February's theme is a little broader: Memory and Imagination. This month, we delve deep into the Carcanet backlist to find some classic treasures, and handpick some of the most engaing new books available. Our online promotion is offering a way into some of our thought-provoking and well-loved titles which you might not necessarily think about together, but which nevertheless indulge, embody or explore common themes: history, nostalgia and memory - sometimes with a few tricks of imagination mixed in. From First World War fiction to the poetry of personal memory; from thoughts of a long-since-lost Baghdad, to a grandmother in South Africa, to an undergraduate's adventures in Cambridge, this month's selection celebrates all that is exciting, enlightening and mysterious about the past.
In what was her first collection of new poems for four years, Eavan Boland's Outside History (1991) brings together womanhood and nationhood in ways perhaps previously unexplored by Irish literary history. This is a great book in which to discover the 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' of Boland's work so loved by the LRB.
Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi – and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.
Parade's End is the First World War masterpiece by the great twentieth century writer, Ford Madox Ford. For the first time, the four novels that make up Parade’s End are published in fully annotated editions, with authoritative corrected texts, edited by a leading Ford expert.What makes these editions even more exciting is the news of a brand new adaptation of Parade's End by world-renowned playwright Tom Stoppard, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the leading role. You can get 20% off each of the four volumes in this month's sale.
Volume III, A Man Could Stand Up, brings Ford’s characters to the 'crack across the table of History', across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of society at a climactic moment. Last Post, the fourth and final volume, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Ford explores the tensions between his characters in a changing world, haunted by the experience of war, facing an insecure future for themselves and for England.
In Heart's Wings & Other Stories - which gathers twenty-three stories written over the past forty years - Gabriel Josipovici’s tales play hide and seek with the reader. Whether they take place in a seedy London nightclub in the sixties, in a brothel in Hamburg during the First World War, or in the fevered world of Shakespeare’s mind as he writes Twelfth Night... one thing is certain: you are never quite where you think you are and what is happening is never quite what you think is happening. No matter how short the story – and many are no more than two or three pages long – by the time you have finished reading you will have travelled an unimaginable distance, and will never be quite the same again.
Born in Baghdad in 1945, now living in London, Fawzi Karim is one of the most compelling voices of the exiled generation of Iraqi writers. In the first collection of his poetry to appear in English, his long sequence ‘Plague Lands’ is an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile, haunted by the deep history of an ancient civilisation. Memories of Baghdad’s smoke-filled cafés, its alleys and mulberry-shaded squares, ‘the tang of tea, of coffee beans…arak, napthalene, damp straw mats’, are recalled with painful intensity. Karim’s defiant humanity, rejecting dogma and polemic, makes him a necessary poet for fractured times.
Child combines a generous collation of poems from Khalvati’s five Carcanet volumes with previously uncollected sequences. She orders her work autobiographically, telling the stories of her life in four sections: childhood and early adulthood; motherhood; meditations on light; and love and art, circling back to childhood in her celebrated final sequence, 'The Meanest Flower'. The figure of the child stands at the centre of the book, appearing in many guises: the poet as a schoolgirl on the Isle of Wight, or in half-remembered later years living with her grandmother in Tehran; her two children, now grown up; children in art; and an enduring sense of oneself as a child that is never left behind.
Mervyn Morris is one of the most distinctive West Indian poets, his work characterised by economy, wit and humane seriousness. He makes elegant use of Jamaica's linguistic range, with poems in international standard English, Jamaican Creole and mixtures in between. These variations inflect his treatment of love, lust, time, memory, death, religion, politics, commitment, identity, history, art and other concerns. His poems frequently suggest the tension inherent in moments of choice.
I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems continues the poet's exploration of self and society, 'reality' and the imagination. It brings together poems from three of Mervyn Morris's previous collections, Shadowboxing, The Pond and Examination Centre, alongside new work.
Neil Powell’s seventh Carcanet collection delves into the self and examines its constituent parts. His poems — oblique, gleeful, pensive — confront family history, looking closely at the inner workings of memory and mind, conversing with the mysterious and finding common ground in surprising moments of discovery.
Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2002) explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age shaped by the Suez crisis and the Cold War. The barbarities of the twentieth century haunt the shadows; there is comfort in the graces of domestic life, in friendships and long memories, in cats and gardens and eccentricities. A sequence of poems honours the life of a scholarly father-in-law who fought in the Great War. In a parallel autobiographical sequence, 'Playtime in a Cold City', three undergraduate years in the 1950s become a touchstone for a lost pastoral, before the 'fields of youth' fade to memory, 'the lit faces of dead friends, / laughing'.
Generous, witty and shrewd, Borrowed Landscapes affirms Scupham's belief that when a 'murderous crew' of sorcerer's apprentices 'turn is to was', there is 'only a pen to turn was to is'.
And finally...
Have you read the latest issue of PN Review? Issue 203 features poems by the Pulitzer Prize-winning John Ashbery, as well as Diana Bridge, Bill Coyle, Alistair Elliot, Vona Groarke, Emily Grosholz, Daryl Hine, Gabriel Levin, Antonio Machado, Adam Nasady, Zoe Skoulding, Ahren Warner, Ian Wedde and Clive Wilmer. Plus Marjorie Perloff refutes the 'authentic voice'; Frederic Raphael reads the riots; Evan Jones gets Marius Kociejowski talking; Henry King has the multi-award-winning Christopher Middleton for breakfast; and Manchester staple Jeffrey Wainwright goes down under with Robert Gray. Click here to order a copy of this issue, or click here to subscribe.We hope you enjoy these titles: if you'd like to know more about them or read an excerpt, just click on the links provided. And don't forget, there's free UK postage and packing on all our titles when ordered from www.carcanet.co.uk.