St. Mark’s Poetry Project will be hosting “A Night with Flood Editions” on Wednesday, February 1 at 8 pm. The readers will be Fanny Howe, Lisa Jarnot, and editor Devin Johnston. Details can be found here.

Forthcoming April 1

Edited by Don Share, this slim anthology collects Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian poetry by Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Sa‘di, Hafiz, and Obaid-e Zakani, including some that are previously unpublished. Bunting, who is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, proved unusual in his deep and abiding interest in Middle Eastern culture. Here, he renders poetry of remarkable tonal and emotional range in characteristically clear and resolute language.

“Reading Bunting’s translations, I am struck again by how fresh and strong they are, how vivid in their feeling, and how he digs into the spirit of the originals—a kind of passionate excavation work.”—Dick Davis, translator of The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

The November/December issue of Boston Review includes an enthusiastic review by Cal Bedient of William Fuller’s Hallucination. It concludes, “Books of the caliber of Hallucination come along rarely. Books that both puzzle and dazzle at first, then prove better and better with each re-reading. Books with a passion to get the spirit right. Ladies and gentlemen, a masterpiece.” Read the entirety here:

Fuller.NovDec2011.

Kintsugi by Thomas Meyer

ISBN 978-0-9819520-9-3 $14.95

Now Available

In Kintsugi, Thomas Meyer has written an intimate elegy for his partner of nearly four decades. As Robert Kelly observes in his foreword, this is “a text written in and through the very death it mourned.” Kintsugi is a Japanese word meaning “golden joinery,” and it describes the practice of repairing pottery with gold lacquer. As Kelly suggests, “the very rupture is what is highlighted”: Meyer’s presence to the loss, in the midst of daily life and its attendant concerns, serves as “the golden line that holds all this together.” Likewise, his supple poetic line joins formal lament with the quiet spontaneity of thinking. The result is poetry of deep grief and wonder: “Walk into a room. / Not know where I am. / Once it was Love / had me so distracted. / Now it’s Death.”

[Photograph of Meyer and Jonathan Williams in Highlands, N.C., 1975, by Guy Mendes]

Filed under: new titles ]]> http://floodeditions.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/thomas-meyers-kintsugi/feed/ 0 floodeditions . meyer_pc.front.2 http://floodeditions.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/adamson-wins-patrick-white-award/ http://floodeditions.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/adamson-wins-patrick-white-award/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:50:50 +0000 floodeditions http://floodeditions.wordpress.com/?p=508 ]]>

The Australian poet Robert Adamson has won the prestigious 2011 Patrick White Award. He is the author of twenty-one collections of poetry including The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood Editions). The annual award, currently worth $18,000 AUD, was established by Patrick White with the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature to acknowledge writers who have made a significant contribution to Australian literature. Writers are automatically eligible without the necessity for submissions. On winning the Patrick White Award, Adamson said: “I am thrilled to be part of White’s marvellous legacy in the company of previous winners like Christina Stead, Gwen Harwood and Randolph Stow.”

The 2011 judging panel praised noted Adamson’s “outstanding contribution to Australian literature” and added that “his continued willingness to explore new poetic territory and his evident potential to produce more significant work made him an excellent recipient of the prestigious award.” The judging panel described Adamson as “one of Australia’s truly great poets of place.” Adamson’s place, the landscape of the Hawkesbury River, is both a real and imaginative homeland and informs much of his poetry. Adamson explains: “I grew up fishing on the Hawkesbury River and during those early years it seeped in, beyond the reach of conscious memory. I love it, it’s beautiful, it is the world flowing through my life, full of birds, fish, mangroves, mud and stars. And yet it’s not the river I try to write, my poetry’s landscape is darker. I am writing about the internalised landscape.” Adamson is the author of twenty-one collections of poetry as well as three autobiographical works, a play and, with Dorothy Hewett, a two-part opera. His most recent collection of poetry, The Kingfisher’s Soul, was published in the United Kingdom in 2009. Adamson’s acclaimed work, The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems, won the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Award (Poetry). The 2011 judging panel members are Dr Michael Costigan, Dr Debra Adelaide, Professor David Carter and Dr Bernadette Brennan. News of the award can also be found here.

William Fuller’s new book Hallucination is reviewed at Triquarterly. On October 26, he will be reading at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee:

Congratulations to Tom Pickard, who as won The Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine for his poem “Lark and Merlin” (which appeared in the December 2010 issue).  He provided some comments on the poem: “Yes, since coming to live in this wilderness I’ve noticed that the poems increasingly reflect the sparseness of this apparently featureless landscape. Or at least a landscape without many vertical features. It’s a truism to say that in an ‘empty’ landscape the eye and mind assume a different sense of measure. The savage relentless beauty of it, hills just roll on ahead of you, and the sky laid out above. There’s a form to that: ‘I accrete—lichen to limestone/sphagnum to peat.’”

Pickard’s most recent books include Ballad of Jamie Allan and The Dark Months of May (both published by Flood Editions).

Congratulations to Robert Adamson, who has just won the Blake Poetry Prize for his poem “Via Negativa, the Divine Dark.” You can watch him receive the prize, discuss William Blake, and read his poem here.

Named for William Blake and administered by the Blake Society, this prize “encourages Australian poets to engage in the dialogue between religion, spirituality and poetry.” Of “Via Negativa, the Divine Dark,” the 2011 judges (Brook Emery, Bronwyn Lee, and Judith Beveridge) said, “This is a powerful, visually striking, intelligent poem that explores complex ideas associated with negative theology in a humble but resonant way. The poem beautifully manages the movement between the immediacy of the present and difficult concepts such as time, suffering and the existence and nature of the soul; between the trivial ordinariness of the world and the large abstractions; between what can be knowable and precisely observed and what remains unknowable and concealed. The voice of the poem is engaging and convincing, the movement and rhythm assured, and the natural imagery convincingly detailed.” The poem itself can be downloaded here. Adamson’s book The Goldfinches of Baghdad is available from Flood Editions.

The Larger Nature by Pam Rehm

ISBN 978-0-9819520-8-6 $14.95

Now Available

The Larger Nature addresses the longing to be at home everywhere. With characteristic humility, Pam Rehm seeks the common roots of life, proposing that “Whatever lives / lives equally with me.” Through austere language and an abstract, associational logic, she filters out the noise of so much communication in order to hear the familiar as if for the first time.

Maureen N. McLane offers a description of Small Works that holds true of the present volume: “There are very few concrete nouns or visualizable places here; instead we move through a realm of language pondered and picked at, with words transposed, broken open, hymned. This is, then, not a poetry of deep image but of deep word, Rehm sounding out in almost Heideggerian fashion the ramifying levels of a word’s depths . . . These poems move astonishingly close to a grim silence, yet they ward off that silence, taking the measure of our days as well as the ways we measure them” (Zoland Poetry).