I've started reading the first of my recently ordered poetry collections - Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008
Also waiting to come in the post is:
Sea Room: An Island Life - a biographical book about a young man, Adam Nicolson, who inherited the Shiants, a group of uninhabited Hebridean islands beween Skye and Harris. I've been wanting to read this book for a long time.
Darkness Spoken - The collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann
Unfortunately, it Was Paradise - Selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish
I really enjoy reading European poetry, my favourite poet last year was the wonderful German poet, Durs Grunbein. When I'm going on holiday I like to read up on some poetry from the place I'm going, the last two books should give you a clue about where I'm going in October! :)
8 comments:
I would be very interested to hear more about Ingeborg Bachmann and Mahmoud Darwish. I've read a bit of Darwish and loved his poems. I haven't really read Ingeborg Bachmann yet, but she had close connections to Paul Celan, one of my favourite poets.
i highly recommend this book as well, for those interested in Bachmann, i read it in german and i suspect the translation they review here is of the same book! the correspondence of Bachmann and Celan
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/correspondence-by-ingeborg-bachmann-and-paul-celan-trans-wieland-hoban-2183833.html
I'll write a bit on both of them once I've absorbed the poems :)
thanks Roxana, that book sounds amazing!
i'm still making my way thru the bachmann so i'm interested to hear your thoughts (am also waiting on a felstiner translation of celan so i can compare wiht hamburger)
what do you find different about european, if anything?
I can't put The Sea Room down, it's a fantastic read! the europeans are much less afraid of mixing the personal with wider philosophical issues, I think british poetry tends to be much more anecdotal. also I'm big on image in poetry and the best translated poetry tends to be very image focused
t was a big fan of sea room.
i like your comment about british poetry. either the english language equivalent just isn't being published (or taught on creative writing courses!) but, much of what i'm reading european wise, seems to go in a very different direction, make different connections
I love Bachmann. That Amichai book is wonderful. I wrote a poem called "God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline," which came from reading the table of contents of that book and mixing up the poem titles. Enjoy.
I've been completely sucked into the Darwish collection but I'm looking forward to getting back to Bachmann and I've not even looked at Amichai yet, so many good books, bliss!!!
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