Visible Poets – serie

"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.

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)

Striking new work by major Indonesian writer.In a strongly patriarchal society in which the norms of feminine subordination are sanctified by the strictures of religion, the rage and aggression in these poems is remarkable. Indeed, for many readers, these emotions are extremely exciting and offer a previously unknown potential for liberation. Dorothea Rosa Herliany was born in Magelang, Central Java. After graduating she worked for several years as a journalist and freelance writer. Beside poetry, she has also written short stories, essays, and art and drama criticism. Her writings have been published by the major magazines and newspapers in Indonesia.

Translated from the German by Jenny Williams. Introduced by Mary O'Donnell. THE FISHERMEN The fishermen sleep.In their sou'westers sea foam evaporates from their eyes the scales fall onto the pale bodies of the fish who dream that the fishermen sleep. "I'm not a political poet… I'm more interested in the landscape of the soul ['Seelenlandschaft']". Sabine Lange "Jenny Williams' utterly respectful translations … reaveal the rhythms and tones of the originator's distinctive voice and convey these with enromous skill. The poems are accessible, yet complex and foreign, in the very best sense of that word." Mary O'Donnell. Sabine Lange has been in print in Germany since 1987 and this, her first full collection, appeared in 1994 under the title Immer zu Fuß. Her poetry explores the human – particularly the female – condition in the light of her personal experiences as a musician and poet, and is set against the backdrop of the beautiful Mecklenburg countryside in which she has spent most of her life. Written in deceptively simple language with short lines and striking images, her poems – often about love, music, the seasons, the landscape – are full of a meditative beauty which is sometimes peaceful, sometimes dark. But she can be upbeat too, funny, whimsical, exultant. The Fishermen Sleep is the first English translation of Lange's poetry, and the English-language reader is the richer for it.SABINE LANGE was born in 1953 in Stralsund , then in the German Democratic Republic. A trained musician, she has worked most of her life as an archivisit, since 1984 at the Fallada Archive in Feldberg. JENNY WILLIAMS teaches at the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University and is author of a biography about Hans Fallada. This is her first published volume of translation. MARY O'DONNELL is a poet, novelist, translator, critic and broadcaster, based in Co. Kildare, Ireland. She is a member of Aosdaná.

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

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.

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.

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.

Davoyan's work reflects the experiences of an old nation, yet it is fresh and very personal at the same time. It is impossible not to feel the struggles, hopes and aspirations of his native land in his work. Whispers & Breath of the Valleys is a book charged with energy – indeed, W. N. Herbert, in his introduction, describes it as being 'saturated with joy'. Davoyan displays 'an equal empathy for the suffering and the exultant, finding for both a voice that implies such oppositions are finally resolved in the poem'. This is accessible, readable poetry from a world, a way of life and a culture unfamiliar to most English-language readers and, as such, it fascinates and enthralls."… saturated with joy"W.N. Herbert, New Generation poet"Razmik Davoyan is in communion with nature : warm sorrow oozes from the willows, the tree unwraps its skin to hold him within… But though his poetry is cheerful, it is at the same time marked by the tragedy of existence..." Zmrouthe Aubozian, France-ArménieRazmik Davoyan, the author of sixteen collections of poetry, is one of the most prominent writers in Armenia, and an advisor on cultural and educational issues to the President of Armenia. He has received numerous awards including Armenia's State Prize for Literature in 1986 and the President's Prize for Literature in 2003. He was decorated with the Order of Saint-Mesrop Mashtots for his achievements and services to the country in 1997.

Shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize 2011.The first English translation of this winner of the 1991 Max-Jacob Prize.The Book of the Snow consists of 112 short poems inspired by a bleak and beautiful natural landscape, where the falling snow gives rise to a sequence of poems that are both lyrical and suffused with irony, allusion and paradox.The Book of the Snow is Jacqmin's twelfth poetry collection and is translated by Philip Mosley.François Jacqmin was born in 1929 in Belgium and spent his formative years in England during the Second World War, writing his first poems in English. His distinctive identity as a writer is inspired primarily by botany and metaphysics.Philip Mosley is Professor of English, Communications, and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. As well as being a highly-regarded translator, he is author of books on Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Ingmar Bergman and Belgian cinema.

