Arc Publications – förlag

Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) who, along with his contemporaries Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Albert Mockel, Charles van Lerberghe and Max Elskamp, helped to define the Symbolist movement, is one of Belgium's most venerated and admired francophone poets. Dubbed the 'European Walt Whitman', he was a pro-European idealist whose poetry explores his all-consuming notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and new technology could combine to produce a more progressive humanity, a hope ignominiously swept away by the industrial brutality of the First World War.This sympathetic modern translation by Will Stone at last allows the English-speaking world to return to, and reappraise, a major poet whose influence was felt throughout European literary circles during his life-time. Not only does this selection contain some of Verhaeren's most passionate and visionary outpourings but also some of the most tender and beautiful love poems ever written."My heart is a burning bush that sets my lips on fire..."- Emile Verhaeren

The prize-winning poet and translator George Szirtes has selected work from eleven of Hungary's leading young poets for this bi-lingual anthology, the publication of which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This is the first major anthology of Hungarian poetry of this generation. Contributors include: István Kemény (b.1961), Szilárd Borbély (b.1964), András Imreh (b.1966), Mónika Mesterházi (b.1967), Krisztina Tóth (b.1967), Virág Erdos (b.1968), Jáos Térey (b.1970), G. István László (b.1972) and Anna T Szabó (b.1972).Plus UK poets/translators Owen Sheers, Anthony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky."... if a lively and different way with words and imagination and risk is to be brought into original English writing, here's a fine push towards it."David Hart, StrideGeorge Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His first book, The Slant Door was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. He has published several books and won various other prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005.

In Poetry of the Holocaust, the editors Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght (helped by many translators, advisors, and experts of one sort and another) aim to give a fuller picture than do most Holocaust anthologies of the poetry that arose from the Holocaust. Here there are poems from languages that are less often associated with the Holocaust (such as Norwegian or Japanese) and there are poems by or about those victimised for perceived disabilities, or because they were gay, or because their political or religious beliefs made them targets of Nazi hatred.It is of course not possible to cover the vast range of Holocaust poetry in one small anthology. But a wider-ranging collection such as this might help readers who are less familiar with the facts of the Holocaust to find a way in, and to empathise on an individual level with the many people who suffered, and are still suffering. And perhaps – because poetry engages the reader’s emotions in a way that documentary writing cannot – it might also help us examine our thoughts and ways of behaving.

This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.Using true stories from her own family annals, Wioletta Greg makes a literary journey through the last century, from Poland at the outbreak of the First World War to present-day Britain. In her own selection of verse and prose poems, set mostly in the geographical heart of Europe, she charts two world wars, life under Communism and the ensuing liberation, and her own experiences as a migrant living in the Isle of Wight.

It is hard to believe that one man could have had so much influence on the musical life not only of the United Kingdom, but of Europe and beyond. Yet the pages of this delightful memoir reveal the extent to which John Manduell's extraordinary vision, his willingness to venture into unknown territory, his ability to think the unthinkable, his wisdom and his persuasiveness have helped to raise the profile of music in so many areas. His establishment of the Music Programme at the BBC, his creation of a Music Department at Lancaster University, his founding and running of one of the most exciting conservatoires in the UK, the RNCM, his artistic direction of the Cheltenham Music Festival, his involvement with the British Council, the Arts Council, European Music Year, Northern Ballet, the European Opera Centre, Covent Garden are all described with a clarity, a disarming modesty and, very often, a gentle humour. We also learn about John Manduell the composer from an appreciation by fellow composer Anthony Gilbert. This volume will give enormous pleasure not only to all those who have had the good fortune to know John Manduell, but also to those who are interested in learning about one of the leading figures in British and European music in the second half of the twentieth century.

