Arc International and UK Poets Autumn Tour 2013 Astrid Alben (UK) DM Black (UK) Cheran (Sri Lanka) Cliff Forshaw (UK) Michael Hulse (UK) Ivana Milankova (Serbia) CK Stead (NZ) Ludwig Steinherr (Germany) plus poets from Armenia and Catalonia
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Astrid Alben Astrid Alben is an Anglo-Dutch poet who grew up in Kent and the Netherlands. She read English Literature and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Since 2006 her poems and reviews have been published in magazines such as The Wolf, Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, TLS, Stand and Shearsman. She is interested in jazzy rhythms, movements through scale and time, maintaining and withholding tension between the images and the words.
Ai! Ai! Pianissimo is Astrid’s first collection of poetry. In it are poems that push and wrestle with form and subject. Innovative and energetic, they are theatrical in spirit and tone, not necessarily ‘dramatic’ but alert and subtle in their shifting language and focus on detail and character. Uncanny and unexpected images and experiences are set against each other to build surreal narratives that dance across the book to celebrate the erotic, the sensual and the miniscule things that surround us.
Bibliographic Information 978-1906570-72-9 (pbk) £8.99 978-1906570-73-6 (hbk) £11.99 “These are poems of the subtlest, most unsettling kind, alive to the paradoxes of intimacy and estrangement, of desire and the distance growing at its heart. The experience of reading them is anything but claustrophobic, even when the subject is just that, because of their tingling hyper-alertness to twists of the language, shifts of tone and implication...” Philip Gross
Contact Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or 01706 812338
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Sample Poem Thursday’s News Every conflict nurses the mildness of reconciliation like a hazelnut in the midst of snow. He cannot stand it. She’s reading the news. But some of it is just so funny she says and some of it is real. In Chicago a young doe burst into the arrival hall of O’Hare International Airport via a loading dock whose automatic doors were open. The police took her down with a stun gun. She has been to Chicago. She was there. This is what makes it real. She adjusts her glasses. Takes a sip of water. Turns the page. We watch him process her on the conveyor belt of his thoughts – deer are colour blind. We stop stirring our tea. Sit still. Watch him prompt his hands watch him knock over the sugar bowl. She raises her eyes to heaven. The airport was very crowded she says like a forest of naked trees.
Notes & Links Astrid Alben is based in London She has read at The Wellcome Foundation, London, The Troubadour and Lauderdale House in London, and forthcoming at Cheltenham Arc Publications page - http://arcpublications.co.uk/book.php?description_id=422 Shadowtrain - http://www.shadowtrain.com/id307.html Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/arc_publications/last-of-the-snow-astrid-alben https://soundcloud.com/arc_publications/the-post-box-astrid-alben
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DM Black D. M. Black is a Scottish poet, born in South Africa in 1941, brought up in Scotland from 1950. In 1991 he produced a Collected Poems (Polygon), having previously published four collections of poems and a number of pamphlets. He was included in the first series of Penguin Modern Poets (no. 11, 1968) and his poems have appeared in many anthologies.
Claiming Kindred is D. M. Black's first full collection since the publication of his Collected Poems 1964-87. In this new collection he uses a variety of poetic forms, in an attempt to convey the immediacy of emotional experience. The psychological intensity of his earlier narrative work remains, but is now placed in the context of a life lived in specific places and in particular relationships. And the reader moves semalessly between the poems, entering wholly into each world. The idea that the poet is 'claiming kindred' is borrowed from Richard Wilbur: the title sets out to capture the underlying intent uniting these diverse poems.
