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Jade Ladder (Paperback)
W.N. Herbert, Yang Lian; Edited by (associates) Brian Holton, Qin Xiaoyu
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R376
R311
Discovery Miles 3 110
Save R65 (17%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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This anthology is the record of a revolution in Chinese poetry. As
the Cultural Revolution gave way to the post-Mao era - years of
political turmoil, economic boom and the return of Hong Kong - the
present period has been one of extraordinary and deeply problematic
growth. Chinese poets, driven by alienation, trauma and exile, have
responded with one of the most thorough and exciting experiments in
world poetry. Jade Ladder shows authoritatively for the first time
in English the diversity of Chinese poetry as it renegotiates its
relationship with Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, and
re-engages with its Classical heritage. Misty, post-Misty, Fourth
Generation; publication in samizdat, publication in exile,
publication on the internet - in a nation of billions, it sometimes
seems that there are a million ways to write poetry. This selection
provides a concise series of perspectives on a proliferating scene.
It focusses on key figures and key poems. It moves beyond the lyric
to showcase an astonishing diversity of genres including narrative
poetry, neo-Classical writing, the sequence, experimental poetry
and the long poem. Through detailed introductions, it examines how
contemporary poetry grew from both the fertile Classical tradition
and the stony ground of the Communist period, only to rewrite that
tradition, and resist that regime. Jade Ladder is the most
comprehensive single volume guide to what has been happening and
what is happening now in a culture of undeniably global
significance. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an
interest in the future not just of China, but of poetry.
This volume presents new versions of key chapters from the recent
Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook
with Readings for writers who are specialising in writing poetry.
It offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities,
making use of insightful, relevant readings from the work of
well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. Using
his experience and expertise as a teacher as well as a poet, Bill
Herbert guides aspiring writers through such key writing skills as:
drafting voice imagery rhyme form theme. The volume is further
updated to include never-before published dialogues with prominent
poets such as Vicki Feaver, Gillian Allnutt, Kathleen Jamie, Linda
France, Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien and Jo Shapcott. Concise and
practical, Writing Poetry offers an inspirational guide to the
methods and techniques of this challenging and rewarding genre and
is a must-read for aspiring poets.
This volume presents new versions of key chapters from the recent
Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook
with Readings for writers who are specialising in writing poetry.
It offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities,
making use of insightful, relevant readings from the work of
well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. Using
his experience and expertise as a teacher as well as a poet, Bill
Herbert guides aspiring writers through such key writing skills as:
drafting voice imagery rhyme form theme. The volume is further
updated to include never-before published dialogues with prominent
poets such as Vicki Feaver, Gillian Allnutt, Kathleen Jamie, Linda
France, Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien and Jo Shapcott. Concise and
practical, Writing Poetry offers an inspirational guide to the
methods and techniques of this challenging and rewarding genre and
is a must-read for aspiring poets.
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Strong Words (Paperback)
W.N. Herbert, Matthew Hollis
2
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R400
R329
Discovery Miles 3 290
Save R71 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience
been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are
right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to know
about poetry would go to someone who knew something about it.'
That's exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this judicious and
comprehensive selection of British, Irish and American manifestos
by some of modern poetry's finest practitioners. Opening the 20th
century account with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the
book moves through key later figures including W.H. Auden, Ted
Hughes, Stevie Smith and Dylan Thomas. America is richly
represented too, from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to
the influential New England poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop
and Sylvia Plath. Strong Words then brings the issues fully up to
date with over 30 specially commissioned statements from
contemporary writers including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Simon
Armitage, Selima Hill, Paul Muldoon and Douglas Dunn, amounting to
a new overview of the poetry being written at the start of the 21st
century. For poets and readers, for critics, teachers and students
of creative writing and contemporary poetry, this is essential
reading. As well as representing many of the most important poets
of the last hundred years, Strong Words also charts many different
stances and movements, from Modernism to Postmodernism, from
Futurism to the future theories of poetry. This landmark book
champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and
present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the
poem.
