Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Bulletin E-Book

• Herausgeber: Poetry Book Society
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 55

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Bulletin features a wide range of exciting new poetry publications, reviewed by expert poet selectors Sandeep Parmar, Vidyan Ravinthiran, George Szirtes, AB Jackson, Degna Stone and Anthony Anaxagorou.AUTUMN SELECTIONSJuly, Aug, Sept 2019Choice: Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Picador)Recommendations: Mary Jean Chan, Flèche (Faber)Peter Sirr, The Gravity Wave (Gallery)Seni Seneviratne, Unknown Soldier (Peepal Tree)Anthony Anaxagorou, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins)Commendation: Carmen Bugan, Lilies from America – New & Selected (Shearsman)Wild Card: Dunya Mikhail, In Her Feminine Sign (Carcanet Press)Translation: Manuel Forcano, Maps of Desire (Arc)

Leseprobe

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The people of my country believe

We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.

- Jericho Brown

FOUNDED BY T S ELIOT 1953

AUTUMN 2019 NO. 262

CONTENTS

CHOICE

Jericho Brown • The Tradition • Picador

RECOMMENDATIONS

Anthony Anaxagorou • After the Formalities • Penned in the Margins

Mary Jean Chan • Flèche • Faber

Seni Seneviratne • Unknown Soldier • Peepal Tree Press

Peter Sirr • The Gravity Wave • The Gallery Press

SPECIAL COMMENDATION

Carmen Bugan • Lilies from America: New & Selected Poems • Shearsman

RECOMMENDED TRANSLATION

Manuel Forcano • Maps of Desire • Translated by Anna Crowe • Arc Publications

PAMPHLET CHOICE

Scott McKendry • Curfuffle • The Lifeboat

WILD CARD

Dunya Mikhail • In Her Feminine Sign • Carcanet Press

REVIEWS

LISTINGS

CHOICE SELECTORSRECOMMENDATIONSPECIAL COMMENDATION

SANDEEP PARMAR& VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

TRANSLATION SELECTOR

GEORGE SZIRTES

PAMPHLET SELECTORS

A.B. JACKSON& DEGNA STONE

WILD CARD SELECTOR

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE O'NEILLNATHANIEL SPAINOISIN POWERJULIA McGEE-RUSSELL

EDITORIAL & DESIGN

ALICE KATE MULLEN

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ISBN 9781913129095 ISSN 0551-1690

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LETTER FROM THE PBS

“I want my poems to make you do the crying that leads to real thinking”

- Jericho Brown

The selected poets this season are truly international and the publications as a collection are wonderfully thought-provoking and full of impact. The poets lead us through ideas of race, identity, sexuality, fathers, alienation, and even the physics of spacetime. Our Charter members, who receive the PBS Choice and all four Recommendations, are in for a real treat! I really hope you enjoy this quarter’s books and the selectors’ commentaries as much as we have.

Do you write poetry as well as read it? We are delighted to announce that we have teamed up once again with Mslexia, to bring you the Women’s Poetry and Pamphlet Prizes. Please do encourage any women you know to enter. You can follow our social media for regular writing inspiration and film interviews with poets including last year’s prize winner, Penny Boxall. We look forward to reading your submissions.

We’re also partnering with the Forward Prizes to offer book clubs across the country a huge discount on all ten shortlisted poetry books, ahead of the award ceremony at the Southbank Centre on the 20th of October. The Forward Prizes Book Club Bundle is only £60 (plus shipping) for PBS Members and includes invaluable reading notes, created by the Forward Prizes. If you run a book group or would like to set one up with other PBS members, email [email protected] for more information.

And finally, by popular demand, we now offer a recurring payment option, so your membership can automatically renew annually! Take a look at the enclosed order form or on our website to find out more and opt into auto renewals in the future.

SOPHIE O’NEILLPBS & INPRESS DIRECTOR

PBS CHOICE: JERICHO BROWN

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

THE TRADITION

PICADOR | £10.99 | PBS PRICE £8.25– PBS CHOICE, AUTUMN 2019

Jericho Brown is a veteran of lyrically graceful and emotionally powerful poetry. His latest collection, The Tradition, is no exception. Brown’s work sometimes revolves around conceptions of the heroic and epic, taking mythology or its social patterns in order to interrogate whiteness and racial violence. In ‘Hero’ he writes “Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. / Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.” Operating between an impersonal plural and the specificities of the flesh, the poem exalts the lyric self to a kind of immortality, one of the preoccupations of a collection that concerns itself with death, divinity, the violent legacy of slavery and the vulnerabilities of the body.

In ‘Riddle’, a poem about the death of Emmett Till, an African-American teenager whose lynched and mutilated body in an open casket exposed American viewers to the brutality of racism, the poem’s subject “we” is constructed out of a wilful aversion to responsibility. This collective subject cannot appropriate or make use of Till’s mother’s grief – it cannot be colonised, owned, or sold. This dilemma is laid bare by the lines:

              […] Shhh. We

Can’t take that sound. What is

A mother wailing? We do not

Recognize music until we can

Sell it. We sell what cannot be

Bought. We buy silence. Let us

Help you. How much does it cost

To hold your breath underwater?

Wait. Wait. What are we? What?

What on Earth are we? What?

The rhythms of Brown’s work, its brevity a kind of incantation, allows for just this kind of inquiry to the reader. Very often there is hope and a celebratory imagining bound tightly with resistance and resilience. The book’s third section links mortality (especially via HIV) and desire with a transcendent longing linked to faith but also sexuality. For Brown, the tradition running throughout these poems is a formal connection to black American writers. But it is also an unacknowledged lineage of embodiment, one that draws together the multiplicities of the self and offers readers a space to question their own becoming.

- Sandeep Parmar, PBS Selector