The Books of Catullus is a new translation of the Roman poet Catullus which reinvents and reimagines his poetry for the contemporary age. It is the first version to divide Catullus’s complete works into the three ‘books’ believed by many scholars to be how the text was originally received in the Late Republic (c.60 B.C.). The length of each ‘book,’ or grouping correlates to the usual length of a single piece of papyrus from that period. These ‘books’ are gatherings of poems in different metres, and concentrate on various themes, including love, sex, friendship and marriage with some poems written in elegiac couplets.

The Books of Catullus (Carcanet Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Carcanet Classics

Famed for his singular prose style as much as for his controversial aestheticist principles, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the great essayists in a century of great essayistic writing. His first book, 
 Studies in the History of the Renaissance—one of the most original and influential texts of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement—was described by Arthur Symons as "the most beautiful book of prose in our literature," and his later work moved Vernon Lee to call him "the natural exponent of the highest aesthetic doctrine." 
Selected Essays is a generous gathering of Pater’s essays on literature, art, history, philosophy and mythology—all of them, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "delicately wrought works of art." The selection is accompanied by Alex Wong’s critical and biographical introduction and rich explanatory notes.

Selected Essays

Pater, Walter Horatio

Essays & Correspondence

Selected Poems (Carcanet Classics)

Heath-Stubbs, John

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation.
Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today’s reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been blessed by posterity. Yet at their best his poems match any of the period. They are poems of love, of desire, of insecurity and obsession: of struggle, too, as they resist the Augustan Empire’s attempts to turn its love poets into propagandists. The result is a highly refined irony, a subtlety of tone and humour that is unique. Patrick Worsnip’s translations bring out Propertius’ playfulness and his psychological acuity, reinstating his poems at the heart of Latin literature’s golden age.

Poems (Carcanet Classics)

Propertius, Sextus

History & Criticism

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. "Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination," she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet Classics)

Elson, Rebecca

Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations , first published in 1886, changed the language of poetry. In John Ashbery the book has a translator whose virtuosic originality brings Rimbaud's visions alive. The 'crystalline jumble' of Illuminations , Ashbery writes, is still emitting pulses of energy. 'If we are absolutely modern - and we are - it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be.' Ashbery relays the kaleidoscopic dazzle of the original, a Splendide Hotel 'built amid the tangled heap of ice floes and the polar night', where the Witch 'will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know'.

Illuminations

Arthur Rimbaud

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: ‘He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’ Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw ‘the world as event... He is fascinated—with his eyes open: a lucid fascination—by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.’ Tomlinson’s take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of ‘sensuous cerebration’ as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.

Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems (Carcanet Classics)

TOMLINSON, Charles

<div>To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was 'shrieking, dumb, defiled' constantly test a vision of 'faith, life, virtue in the sun'. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.</div>

BLUNDEN, Edmund

<div>Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.</div>

Prose

BONNEFOY, Yves

Collected Poems Volume II: 1939-1962

William Carlos Williams

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Books by Carcanet Classics

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The Books of Catullus (Carcanet Classics)

Selected Essays

Selected Poems (Carcanet Classics)

Poems (Carcanet Classics)

A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet Classics)

Illuminations

Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems (Carcanet Classics)

Selected Poems (Carcanet Classics)

Prose

Collected Poems Volume II: 1939-1962