Alamgir Hashmi has been writing poetry for the past forty years, and is the first English-language writer to bring such recognition to English writing in Pakistan. Of his work, Ted Hughes wrote: "Hashmi's poems are a delight – sinuous and assured, serious with a light touch, full of character, surprise, authenticity. I read them with intense pleasure."Introduced by John Kinsella

With an Introduction by Rod Mengham.In The Silo, John Kinsella's fifth book of poems (and the second published by Arc), the poet examines the role of the artist in the landscape and the unique character of rural life. Using Beethoven's 6th ('Pastoral') Symphony as the framework for the collection, he explores the music of an Australian rural landscape and the European impact on a tenacious yet fragile environment."Many of the poems are vintage Kinsella, suffused in the beautifully audacious language of his later pastorals — the metonymical manipulations of time and place that set you down firmly in the Australian landscape-history, yet by the end of the poem leave you wondering how he ever arrived at such seamless transformations and transportations."Andy Brown, PQR"The Silo is a fine sequence of poems, giving us a tough, focused, loving picture of Kinsella's heartland."Peter Bland, The London Magazine"John Kinsella, in The Silo, shows himself to be an authentic poet, astonishingly individuated. There are only a handful (or fewer) English-language poets of his generation whose work is already so original, so fully formed, and so clearly destined to become part of the central tradition."Harold BloomJohn Kinsella was born in Perth, Australia in 1963. He studied at the University of Western Australia and travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards. Since 1998, he has been International Editor for Arc Publications, with whom he has published four collections, the first of which, The Undertow: New and Selected Poems, was his first UK edition. His second collection for Arc, The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1997) was followed in 1999 by Landbridge: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, which he edited. Lightning Tree was published in 2003, and America in 2006. His most recent collections include The Hunt, Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, The New Arcadia and Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

"This is a remarkable debut collection by Chris Emery. He possesses an attack vocabulary and has the ambition to think the unthinkable. Cross yourself before reading Dr. Mephisto." John Hartley Williams"Certainly you will not have read any other poetry book like this, and Goethe and Christopher Marlowe must surely have been looking approvingly over Chris Emery's shoulder when he was writing, gasping at his command of language."Anne Born, Leviathan Quarterly

"These poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.""A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers.Introduction by Jeffrey Wainwright.Translated by Willem Groenewgen.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Subhadassi's first full-length poetry collection makes an immediate impact. It abounds in exquisitely-drawn images in which family, friends, memories, historical figures and events, and real and imagined locations and landscapes come into sharp focus as the poet savours the detail and 'flavour' of what he holds before him. Indeed, the poet likens this collection to a feast with "enough food to keep a person going for at least a week-end...and enough emotional juice and existential questioning to give them something to think about..." There is a compassion, honesty, humour, tenderness and sensuousness about these poems which makes them both eminently readable and strikingly memorable.

The Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen, has been writing and talking about his own work and everything which is directly, indirectly, or nothing at all to do with it, for many years now and The Art of Stealing Time is a collection of these articles, lectures and interviews. Andriessen talks about his childhood memories, his literary and cinematic preferences, colleagues he admires and ensembles he has established. He also talks about his own work, from De Staat [The Republic], the piece with which, twenty-five years ago, he changed the face of the musical landscape in the Netherlands up to and including the last opera he created with Peter Greenaway, Writing to Vermeer. Andriessen's style is informal, direct and always engaging, and through his use of anecdote, he is able to convey complex ideas to the widest of audiences, musicians and non-musicians alike. Controversial, funny, stimulating and thought-provoking, The Art of Stealing Time gives us a unique insight into the mind and working methods of one of the most significant composers alive today. This is, without doubt, a book to return to again and again.

An extraordinary collection of sonnets composed while the poet was in solitary confinement and deprived of writing materials in a Vichy prison between December 1941 and February 1942, in a new prize-winning translation.Introduction by Alistair Elliotwith an original introduction byLouis Aragon

