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New Publications


On National Poetry Day, we’re delighted to bring you details of our most recent titles, all of which can be obtained through the Arc website at a 10% discount off the cover price.

Stein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing about love and desire, and the despair that often attends them, he weaves together classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of the strongest human emotions.

"[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
It is hard to imagine a time when coffee drinking was not part of every-day life and yet it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that it became widespread in Europe. The visit of the Turkish Ambassador to Louis XIV's court in 1669 helped to make coffee-drinking fashionable in France, so it is not surprising that it was a Frenchman who chose to extol its delights, not to mention its health-giving properties, in a long poem written in Latin, the popular language for verse throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. L'Abbé Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore's masterly translation.

"I read Not On The Side Of The Gods with growing admiration. It was like wandering through a fabulous living museum, filled with places and plants, birds and other creatures and, often, most movingly, with the people they call to mind. Anna Crowe builds for each vulnerable creature a house of jewelled words. What I came away with was not just the richness and precision of her descriptions but a cornucopia of sounds, not least the wonderful music of her voice."

- Vicki Feaver

Referred to as 'the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language', the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has been published in the original Spanish and in translation throughout the world. So it is remarkable that some of this Nobel Prize-winner's verse has never been published in English and this book goes a long way to filling this extraordinary gap. Edited and translated by Neruda's acclaimed biographer, Adam Feinstein, these brand-new versions begin in 1919, and go on through many of his further collections up to his final works in the early 1970s. Neruda's poetry is a fusion of beautiful love poetry and politically engaged verse, lyrical and apocalyptic by turns, and in few poets can life and work be so intimately interwoven: Adam Feinstein provides an illuminating introduction which puts these poems in the context of a man of memorable actions as well as words.

“Brilliant . . . [an] amazing collection ”

— Ian McMillan


 

“In Mr. Maynard’s wonderfully expressive language, the reader hears and feels the rush of the war horse, the clash of steel weapons, the cries of the victorious and of the fallen. This is, to my mind, one of the best books of Chinese poetry ever published in English.”

— Professor J P Seaton, author of The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry

During the Second World War, being of Jewish descent, the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti served three periods of forced labour, the last in a slave camp in northern Serbia. Here, in a tiny concealed notebook, he wrote his last and finest poems. In November 1944, in the western Hungarian town of Abda, Radnóti was shot whilst being force-marched towards Germany during the liberation of the Balkans. His body was exhumed from a ditch after the war, and identified from the notebook in his pocket.

This very first title in Arc's landmark Translation Series, 'Visible Poets', is now available in a new and expanded edition.


Events

You may be interested to know that:

 

Kevin Maynard will be giving a launch reading of The Iron Flute on Friday 15 November at 6.00 pm at The Oxfam Bookshop, 36East Street, Chichester, PO19 1HS.
 
Anna Crowe will be launching Not on the Side of the Gods with a reading at the Scottish Poetry Library (5 Crichton's Close, Canongate, Edinburgh, EH8 8DT) on Wednesday 16 October 2019 at 7 pm.

 


If you are an Arc author or translator

and would like to update your biography (and photograph) on the Arc website, please email us (info@arcpublications.co.uk) with new copy. Please also let us know of any readings you are giving so that we can publicise them on our website and, for those of you who live overseas, of any forthcoming visits to the UK you have planned. And finally, don’t forget that you can purchase copies of your book(s) from us at author’s / translator’s discount -- again, please email us.
 

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https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/friends

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