Kelvin Corcoran – författare

Under Tainaron recasts elements of the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and is rooted in the locations where that mythology originated. On that basis the author's libretto discloses its poignant relevance to our present world."Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present." -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence."Kelvin Corcoran's recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition." -Peter Riley, PN Review. "Kelvin Corcoran is a writer for whom politics and poetics are inseparable; his work demonstrates an exhilarating truth, that wit and irony need not exclude passion and trust in the pursuit of poetry." -Ken Edwards, The New British Poetry.

The purpose of About Poetry is to offer a contextual account of the poetry of Peter Riley. Of course, it is a poetry that speaks for itself, but in About Poetry we also have the voice of the poet himself in counterpoint. To understand aspects of the origin of that voice led to the inclusion of two autobiographical essays. The essays and interviews are not only about Peter Riley's poetry, its transition through five decades, but also the landscape of contemporary poetry. Much of what is said here explores the poetics of that landscape, its achievements, contradictions, creative diversions and its vitality. "I think the way to read poetry is with very bad eyesight, so you have to screw up your brows and peer at the words in front of your face one by one, filling the visual field, the black quarry before you and the pale air all around. So that you would only go to this trouble with a telegram of some concern. And secondly to believe everything you hear for as long as you can." -Peter Riley, XIV PIECES, Longbarrow Press, 2012.

To accompany Lee Harwood's new Selected Poems, we offer also this book-length collection of interviews with Harwood by his long-time friend and admirer, Kelvin Corcoran - himself also a Shearsman author. An invaluable opportunity to "hear" Harwood talking about poetry and about his own work.

Hotel Shadow continues Kelvin Corcoran's remarkable poetic venture begun with Melanie's Book in 1996; here, with characteristically rich lyricism, Corcoran explores Greece ancient and modern. Travelling out from the real Hotel Shadow in the low season, the work encompasses: Aristomenes and the ethics of terror; paternal affection; Xenophanes of Colophon; the origins of poetry itself and a subsequent history; family mythology and the vagaries of DIY.

For the Greek Spring is a selection of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry about Greece, combining new work with poems from his previous collections. The poet's sustained engagement with Greece is evident at every turn. Corcoran's project is a re-imagining and rethinking of our cultural antecedents, which goes considerably beyond the ready co-option of classical values into the pockets of ambitious politicians and the familiar reaches of the academy. Corcoran has developed an artful ventriloquism in which we're not only uncertain of who may be speaking, but are ultimately persuaded that it doesn't matter. The voice is poetry itself, first and last.

The second issue of Shearsman magazine for 2013 contains poetry by Theodoros Chiotis and Sophie Mayer, Patricia Debney, Carrie Etter, Charlotte Faber, Kim Goldberg, Graham Hardie, Michael Haslam, Ralph Hawkins, Jeremy Hooker, Alex Houen, Peter Hughes, John James, Maria Jastrzebska, Kelly Malone, Marion McCready, Maureen McLane, George Messo, Alistair Noon, Kat Peddie, Marthe Reed, Denise Riley, Antony Rowland, Aidan Semmens, Lucy Sheerman, Simon Smith, Donna Stonecipher, Nathan Thompson, John Welch and El?bieta Wojcik-Leese, plus translations of Gezim Hajdari by Cristina Viti.

In Sea Table Kelvin Corcoran brings it all back home. Not that it was ever very far away, but for twenty years or more he has been writing a lot of poetry concerning Greece and may have gained a reputation as a specialist or travel-writing poet, both of which would be wrong. Greece, both place and stories, was a lens onto our present condition and its depths, and through that focus he developed an essentially lyrical (meaning 'unashamedly poetry') field as the basis for a move towards larger forms: monologue and narrative, neither merely transcribed but re-invented every time from a literal rendering of the life and the materials. The four substantial sets in this book bring these extended skills to work on a range of subjects: a personal health crisis and recovery told as an underground descent and the return to intellectual light; a light-hearted musical prance around various poets; a rhapsodic rendering of the story of Glen Gould...And the last, the title-set, "Sea Table", which re-engages Greece in a substantial and remarkably sustained and eloquent sequence, a multiplied poetical narrative of sea voyage and trading venture coming through difficult and easy seas back to the home it started from, which the present tense and the archaic past inhabit in harmony.-Peter Riley

The second issue of Shearsman magazine for 2015, this includes new poetry by Juana Adcock, Astrid Alben, Carmen Bugan, Claire Crowther, Ian Davidson, Mark Dickinson, Clayton Eshleman, Gerrie Fellows, Samir Guglani, Lucy Hamilton, Lee Harwood, Dorothy Lehane, David Miller, Helen Moore, Sabiyha Rasheed, Peter Riley, Jaime Robles, Ian Seed, Aidan Semmens, Lucy Sheerman, Donna Stonecipher, Janet Sutherland, Philip Terry, Helen Tookey, Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, Amy Wright and Tamar Yoseloff, and translations of Philippe Jaccottet by Ian Brinton, Osip Mandelstam by Alistair Noon, Winett de Rokha by J. Mark Smith and Marina Tsvetaeva by Angela Livingstone.