In the Temple of a Patient GodTranslated by Ruth Christie with an introduction by Maureen FreelyVisible Poets series no. 12, parallel-text edition"To read Bejan Matur is to walk into a windswept desert strewn with bones and broken bodies and stones stained red by absent gods. Nothing is whole; nothing explains itself; nothing lasts. Horsemen gallop out of the night only to fade into the mountains on the horizon. Gravestones line the roads. Ruined houses howl with wind while shepherds sing dirges about a shattered, scattered tribe left to wander in the dark. It is a haunted, desolate and fragmented landscape in which every stone glows with a grief beyond words...""[Matur's] poems are jagged shards that stand together only to expose history as a myth. But it is still possible to see them as children of her childhood (she comes from a Kurdish Alevi family and grew up in south-eastern Turkey at a time of virtual civil war). And it is possible, when reading her poems, to imagine what that might mean. It is evident in their very shape, for Matur carves away at her images until she's stripped them down to the anguish at their heart. She claims no literary ancestors, drawing instead upon the oral traditions of her childhood...""It is almost as if her words are themselves gods, animating everything they inhabit. And here we come to the central paradox of Matur's poetry. Matur does not write in Kurdish, the banned, and therefore private, language of her early childhood. She writes in Turkish, the language in which she was educated — one might almost say exiled... She talks on the one hand of her Turkish being stronger than her Kurdish. And then she talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages. Words never forget their spiritual histories... She speaks of cutting her poems back and back, shaving them down to the bone until she has found the old word inside the new word, the Turkish poem that owes its haunting power to Kurdish.""So she is chipping and carving for a reason. Her dedication to this cause is absolute, and it takes her far beyond the questions raised by her own history. And it's this that makes her a world poet of the highest order."- Maureen Freely (from her Introduction to In the Temple of an Ancient God)

A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern and Central EuropeArc Publications Translations Series (parallel-text)A bilingual anthology, with a preface by Václav Havel, published by Arc Publications in association with the UK-based international organisation Literature Across Frontiers, presenting the new poetic talent from ten Eastern and Central European countries.The poets included in the anthology are as follows:Georgi Gospodinov and Nadezhda Radulova (Bulgaria)Petr Borkovec and Katerina Rudcenkova (Czech Republic)Kristiina Ehin and Akso Künnap (Estonia)János Térey and Krisztina Tóth (Hungary)Karlis Verdins and Sergeij Timofeyev (Latvia)Daiva Cepauskaite and Rimvydas Stankevicius (Lithuania)Agnieszka Kuciak and Edward Pasewicz (Poland)Emilian Galaicu-Paun and Ioana Nicolaie (Romania)Katarina Kucbelová and Martin Solotruk (Slovakia)Primoz Cucnik and Taja Kramberger (Slovenia)"This is wonderfully sovereign poetry. These writers were mostly students or even at school when their Communist regimes perished; the war and the post-war Stalinist terror happened to their grandparents. Their poise and their self-possession are startling; they seldom lament and have no interest in preaching. The encounter with Western abundance gives them fresh imagery, but also grounds for amusement and irony.""From their part of Europe, they bring a special joy in the natural and physical world, and also glittering metaphysical brilliance. This is a poetry of wit and complexity, never raw but always glowing with human feeling. As for the translators, it's impossible to praise them too highly. Imaginative, sensitive and yet loyal to the texts, it is they who have delivered this treasure intact to new readers."- Neal Ascherson

'Salvatore Quasimodo was born-and lived-through historical tragedies which impressed his mind for ever. What one hears in his lines are the tears of mankind and its wail. Sonzogni and Dawe have captured the singular strength of Quasimodo and heard the penetrating voices of humanity. Their translations of this particular poet are a beautiful work of rendering history in rhyme and do more than justice to the art and the feelings of Salvatore Quasimodo. "The Night Fountain" should be read and re-read, learned and re-learned, and must be at hand to every reader who can only gain from its penetrating elegy' - Allen Mandelbaum, Kenan Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University, USA.'"The Night Fountain" discloses a great poet in the making, now veering into Expressionism, now surreal, but always with an imaginative prosody and a voice that admits us into its intimacy. There is at once abundance and refinement here, and many of the elements that go into his great work. The translations are resourceful and inventive, keeping faith with the movement of the originals' - Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry, University of Glasgow.

Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful – has steadfastly defied any coherent critical analysis.Will Stone's outstanding new translation, complete with contextualizing essays, promises to rekindle interest in the work of this seminal poet.GEORG TRAKL (1887-1914) was one of the most influential poets of his time. Born in Salzburg, Austria, he died at the tragically early age of 27 from an overdose of cocaine whilst being held for psychiatric observation in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. WILL STONE is a poet and translator, whose translations of the work of Nerval, Rodenbach, Baudelarie, Verhaeren and Egon Schiele have been published in books and literary journals. He has published several pamphlet collections of poetry, and reviews by him have appeared in the TLS, Guardian and Independent on Sunday and in various literary magazines.This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 1The first volume in Arc's New Voices from Europe, a series of anthologies featuring the work of contemporary poets written in what might be described as the 'small' languages of Europe. The six young Slovenian poets - three male (Uros Zupan, Peter Semolic and Gregor Podlogar) and three female (Vida Mokrin-Pauer, Maja Vidmar and Natasa Velikonja) - who contribute to this anthology are from the post-postmodernist generation, the generation that came of age in the 1990s and that takes the freedoms of an independent nation-state as a given. Although their work may have more in common with that of poets in wider Europe (even North America) than with their predecessors in the Slovenian cultural tradition (as described in the illuminating introduction to this volume), they write with a distinctiveness and originality that, to quote from the introduction, "traverses the hitherto neglected terrain of colloquial speech, hybrid identities and cultural sensibilities of an urban capitalist milieu". This is a fascinating introduction to contemporary Slovenian poetry. "This is the first in a new series of bilingual anthologies from Arc, with the admirable aim of bringing the work of a younger generation of poets across Europe to a wider English-language readership. Six Slovenian Poets fulfils this endeavour with a varied selection of poets under forty, all published for the first time within the past decade and all, in their various ways, breaking with Slovenian literary tradition. These young poets reference the Beckhams, Dolce & Gabbana, Sinead O'Connor and Gilbert and George as well as Paz, Yeats and Auden: poems, as Gregor Podlogar comments in Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts' fine translation, for when '54 TV programmes / just aren't enough'."Modern Poetry in Translation

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 3The third in a series of bilingual anthologies of European poetry and an introduction to the here-and-now of Czech poetry, this volume presents the work of six Czech poets who belong to very different generations. Zbynek Hejda and Viola Fischerova are part of the generation which was exiled by the totalitarian regime of pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia while Petr Borkovec, Katerrina Rudcenkova, Pavel Kolmacka and Petr Halmay represent the younger generation which started publishing in the late 1990s. All six poets are widely known and highly regarded in the Czech Republic but are unfamiliar to English-language readers, so this anthology is an excellent introduction to the cutting edge of Czech poetry."Six Czech Poets opens with the work of Zbynìk Hejda, widely recognised as one of the most important Czech poets since World War II. One can see why... It is haunting work built upon landscapes, some part of the surface of which gets scratched away, leaving a view, to paraphrase the author, right down to the bone, the death..."Edinburgh ReviewZbynek Hejda, Viola Fischerova, Petr Halmay, Pavel Kolmacka, Petr Borkovec and Katerrina Rudcenkova have all had collections of poetry published in the Czech Republic and abroad. Hejda and Fischerova are two of the great names in late twentieth-century Czech poetry, much revered in their native land; while Borkovec and Rudcenkova are rising stars of the twenty-first century and more widely known.

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 2Six Basque Poets is the second volume in a new series of bilingual anthologies which brings the work of contemporary poets from Europe and beyond to a wider English-language readership, a series which aims to keep a finger on the 'here and now' of international contemporary poetry.The six poets included in this collection have played a defining role in the development of Basque-language poetry in the last thirty years, since the arrival of what we have come to refer to as the 'democratic age' in Spain and the Basque Country. They represent the diversity of voices and poetic schools that populate the contemporary Basque literary scene, where a variety of tendencies has emerged in the recent decades: a range of different poetics, use of various narrative styles, a preference for a non-aesthetic approach that dwells within the quotidian and an emergence of female voices that reclaim other codes and other universes.Direct, moving and thought-provoking, the poetry in the present volume gives us insight into the preoccupations of a literary milieu which may be marginalized by its use of an ancient language not spoken outside its territory but which is as powerful and original in its production as any of the literary centres in today's Europe.The featured poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia.

Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin International Prize, the world's largest poetry prize.Cold Spring in Winter (Pas Revoir in its original French) caused quite a stir when it was published in 1999. Here was the shock of an authentically new voice in whose urgent, stammered cadences an adult, and the little girl she used to be, join together to compose a lament for her dead father, a scrap-metal dealer. It takes a page or two to get used to this strange mixture of 'child-speak', youth slang, made-up words, puns and sophisticated adult expression (all perfectly conveyed in Susan Wick's translation), but once immersed in this extraordinary sequence of poems, it is hard to put it down, so compelling, strange and moving does it prove to be. Arc Visible Poets' series no. 25"... this poet has found a truly authentic voice in what will doubtlessly be a glittering career this side of the Channel."Poetry Review

Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the towering literary figures of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, speaking as much to the working man as to other poets. His fascination with sound and form, linguistic metamorphosis and variation made him a sort of 'poet's poet', the doyen, if not the envy, of his contemporaries, (Pasternak among them). His poetry is strangely akin to modern rock poetry in its erotic thrust, bluesy complaints and cries of pain, not to mention its sardonic humour. It is often aggressive, mocking and yet tender, and can be fantastic or grotesque.That's What is a long love poem detailing the pain and suffering inflicted on the poet by his lover Maria and her final rejection of him. But as well as being an agonising parable of separation and betrayal, it is also a political work, highly critical of Lenin's reforms of Soviet Socialism. The publication of That's What is something of a landmark as this the first time that this seminal work has appeared in its entirety in translation. Included also are the 12 inspired photomontages that Rodchenko designed to interleave and illuminate the text, illustrations which inaugurate a world of new possibilities in combining verbal and visual forms of expression and which are reproduced in colour for the first time. "Arc have produced a handsome Russian-English edition of this personal epic of the early years of the Revolution, first published in the LEF journal (Left Front of the Arts) in 1923. George Hyde adds a lively note on 'Translating Mayakovsky's That's What'. His co-translator, Larisa Gureyeva, is the granddaughter of V.M. Molotov-Skryabin, co-signatory of the notorious pact with Germany of 1939. Hyde writes of the 'permissive' 1920s in the early Soviet Union. Following the recent splendid exhibition of Rodchenko and Popova at the Tate Modern, there are increasing signs of a growing interest in the early, tumultuous years of the Russian Revolution."The Spokesman Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Georgia in 1893, but moved with his family to Moscow after his father's sudden death. By the time he was 20, he was a well-known literary figure, having toured Russia in the winter of 1913-14 with the Futurists (with whom he had identified). He made several trips abroad during the 1920s, including a long visit to America in 1925. A prolific writer, he still remains a popular poet among present-day Russian readers. He died in 1930 by his own hand, killing himself playing Russian roulette with a single bullet. Aleksander Rodchenko was a Russian artist, sculptor and photographer and one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

TRANSLATED BY MARA ROZITIS An extraordinary cycle of poems – magical, mysterious, sinister, funny – about exile, in which the protagonist, Wolf One-Eye, finds himself an exile from an ancient mythological landscape in a new realm of quarks and expanding and alternating universes. Dislocated and alone, he travels through totally unfamiliar territory, closely observed by the other voice in these poems, that of the poet / narrator. Kronbergs is himself an exile, having grown up as a refugee child in Sweden after the Second World War, and this gives an edge to his poetry that is both distinctive and resonant. He is a poet, freelance journalist and translator. Kronbergs was born 1946 in Sweden, in an exiled Latvian family. He studied Literature, Nordic and Baltic languages at the University of Stockholm, as well as Translation theory and 20th Century poetry at Cambridge. He has been the President of the Latvian PEN centre, and received the Latvian Three Star order, the Swedish North Star order, several scholarships and prizes for poetry and translation in Latvia and in Sweden; among them the prize for best poetry collection of the year in Latvia (1997) for the collection Wolf One-Eye . He has published ten collections of poetry, one in Swedish and one bilingual, as well as poetry on CD. Arc Visible Poets series – The translators working on this series aim to reveal the original language in all its manifestations and make it 'visible'. By this process, they invite the reader to develop a deeper understanding and enjoyment of, both the original and the translated poem.