These poems contemplate the poet's native land of Russia, while at the same time casting a jaundiced eye on the alien culture of America, where he spent the final years of his life.Whether absorbed by the world of literature (particularly his fellow poets) or relating real-life experiences, Loseff conjures up a restless, frequently disturbing universe, full of complex imagery, rich literary allusion and formal experiment.Lev Loseff was born in 1937, grew up in Leningrad and worked as a journalist in northern Sakhalin, and as a magazine editor and children's playwright. He emigrated to America in 1976, where he later taught Russian literature at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He died in the USA in 2009.G.S. Smith was Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford from 1986 to 2003. He translated the bilingual anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry (1993), and worked in collaboration with Lev Loseff for many years.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Summer 2010Arc 'Visible Poets' translation series, no. 29My soul is like these threads of spider silk tensed criss-cross between two apple treesRooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Kristiina Ehin's poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader's own. These poems, beautifully translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and selected from her most recent collection, were written over two years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son."Here is a generous, honest imagination: visceral, shamanistic and wise. Kristiina Ehin is a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirts and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life. There is a refreshing lightness and originality to her poems, which are nonetheless poignant. She is able to express strong emotions without being sentimental. Her work has truly haunted me; it has entered the deepest layer of my being with its rare combination of directness and subtle nuances, ancient traditions and modernity." Sujata Bhatt"Ehin's poems are deeply personal, but not in a way that excludes the reader: quite the opposite, they draw the reader in, so that Ehin's life feels like our own, a fascinating glimpse into a different, simpler life lived close to nature. Reading these poems is like a holiday of the best kind: eye-opening, relaxing and different. Ehin's work is rooted in Estonian folk tradition, and music permeates both the forms and the language. I particularly relished her poems about parenthood, for their beauty and tenderness."StrideKristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She received an M. A. in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from Tartu University in 2004. She has published five volumes of poetry in her native Estonia and has won a number of prizes there, including Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for her fourth volume, written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. She has also published a book of short stories and has written a play as well. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007. Her other books in English translation are Põletades pimedust – Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, 2009), A Priceless Nest (short stories, Oleander Press, 2009), Päevaseiskaja – South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik – New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, 2007). She is often invited to take part in international arts and literary festivals and her work, poetry and prose, appears regularly in English translation in leading Irish and British literary journals. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. Kristiina's reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival (July 2010) was one of the highlights of the Festival.Ilmar Lehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin's The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English. His own poetry has appeared in Estonian and Irish literary journals.Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, and grew up in Pune, India and in the United States. To date, she has published seven collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. The recipient of numerous awards, such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and the Cholmondeley Award, her latest collection, Pure Lizard, was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize and received the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a frequent guest at literary festivals throughout the world. Currently, she lives in Germany with her family.

Peatlands is the first bilingual single collection of Mexican poet Pedro Serrano's work to be published in the UK. Introduced by WN Herbert, the poems are as linguistically thrilling as they are wide-ranging: with subjects as diverse as snakes and swallows, valleys and skyscrapers, weariness and love.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.Pedro Serrano is the author of six poetry collections published between 1986 and 2009. He also co-edited the 2000 anthology The Lamb Generation, which brought together translations of 30 contemporary British poets. His poems have appeared in the likes of MPT, The Rialto and Verse, and in 2007 he was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship. He lives in Mexico City. Anna Crowe's other translations include Joan Margarit's collections Tugs in the Fog (2006; ISBN 9781852247515) and Strangely Happy (2011; ISBN 9781852248932), both published by Bloodaxe, and the Arc anthology Six Catalan Poets (2013; ISBN 9781906570606). She lives in St Andrews.

The Play of Waves is a collection of poems written over the period of five years by Malta’s most distinguished poet, Immanuel Mifsud. It falls into six sections: the first consists of mainly lyrical poems; the second explores mental instability and the fluidity of the Self; the third is a sequence of travel poems; the fourth focuses on the dialectic of body-spirit; the fifth consists of poems about sex and sexuality; and the sixth and final section is a short cycle about Medusa. Throughout all six sections, the theme of ‘waiting’ runs as a leitmotiv – waiting at airports, at the psychiatric clinic, at railway stations, sex-workers waiting for clients, lonely people waiting for imaginary lovers.This is a powerful yet tender collection from a writer whose name may be familiar as winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 but whose unique poetic voice is little-known outside Malta.

It is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Törne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement – Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Toerne’s collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Toerne’s powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.