The first issue of Shearsman magazine for 2017. Poetry by Dennis Barone, James Bell, Marianne Burton, Makyla Curtis, Mark Dickinson, Khaled Hakim, Caroline Hawkridge, Julie Irigaray, Sarah James, Peter Larkin, John Levy, Rosanna Licari, Ann Matthews, David Miller, Kate Miller, Michelle Penn, Frances Presley, Dikra Ridha, Colin Campbell Robinson, Peter Robinson, Julie Sampson, Alexandra Sashe, Nathan Shepherdson, Jennifer Spector and Steve Spence, plus translations of Masayo Goshi by the auhor, Szymon Slomczynski by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese and of Menno Wigman by Judith Wilkinson.

The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2017 contains poetry by Martin Anderson, Daragh Breen, Carmen Bugan, Susie Campbell, Chloe Carnezi, Rachael Clyne, Cathy Dreyer, Steve Ely, Liam Ferney, Eiffel Gao, Lucy Hamilton, Ho Cheung Lee, John Levy, Julie Maclean, John Phillips, Claire Potter, David Rushmer and Helen Tookey, & translations of Philippe Jaccottet by Ian Brinton, of Osip Mandelstam by Alistair Noon, of Naka Taro by Andrew Houwen & Nihei Chikaku, and of Virgil by David Hadbawnik.

Not Much to Say Really is an account of extended conversations with four elderly patients in hospital. Standing on the edge of their time they look back over their lives with good humour, tenderness and remarkable candour. At every turn these conversations show the reader that the most personally lived events and experiences are the most powerfully shared in the common lot of mortality. On that score they have much to say."We asked the poet, Kelvin Corcoran, and the doctor and artist, Emma Collins, to meet and speak with elderly patients in General Hospital, then to translate these conversations into creative works. The poems and artworks in this book offer us a glimpse of other human lives; of persons who have experienced our very own desires, fears and hopes; of human beings who are now briefly patients. Patients whom we owe a duty beyond the delivery of just blood tests or drugs or suitable placement. Patients and persons who, one day soon, we ourselves will be."-Dr Sam Guglani, Consultant Oncologist & Director, Medicine Unboxed"Working with interview material from elderly patents, Kelvin Corcoran's new work conveys 'the miracle of ordinary events recalled' - births, deaths, weddings, international travel, and social change. Through his characteristic technique of layering voices, places and times into a continuous present, Corcoran re-weaves these testimonies into a Greek chorus of lived experience. From his generous encounters, Corcoran finds the poetry and patterns in memories and the gaps between them, exploring how a life is made, re-made and re-told through the changing textures of history and language. Songful, humorous, poignant and often very moving, this work proves just how valuable poetry can be at that point where it interfaces with medicine." -Andy Brown (co-editor A Body of Work: Poetry & Medical Writing, Bloomsbury 2016)

The second issue of Shearsman for 2018 contains poetry by Martin Anderson, James Bell, Guy Birchard, Susie Campbell, Martin Corless-Smith, Cathy Dreyer, Carrie Etter, Khaled Hakim, Ralph Hawkins, Jill Jones, Julie Mellor, Drew Milne, Lance Nizami, Gillian Kidd Osborne, Natasha Sajé, Hilda Sheehan, Lucy Sheerman, Robert Sheppard, Janet Sutherland, Barbara Tomash and Tamar Yoseloff, plus translations of three Lithuanian poets by Rimas Uzgiris: Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, Judita Vaičiūnaitė & Indrė Valantinaitė.

The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. - Kelvin Corcoran

Below This Level recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.

The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2021 contains poetry by Tomi Adegbayibi, Ken Bolton and Peter Bakowski​, Daragh Breen, Belinda Cooke​, Stuart Cooke​, Gareth Culshaw​, Carrie Etter​, Gerrie Fellows, Maria Jastrzebska, Kenny Knight​, Rosanna Licari​, Fran Lock​, Julie Maclean​, Fokinna McDonnell, John Muckle​, Simon Perchik, Kerry Pries, Peter Robinson​, Paul Rossiter, Simon Smith​, Maria Stadnicka​, Janet Sutherland​, Lydia Unsworth​, and Cliff Yates, plus translations of Cecilie Løveid​ (by Agnes Scott Langeland), Gerard de Nerval (by Ian Brinton & Michael Grant) and Ivan Strpka (by​ James Sutherland Smith).