Bibliographic Information
978-1906570-46-0 (pbk) £9.99 978-1906570-47-7 (hbk) £12.99
“DM Black's Claiming Kindred is a welcoming book of poems, in the sense that his prosaic style...moves each poem about its business with a conversational, avuncular authority. It is an unpretentious kind of verse, talking in straight lines, but retaining room for more imagistic or lyrical moments.” Jack Underwood, Poetry London
Contact Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or on 01706 812338
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Sample Poem The Bumble Bee I went into a room I had neglected. He or she was crawling torpidly against the doorstep inside my tall glass door which opens onto the balcony. Outside was a high blue day in wonderful dizzy midsummer. I thought: he has been here for days, is starving and close to death. But I invited him to step onto a compliments slip from the British Journal of Psychiatry, and languidly, like a child with flu, he consented – one leg, two, and then, with my shove, the whole of his body – I opened the door and laid the freighted compliments slip on the earth of a window-box. I thought: let him die at least in sight of the sun and the chestnuttrees, the extravagant summer roses. He lay still. I turned to go in but a sizzling arrested me – I looked back – he was gone – Like a humming arrow I saw him sing into the green depths of the air, then higher andhigher on a swerving, all-but straight path, lofting superbly above the tree-tops like someone in no doubt at all where he’s got to get to.
Notes & Links DM Black is based in London Arc Publications page - http://arcpublications.co.uk/book.php?description_id=415 Guardian Review - http://tinyurl.com/83we9ga
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Cheran Cheran was born in Alaveddy in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and began writing poetry at a young age. His two early collections, together with an anthology of Tamil resistance poems, are all landmarks in contemporary Tamil poetry, setting him out as one of the most important poets writing in Tamil today. His poetry is read widely in North America, Europe and South Asia. In 1999 Cheran received a creative non-fiction award from the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. He is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor, Toronto, Canada.
In A Time of Burning is a selection of poems charting the civil war in Sri Lanka, spanning more than three decades, and its aftermath. It is set in a landscape once idyllic, now devastated. Yet this is not the only narrative in this book: woven throughout are love poems–which, even in his earliest work, are shadowed by uncertainty and loss–and poems about displacement, exile and the experience of diaspora. Translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom Introduced by Sascha Ebeling Bibliographic Information ISBN: 978-1906570-32-3 pbk £9.99 ISBN: 978-1906570-33-0 hbk £12.99 Someone who reads my entire poetry will have a clear picture of what happened to the Tamils from 1980 up until 2010, it’s a kind of snapshot. […] It’s noto like a political statement, because I lived through it […]. In a sense I am a poet as a witness, a witness to history. Cheran Availability Availability: We hope Cheran will be in the UK early to mid November 2013 Contact Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or on 01706 812338
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Sample Poem Rajani (1989) Now, in a little while the sun will set, darkness will fall. The darkness that is yet to come will not be as before but the very devil — a night that has murdered the moon and set fire to the stars; an ash-smeared night. You hurried on your way hoping to light a small hand-lamp or at least a candle before such a night could fall. Amma, today they were in great haste arriving from the south — Death’s messengers with their rifles and their five bullets. As you fell the sun’s last rays threw upon the wall your shadow: your waving hands rising higher and higher beyond the horizon.
Notes Speaks good English. Recent appearances: Sundarayya Vignana Kendram, Hyderabad. India. 20 December 2012 "Samadhana 2012 Benefit Reading Series" Sri Lankans Without Borders (SLWB) Toronto. September 2012
Links http://www.mptmagazine.com/author/r-cheran-4057/ http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/magically-cheran/article3384015.ece http://lankanewsweb.rsf.org/english/ index5d90.html?option=com_content&view=article&id=1249:unperturbed-he-writesthis-poem-interview-with-cheran&catid=3:features&Itemid=108
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Cliff Forshaw Cliff Forshaw left school at sixteen and worked in an abattoir before going back to eduction and gaining with a doctorate on Elizabethan satire at Oxford. Since then, he has lived in Snowdonia and Yorkshire, and taught at Bangor, Sheffield and, from 2005, Hull University. Cliff has been a writer-in-residence in California, Transylvania and Tasmania; twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow; and winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award. His chapbook Wake was joint-winner of the Flarestack Pamphlet Prize 2009.
