Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Translated by Christopher Middleton. Although he received little recognition during his lifetime, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) has come to be considered one of Europe's greatest poets. His visionary work--at once local and cosmic--has influenced such figures as Rilke, Heidegger, Celan, and Cixous. This bilingual volume contains translations of thirty-one poems and fourteen letters, as well as an Introduction, Notes, and commentary by the highly regarded poet and translator Christopher Middleton. "This is an extraordinarily rich and powerful selected assemblage of Hölderlin's writings--poems and also letters--bilingual and translated with intense inwardness, situated by accompanying commentary and discussion in both the historical contingency of the poet's Lebenswelt and at the same time in his passional spirit-thinking as it evolves and informs his poetical experiments. There have been many previous versions into English of the most celebrated of these poems, but these here come unmistakably from the imaginative intelligence of another strenuously original poet, at exceedingly close connection with Hölderlin's wrestle with language, its upward reach into the fleeting semi-permanence of the divine presences and its probing downwards into the Germanistic roots of a language-culture at this time in historical and political turbulence. Middleton's full and thorough-going Introduction pre-empts earlier (and later) translation dalliance with spirit-fancy by his rigorous and persistent precision."--J.H. Prynne

Friedrich Höderlin: Selected Poems and Letters

Literature & Fiction

HÖLDERLIN, Friedrich

Essays & Correspondence

The Last Books

The five essays printed here are excerpted from Part I of PRESENT CONTINUOUS, a book of prose written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London. The essays in the present volume were written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Nearly two years on, following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from pandemic to endemic, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope they provide some sort of record, not just of where 'we' were in 2020, but where 'we' are?--?or might be?--?now. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. African & African American Studies.

Five Essays from PRESENT CONTINUOUS

Grundy, David

And so, beginning in September of 2020, and carrying on, with occasional interruptions and dilations, until the next April, we read from the first page of J.H. Prynne's PARKLAND to the last. After that first pass through the nineteen sections, we gathered all the emails and printed them out. In their raw form they told the story of an evolving, dialogic critical encounter, written not from the omniscient vantage of the reader who has got to the last page, but in real time and close to the ground--each linguistic event, as we encountered it, blocking our view of the pages ahead. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Essay. Literary Criticism.

The Parkland Mysteries

Kotin, Joshua

Dolven, Jeff

Poetry. "The pastoral has always been a civic genre: shepherds' songs written by city workers dreaming of release, of timely coincidence between feeling and nature. In WOOD CIRCLE, one of Wilkinson's most powerful poetic books, the green thought in a green shade perishes--wildfire destroys the canopy, the Calais jungle is cleared by immigration police. The pathetic fallacy is now literal, dawn chorus imitating car alarms. And yet, each line of this astonishing collection offers a new analysis of the earth's fever dreams. If 'None had loved enough what / they must find by losing,' in this book's moratorium we can find time to remember what we never loved enough. These poems sing for mortal creatures, some human, and collect their leavings: skin, bees, infants, fruits, tires. Seared by the world and everything in it, Wilkinson's poems are radiant, damaging, a consuming memorial fire."--Andrea Brady "Wilkinson's . . . distortions of syntax and vocabulary continue to jolt readers into an awareness of how slick and commodified the language of most self-expression has become in what Adorno called an 'administered world'. . . . Wood Circle balances a delicate lyrical sensibility with an acute awareness of the responsibilities that the poet, as denizen of late capitalism, cannot escape through a vacation in the woods." --Hyperallergic

Wood Circle

WILKINSON, John

Poetry

Douglas Oliver (1937-2000) and J. H. Prynne (b.?1936) are two of the most original and ambitious poets of the contemporary era. Eschewing the conservativism of mainstream postwar British verse and embracing influences from America and Europe, each developed their craft through continuous correspondence and exchange as part of the febrile scene of poetical community and contestation that emerged in Cambridge in the 1960s. Their works over the following decades exhibit frequent shifts in form and style, from Prynneís radical transformation and dispersal of the lyric tradition to Oliver's adaptation of dream visions and medieval-inspired verse satires. Their letters are a record of both the high stakes and playful experiments that constitute the writing lives of two singular poets determined not just to engage with modern political and social life during decades of crisis and upheaval, but to contribute through the circulation and publication of poetry to what Oliver calls "a community of political ethic." Over the course of more than thirty years of friendship and mutual appreciation, the motivations for, and consequences of, their poems are constantly worked through, tested out, evaluated, and contradicted, always with a view to what the poetry means for the other, for the poetical communities they inhabit, and for the life of poetry itself. This volume collects for the first time the majority of Oliver and Prynne's correspondence, allowing new insights into the literary, political, and historical contexts of their lives and writing. An introduction, notes, and appendices provide a scholarly apparatus to situate Oliver and Prynne among the poets and publishers with whom they worked and socialized, and to identify and expand upon their frequent references to an enormous range of source material and reading matter. 
"The correspondence between J. H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver is gripping and illuminating, brilliantly edited and completely absorbing. Two great poetic intelligences respond to each otherís work and to the society around them, thinking through the issues at stake in their poetic practice, their differences in approach, the different worlds they inhabit, their shared commitment to writing poetry and their admiration of each otherís work. The letters, complex as their matter can be, repay repeated reading; taken together, over a period of 33 years, they chart the context and creation of some of the most significant work in late twentieth-century poetry. This is an utterly engaging volume, and should be read by anybody interested in poetry and its place in the contemporary world."--Ian Patterson 
"For writers who welcome each other as peers, the exchange of letters is the spontaneous moment of exposure, the drawing out of selves. It is thinking in mutuality. In this thoughtfully edited and carefully, even beautifully, presented correspondence between Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, two of the preeminent poets of the 'British Poetry Revival' of the post-World War II generations, we witness two writers of immense gifts thinking with each other, coming alive to thought and, ultimately, a shared world or community of wish. There is life, there is death; there is grief, there is anger--and love--but always there is a seeking, an attempt to arrive at a language for our worlds. Henceforth, one cannot imagine reading the work of either Oliver or Prynne without this correspondence and all that it offers in openings onto what Oliver himself saw as 'the poet's full performance [which] is the whole life's work.' It is a glimpse into an athanor of poetic creation."--Michael Stone-Richards 
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Poetics.

The Letters of Douglas Oliver and J. H. Prynne, 1967-2000

Biographies & Memoirs

Prynne, J.H.

Oliver, Douglas

Arts & Literature

Book 9789491780196

Keston Sutherland

Poetry. SCHERZOS BENJYOSOS is a set of four poems, scherzos in prosimetrical blocks, a comical, wild, and delirious sifting through the carnage of the financial crash, the dreamscapes of capitalist infancy, histories of sadism and persecution, the fetish bars of canonical literature, and the psychoanalysis of grass. The book also includes "Sinking Feeling," Sutherland's long poem from 2017, described by J.&thinsp;H. Prynne as "breathtakingly lovely, and desperate, racked with desire to become truthful love."

Scherzos Benjyosos

Sutherland, Keston

What's history? Dante Aligheri ensconced Joachim of Fiore, di spirito profetico dotato, in the heaven of the wise (Paradiso XII) as testament to the earlier writer's visionary exegesis of John's Apocalypse, the scripture's last book, from which the Calabrian abbot exegeted a pictorial history of the world's successive stages, culminating in the age of the Holy Spirit. David Brazil's FIGURAE collects the first eight fascicles of a projected sequence of twenty-two into a singular meditation on form, time, hope, faith, and song. We grow out of the Bible: Paul Celan. Come and see. Poetry.

figurae

Brazil, David

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