Stein Mehren “is one of Norwegian literature’s greatest lyricists, and perhaps its finest love poet. His ground-breaking imagery and use of language are intensified by paradoxical turns of expression… The rhythmical force he creates is at times symphonic and melodious, rising towards the ecstatic, or brief, concise and penetrating… his best work earns him a place among Norway’s leading poets…” Per Thomas Andersen Norwegian Literary History, Universitetsforlaget“Stein Mehren has been his own school of lyrical poetry within Norwegian poesy… He wrote impassioned poems with philosophical themes, poems that search for identity or that place humanity in a cosmic world picture… Novel metaphors and lucid images whirl through tales that put life in perspective…”Fredrik WandrupDagbladet (29 July 2017)“My love poems are not solely concerned with love. I use it as a metaphor to portray loss, failure, childhood – the best love poetry is as much about life as about love…” Interview with Stein Mehren by Stein Kjos at Galleri Haaken

Translated by Brian Cole, with an introduction by Peter Dale.Parallel text, Italian / English"Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with skill and subtlety."Translation Review:"This is a subtle book full of those flashes of half-recognition that come 'when the hawk has made his journey / from the fist to a heart.'" Susan WicksVisible Poets series, no. 1. Series editor: Jean Boase-Beier.A selection from over 300 poems in the Collected Works, containing some of poet's finest writing. This collection reflects Cattafi's restlessness and his urge to travel — there are poems about islands, streets, cities, the sea, about places both familiar and unfamiliar to the English reader.But we are also aware of a strong element of spiritual journeying in his poetry, as he probes the truth and meaning behind the existence of the concrete, the ordinary, the everyday. In this new translation, Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with consummate skill that allows the English reader to share the poet's urgency of being "driven by necessity / to a truth clothed in falsehood".Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, Summer 2000

"The greatest female poetic voice of our time." Rimbaud Revue"Burine's themes are the grand commonplaces of poetry – love and time, death and memory – and I am grateful for the introduction to her beautiful and intriguing work." Glyn Pursglove, Acumen.Introduction by Susan Wicks.Translated by Martin Sorrell.

"One of the most powerful recent achievements of the poet who has been called 'the chronicler of the 20th century', and recognised as one of Europe's outstanding artists. I am haunted by the vision of history and politics which I draw from Rózewicz." Tom PaulinIntroduced by Adam Czerniawski.Translated by Tony Howard and Barbara Plebanek.

Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century. Here are political poems from the '70s and '80s which speak openly about the horrors of the Soviet system, others which comment directly on purges and torture, and yet more which convey the struggle to grow and mature with one's soul intact in a world of suffering.Yet throughout this book, as Sasha Dugdale points out in her introduction, there are moments of hope, of a spiritual - even religious - dimension that afford glimpses of a transcendent world and bring peace of mind to the beleaguered soul. Larissa Miller is a consummate technician, combining simple words with complicated and intricate rhythms to produce apparently effortless poetry which succeeds in elevating the ordinary and commonplace to a higher plane.Described by her translator Richard McKane as 'a poet of all seasons, not only of the natural world, but of the soul', Larissa Miller writes with an intensity and a lyricism that is compelling, mesmerising and unforgettable.

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDED TRANSLATIONin a translation by Daniel Weissbort that Elaine Feinstein describes in her illuminating introduction as 'clean, clear and … amazingly felicitous'. Lisnianskaya, an intensely lyrical poet, is first and foremost a love poet, and the love that she and her late husband, the celebrated poet Semyon Lipkin, had for one another colours – without the least sentimentality – many of Lisnianskaya's more recent poems. Indeed, her most recent collection consists partly of an elegy to him."Always – intensity of feeling, and a tranquillity(rare) of the most profound sort. No artificiality,no posing – total sincerity."Alexander Solzhenitsyn (of Lisnianskaya's poetry)INNA LISNIANSKAYA was born in Baku in 1928 and her first poetry collection appeared in 1957. She is now recognised as one of Russia's leading female poets, a recipient of both the State Prize and the Solzhenitsyn Prize for her work. She lives in Moscow. DANIEL WEISSBORT founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965 with the late Ted Hughes, and editedit until 2004. He is Research Fellow at Kings College, London and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

