David Batten – författare

Charting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm Müller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on Müller’s poems. The poems here become an “assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe...” and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.

Rooted in the land he dwells on, attuned to the ancestral lines of place and body and the resonances between the two, in Aubrac David Batten records our at-oneness with the nature that humanity too often attempts to fragment. Lucid, deeply effective and intelligent, these poems take us into a landscape where the past speaks loudly to the present and to the future, letting us know that we are not alone, not apart. In a year in which the poet himself moves through cycles of chemotherapy, along with the randomness of death, life and renewal re-assert themselves with the movement of the seasons. As he observes nature with a keenness of vision and attention that is present in every line, nature returns the gaze. A collection that bears witness to the human and more than human.

Lost Voices reimagines Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul as a chorus of the silenced. Drawing on the Commentaries yet refusing their authority, David Batten’s sequence gives voice to legionnaires, chiefs, mothers, and the land itself, revealing the campaign not as civilising triumph but as devastation—systematic, intimate, and enduring.Across eight movements mirroring the original campaigns, these poems inhabit both conqueror and conquered: Caesar as strategist, propagandist, and increasingly haunted figure; Gaul as witness, victim, and memory. The language is spare, incantatory, and unflinching—moving from battlefield report to lament, from irony to elegy—until history itself begins to fracture under the weight of what it cannot fully contain.This is not a retelling but a reckoning. Lost Voices asks what lies between the lines of empire, and what remains when those erased speak again.

In the mountains of France the seasonal movement of livestock from one region to another acts as a metaphor for transition and transformation in the human the human world, whilst ''humance'' relates us to the natural world; to the animals we rely on, to the seasons affecting our behaviours, our movements. And the seasons themselves are also in transition: behaving – often unpredictably – according to a cosmic order governed by strange powers: black holes, red/black/white dwarves, planets, stars. The tightly honed lyrical poetry of Transhumance follows a narrative arc that recognises that we are irrelevant in our minuteness and yet central to everything; without our interference things fall apart, yet sometimes our interference is what unravels things. Exploring how humanity is rooted in and linked to everywhere and everything, Batten brings a fresh voice and precise language to this reflective debut collection.

Washed up far from home at the bitter end of the ‘70s, Paul spends an ordinary morning travelling to work at the Rotterdam container port and back into the city that evening to work his second job at a burger bar. As the day passes, his mind travels from his childhood in the UK, to an ill-fated love affair on an Left Bank kibbutz, and back to the chance of love in the present. Paul tries to unravel tangled knots of biography, the hopes and disappointments of a short life that still holds future and promise. But, as the torch is put to the last remnants of the hippie dreams he put up with and the harsh 80s economic winter begins to make itself in the frigid cold of a Dutch winter’s day, Paul’s problems are as much philosophical and political as they are personal and ethical.Mixing poignant, slice-of-life narrative with sinuous, deeply argued reflections on a life lived amidst the first brush fires of Consumerism, and asking questions as universal as they demand different answers from each of us, David Batten’s Rotterdam is an absorbing, thought-provoking brush with the textures, heartbreaks and dilemmas of ordinary life, part novel, part autobiography, part ethical tract, individualistic and thoroughly humanist.

Since the beginning of the fifties, the ruling paradigm in the discipline of economics has been that of a competitive general equilibrium. Associated dynamic analyses have therefore been preoccupied with the stability of this equilibrium state, corresponding simply to studies of comparative statics. The need to permeate the boundaries of this paradigm in order to open up new pathways for genuine dynamic analysis is now pressing. The contributions contained in this volume spring from this very ambition. A growing circle of economists have recently been inspired by two distinct but complementary sources: (i) the pathbreaking work of Joseph Schumpeter, and (ii) recent contributions to physics, chemistry and theoretical biology. It turns out that problems which are firmly rooted in the economic discipline, such as innovation, technological change, business cycles and economic development, contain many clear parallels with phenomena from the natural sciences such as the slaving principle, adiabatic elimination and self-organization. In such dynamic worlds, adjustment processes and adaptive behaviour are modelled with the aid of the mathematical theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. The dynamics is defined for a much wider set of conditions or states than simply a set of competitive equilibria. A common objective is to study and classify ways in which the qualitative properties of each system change as the parameters describing the system vary.

fifteen countries in Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, Australia, and U.S.A. All of them came to Stockholm primarily because they recognize the growing im­ portance of networks as complex systems, and their home institutions do not offer any systematic lectures on this topic. The Networks Course was originally initiated jointly by the Summer University of Southern Stockholm Foundation and the County Council of Stockholm, the Swedish Aviation Administration, the Swedish National Road Administration, the Swedish Post, the Swedish State Railways, and Telia AB. They have all served as joint sponsors and hosts for the Course. In the year 1993 the Course also was sponsored by the Swedish Transport and Communications Research Board. All these organizations have supported the publication of a series of key lectures from the Course, to be released as a single volume entitled Networks in Action. It is the ambition of the Foundation to create continuity in its activities for the future. The board has proposed to its principals to take a decision in this direction. It is my expectation that this will be the case for the Networks Course from 1995. This book will then serve as a basic reference for use in an era when the topic of Communication-Networks will be included on a permanent basis in the Summer University''s agenda.

fifteen countries in Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, Australia, and U.S.A. All of them came to Stockholm primarily because they recognize the growing im­ portance of networks as complex systems, and their home institutions do not offer any systematic lectures on this topic. The Networks Course was originally initiated jointly by the Summer University of Southern Stockholm Foundation and the County Council of Stockholm, the Swedish Aviation Administration, the Swedish National Road Administration, the Swedish Post, the Swedish State Railways, and Telia AB. They have all served as joint sponsors and hosts for the Course. In the year 1993 the Course also was sponsored by the Swedish Transport and Communications Research Board. All these organizations have supported the publication of a series of key lectures from the Course, to be released as a single volume entitled Networks in Action. It is the ambition of the Foundation to create continuity in its activities for the future. The board has proposed to its principals to take a decision in this direction. It is my expectation that this will be the case for the Networks Course from 1995. This book will then serve as a basic reference for use in an era when the topic of Communication-Networks will be included on a permanent basis in the Summer University's agenda.