The term Vandemonian refers to Van Dieman’s Land, and Cliff Forshaw’s sixth collection focuses on its inhabitants, both human and animal, newcomer and Aborigine, to piece together a fragmentary history of Tasmania. From the island’s mythic beginnings, through its discovery by Europeans and the subsequent destruction of native peoples and wildlife, the poems describe the island becoming a penal colony’s own penal colony. An absorbing and evocative book.
Bibliographic Information 978 1904614 60 9 (pbk) £8.99 978 1904614 72 2 (hbk) £11.99 “These are poems of voyage, exertion and discovery, enjoying the challenge of unpredictable and unusual locations, both geographical and psychological. At the same time, they demonstrate grounded, dependable craft. They never trick the reader, but, witty and exuberant, send us on our poetic journeys with new imaginative maps.” Carol Rumens
Contact Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or 01706 812338
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Sample Poem Bird You work. Pick oakum in solitude. In the yard you’re hidden by a mask that twists each jail-bird’s face into beak. Nothing to say or do, but Work is Prayer. You do your bird. You do your time. Keep shtum Keep nose clean. Keep hands to yourself. Keep mum. One day in the yard, a man runs head-first, mad against the wall. Falls, gets up, head-butts his way, almost through brick: again and again, you hear skin and bone on stone. That crack. It echoes down the months. It fills your cell. Your mind’s eye colonised by the twitch of a wounded bird, the way it fell; how blood frothed cobbles, sun smirked along its beak.
Notes and Links Cliff lives in Hull Arc Publications Page - http://tinyurl.com/abt6oya Cliff reading ‘Loop’ - http://tinyurl.com/al5kawp Poetry pf - http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/cliffforshawpage.html
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Michael Hulse Michael Hulse, born in England, lived for twenty-five
years in Germany before returning in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick. His poetry has won first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors. He has edited the literary quarterlies Stand, Leviathan Quarterly and (currently) The Warwick Review. He has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by Goethe, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald.
Lucid narratives of family dramas, global warming, and conversations with Death make a riveting new collection from this prize-winning poet. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home, their engagement with the church, art and natural beauty provide sure-footed travelling companions. In an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with people and culture. Each poem provides an opportunity to challenge and question its integrity. By turns mischievous and assured, this collection becomes more engrossing the more you read..
Bibliographic Information 978-1908376-19-0 (pbk) £8.99 978-1908376-20-6 (hbk) £11.99
Publication date: August 2013 “Hulse's hypersensitivity to the insecurities of life are never far below the surface and give his work an edgy truthfulness.. He writes with a controlled passion, close to the spoken word, using sophisticated effects to locate the significant and develop its larger emotional truth.” John Levett, Agenda
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Sample Poem [v]
from Foreknowledge
Absolute
This is a story I’m sure you have heard, says Death (as she brushes her lips on my cheek, her fingers busy with my belt) —a story about a girl, the usual girl, taking the usual path through the forest and meeting the usual stranger, a wolf full of questions and hunger, a grin like a Chevy, all teeth. Some say the wolf runs ahead of the girl and hides in the bed with a headful of horrors. Some say the girl makes her visit, returns, and surprises her mother entwined on the sofa with somebody muscular and furred. Some say the girl makes her visit, returns — her mirror shows her yellow-eyed and wiry, the hair breaking out on the backs of her hands and her neck, the drooling hunger dripping from her muzzle. Still others doubt there ever was a wolf. They say she was always all talk and her skirts were short. Me (she says), I know that girl, I know her well — now you lie there and don’t you say a word.
