E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Heidi Williamson reviews Misprint by James Womack If you’re the sort of bookshop browser who does judge a book by its cover, you’ll get a good indication of the content of James Womack’s debut poetry collection from its aptly chosen cover art. As well as its obvious references to historical, social, cultural, and political concerns, ‘The Origin of Socialist Realism’ by the two-man Russian émigré collective Komar and Melamid is technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist. These are also features of Womack’s highly articulate and assured work. Having seen his poems in PN Review and the Guardian online, I was aware of Womack as a poet with an ambitious reach – not afraid to tackle subjects like politics, terrorism, and war, but with a nice line in irony that shifts the tone of his work well out of the bounds of ‘worthiness.’ In this book he’s as comfortable and convincing narrating a seemingly ‘real-life’ story a...

Dr Sandeep Parmar I was glad to attend the Bloomsbury launch of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees , from Carcanet's Fyfield Books, last evening.  The book has been edited by British poet and scholar Sandeep Parmar , currently a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.  Mirrlees is the little-known modernist who wrote the splendid and astonishing poem 'Paris', published in 1919.  It anticipates many of the elements of The Waste Land , and is one of the most experimental English poems from the period.  It has recently become seen as integral to a reformation of the modernist canon. This rediscovery of Mirrlees is down to a few people, and Parmar is one of them, who have heroically worked these past few years to bring proper attention to bear on this writer.  Mirrlees has a complicated life, in that she was a lesbian who turned against her past life and became a Catholic, moving to South Africa, and writing relatively traditional verse in later years, d...

Carcanet launches a cool new blog, New Poetries .  Try it and see...

Ian Pople weighs in on Modern Canadian Poets over at The Manchester Review .

Carcanet Twelve Days of Christmas Sale: Illustration by Carry Akroyd, from John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar The Carcanet Twelve Days of Christmas Sale is still on! To celebrate the festive season Carcanet are offering a 25% discount on chosen books, including poetry, fiction, photography and essays. This is a varied selection of a dozen highlights from 2010 as well as some older favourites. We will also be giving away a free copy of Five American Poets , an anthology edited by Michael Schmidt (RRP £14.95), to anyone who spends over £30 on their order from www.carcanet.co.uk . Delivery within the UK is free as usual. Click here for more information.     Our Twelve Books of Christmas are: Likenesses by Judith Aronson Collected Poems 1956- 1987 by John Ashbery A Field of Large Desires by Anthony Astbury Selected Poems by James K. Baxter Some Do Not. . . Parade's End Volume I by Ford Madox Ford Heart's Wings and other stories b...

Modern Canadian Poets: An  Anthology , edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet, 2010). London Launch Event Thursday, November 18th, 2010 6.30-8.30 pm Oxfam Books & Music 91 Marylebone High Street London W1U 4RB near Baker street tube Telephone: 020 7487 3570 Wine reception, book signing, with brief readings from George Elliott Clarke , Marius Kociejowski , David McGimpsey and Eric Ormsby All are welcome; free admission with support from Kingston University

I am pleased to announce that Carcanet's Modern Canadian Poetry anthology, edited by Evan Jones and myself (Todd Swift) has been listed in the latest, and very attractive, catalogue from the superb small press.  It is available as a PDF.  Go to page 27 for more information on this book, forthcoming November 2010.

Carcanet has recently published Selected Poems by Thomas Kinsella . Kinsella is fast approaching his 80th birthday (born in Dublin in 1928). This year, he was awarded The Freedom of that city (as was U2 , shamefully before). As younger Irish poet-critic David Wheatley recently indicated in his Guardian review , here is a major Irish poet to reckon with - a figure who, if the poetry world were at all balanced, proportional and fair - would be mentioned in the same (or an earlier) breath as Heaney , Longley and Mahon (indeed, he is of an older generation and is in fact their senior in many ways). I am currently making my way through this new collection, with something akin to awe and gratitude (as the blurb might say). How do we not all know these poems (or do we?). "Baggot Street Deserta", so far, has struck a particular chord - its combination of evening young man's reflective doubt, and poetic high rhetorical flying, manages to get a bit of Yeats , a bit of Prufrock-...