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The True Paradise

Gamini Salgado

Edited by Michael Schmidt

Cover Picture of The True Paradise
Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • `. . . one must be grateful for this volume, with its sense of the beauty and transience of human existence, with its piquant flashes of humour and above all, with its blazing vividness of style.'


    FRANCIS KING. Spectator

                  
    Less than a quarter of a mile from our house, the red road met the tarred road that led to Colombo, twelve miles away. But where we lived a stranger rarely passed by, and a motor car was a nine days' wonder. Not that it was what you call a lonely road, or a quiet one; oh no, the red dust swirled upwards in the luminous daylight, disturbed by many pairs of feet, and at dusk, the blackness was loud and vibrant . . .

    from `The Red Road and the River'


    Childhood in Ceylon is vividly portrayed in a sequence of stories and vignettes which evoke the exotic beauty of the author's birthplace, the secretive pleasures of his boyhood there, and the poignance of a Buddhism riveted on ephemerality. The lyricism of the writing and a large cast of characters make this book a delight. It portrays an exceptional individual, a gifted imagination growing up in one culture and gradually being possessed by another.
    Gamini Salgado
    GAMINI SALGADO was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and came to England in 1947 to attend the University of Nottingham. He became an expert on D. H. Lawrence's poetry and on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and was appointed to the Chair of English at Exeter University in 1977. He died ... read more
    Michael Schmidt
    Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general ... read more
    Awards won by Michael Schmidt Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Sasha Dugdale's 'Joy', published in PN Review 227  (PN Review 227 )
    Praise for Michael Schmidt 'Its pleasures are longer term ones: as you return to it and re-read its substantial selections, you come to appreciate how and what each contributor is working on.'

    Jane Routh, The North 66

    '...this is the joy of New Poetries VIII: time and again you discover refreshing and compelling new styles and subjects'

    Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School

    '...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.'
    John Ashbery
     'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines.'
    Simon Armitage
    'It has attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health.'
    Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement
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