Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Bulletin E-Book

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

Seitenzahl: 64

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 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.SUMMER SELECTIONS April, May, June 2018 Choice: Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet) Recommendations: Loretta Collins Klobah, Ricantations (Peepal Tree) Alice Miller, Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion) Faisal Mohyuddin, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear) Tishani Doshi, Girls are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe) Commendations: Michael O'Neill, Return of the Gift (Arc) John Kinsella, The Wound (Arc) Translation: Evelyn Schlag, All Under One Roof, translated by Karen Leeder (Carcanet)

Leseprobe

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Wait a summerlong day for you.

– Vahni Capildeo

FOUNDED BY T S ELIOT 1953

SUMMER 2018 NO. 257

CONTENTS

CHOICE

Vahni Capildeo • Venus as a Bear • Carcanet

RECOMMENDATIONS

Loretta Collins Klobah • Ricantations • Peepal Tree Press

Tishani Doshi • Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods • Bloodaxe

Alice Miller • Nowhere Nearer • Pavilion Poetry

Faisal Mohyuddin • The Displaced Children of Displaced Children • Eyewear

SPECIAL COMMENDATION

John Kinsella • The Wound • Arc

Michael O’Neill • Return of the Gift • Arc

RECOMMENDED TRANSLATION

Evelyn Schlag • All Under One Roof • CarcanetTranslated by Karen Leeder

PAMPHLET CHOICE

Mary Jean Chan • A Hurry of English • ignitionpress

WILD CARD SELECTED BY ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Amy Key • Isn’t Forever • Bloodaxe

STUDENT POETRY PRIZE

GUEST REVIEWERS

NEWS & EVENTS

LISTINGS

CHOICERECOMMENDATIONSPECIAL COMMENDATIONSELECTORS

SANDEEP PARMAR& VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

TRANSLATION SELECTOR

GEORGE SZIRTES

PAMPHLET SELECTORS

A.B. JACKSON& DENISE SAUL

WILD CARD SELECTOR

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE O'NEILLNATHANIEL SPAINSAM BUCHAN-WATTSLEDBURY CRITICS & STUDENTS

EDITORIAL & DESIGN

ALICE KATE MULLEN

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Charter - 4 Choices, 16 Recommendation books & 4 bulletins (£170, £185, £215)

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Charter Education - 4 Choice books, 16 Recommendation books, 4 bulletins,

posters & teaching notes (£180, £195, £225)

Translation - 4 Recommended Translations & 4 bulletins (£70, £100, £118)

Student - 4 Choice books & 4 bulletins (£27, £47, £57)

Single copies £5

Cover Art Emma Holliday. 'Longsands Looking North'. www.emmaholliday.co.uk

Copyright Poetry Book Society and contributors. All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781999858926 ISSN 0551-1690

Poetry Book Society | Inpress Books | Churchill House | 12 Mosley Street | Newcastle upon Tyne | NE1 1DE | 0191 230 8100 | [email protected]

WWW.POETRYBOOKS.CO.UK

LETTER FROM THE PBS

We are delighted to announce Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear as the Summer Choice. The poet selectors were impressed with Capildeo’s “verbal and intellectual voracity”. The Recommendations take us to Puerto Rico with Loretta Collins Klobah’s collection, Ricantations, all about her “island home”, Tishani Doshi reveals the moment of inspiration for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, a moving exploration of rape and gender violence set alongside poems about coastal life on the Bay of Bengal. Faisal Mohyuddin explores intergenerational trauma in The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, “a deeply necessary, clear and moving rejoinder to the silence of all our histories.” Alice Miller is praised for her “genuinely unpredictable” works in Nowhere Nearer.

Michael O’Neill and John Kinsella receive Special Commendations for their collections, the selectors praise O’Neill for the faith in humanity which shines through his poetry and Kinsella for his call to change as a poet-activist. Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag’s All Under One Roof wins the tight fought contest for Recommended Translation, translated with a “lightness of touch” by Karen Leeder, both of whom will be reading at our Northern Poetry Symposium on 3rd May. Having heard Mary Jean Chan read at the Forward Prize, I am delighted she has been awarded the Pamphlet Choice with A Hurry of English. Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever is our first-ever Wild Card Choice and we look forward to seeking out future boundary-pushing collections.