Translated By Donald GardnerFaded Days It was late in the eveningrain caught in lamplight beat down on the cobbles of the Old Mechlin Road you were wearing an off-white dress I'd have guessed you were fifteen you were walking down the street as I was crossing cars passed by braked rode on you asked me the way to the Muse Café the bar where that singer was on singer you said of your song voice that had found you you were on your way there 'Just follow the tram lines' I let you go Antwerp girl you're still on my mind what have I done with my lifeIconoclastic, experimental, bohemian and anti-establishment, Remco Campert – who came to prominence in the 1950s – has survived to become something of a national institution in the Netherlands: as a chronicler of alternative Amsterdam life in stories and novels; as a columnist in a national newspaper; as a script-writer and film-maker; and above all as a steadily productive, if not prolific, poet. For many Dutch people, Campert remains first and foremost the writer of such classics as Alle dagen feest (Party, Party, 1952), Een ellendige nietsnut (A Useless Layabout, 1960). Hopefully, this new translation of Campert's quiet and quirky work (reminiscent of Brian Patten's or Roger McGough's) can help gain a new audience in the Anglo-Saxon world. "Influenced by jazz, Campert's dry, almost dead-pan voice could be difficult to convey in English but Donald Gardner's versions capture both the lightness and the underlying intensity of the originals: 'Doors are open,' as 'House in Antwerp' wryly observes, 'that will never close again'."Modern Poetry in TranslationDonald Gardner, born in London in 1938, is a poet and freelance Dutch translator. He has lived in Holland since 1979. He was originally a translator of Latin American literature and his published work includes an acclaimed translation of Octavio Paz's long poem, The Sun Stone (Cosmos, York 1968), and Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity (Cape, 1970). He also published translations of poems by Ernesto Cardenal and contributed to Con Cuba, an anthology of Cuban poetry (Cape Goliard, 1969). He translated the notoriously difficult novel Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in collaboration with the author (Harper & Row, 1971). He is the author of several collections of poetry, the most recent of which are: How to Get the Most out of Your Jet Lag (Ye Olde Font Shoppe, New Haven, 2001) and The Glittering Sea (Hearing Eye Press, 2006). He is known for his performances of his poetry -- in Amsterdam, London and New York.

The Flights of Zarza, published in 1992, appeared in the decade in which democratic rule returned to Argentina after seven years of brutal dictatorship and state terror, a period which Kofman, a Jew, likened to Germany before and during WWII. The post-dictatorship years of the late 80s were characterised by their rampant consumerism and hyper-inflation, and in an environment that was becoming more and more like a US shopping mall, poetry seemed like one of the last bastions of the 'internal voice', no longer an escape from military repression but a refuge for the literary language of a whole society. For Kofman, however, this was not the end but a new beginning, and his poetry expresses the divide between the past and the need to move on, the break of the new poetry of the 90s with the politics of the 70s. Kofman's fourth published collection is very much part of this new expression as it follows the androgenous Zarza (here a pugnacious male, there a seductive female) in his / her travels the length and breadth of Argentina and beyond. Fernando Kofman was born in 1947 in Posadas, capital of the subtropical province of Misiones, but in 1967, he moved south to Buenos Aires and has lived there ever since. He has written poetry, short essays, a handful of plays and six collections of poetry, of which The Flights of Zarza is the fourth. He is currently editor of the literary magazine Frank Baires.Translated by Ian Taylor.'Visible Poets' translation series no. 22

