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Zigzag

Anthony Rudolf

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Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Northern House
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2010)
9781847771100
£9.95 £8.96
  • Description
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • Zigzag: five sequences marks the welcome return of Anthony Rudolf - publisher, translator, autobiographer, essayist - to his first vocation, poetry. Apart from collaborations with artists, this is his first book containing poems for more than thirty years. Zigzag consists of five sequences: two verse, one prose and two combining prose and verse. Among the texts are a recitative in the voice of the author's grandfather, a story about Kafka for grownups written according to the conventions of a children's story, and a sequence of prose and verse after Schumann's Kinderszenen. Autobiography, poetry, documentary, fiction: the book zigs and zags with humour and lyrical lightness, complicating Rudolf's concerns with memory, time and loss. 


    Helena de Freitas' Poetry Choice
    Praise for Anthony Rudolf's poetry:

    ...Rudolf's fine exact craftsmanship; no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true - George Mackay Brown, The Scotsman

    Every poem like a new geometry - of suprises... A sort of sewing of a hyper-active intelligence to hypersenstive skin - Ted Hughes

    Witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory - Robin Skelton, The Malahat Review



    Cover painting Johannes Gumpp (1626-c.1646), self portrait 1646

    Image c Uffizi Gallery, Florence




    Born in London in 1942, Anthony Rudolf has two children and three grandchildren. He is the author of books of literary criticism (on Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz and others), autobiography ( Silent Conversations and The Arithmetic of Memory ) and poetry ( Zigzag, The Same River Twice and collaborations with ... read more
    Praise for Anthony Rudolf 'His poems are charged with the love of beauty: in paint, in the poetry he admires, and in women. His longing is almost impersonal in its intensity.'
    Elaine Feinstein, JQ
    'It moves us through time and space to the long view of a life's work...European Hours is an open book of secrets, and the remarkable intimacy Rudolf has spun through it that binds the reader to the poems.'
    Paul Pines, American Book Review
    'For Rudolf, writing and painting especially, but also music, are exploratory tools that enable him to probe more deeply into his own self, his relationships, as well as all those other selves that are not ''himself.'' For he is obviously also par excellence a poet and an intellectual attracted to otherness, to what he is not.'
    Antioch Review
    'Every poem like a new geometry -€“ of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light -€“ very strange and unpredictable.'
    Ted Hughes
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