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HeavenManuel VilasTranslated by James Womack![]()
RRP: GBP 12.99
Discount: 10% You Save: GBP 1.30 Price: GBP 11.69 Not Yet Available ![]() This title is available for academic inspection (paperback only).
Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 784108 86 1 Categories: 21st Century, Humour, Spanish and Catalan, Translation Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Published: January 2020 216 x 135 mm 144 pages Publisher: Carcanet Press Spend GBP 15 or more and receive a free Carcanet tote bag.
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This is the first translation of Spanish poet Manuel Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into freewheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The poet James Womack has won prizes for his versions of Vilas's work, and of Mayakovsky’s.
Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map, across land and water, and between romances. His tact and instinct for rhythm and detail give the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak, bluntly and with black humour, always alert for the fantastic.
Awards won by James Womack
Short-listed, 2019 The Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections
(On Trust ) Long-listed, 2018 The International Dylan Thomas Prize (On Trust ) Long-listed, 2018 Read Russia Prize (Vladimir Mayakovsky)
Praise for James Womack
'True to its title, On Trust: A Book of Lies explores the metamorphic landscapes of shifting allegiance and unstable epistemologies. Writing a cunning jazz line in one poem and a supple passage of lyric prose in the next, Womack matches limberness of method to his ambitious subject: the shifting instabilities of character, circumstance, and faith.'
Judges, Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections 'This is a gorgeous book. The reader will find it either a seductive introduction or a thrilling reunion. James Womack's translations are bristling with appropriate vigour.' The Spokesman In James Womack's 'book of lies', in the court of love and the erotic, where honesty may be a necessary contrivance, the speaker is both accuser and accused. The poems display a wry, mordant romanticism which manages to be at war with itself while keeping a keen eye on the imaginative opportunities. On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.' Sean O'Brien 'The first half of On Trust is about a love affair, which is true to all the stumbles of falling in love. An actual affair? Or a vivid thought-experiment? It is both and neither. It is Schrödinger's pussy. It is and it isn't. 'In your park, the wind pushes at an empty swing.' Inventive, clever, funny, rueful, ironic, hypnotised by the erotic.' Craig Raine 'Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist... Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that's ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious. ' Heidi Williamson, Eyewear 'James Womack is another bright young poet... he is capable of lugubrious comic inventions such as 'From the Literary Encyclopaedia', which charts an experimental novelist's doomed career, alongside 'Tourism', a clipped and chilly poem about the export of jihadis to the Middle East... on the evidence of Misprint Womack has scope, curiosity and a refreshing sense of not having foresuffered everything he encounters.' Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times 'In 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' and Other Poems the poet James Womack has put together the comprehensive selection of Mayakovsky's poems I have long been waiting for. His fresh translation allows English readers to appreciate the non-aligned and passionate personality of the Russian poet. I recommend a few lines twice a day to protect against dry academic writing.' The Times Higher Education Best Books of 2016 |
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