Sasha Dugdale

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale's fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. 'Joy' is a monologue in the voice of William Blake's wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it 'an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing'. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto 'silent' dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the 'maligned and misaligned'.

Deborah de Kock

Scorched Glass

Helen Constantine

David Constantine

Centres of Cataclysm covers the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the UK's most innovative and prestigious poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has published some of the first translations of the twentieth century's most significant poets, among them Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai, Marina Tsvetaeva and Miroslav Holub. MPT was intended, in Ted Hughes's words, as an 'airport for incoming translations', so they might find more permanent residence in English-language poetry. This celebratory and inspiring anthology, Centres of Cataclysm, includes excellent and various poems from the MPT archive together with responses to those poems by English-language poets and writers. Included here also are letters concerning the magazine's history as well as short essays on the art of translating poetry.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation

Centres of Cataclysm

Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.

Deformations

In Red House, her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry. Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in Red House proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.

Red House

MPT's Spring Issue Strange Tracks features a focus on new Dutch poetry: new work by Toon Tellegen, Ester Naomi Perquin and Menno Wigman and an interview with Tellegen about his prize-winning collection Raptors. Poems by Zhang Zao, Valerie Rouzeau, versions of riddles and poems from The Exeter Book and more make up the first issue of the new look MP

Strange Tracks

Modern Poetry in Translation 4/01

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the 2018 Bolshaya Kniga Award Winner of the 2019 NOS Literature PrizeAn exciting contemporary Russian writer explores terra incognita: the still-living margins of history.With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms--essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents--Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities, offering an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.Praise for In Memory of Memory:"A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn't put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid American fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia." --Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, finalist for the Pulizter Prize for Fiction"There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with." --Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova's profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history." --Esther Kinsky, author of Grove"A book to plunge into. 'Everyone else's ancestors had taken part in history' writes Stepanova; building itself via accumulation, these chapters become an important testimony to the cultural and political lives of the people held beneath the surface of the tides of history" --Andrew McMillan, author of Playtime

In Memory of Memory

Roddy Lumsden

The Best British Poetry 2012 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem. An indispensable guide to British poetry and a must-have purchase for anyone interested in the art, from newcomers to the most experienced professional and all creative writing students working in English.

Sasha Dugdale

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