<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

Literature & Fiction

David Constantine

Poetry

Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

<p>Davies became famous briefly in 1911 when Home Secretary Winston Churchill raised his case in Parliament. But who was Davies? In this fictionalised account of a lifelong petty criminal, Constantine explores the mystery of a shadowy loner caught in a vicious circle of self-perpetuating crime.David Davies (1849-1929) was known in his day as the 'Dartmoor Shepherd'. He spent half a century in prison for a succession of minor offences, mostly for stealing coppers from the poor-boxes of local churches. In Constantine's novel three characters reflect on Davies' life, and understand him as best they can. But Davies remains uncomprehended and in isolation.Davies came from Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire, and Constantine has set his novel in the counties of the Welsh Marches, in Flint and Montgomery, Shropshire and Cheshire. He has made much use of documentary material - Hansard, newspaper reports and a biography - and aims in his novel to seek a truth behind established facts. Although historically based, Davies is a novel whose concerns are very much relevant to the present day, particularly in its portrait of the habitual offender and of vagrancy.This first novel by a young award-winning Bloodaxe poet marks the emergence of an exciting new talent in British fiction.</p>

Davies

Bloodaxe

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

Belongings

Bloodaxe Books

A Bird Called Elaeus

The Life-Writer

Contemporary

Comma Press

45 Years Selected Stories

Literary

Refugee Tales: Volume Iii

IAN SANSOM

Emma Parsons

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

Lisa Appignanesi

Bernardine Evaristo

Jonathan Skinner

Jonathan Wittenberg

patrick-gale

ROMA TEARNE

Monica Ali

Gillian Slovo

David Herd

Lytton Smith

Naar de stad

Alejandro Zambra

Carlos Fuentes

OLGA TOKARCZUK

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Etgar Keret

Ali Smith

Wells Tower

Gyrðir Elíasson

Fouad Laroui

Mehmet Zaman Saçlıoğlu

Khan Mohammad Sind

Arkadi Babtsjenko

De Geus

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Books by David Constantine