The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2022 features poetry by Gordon Alexander, Lisa Blackwell, Cecile Bol, Ken Bolton, Jessica Bundschuh, Geraldine Clarkson, Angelina D'Roza, Lucy Hamilton, Denis Harnedy, Finn Haunch, Jill Jones, L. Kiew, Edward Lee, Hannah Linden, Tim MacGabhann, Aonghas Macneacail, David Miller, Eliza O'Toole, Rochelle Owens, Peter Riley, Lucy Maxwell Scott, Lucy Sheerman, Penelope Shuttle, Andrew Taylor and Tamar Yoseloff, plus translations of Chen Xianfa (by Martyn Crucefix & Nancy Feng Liang), Dorien De Wit (by Judith Wilkinson) and Ulrike Almut Sandig (by Karen Leeder).

Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (West House 2001), A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).

Lee Harwood's work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice, speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from complex cut-ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.From his earliest pamphlet 'title illegible' (1965) to his last collection 'The Orchid Boat' (2014), 'New Collected Poems' assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in pamphlet or book form, in broadly chronological order, fashioned upon the ordering of Harwood's own 2004 'Collected Poems'. Some excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected material from the end of his career completes this rich body of work.'This new collection is a generously considered gathering of resistant and supple fragments, hard evidence of a life truly lived. We are the beneficiaries of these dazzling transfusions of personality and circumstance. Of remembered and newly encountered detonations of affect. "The clarity of such moments," Harwood confesses, can never stay still, even when that seems to be the required task. Love moves and shifts. Through repeated acts of making, it coheres and continues.' -Iain Sinclair'Lee Harwood's English is like American English in that it lacks a strong sense of possession. At the same time it has a pearly, soft-focus quality one rarely sees in American poetry [...] The "great" poetry I like best has this elf-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to consider itself.' -John Ashbery'Harwood's work returns to local habitations and names, the lives of family, elegies for friends, to direct communication among intimates. These vividly rendered, plain-style evocations, intercut with speculation and emotion, construct improvised holding environments where the home world and the safety of loved ones is primary' -Peter Robinson, Times Literary Supplement

A major event, this volume presents some 40 years of work."Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller's gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song... Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." -David Wevill"Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist." -Frances Leviston, The Guardian"Kelvin Corcoran has allied a strikingly individual intelligence to a genuinely musical sensibility." -Don Paterson, The Observer"The 'straight music' of the English lyrical tradition drives these poems that are honed, hard, elegant and economic. Then, suddenly, brilliance flashes out against the grain, in the flaws. It is 'the ripped voice makes us free'." -Rosmarie Waldrop"Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present." -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence"Kelvin Corcoran's recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition." -Peter Riley, PN Review

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2024 features poetry by Josephine Balmer, Daragh Breen, Steve Brock, Carmen Bugan, Anna D'Alton, Amy Evans Bauer, Mischa Foster-Poole, Lucy Hamilton, Ellen Harrold, Huw Gwynn Jones, Jazmine Linklater, Sujatha Menon, John Muckle, Tom Phillips, Paula Sankelo, Ian Seed, Aidan Semmens, Simon Smith and Rimas Uzgiris; plus translations of Marco Catalao by Chris Miller, Giedre Kazlauskaite by Rimas Uzgiris, Concha Mendez by Harriet Truscott, Ennio Moltedo by Marguerite Feitlowitz and Miguel Otero Silva by Chris Holdaway.

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2025 features poetry by Ophira Adar, Alan Baker, Ian Davidson, Adam Flint, Alexander Gaul, John Goodby, Lucy Hamilton, Ellen Harrold, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Peter Larkin, John Latta, Dorothy Lehane, Iain MacLeod, Colin Campbell Robinson, Peter Robinson, Biljana Scott, Aidan Semmens, Penelope Shuttle, Andrew Taylor, Steven Taylor and translations of Catullus (by Jennifer Ingleheart), of Dmitry Blizniuk (by Yana Kane) and of Merce Rodoreda (by Rebecca Simpson).

Corcoran's first collection since his New & Selected Poems in 2004, 'Backward Turning Sea' (i.e. the Mediterranean) shows the author deepening his engagement with Greece, both ancient and modern - but it is a place where contemporary politics can intrude, disturbing the reverie. The collection also includes a number of poems based on the author's fascination with the paintings of the St Ives artist, Roger Hilton.