Richard Berengarten - Böcker

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'.

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.

Taking its departure from both the Nazi massacre at Kragujevac in former Yugoslavia in 1941, and a moment at the memorial museum in 1985, when a blue butterfly descended onto Berengarten's writing hand, this profound book crafts living poetry out of suffering and tragedy. Passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, this moral and joyous work is European in context but universal in scope and relevance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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

Imagems 2 contains six statements by a poet who continues to challenge modernism and post-modernism alike. This chapbook complements and elaborates Richard Berengarten's Imagems 1 (2013). In this sequel, the borders between poetic theory and practice blur, for some of these texts are prose-poems in themselves. While their themes are rooted in the here-now, their 12-point structures call to mind early 20th century manifestos and late 20th century memoranda. Themes include the birth of poetry in sound, breath, and inner speech; the interdependence of the universal and the particular; and language, light and vision. Imagems 3 is on the way.

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.

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

"The age both of present-day poetry and of poetry-to-come is irreducibly and inevitably transcultural, multilingual, international." Together with his Imagems 1 and 2 (2013, 2019), Richard Berengarten's third collation of statements on poetics reaffirms poetry as imaginational.From catacombs of dreams and image(m)s coiled in reverie, through fissure of sign and syntax, in articulated rhythm, and in wordplay and word-coinage (verbing, nouning, unfinishment) - poetry, Berengarten assures us, comes into being from within to without. -Ana Radovic FiratThese lyrical meditations celebrate poetry as the form of language best fitted to bringing us more deeply and vividly into reality in its many psychic, natural, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. Through the beauty, precision, and generosity of their language, the meditations - prose poems themselves - not only pronounce this power but evoke and induct it. -Roderick MainHere, Richard Berengarten continues to advocate a numinous poetics, expres-sed in a language filtered through trees, whose oxygen we breathe. This is a poetics conceived in darkness, growing and spreading inexorably into light. For Berengarten, poetry begins and ends, and begins again, in an inherently shared present, spanning generations, where "all that's needed is breath. -Katie Lehman