Poésie

Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home. "For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm,' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear,' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters "Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert Wrigley

In this light-hearted book, poet and gardener James Fenton describes a hundred plants he would choose to grow from seed. 'It seemed a simple and interesting idea: what plants would you choose if starting a garden from scratch?'Includes chapters on flowers for colour, size, or exotic interest; herbs and meadow flowers; climbing vines and tropical species; the micro-meadow; raising plants from seed; and a wealth of personal tips and advice. As Fenton writes, 'the emphasis is on childish simplicity of approach, and economy of outlay.'Here is a happy, stylish, thought-provoking exercise in good principles, which exudes that rare thing: common-or-garden sense about gardens.

200 χρόνια και πλέον μετά τον θάνατό του, η ποίηση του Τζων Κητς έχει τη δύναμη να γοητεύει και να συγκινεί, αφήνοντας τον αναγνώστη με την αίσθηση μιας ασυνήθιστης, πολύ δυνατής συνάντησης. Η παρούσα μετάφραση μερικών από τα πιο αντιπροσωπευτικά ποιήματά του, από τα πρώτα σονέτα ώς τα έργα της ωριμότητάς του, τις μεγάλες ωδές, επιχειρεί να μας συστήσει εκ νέου τον μεγάλο δημιουργό, να μεταφέρει στη γλώσσα μας το άρωμα της ποίησής του – μιας ποίησης γήινης αλλά και αιθέριας, μιας ποίησης των αισθήσεων και των αντιθέσεων. Δοκιμάζοντας τις δυνάμεις του στα πιο διαφορετικά ποιητικά είδη, ο Κητς αποδεικνύεται ένας ευφυής πειραματιστής και ένας μοναδικός τεχνίτης του λόγου. Σε πορεία παράλληλη με την ποίησή του, οι επιστολές του (γράμματα σε φίλους, στα αδέρφια του, στους εκδότες του, στην αγαπημένη του Φάννυ) ανοίγουν ένα παράθυρο στην καθημερινή ζωή και σκέψη του ποιητή. Φωτίζουν τις αγωνίες μιας ψυχής που βάδιζε μέσα σε «αβεβαιότητες και μυστήρια» αναζητώντας την ομορφιά σε κάθε της έκφανση. Τα γράμματα του Κητς (κατά τον Έλιοτ, «τα σημαντικότερα που γράφτηκαν ποτέ από Άγγλο ποιητή») οδηγούν κατευθείαν στον πυρήνα της δημιουργικής διαδικασίας και τη φωτίζουν με τον πιο ουσιαστικό τρόπο.

"Ο δρόμος για το καλοκαίρι " του Άγγελου Κούρου είναι μια περιπλανώμενη ποιητική
αφήγηση του καλοκαιριού στα ελληνικά νησιά του Αιγαίου, σαν ένα απαλό μελτεμάκι… 
Αθήνα, λιμάνι του Πειραιά και μετά ξεκινά κανονικά το ταξίδι, Σαντορίνη,
Αμοργός, Ρόδος, Μήλος... και το ποιητικό ταξίδι στα νησιά συνεχίζεται! Προορισμοί που
διατηρούνται ανέπαφα στις αναμνήσεις μας για μια μελλοντική επιστροφή ...
Αλλά τι συμβαίνει εκεί; Ο λυρισμός του δεν είναι άκρατος, υπερβολικός, είναι ελεγχόμενος,  είναι γλυκός, δεν έχει χαρακτήρα καρτ ποστάλ και επίσης έχει και χιούμορ. Αυτό είναι πολύ σημαντικό, καθώς είναι σπάνιο στην ποίησή μας να βρούμε χιούμορ, να βλέπουμε τον αναγνώστη να χαμογελά με ένα διακριτικό αλλά και ανακουφιστικό τρόπο.
Και πάνω από αυτό το χαμόγελο, πάνω από το ελληνικό καλοκαίρι, ο Κούρος χτίζει τον δικό του κόσμο
όπου ζει η αυθεντική ποίηση. Είναι ένας κόσμος που έχει το ιδανικό μέγεθος των ονείρων μας.
Ποιήματα που διαβάζεις και χαίρεσαι γιατί νιώθεις το θεϊκό φως του καλοκαιριού να σε λυτρώνει.
Ο Κούρος περιγράφει το καλοκαίρι ως έναν ερωτικό τροφοδότη λογαριασμό που μας κάνει πλουσιότερους και πλουσιότερους ...

 «Διασκεδαστικός (τολμώ να πω) ο Κούρος, όχι υπό μία έννοια φθηνής ψυχαγωγίας, αλλά σε μια σφριγηλή και δροσάτη εκτύλιξη ενός καλοκαιριού κάτω από το άγρυπνο βλέμμα ενός ουσιώδους συμβολισμού, μιας ειρωνείας λεπτής κι ενός διάχυτου συναισθηματισμού. Η αφήγηση είναι σε όλο το μήκος της απολαυστική». Περιοδικό Ποιείν.

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian emigre mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When "Howl and Other Poems" was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His "Collected Poems: 1947-1997" appeared in 2006.

A love song between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London from Man Booker shortlisted LevyShe is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. She attempts to fly him away from his habits and fears, while he holds on tight to all he knows.

Man Booker Prize shortlisted Deborah Levy whips up a storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912.

Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

This collection of lyric essays by award-winning poet Kim Moore explore the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet - confronting the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification, in a context that traditionally disregards the body. Kim states "With the strides and gains made through the #MeToo movement, I believe the time is right for a book like this to make an impact. As a female poet, I know there is a need for such a book to examine the intersection between writing, performing, feminism and sexism. I wish this book had been written when I first started working as a freelance writer and I've had many conversations with other female poets who have also confirmed my thinking - that female poets are navigating these things regularly, and yet nobody is really writing or talking about them." The book draws on her experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All the Men I Never Married. It is a balance of memoir, academic treatise and poetry, though the author's emphasis is on writing in a popular way and making the subject accessible to a wide audience. To achieve this her models have been Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Sarah Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life. The book's subjects include heckling at poetry readings and other interactions; problems with the 'male gaze' and what the 'female gaze' might look like in poetry; 'guilty for being a man': how guilt can be useful if it can bring about change; how writing poetry about sexism can shed add meaning to the term; the objectification of men and women, and 'bad faith' arguments.

From the author of the bestselling Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel's new collection follows in the footsteps of one of the world's greatest composers, Beethoven, and investigates what his life and music might mean to us todayTwo hundred and fifty years since Beethoven was born, Ruth Padel goes on a personal search for him, retracing his steps through war-torn Europe of the early nineteenth century, delving into his music, letters, diaries and the conversation books he used when deaf, to uncover the man behind the legend. Her quest, exploring the life of one of the most creative artists who ever lived, turns more personal than she expects, taking her into the sources of her own creativity and musicality. From a deeply musical family herself, Padel's parents met through music, and she grew up playing chamber music on viola - Beethoven's instrument as a child. Her father's grandfather, a concert pianist born on the German-Danish border, studied in Leipzig with a friend of Beethoven before immigrating to the UK. The poems in this illuminating biography in verse conjure not only Beethoven's life and personality, but her own music-making and love both of the European music-making tradition to which her father's family belongs, and to the continent itself Europe.