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Ask the Thunder (English, Somali, Paperback)
Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac Gaarriye; Translated by W.N. Herbert, Martin Orwin; Afterword by Clare Pollard
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R213
R174
Discovery Miles 1 740
Save R39 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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For nearly three hundred years Scotland and England were the Laurel
and Hardy of nations. For nearly two hundred years The Prelude was
a poem by Wordsworth. Something had to give. As Britain begins to
resemble a cut-up by William Burroughs, and the heritage of Robert
Burns is flushed down a lavvie in Leith, one verse-monger steps
forward to do battle with (or possibly for) cultural chaos. Bill
Herbert's Laurelude is in three sections: The Laurelude is a blank
verse myth about Ulverston's Idiot Boy, Stan Laurel. Othermoor
depicts a cubist version of the North where the Wild Boy himself,
the late Bill Burroughs, rewrites the rules. And The Madmen of
Elgin squashes both Lost Boys and Solitary Reapers into Middle
Scots verse forms for a pre-millennial song-and-dance. Like Oliver
Hardy this volume refuses to be slim: it bursts all borders,
literary and political, creating a zone where the Hollywood musical
meets the Jolly Beggars, where lament bumps into love lyric, where
the dictionaries go to die. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
The northern word for hometown, 'toon', flickers in meaning between
'tune' and 'cartoon'. In Bill Herbert's big bumper book, the title
toon is Troy: the first lost home. Exiled to a lighthouse on the
River Tyne, the wily Scots maestro has written a book in love with
lost and difficult things. Sometimes reflective, sometimes
subversively mischievous, he registers or rails against
displacement and resettlement, lamenting the passing of relatives,
cities, furniture, and the odd lemur. Plugged in to the poetry
zeitgeist as ever, Herbert has revived a medieval publishing craze:
the Troybook. Painstaking excavation of old comics establishes that
the original site of Troytoon is Dundee. Or Madrid. Or possibly St
Petersburg. The search for traces of Troy leads to Donegal, Crete,
and, at the heart of his grand tour, a vivid verse journal set in
post-perestroika Moscow. Dust off your highest brow and fasten your
seatbelt, we're flying Economy to Byzantium. The Big Bumper Book of
Troy is driven by sudden shifts of register - English to Scots,
free verse to antique stanza, page to performance, narrative to
lyric. Everything has become a dialect, yet - cheekily borrowing
the Russian composer Schnittke's term - Herbert aims at a
disrespectful polystylist unity. It is his most unorthodox
rebellion yet against the dictatorship of the slim volume. A riot
of colourful humour, a revolution in poetic taste.
'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the
modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world
but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly
impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the
alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed
totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary
text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of
a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both
versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary
prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or
both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the
Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the
'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of
Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to
translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief
encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm;
looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture
lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in
Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south
of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between
lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what
it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity.
Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is
two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by
the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you
reading?
'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the
modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world
but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly
impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the
alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed
totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary
text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of
a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both
versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary
prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or
both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the
Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the
'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of
Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to
translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief
encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm;
looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture
lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in
Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south
of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between
lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what
it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity.
Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is
two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by
the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you
reading?
Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the
most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in
America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world
literature, he has been translated into many languages. "Lee Valley
Poems" is his first book to be wholly conceived and written in
London, once his place of exile and now his permanent home. It
includes an extended sequence, "When Water Confirms", translated by
Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan, and a suite of shorter
poems translated by several poets, most of these working with Yang
Lian: Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, W.N. Herbert, Pascale
Petit, Fiona Sampson and Arthur Sze. The book's preface, A Wild
Goose Speaks to me, takes as its springboard Yang Lian's comment
'There is no international, only different locals'. With this
perspective, the Lee Valley of his first London poems becomes the
international inside the local: the poet may travel far but never
really leaves the ground of his own inner self, and the value and
joy of poetry is seen as fishing in the deep sea of existence. This
title is published in a dual language Chinese-English edition.
