The Poetry Book Society Anthology

Literature & Fiction

David Constantine

Poetry

London: Hutchinson

<p>Talitha Cumi is a collaboration between two artists and two poets, their collective response to the story of Jairus's daughter, the young girl whom Jesus raised from the dead with the words 'Talitha cumi' - or, 'Little girl, awake.' The story is the seed of a broad, personal exploration through interlinking images in drawing and poetry. There are two sequences, 'Little Girl Asleep' by Rodney Pybus and Noel Connor, and 'Little Girl Awake' by David Constantine and Barry Hirst. They move from birth shadowed by death, the father's anxiety for mother and child, to re-awakening, with the father witnessing his daughter's growing awareness of the world that holds her future.Talitha Cumi began not with the Biblical story but with an incident in Ulster - in which an unborn child was killed in the womb when a bullet ricocheted and hit the mother, who survived. For Belfast artist Noel Connor this was the worst possible atrocity, 'violence invading the womb, a horrifying reversal, death before birth, complete hopelessness... That child, perfectly innocent as it was, became a ghost of my conscience and much of my work became memorials to it.After his first child was born, Noel Connor felt he could counter and balance this incident through the story of the raising of Jairus's daughter. But he wanted to share this affirmation, to work with another artist and with two poets. In Talitha Cumi they have created a testament of great tenderness and universality, a four-part song of hope.</p>

Talitha Cumi

Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

This series publishes translations, original poems, reviews and short essays that address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, and the speaking of languages outside their native home.

Love and War (Modern Poetry in Translation, Third Series)

MPT Books

'Polyphony' is concerned with voices: the local, the foreign, the native, the acquired - and the strange hybrids that come into being when the language of home is crossed with that of abroad. All poetic language is essentially foreign - 'otherwhereish', as Robert Graves said. This issue attends to the differences of voices - within individual poems, in the interplay of poet and translator and among various translations. It is an anthology in celebration of variety, without suppressing tones, dialects and utterances it might disturb us to hear.

Polyphony

UNKNOWN

Modern Poetry in Translation

The Life-Writer

Contemporary

Comma Press

45 Years Selected Stories

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Constantine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by David Constantine