Elder - Softcover

Constantine, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780370989 ISBN 13: 9781780370989

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, 2014

Synopsis

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Sicily, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places in literature and mythology. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal, elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty, and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

About this title

About the Author:

David Constantine has published ten books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); and Elder (2014). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Holderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize; his version of Holderlin's Sophocles; and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. He won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international award. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013.

Review:

'The mood is both tender and desperate, with something of the uncanny in its blend of the recognisably human and apparently Other - His religious regard for the world (not the same thing as religious conviction) produces a strange translation of its ordinary terms. Its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever, yet at the same time brought into clearer focus' - Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review. 'Drawing on the sensibilities of the European poets - Goethe, Michaux, Holderlin - whose work he knows so intimately, Constantine's humane and serious volume weighs the life of the individual against the crash and tumble of the wider world and finds in favour of the subtler forces and complexities of the former' - Sarah Crown, Guardian.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1780370989
• ISBN 13: 9781780370989
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96