Vengeanceparticular soldiersdisfigured the face of my beloveddead for having believed freedompossiblethe Berlin Wall fell far from useven as we were singingof an earlier victoryso very quickly confiscatedI've no desire to beg pardonOf my torturers – as if! –I've no desire to close my eyesSoleïman Adel Guémar's poetry is powerfully lucid, moving and sometimes shocking. Rooted in Algerian experience, it speaks of urgent concerns everywhere – oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams.As Lisa Appignianesi writes in her introduction to this selection of Guémar's poetry: "Deceptively casual, colloquial in their idiom, always dramatic in their pessimism, Guémar's poems are a searing howl against the brutality which invades everyday Algerian life.… This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times. Where before we had only newspaper headlines or the dry reports of NGOs, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical – an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history."Soleïman Adel Guémar was born in 1963 into a left-wing political family of Berber ancestry. He spent 2 years in France working in publishing, then, at the promise of free national elections, returned to Algeria in 1991 to work for (among others) the weekly newspaper L'Evènement. The elections were cancelled when an Islamist party won a landslide at local elections and L'Evènement was banned. For 10 years, Guémar worked in Algeria as a freelance journalist and publisher, but fell foul of the regime and was subjected to a campaign of violent intimidation. In December 2002, he arrived at Heathrow, claiming political asylum and, two years later, was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, where he now lives with his family in South Wales.

Love StoryThey played games with each other –he with her head,she with his legs.Then he gave back her head,a little worn out,and she – I'm not surewhat she did with his legs,this is as much as I know.Kristin Dimitrova (translated by Andy Croft)This anthology is the result of an exciting cross-cultural 'experiment' in which four well-known British poets who live and work in the North-East of England – Andy Croft, Mark Robinson, Linda France and W. N. Herbert – worked collaboratively with four leading young Bulgarian poets – Kristin Dimitrova, Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and the male poet who goes under the name of 'VBV'. On a number of visits to Bulgaria, and working in a totally unfamiliar cultural environment on the very edge of Europe (the 'Near East'), the British poets got to know, and began to translate, the work of their Bulgarian counterparts. The Bulgarians visited Newcastle, embarking upon a relationship with the home-territories of the British poets (the 'North East'). The eight poets painstakingly refined their translations of the Bulgarian poems and the British poets contributed their own poems about visiting Bulgaria – not touristic notes but rather maps of the type of engagement found in the translations. "It seemed to me", W. N. Herbert writes, "that this project was as much about an encounter between people and places as it was about an encounter with texts. It was about the collisions and interactions of cultures, not just the friendships formed but the shifts in our historical imaginations."

TRANSLATED BY PETER ORAMOn the Century of Anna Akhmatova's Birth(Joseph Brodsky, July 1989)The page and the fire, the millstone, the grain,the blade of the axe, the hacked crop of hair –God cares much for these, yet, as were they his own,for two words – Love, Forgiveness – still fonder's his care.In them beats a broken pulse, cracking of bones,the knock of the spade; and even-paced, soft(since life comes once only), more clear ring their tonesfrom the dead's mouths than from soundproofedheavens aloft.Great soul, over oceans my reverence I'm sendingfor finding them for us; to you, your remainsin our native soil sleeping, I give thanks for findingthe blest gift of speech in earth's deaf-mute domains.An anthology of poems by the major literary figures in Russia, writing to, about, or in memory of other poets, following a tradition which started in the early years of the twentieth century and continued through the subsequent decades, more or less until the millennium.With the great names of Russian poetry represented – among them Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bloch, Nabakov and Brodsky – this is a unique approach and promises to be a publication of great significance both in the UK and in Russia.Peter Oram is known both as a translator (from Russian and German) and as a poet, novelist and short story writer. He has had two novels published – Maddocks (Gomer Press), and The Rub (Starborn Books) and a collection of poems, White (Starborn Books).

Before the Invention of Paradise is a selection from Steinherr's nine collections published since his debut collection in 1985. Dealing with the things that concern many modern German poets – silence, memory, knowing and the impossibility of knowing, the everyday and what is beyond – Steinherr's is profound yet accessible poetry. This bi-lingual edition is the first full-length collection of his work to be published in the UK, translated by Richard Dove."Ludwig Steinherr writes with almost oriental spareness and obliquity. The idea is everything, expressed simply, as if he invites us to take up a thought he has not yet followed into any certainty... Richard Dove's translations catch the spareness and the physical shape of Steinherr's poems perfectly."Don BarnardLudwig Steinherr was born in Munich in 1962, where he still lives, studied philosophy at the University of Munich and is now a freelance writer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Eichstätt. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies in Germany and abroad and have been translated into various languages, including French and Czech. Steinherr was elected a fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 2003.