Nameless Country: Selected Poems - Softcover

Jacobs, A. C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784106755 ISBN 13: 9781784106751

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd., 2018

Synopsis

Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur "A.C." Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK.

A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the "right language," which "exists somewhere / Like a country." His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual’s struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.

About this title

About the Author:

A. C. (Arthur) Jacobs was born in Glasgow into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937 and grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust. An erudite and committed poet from a young age, he became a self-made migrant, a wanderer through countries and through other people’s more settled lives. He was a Jew in Scotland, a Scot in England, and a diaspora Jew wherever he travelled. Nameless Country returns selections of A.C. Jacobs’ poetry to a 21st-century audience. His poems compel our attention because they bear the stamp of their long-ago moment but in their embrace of complex identities, speak clearly to our own.

Merle Lyn Bachman is a poet, Yiddishist, and an Associate Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, where she directs the undergraduate Creative Writing program. She is a 2015 Translation Fellow of the National Yiddish Book Center. Anthony Rudolf is a major translator of literary works from French, Russian and other languages, including books by Yves Bonnefoy, Claude Vigée, Edmond Jabès, and Evgeny Vinokurov. He is also the author of a trilogy of memoirs: Silent Conversations: a Reader’s Life, A Vanished Hand and The Arithmetic of Memory. His critical work includes the first extended study in English of Primo Levi and a wide range of essays on international modernist writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1784106755
• ISBN 13: 9781784106751
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Bachman Merle, Rudolf Anthony