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

Ljubljana is Meta Kusar's city, where she has lived, wandered, bought and cooked her food, thought, written and loved. When she travels, it is to Ljubljana that she returns and this city, her constant home, has become her muse. Ljubljana, in its 77 untitled poems, reflects all of this. Each poem opens a door onto a different aspect of Ljubljana, and onto a different aspect of the world and life itself. It is a sensual yet spiritual book, full of all the contrasts and contradictions one might expect to find in a city, and yet full of wisdom and beauty too. "Kusar's vision has a bracing, dynamic, anarchic individualism, and I hope the translators are already at work on more of her fascinating work."Martyn Crucefix, Poetry ReviewMeta Kusar, poet and essayist, was born in Ljubljana in 1952. With three collections of poetry in print, she is one of Slovenia's most popular and successful women poets. Since 1980 she has regularly contributed to the Slovene National Radio and the RAI-Trieste with cultural and historical talks. She has also directed a musical performance of her poetry, The Throne of Poetry, which was staged in Slovenia, Washington (1991) and London (2000).

Born in San Sebastian, and still living and working there, the Basque poet Eli Tolaretxipi has published two collections of poetry in Spanish – Past Love Still Life and The Loops of the Figure. Although translated into French and Italian, she has had to wait until the publication of this volume for her poetry to appear in English, in a fine translation by Philip Jenkins. Tolaretxipi's poetry has a rich sense of unease, the sense of unease we feel about love and perception. Her first collection draws on the language of the visual arts to portray the end of a failing relationship, while her second reflects on the nature of perception and poetry. Still Life with Loops, as its title suggests, is made up of work from both these collections. Her poetry is similar in texture to that of some of the English-language women poets she has translated into Spanish, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath among them.Translated by Philip Jenkins"... short as they are, each one has an intensity that needs to be savoured... The poems are written in free verse, subtly rhythmic in Spanish and English. Powerful stuff. Nothing as simple as it looks. Congratulations to Arc - they've done us proud."Malcolm Parr, Roundyhouse

Translated by Christopher Pilling.Defying Fate, like most of Maurice Carème's poetry, is marked by its fluency and ease of access. Here are poems that charm at first sight, short, seductive to the eye and ear, satisfyingly metrical and given to rhyme. Their subject matter is generally familiar to us – children, silence, death, God, the troubled mind – and is argued and developed in ways we can follow with sympathy; this is poetry to identify with, poetry of shared emotion and aesthetic satisfaction. In his introduction, Martin Sorrell calls Carème "A poet of tact. What he says may be disturbing, but the way in which he says it remains well-mannered", and Christopher Pilling, in his sensitive and resourceful translation, conveys this absolutely. Defying Fate, which, incidentally was published posthumously, is a fascinating introduction to this intriguing Belgian poet. "Careme demonstrates over and over of how he 'believe(s) more in the heart's dark shadow than the light of intelligence.'"Marcus Smith, EnvoiMaurice Carème was born in 1899 in Wavre, a small town in Brabant-Wallon, Belgium. In 1918, he left Wavre to become a primary school teacher in Brussels and married a fellow-teacher, Andrée Gobron in 1924. He gave up teaching to write full-time in 1943. Author of some ninety books, novels, short stories, fables and essays, as well as poems, he published a collection of poems nearly every year from 1947 to 1975. He won numerous prizes in Belgium and abroad and, in Paris in 1972, was elected "Prince des poètes" to succeed Jean Cocteau. He died in 1978 (working till his final afternoon) and Defying Fate appeared in 1987.

At the Edge of Night, a selection from four recent collections by Anise Koltz, Luxembourg's best-known poet, brings the work of this daring and audacious poet to the attention of the English-speaking literary world for the first time. Written in Koltz's prolific seventh decade, these brief poems – with their short, unpunctuated lines, clearly separated stanzas and powerful, direct language – are both personal and universal."This poetry feels utterly European… it speaks to the reader directly, jumping cultural barriers."Anne-Marie Glasheen, translator "Her austerity is in its way beguiling and inviting."David Morley, Poetry Review

Antônio Moura's third collection plays with both experimental and traditional poetic styles, giving it a powerful mythic reach and a bizarre, neo-Baroque flavour. Life in these poems appears as uncanny, mysterious, something to be faced by the individual. There is a tension between spiritual insight and the sordid realities of life, between the world of today and that of previous eras, between the wider picture and the intensely personal. With an Introduction by David Treece, Professor in Brazilian Studies at Kings College, London. Antônio Moura is considered to be among the strongest Brazilian poets writing today, and is one of the youngest poets to appear in Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2004). Moura has published two previous books of original poetry in Brazil as well as a Portuguese translation of the Madagascan poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. Stefan Tobler's poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Shearsman, Ambit and Poetry Wales.