We hope you enjoy reading the winning poems from the PBS Student Poetry Prize – we are delighted to be supporting emerging poets as well as celebrating more established poets in our selections. Thanks also to the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics, curated by PBS Book Selector Sandeep Parmar and our Newcastle University student contributors for their excellent guest reviews in this issue.

We look forward to launching the Summer Bulletin at our Northern Poetry Symposium with NCLA and Poettrios at Sage Gateshead on the 3rd May, as part of the Newcastle Poetry Festival. We’re also delighted to feature this cover artwork from the Festival's Painter-in-Residence, Emma Holliday. Finally, we hope to see you at our PBS Summer Showcase at the Southbank on 25th July, featuring Sandeep Parmar, Amy Key, Mary Jean Chan and our student prize winner Jay G. Ying. Visit our website or subscribe to Alice’s newsletters for more details.

- Sophie O’Neill, PBS and Inpress Director

PBS CHOICE: VAHNI CAPILDEO

Vahni Capildeo works with multilingualism, place and memory. Their books include Venus as a Bear (Carcanet, 2018), Measures of Expatriation (Forward Poetry Prizes Best Collection, 2016) and Utter (Peepal Tree Press, 2013). Capildeo served as the Chair of the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize 2018 (Bocas Litfest, Trinidad & Tobago). They are a contributing advisor to Blackbox Manifold. Collaborations include intersemiotic translation with Chris McCabe for Zoë Skoulding’s AHRC-funded ‘Expanded Translation’ (University of Bangor), and feminist theatre with Sophie Seita’s collective, ‘Gorgonia’. They are the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds.

VENUS AS A BEAR

CARCANET | £9.99 | PBS PRICE £7.50– PBS CHOICE, SUMMER 2018

Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear begins with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein’s cubist-inspired poems from Tender Buttons. In Stein’s ‘A Piece of Coffee’, Capildeo concludes: “supposing that there was no astonishment, is it not necessary to mingle astonishment.” To take the object as itself, to return the thing to its referents, its many particulars, is partly also the poet’s project here. Thus Capildeo liberates subjects from their field of language and discourse. This especially occurs with linguistic ingenuity in the book’s sections entitled ‘Creatures’, ‘Shameless Acts of Ekphrasis’ and, finally, in ‘Some Things’, where Capildeo transforms moss into language itself: resistant, absorbing, ageless. Capildeo denies the lyrical fallacy of anthropomorphism, decentres the human eye for another, one that survives in abrupt bursts of Steinian syntax:

Don’t slip. Grab the balustrade. Don’t slip. She’s broken her arm. Don’t scrape

too much off. It’s beautiful. Bleach it all off. It’s a risk. Coexist. Moss exists.

And, of course, Capildeo is mindful that objects are not apolitical, to be held at arm’s length or fetishized. Stein’s famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose”– an attempt to defamiliarize the symbol with its sign – is reworked in ‘Heirloom Rose, for Maya’:

[…] the reddest rose nonetheless a blonde princess, dangerous, dangerous to me, rose of heritable identity, not flaming shedding transgressing parterres and pathways not rose phénix rose curieuse but emblem of empire, imperial as natural, pressing away the senses’ write/right to come to the rose as is – you could even make wars under its banner, york or lancaster, roses, rose is, rose isn’t, sorry Gertrude Stein, rose exceeds/is in excess of no I mean is exceeded by connotations, with heirloom, of ‘rose’.

Here the heirloom rose, prized for its pure origins, is the bloodiest perennial in the imperial garden. With characteristic verbal and intellectual voracity, Capildeo remakes the seen world for us and, in doing so, astonishes.

- Sandeep Parmar, PBS Selector

VAHNI CAPILDEO

The working title for Venus as a Bear was Some Things, and the inspiration for the book was exactly that. This is a book of encounters with it-ness; not images, stories or arguments. The poems are (for me) unusually small and poem-looking. Offering spaces of stillness, dwelling with rather than on their subjects, perhaps they suggest ways for readers to recollect and explore emotionally what it’s like to be, simply, in the presence of vibrant unknowability.