The selection is judicious.... Readers will get a lot of pleasure from Oldham's witty and rather damning picture of his society, as well as a new perspective on the work of his friends Dryden and Rochester"" - British Book News.

Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Oldham, John

Poetry

Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

This single long poem (later included in Harrison's Penguin Selected Poems) is about relishing the joys of life, and is set in Florida. It is illustrated with five botanical line drawings of kumquats. The drawings are printed in a pastel colour to match the cover, and kumquats.

Kumquat for John Keats

Harrison, Tony

Marin Sorescu (1936-96) was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later - like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas - the peasant-born people's poet was made Minister of Culture, in Ion Iliescu's post-Ceauçescu government.Like Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia, Sorescu used plain, deceptively straightforward language, believing that poetry should be 'concise, almost algebraic'. Seamus Heaney wrote that behind Sorescu's 'throwaway charm and poker-faced subversiveness...there is a persistent solidarity with the unregarded life of the ordinary citizen, a willingness to remain at eye-level and on a speaking terms with common experience'.A prolific writer and a prominent dramatist, Sorescu published over 20 books of poetry in Romania, with several English translations of his poetry and plays appearing in Britain and America. Michael Hamburger's translation of his Selected Poems (1983), drawing on six collections published between 1965 and 1973, introduced him to English readers. The Biggest Egg in the World followed in 1987, a selection of mostly later work edited by Edna Longley with translators including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.Virgil Nemoianu has described how Sorescu's black humour and keen feeling for the absurd enabled him to survive as a writer: 'His reactions to an increasingly absurd political régime were always cleverly balanced: he never engaged in the servile praise of leader and party usually required of Romanian poets, but nor did he venture into dissidence. He was content to let irony do its job... His texts are masterpieces of allusion and adroit manoeuvring...' All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he dared not publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems (2001), translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski, is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the risker secret poems censored by the author.The Bridge (2004), translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, published in Romania in 1997, was Sorescu's farewell to life, a book of painfully quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks - and dictated to his wife - as he waited for death to take him. Suffering from hepatitis and cirrhosis, he died from a heart attack on 8 December 1996, in the same year that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Selected Poems (English and Romanian Edition)

Sorescu, Marin

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.

Talitha Cumi

David Constantine

Wonderful verse translations of medieval Latin lyrics.

Virgin and the Nightingale

Days

FIGES, Eva

Contemporary

Ireland & the English crisis

Tom Paulin

Classics

Complete poems

Crane, Hart

Quiet Gathering

SCOTT, DAVID

Life by Drowning: Selected Poems by Jeni Couzyn

This selection is a fine introduction to the work of a major international poet who writes of Africa, politics, feminism, and the birth experience in a work celebrated for its sensitivity and force.

Life by Drowning

Couzyn, Jeni

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