Bøger udgivet af WAKE FOREST UNIV PR

"When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief, and the necessity of the unreal"--

"For half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls 'his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects'. His latest book is a quest, through origin and migration, South America to the North of Ireland, Khao I Dang refugee camp to Glasnevin graveyard, for a lost maternal ground"--

"Poems in Sara Berkeley's newest collection (published previously in Ireland as The Last Cold Day) are alert to climate threat, conjuring memories of fires sending up "their smoky prayers" and "the ice [that] sings its long last song, / a requiem." In Some of the Things I've Seen, Berkeley charts a move across America, from California to New York's Hudson Valley, from one climate to four seasons, navigating new love and marriage, as well as her life in the frontlines of the pandemic as a Hospice nurse, the lessons of the dying and the life that goes on"--

"Michael Longley's new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas--'for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.' The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings, and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in 'Totem, ' which represents the book itself as 'a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures.' 'Slain birds' exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book's cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is 'the merlin we cannot see.' Longley's soul-landscape seems increasingly haunted by death, as he revisits the Great War, the Holocaust, and Homeric bloodshed, with their implied counterparts today. Yet his microcosmic Carrigskeewaun remains a precarious 'home' for the human family. It engenders 'Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry.' Among Longley's images for poetry are crafts that conserve or recycle natural materials--carving, silversmithing, woodturning, embroidery--suggesting the versatility with which he remakes his own art." --

This new selection of poems by Paula Meehan resonates with integrity and sympathy. The poet moves from the feminist to the ecological, from the grittier urban spaces of the north side of center-city Dublin to the suburban spaces outside, never leaving the former behind while weaving the gathering themes in a compassionate web. Meehan writes evocatively about gender and class, never losing sight of the lyric purpose of her poems. She blends the comic and tragic as many Irish writers before her have done. In Meehan's poetry, particularly her most recent volumes, nature has historical and personal significance, but it also functions on its own terms. Meehan endeavors to examine the places, public and private, where nature and culture meet. At this intersection she begins to make sense of the suffering of innocents and the powerless, to chart avenues toward liberation, and to salve their psychological and physical wounds by finding poetry in the disappearance and reappearance of the natural world.

"'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.'" So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book, Angel Hill . Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters--Matisse, Bonnard--imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: "We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year." The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date, too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots "Hochmagandy." Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun." --Provided by publisher.

"Alan Gillis's The Readiness is a volume that moves fluently among various modes of poetic expression: the lyric, one of his most beautiful and assured; the gritty, one of his most familiar; and the comic, one of his most form-splitting. He can be darkly profound and lovingly comic, bitingly indicative, and compassionately pained. Gillis writes poems that measure our cultural morass with the love, pity, and sarcasm that it deserves. The volume is set in the terms Hamlet finally comes to at the end of the play: "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow ... the readiness is all." Gillis concludes: So make sure you're up to speed when, at sunset or dawn, worms vex the seed, crows shadow the corn. The shadowy threats that appear throughout the volume are met in "Late Spring" by how the beauty of "a green / world moves through // us in slow motion." They are also answered by the "quake" of recognition in a poem like "The Dote" that leaves the poet's "mind in the air." Yet, the darkness remains. We readers must also be ready, and, as the poet insists, we "know this, / the oncoming day, is nothing / but the night's brief parenthesis." -- provided by publisher.

The Mother House is rich with images of orphans, exiles, migrants, decay, destruction, famine, disaster, the cloistered, the drowned, the marginalized, as well as disappearance and memory, music and loss. The poems speak of histories, in Ireland and elsewhere, as allegories of our age. Yet, the poetic is not offered as a salvo or a salve, for as the poet questions, "We made the long journey // to deliver the gesture, but who has noticed us?" Ní Chuilleanain nevertheless proves that when the mirror is held at the right angle, the past can shed a telling light upon the present, observing with great acumen, "it was like history, held there / in view of another lifetime." In this remarkable volume, art and literature reflect human suffering and survival across many frontiers.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's Selected Poems gathers poems from six collections of poetry, from Acts and Monuments (1972) to The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), and proves that she is one of the major poets in Ireland. While her numerous images of mythical figures, travelers, pilgrims, and women--especially of the veiled subject of the nun--remind us of our deepest inner sanctum, with its litany of spiritual truths, human fears and needs, these images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic as new metaphors for human experiences and emotions. Ní Chuilleanáin allows those who have been silenced in history to surface in art as surreal but living presences.

In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer's pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet's vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: "Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture--there!--in a patch of / sunlight. ... They could be us, out for a walk." Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us--"Look! ... There!"--that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.

The Unfixed Horizon: New Selected Poems traces Medbh McGuckian's remarkable trajectory through fourteen volumes published between 1982 and 2013, amply displaying her bewitching, opulent imagination. A comprehensive introduction by editors Borbala Farago and Michaela Schrage-Fruh offers a valuable overview and rare insight into the work and the myriad influencesboth private and publicof this mysterious poet. Their selection perceptively charts the history through which the poet has lived. McGuckian's early poems, the editors point out, view Belfast's sectarian violence through the lens of the female body and domestic imagery, while her political engagement later becomes more direct. McGuckian's poems are "firmly rooted in Northern Irish soil," yet encompass a world of interests erotic and maternal, spiritual and sensuous, private and political. Readers open to her enigmatic syntactical structures, wide-angled metaphors, and metamorphic images multiplying in dream-like fashion will be richly rewarded.

"First published by Faber and Faber Limited, London"--Title page verso.

Philippe Jaccottet is one of a group of poets who turned away from the Surrealists' sometimes abstruse experiments with form in favor of a muted lyrical expression born of a quasi-fraternal bonding with the wonder of earth, light, water, sky. This lyricism is steeped in an ambiguous sense of our planet's vulnerability in this nuclear age. Jaccottet's work has now developed steadily over nearly four decades as Derek Mahon points out in his introductory essay. In themes and form it will not seem alien to English language readers, yet Jaccottet's voice is his own. The sensuous modulations of imagery, harmony, and mood are strangely moving and haunt the imagination.

Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson's third book of poetry, weaves together in a carefully sequenced volume prose pieces, long poems, lyrics, and haiku. His subjects include the permeable boundaries of Belfast neighborhoods, of memory, of public and private fear, and, indeed, of the forms of language and art. Carson finds unexpected uses--constructive and destructive--of the building rubble of Belfast history. Rich in lore of place, these innovative and vividly fresh poems draw deeply on traditions--oral, local, and literary.