Notes & Links Michael is based in Warwick. The Secret History took him on reading tours of Mexico, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. At Adelaide Writers’ Week his solo event attracted an audience of 700. Arc Publications page - http://arcpublications.co.uk/biography.php?writer_id=101 Britsh Council page - http://literature.britishcouncil.org/michael-hulse
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Ivana Milankova Ivana Milankova Milankova, born in1952, in Belgrade, Serbia, studied English language and literature at Belgrade University. She is the author of seven books of poetry and one book of poetical prose – a dream diary. She is also a translator of English and American poetry. Following an invitation by Allen Ginsberg after his visit to Belgrade, Ivana took part in creative workshops at the Naropa Institute with Ginsberg and Ann Waldman in Boulder, Colorado. In the mid 1980s she was very active in alternative theatre and street performances. She now earns a living as an English teacher in a secondary school in New Belgrade . Dinner with Fish and Mirrors reveals Serbia’s rich historical and religious history. Milankova writes with an untiring, effort to reach beyond the sensations of the world around her towards mystical revelation, to communicate the incommunicable. Some poems emerge from private experience and others from the imagined experiences. Milankova’s poetry does not seek to be contemporary in that it does not deal directly with recent conflict in the Balkans. Rather it draws on the insights and shortcomings evident in the wider European culture. Translated and introduced by James Sutherland-Smith and Zorica Patrovic Bibliographic information ISBN 978 1904614 78 4 pbk £9.99 ISBN 978 1906570 18 7 hbk £12.99
Availability Availability: Ivana is available to read October 2013 Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or 01706 812338
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Sample Poem Letters from Persia An afternoon in the hereafter in Persia, a January and the young shadow of Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, at the end of the forest, and further, constantly behind my back: a thought rather than a shadow, in cities, on bridges, at sunsets when I think it is dawn. Delusion! The East is a shadow too, the west in disguise, a deep tumble into winter and the death of the century. Constantly behind my back. That is how life happens behind my life behind my back. Simply. A shadow. All I see, forgets me, and the Mind assembled in fireplace tiles, later fragmented in a game of chess and dominoes. In your country of January, in Persia they bring tea to wonders and the shadows of mountains. Here the wonders are drowsy and sluggish. Noon with Miracle workers seduces them in the square. I wait for you. From fog into fog only your invisibility and her shadow. In between? The soul - the space where I wait for myself at some point in Persia and only myself, far behind myself.
Notes
Ivana speaks good English
Links James Sutherland Smith article - http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/64/ article/poetry-belgrade
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CK Stead Christian Karlson Stead was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1932. Acclaimed internationally, he has published more than forty volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir and criticism. Stead’s numerous prizes and honours include the 2009 New Zeland's Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, a 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Award for his Collected Poems, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2010. Stead was awarded a CBE in 1986 and received the Order of New Zealand in 2007. He was the open winner of 2010 Hippocrates Prize.
The Yellow Buoy is CK Stead’s fifteenth collection of poetry, in which thewriter journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Côte d’Azur; Catullusreturns to receive plaudits, write to friends and readthe world; and various other literary fellows appearin person, dream or conversation – Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield. Alongside glimpses of fantails and elegies for friends, The Yellow Buoy also includes translated versions of poems by Eugenio Montale, Carlo Vita and Philippe Jaccottet.
Bibliographic Information 978-1908376-14-5 (pbk) £10.99 978-1908376-15-2 (hbk) £13.99 “His best poems display that defiant, personal quirk of original perception that makes you blink and turn back to them in surprise, to re-read and memorise them, to interiorise them as scraps of wisdom, moments of illumination.” David Eggleton, NZ Listener Availability Availability: CK Stead will be in the UK early October Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or on 01706 812338
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Sample Poem La Casa That day we flew you east I west to separate continents I think la Casa attuned to absences one or other or even both when we travelled together was troubled. Where was it to send its homing beam? How be guiding light to divided souls? Come back soon. Let's set the mind of that weatherboard kitset we've called home so long once more at rest.
