In today's blogpost, some of our authors share the titles they're most excited about for the coming year. Over time, we'll add more picks from the catalogue, eventually forming a useful forum for sharing thoughts about this year's exciting Carcanet list. We hope you enjoy reading it - and if you have any favourites, why not let us know in the comments? We always like to hear from you.
Stephen Burt, Harvard Professor of English and contributor to the 1999 anthology, New Poetries II, picks forthcoming collections by Jane Yeh (whose first collection, Marabou, won acclaim in 2005) and by the multi-award-winning Robert Minhinnick.
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"I couldn't be happier to see that Jane Yeh's second book is on its way: I've treasured the neo-Baroqueness, the wry secret-keeping, the scene-setting and the scene-stealing, of her first collection for many years now.
I'm also excited about the chance to get caught up - and to get other readers, especially outside the UK, caught up at last - with Robert Minhinnick, whose last decade-plus of poems about beaches and war zones, plant life and peregrinations, chemical elements and historical bafflements (not to mention cerements), use fragmentation, accretion and a kind of self-dispossessing wild symbolism to do something almost scarily new."
Robert Minhinnick's New and Selected Poems will be published in June.
I'm also excited about the chance to get caught up - and to get other readers, especially outside the UK, caught up at last - with Robert Minhinnick, whose last decade-plus of poems about beaches and war zones, plant life and peregrinations, chemical elements and historical bafflements (not to mention cerements), use fragmentation, accretion and a kind of self-dispossessing wild symbolism to do something almost scarily new."
Robert Minhinnick's New and Selected Poems will be published in June.
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Henry King (left), contributor to the bestselling New Poetries V anthology (Carcanet, 2011) is intrigued by the poetry of David Herd, whose new book is published in July.
"In 2005, at the end of a brief but bold editorship (with Robert Potts) of Poetry Review, David Herd published his first collection, Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir, the title of which was as much an homage to Frank O’Hara as to the eponymous Peter. All Just seems to promise greater seriousness – the civic dream of comprehensive justice – while acknowledging the danger that 'we are all just – just circulating, sauntering from here to here'. His recent essay (in PN Review 197) on 'Poetry and Voice: The Urge to Nowhere' gave tantalising hints of how poetry might engage with recent critical theory on place, the state, and stateless persons; I am excited to see how All Just will develop these possibilities."Henry King's poems have appeared in New Walk magazine and New Poetries V. He is writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow, and blogs at henrymking.blogspot.com.
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Alison Brackenbury (right), author of Singing in the Dark says:
"I look forward eagerly to Elizabeth's Jennings's Collected Poems, to be published in March. She is a poet of extraordinary authority and technical assurance, who deserves to be even better known. I hope to discover -and re-discover - memorable poems in this new Collected."
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. She has published several Carcanet collections and her next book, Then, will be released in 2013. Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and her collection 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (2008): 'A quiet lyricism and delight' (the Guardian).
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Rory Waterman (left), contributor to the bestselling New Poetries V anthology (Carcanet, 2011) and editor of New Walk recommends these two collections:
Gareth Reeves's poetry is erudite but accessible and often demotic, frequently emotive and sappy but never brash. His is a poetry of ideas and tensions. A new book from him is rare enough to be an event. That this book (To Hell With Paradise: New and Selected Poems, available in August) apparently pairs the best work from his previous collections with a selection of his lively and passionate recent pieces about Shostakovich (but also about all of us), 'Nuncle Music', makes it all the more alluring.
'Form need not be a constraint. It is a partner to spar with.' So writes Julith Jedamus in the prefatory statement to her poems in New Poetries V, and I couldn't agree more. But rarely have I read a poet with such feeling for what can be achieved by baiting and courting rhyme, metres and other formal 'constraints'. Rarely have I read such lithe, carefully understated and, dare I say, musical poems about real things that really matter as her pieces in that book. So naturally I expect The Swerve (available in May) to be one of the highlights of 2012, and many of its poems to make permanent impressions on me.
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast, grew up mostly in rural Lincolnshire, and currently lives in Bristol. His poems have appeared in Stand, Agenda, PN Review, The Bow-Wow Shop and various other publications, and he co-edits New Walk Magazine from the University of Leicester.
Watch this space for more recommendations. In the meantime, why not let us know which 2012 titles you're excited about? Share your thoughts in the comments below.