds of corporate man. The Manager is a poet's response
to challenges thrown down by T.S. Eliot more than eighty years ago
in The Waste Land. Its ground is identity, sexuality and vision.
Its occupation is mind, heart and spirit. This revised edition of
The Manager is the second volume in the ongoing series of Richard
Berengarten's Selected Writings. Richard Berengarten used to be
known as Richard Burns. With the inital publication of this series
of books, he repossessed the family name of his father, the cellist
and saxophonist Alexander Berengarten.
Poetry. Volume 3 of Berengarten's Selected Writings. THE BLUE
BUTTERFLY has two points of departure. The first is a Nazi massacre
in former Yugoslavia. On October 21st, 1941, seven thousand men and
boys from Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia, were marched out to
the nearby hills and gunned down. The poet Richard Berengarten
visited the site of this atrocity, on May 25th, 1985. As he was
queuing to enter the memorial museum, a blue butterfly descended
onto the forefinger of his writing hand.
This extraordinary and powerful book takes off from these two
episodes. The title poem is already famous in former Yugoslavia in
the translation by Danilo Kis and Ivan V. Lalic. In Serbia,
Berengarten has been honored with the international Morava Prize
for Poetry. In the UK, an early unpublished draft of this sequence
was awarded the Wingate-Jewish Quarterly Prize in 1992.
THE BLUE BUTTERFLY unflinchingly explores both revenge and
forgiveness, expanding from the Balkan historical context to the
present time. The complete book has been a long time in the making.
Because it examines profound and important issues, because it does
not flinch from asking large questions, because it shapes a
crafted, vital, living poetry out of suffering and tragedy, and
because it insists on hope and pleads for joy, this is a book which
has moral implications on many levels. Both passionate and
thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, it is European in context and
universal in scope and relevance.
ichard Berengarten has made the long poem and the sequence his
forte, and many of these poems have received international acclaim.
Through his choice of themes and motifs, and his affirmation of
psyche, eros and hope, he writes in the tradition of George Seferis
and Octavio Paz. This selection (1965-2000) includes 'Avebury',
'Angels', 'Tree', 'Against the Day', 'Croft Woods', and the widely
acclaimed sequence 'Black Light'.
Throughout his adult life, C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) rarely
journeyed outside his native Alexandria, though he spent some of
his childhood years in Liverpool and London. In the course of the
20th and 21st centuries, the reach of his poetry has been immense.
It has been witnessed and addressed through a global wealth of
versions, imitations and rewritings: those poems written 'in the
manner of Cavafy', variously channelling his themes and style.
Here, for the first time in English, is a selection of such work by
poets writing in Cavafy's own language, Greek. Together they embed
the intimacy of shared culture, skilfully mirroring passions and
preoccupations. This bilingual presentation includes voices
familiar to English readers, such as those of George Seferis and
Yannis Ritsos, alongside lesser known names-all of them, engaged in
layered dialogues with Cavafy. The result is a lasting image of
literary influence and reception, and ultimately, of poetry
translated by poetry.
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