Notes & Links Arc Publications page - http://arcpublications.co.uk/biography.php?writer_id=173 Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Stead Interview - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview35 Reading Catallus - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQZz6JDJBo
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Ludwig Steinherr Ludwig Steinherr (b. 1962), lives in Munich. He studied philosophy at the University of Munich. He is now a freelance writer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Eichstätt. He has written his way into the front rank of contemporary German writers. His poems have received a number of awards, including the' Leonce-und-Lena-Förderpreis (1993), the Buchpreis des Verbandes Evangelischer Büchereien (1999) and the Hermann-Hesse-Förderpreis (1999). Steinherr was elected a fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 2003.
Before the Invention of Paradise has been selected from his first ten collections, beginning with his 1985 debut volume, Fluganweisung (Flight Instructions), up to Die Hand im Feuer (The Hand in the Fire), 2005. Its themes are silence, memory, knowing and the impossibility of knowing, the everyday and what is beyond. It also shares with much contemporary German poetry its spareness of style, lack of ornamentation and punctuation. Translated by Richard Dove Introduced by Jean Boase-Beier
Bibliographic Information 978-1904614-45-6 (pbk) £10.99 978-1904614-94-4 (hbk) £13.99 “Ludwig Steinherr writes with almost oriental spareness and obliquity. The idea is everything, expressed simply... Steinherr's calling as philosopher is noticeable throughout. He seeks clarification and meaning always, sees the simplicities within the complexity, shows us the obvious that we had missed. .” Don Barnard, The Warwick Review Availability: Ludwig is available to read October/November Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or 01706 812338
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Sample Poem Distances I put back my watch to combat the tiredness and think ahead to what you’re now doing whether you’re awake or sleeping how far I’m removed from you from me between these proverbially howling police-cars taxis for ever in transit beneath the towers on Fifth Avenue how far removed from myself and suddenly in my own skin in front of La Tour’s Penitent Woman who’s sitting motionless in this breakneck city who only sees the candle sees the flame: it’s burning so bright so fearless in front of the sombre mirror
Notes & Links Ludwig speaks good English and could participate in a discussion Recent Appearances European Literature Night, London 2012 - http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2HNpzDBD2WA He is also reading at the ELN, StAnza 2013 He was guest author at the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana USA, Nov 2012. Arc Publications page - http://arcpublications.co.uk/book.php?description_id=411 On Soundcloud - http://tinyurl.com/auk9xbr http://tinyurl.com/apgdxoj
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Six Armenian Poets No. 10 in the New Voices from Europe Anthology Series, edited by Alexandra Buchler ed. Razmic Davoyan translated by
Armine Tamrazian
featuring the work of
Hrachya Saroukhan Khachik Manoukian Violet Grigorian Hasmik Simonian Azniv Sahakyan Anatoli Hovhannisyan
Here are poems using various tricks, weaving pictures with micro-strokes as a confession, as a memory, or sometimes with the thorn wreathes of their losses, throwing a not very confident glance at the other world. Elsewhere are The Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments. The younger generation are also represented, with a united philosophy, they have no fear of endangering the “poetry” in favour of the consolation of creating something from the ruins of their inner worlds. Psychological states are shown to be in harmony with self expression. This is an athology that brings about a feeling of comfort from suffering and experience. Bibliographic information March 2013 ISBN 978 1906570 87 3 pbk £10.99
Availability Availability: Two of the anthologised poets will be touring the UK
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Six Catalan Poets No. 9 in the New Voices from Europe Anthology Series, edited by Alexander Buchler ed Pere Ballart translated by
Anna Crowe
featuring the work of
Josep Lluís Aguiló Elies Barberà Manuel Forcano Gemma Gorga Jordi Julià Carles Torner History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under a democratic regime. Together, their work could not be more modern, comprehensive or polyphonic: politics and history cohabit with love (both heterosexual and homoerotic), learned allusion and popular image, stanzaic rigour and freedom of form, the song to the land of one's birth and hymn to the voyage.
Bibliographic information March 2013 ISBN 978 1906570 60 6 pbk £10.99
Availability Availability: Two of the anthologised poets will be touring the UK
Contact: sarah.arcpublications@gmail.com or 01706 812338
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