Original Poetry
18/03/2010 978 0 571 254736 96pp _
Hardback £12.99 _ _
UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada _ _
White Egrets
Paperback £9.99 _ _
World English Language _ _ _
Original Poetry
Valerio Magrelli translated by Jamie McKendrick
In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects – the Caribbean’s complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time’s cunning passages, the poet’s place in all of this — with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott’s cadence carries from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.
A Sea-Change With a change of government the permanent cobalt, the promises we take with a pinch of salt, with a change of government the permanent aquamarine, with a reorganized cabinet the permanent violet, the permanent lilac over the reef, the permanent flux of ochre shallows, the torn bunting of the currents and the receding banners of the breakers. With a change in government no change in the cricket’s chirrup, the low, comical bellow of the bull, or the astonishing symmetry of tossing horses. With a change in government the haze of wide rain which you begin to hear as the ruler hears the crowd gathering under the balcony, the leader who has promised the permanent cobalt of change of government with the lilac and violet of his cabinet change.
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The Embrace: Selected Poems
Derek Walcott Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He is the author of eight collections of plays, and a book of essays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. White Egrets is his fourteenth collection of poems.
19/11/2009 978 0 571 251766 96pp _
Valerio Magrelli was born in Rome in 1957. He has published critical works on Dadaism and Paul Valéry, as well as notable translations of Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry and Francis Ponge. He has also written a collection of short prose pieces, Nel condominio delle carne, a dry-eyed and poignant meditation on his own body and the ills to which it is heir and host. He is currently working on a study of Baudelaire.
The renowned Italian poet Valerio Magrelli has forged a unique language for exploring language, writing a poetry of perception which takes the measure of its own veerings, ‘the exact degree / of deviation’. Here are histories of the inner life that turn into xrays of the urban and the global, and press the intelligence into the service of the senses. His poems condense the abstract and the intensely physical, subjecting modern experience to a minute and naked scrutiny. Not since Montale has a poet brought together in one voice so many strands of the Italian lyric tradition and handled them with such originality. For more than ten years, Jamie McKendrick has been translating Magrelli’s poems, and this selection records a sustained commitment to a voice and a poetic distinct from his own, but which shares many of his concerns. As he writes in his introduction: ‘I can think of few living poets who have evolved a style so equal to and so inclusive of the most resistant aspects of modernity. A Magrelli poem is equipped to address and carry something back from subjects as various as hijackings, radioactive contamination, dinosaur toys, sheep cloning, recycling, graffiti, skateboarding and environmental destruction. As Marianne Moore said of her ostrich, “He Digesteth Raw Yron”.
Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of three volumes of poetry, including The Marble Fly, winner of the 1997 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is the editor of 20th-Century Italian Poems. A selection of his poems is available under the title Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997.
‘Magrelli’s poetry is a soliloquy written with a pencil and small notebook, during the deepest and most silent hours of the night. It is a poetry that looks at itself, but at the sight of itself vanishes.’ Octavio Paz
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