Alireza Abiz is a multi-award-winning Iranian poet, literary
scholar, and translator. Born in South Khorasan, Iran in 1968, Abiz
studied English Literature in Mashhad and Tehran universities and
received his PhD in Creative Writing-Poetry from Newcastle
University in the UK. Abiz has written extensively on Persian
contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship
of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture
since 1979 was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. He has so far
published five collections of poetry in Persian; Stop! We Should
Get Off!, Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce, I Hear My Desk as a Tree,
13/1 Koohsangee Street, and Black Line - London Underground. The
latest collection published in 2017 was awarded the most
prestigious independent poetry award in Iran, the Shamlou Award.
His sixth collection, The Desert Monitor, will be published in
2021. Abiz is has translated many leading poets including Rilke,
Bunting, Walcott, Kerouac, and C.K. Williams into Persian. His
translation of African Contemporary Art won him the Iranian Book of
the Season Award for the best translation in visual arts in 2007.
English, German and Arabic translations of his poetry have been
published in numerous journals and anthologies and have been
showcased in public places including Stuttgart subway in Germany.
He has performed at many international festivals and acted as judge
in numerous Persian language literary prizes. He is a board member
of the Poetry Translation Centre and chaired the judges for the
Sarah Maguire Poetry in Translation Prize 2020-2021. Abiz is the
co-founder of MAHA, a Persian language online platform for art and
literature and Editor of Radio Now podcasts. He lives in London
where he works as a creative writing teacher, translator and
researcher.
Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill
Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a flat overlooking
Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its
native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died,
and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political
roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU
membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war
liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian
Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the
encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s defining modern
disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands
– becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while
patriarchy flounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd
alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye
to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right
itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s flotsam
and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reflected in
the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee
Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the
imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include
Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Denfiends, and a lion,
while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora
Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its
voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s
merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s
later trade of precision engineer, it fits together a dynamic
range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and
redemptive energies of language.
Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a
translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as
the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something
unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from
copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness
of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new
element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets
come together to translate each other's work. The Chinese poets
involved are: Jiang Tao, Leng Shuang, Tang Xiaodu, Wang Xaoni, Xiao
Kaiyu, Xi Chuan, Yan Li, Yang Lian, Yang Xiaobin, Yu Jian, Zang Di,
Zhai Yongming, Zhang Wei and Zhou Zan, while the Western
representatives are: Nicholas Admussen, Tony Barnstone, Polly
Clark, Jennifer Crawford, Antony Dunn, W.N. Herbert, Sean O'Brien,
Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson, Arthur Sze, George Szirtes and Joshua
Weiner.
This exciting anthology maps a singular encounter between two
groups of poets, one based in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, the
other in the North East of England. Over a period of four years,
these eight poets, working together as writers, editors and
teachers, maintained a creative dialoge. The result is a diverse
body of work including original poetry and new translations.
Bulgarian poetry, liberated by the casting off of communism, now
looks coolly at an uncertain cultural and economic transition. The
Bulgarian poets -- Kristin Dimitroval Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya
Radulova and VBV -- are all leaders in a remarkable resurgence of
Balkan literature. Their British counterparts -- Andy Croft, Mark
Robinson, Linda France and W.N. Herbert -- are all highly-regarded
and widely-published poets in the UK whose original work in this
anthology is marked by formal ingenuity and conceptual daring and
is a fitting response to Bulgaria's new poetic voice.
Sailor's Home is a miscellany (or anthology) of poems by six poets
who came together for a private festival in London in October 2005.
The poets are Arjen Duinker (Netherlands), W.N. Herbert (UK), Uwe
Kolbe (Germany), Peter Laugesen (Denmark), Karine Martel (France)
and Yang Lian (China), whose idea the festival was. Each poet takes
the phrase "Sailor's Home" and builds a work from it in his or her
own language. The festival, featuring the six poets and invited
guest, and the book as a record of the event, demonstrate how the
poets interact acroos languages and cultures. All the poems are
presented in their original languages and in English translation.
While the festival was a one-off event, the poems remain, and the
book stands testimony to the creative impulse amongst friends whose
poetry can cross borders. A fascinating document.
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