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Misprint

James Womack

Misprint by James Womack
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Categories: 21st Century, First Collections
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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(Pub. Nov 2012)
9781847776693
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847771384
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  • You never told me how boring it is to be mad
    with you it was always gin and parties
    and the solar radio, that remembered
    its songs with the sunrise...

    from ‘Eurydice’
    ‘The only end of writing,’ Dr Johnson said, ‘is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently ‘real’ virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. ‘Eurydice’, the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together.

    We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: ‘I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.’
    From a Notebook    
    The Thing    
    The Water Cycle: Variations on a Theme    
    Halfway through the A-Feature
    Internet Poems    
    Young Romance    
    Three Epigrams    
    The Underworld    
    Ariadne    
    Tourism    
    Little Red Poem    
    Fish    
    The Dogs of a House in Mourning and the Naked Girl    
    Master Chuang    
    Found Poem: President’s Reminiscences Read Widely    
    Property    
    Maisky Poems    
    Vomit    
    Likeness    
    Experiment    
    Foiled again…    
    Criticism    
    The True Scholar    
    from The Literary Encyclopaedia    
    Dark and stormys    
    Mosaic    
    Now, / A / Poem / That is Called / ‘Of Insomnia’    
    Misprint    

    Eurydice
    1    Was it that long ago you died?    
    2    Pray for us sinners, that we have climbed    
    3    The shutters falling    
    4    After, it is you who lie in the hollow of my elbow    
    5    Slowly and patiently we have forgotten it all    
    6    You never told me how boring it is to be mad    
    7    Leaving the bright town to the desert    
    8    A garden, as a child might draw it    
    9    I wrote to you last March in Madrid    
    10    Thick fog. I walked down the way of all flesh    
    11    Your smile fades and the garden is now dark    
    12    Death is not the end; some doors are never fully closed    
    Coda    With two bags where his two hands were    

    Notes  
    James Womack was born in 1979. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017) and Homunculus (2020). He is also an award-winning translator, and has translated widely from Spanish and Russian, including works by Vladimir Mayakovsky ( ‘Vladimir ... read more
    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)
     '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
    Praise for James Womack 'The poet and translator James Womack's long poem Homunculus is a deliciously grouchy howl at the indignities of the ageing body, studded with great jokes and brilliant shards of pain.'

    Claire Lowden, Times Literary Supplement

    'Homunculus is an inventive and exhilarating update on the dramatic monologue.'

    Kathryn Maris, The Poetry Review 

    'This interpretation of the Elegies puts a modern spin on the serious nature of content, creating a rhythmic flow of references woven into the pacing of the poem [...] Womack's Homunculus is brutally, even indecently honest about the titular character's feelings and thoughts.'

    Allen Chiu, DURA Dundee

    'With an ear finely tuned to colloquial speech and a knack for deadpan delivery, Womack gives Vilas' poems a thoroughly convincing new life in English'
    Jennifer Barber, The Critical Flame
    'James Womack's translations are immaculate distillations of Vilas... Vilas' poems are long and decadent affairs, euphoric tales of drunken debauchery told through a first person narrative.'
    Charlie Baylis, Stride Magazine
    'Vilas is an accomplished, freewheeling storyteller, forever leading his readers into unexpected byways...James Womack's translations of these beguiling narrative poems, selected from two of Vilas' collections published in 2000 and 2008, are so vivid, natural-seeming and alert to every nuance and shade of feeling that they scarcely register as translations at all.'
    Paul Bailey, Literary Review
    'witty, nuanced, urbane'

    Clark Allison, Stride Magazine

    '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
      '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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