ANVIL PRESS POETRY

THE AXION ESTI
When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out The Axion Esti, first published in 1959, as 'one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems.' It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of e...
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ELYTIS: SELECTED POEMS
This representative selection from the work of one of modern Greece’s most fascinating poets was made shortly after his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. It is drawn from all periods of his distinguished career and traces his development from early surrealism, in which he transforms French influence into a distinct personal voice and mythology, through the dramatic style of The Axion Esti with its blend of spirituality and earthiness, up to the later work in which he experiments with new modes for expressing his perennial th...
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(P/B) THE SCATTERED PAPERS OF PENELOPE
In Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry the body, myth, the soul, nature and language are deeply entangled concepts. Yet her poetry is passionate and direct: 'I am not interested in distorting reality when I play with language.' With translations by such notables as Rae Dalven, Edmund Keeley and Kimon Friar as well as the editor and others, this is the most complete picture yet of this major Greek poet. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE POEMS OF GEORG TRAKL
This collection of Trakl's essential poetry contains the two books published in his lifetime, Gedichte (Poems, 1913) and Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian in a Dream, 1914), together with the later poems published in the magazine Der Brenner which might have formed the nucleus of a third collection. His starkly beautiful, musical poems are rightly regarded as being among the early twentieth century's most original poetry. From a life marred by drug addiction and breakdowns, he created work of great depth and power, brought hauntingly to life i...
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(P/B) A SEASON IN HELL
A Season in Hell is one of the great works of modern literature. It is published here in a bilingual edition together with many of the verse poems which Rimbaud wrote between March 1870 and August 1872. A Season in Hell was Rimbaud’s literary testament, his apology and a contribution to the mythology of his time. Norman Cameron’s masterly translations capture the shape and spirit of these extraordinary works. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) TURNING-POINT
While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the New Poems volumes, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a de...
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(P/B) COLLECTED POEMS
Anthony Hecht described Donald Justice as ‘among other things, the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.’ This memorial volume of his complete poetry testifies to his subtle and enduring brilliance. With painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance he endeavoured to make the local views which his titles often evoke - ‘Bus Stop’, ‘Men at Forty’, ‘Dance Lessons of the Thirties’ - part of the literary heritage from which he so often took solace and inspiration. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) POEMS
Francois Villon was born in Paris in 1431. His life was blighted by destitution and ill health, robbery and murder, torture and exile. While we do not know what became of Villon after his 32nd year, the poems he produced in just six years capture in forceful, intelligent and candid verse the low and high life of Paris. They constitute a body of work with few rivals in the literature of his own country or in that of any other. His work was greatly admired by Ezra Pound, who ranked him with Sappho and Catullus in his pantheon of great lyric ...
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(P/B) ROMAN ELEGIES
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is mainly known to the English-speaking world as the author of the poetic drama Faust. In Europe - as poet, dramatist, novelist, art critic, literary theoretician, travel writer, author of a treatise on light and colour, and prolific correspondent - he is regarded as the supreme Romantic literary figure. This selection is a classic introduction to one of the giants of European literature. It collects all the beautifully crafted versions Michael Hamburger has made over many years from all periods of Go...
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(P/B) I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
Walt Whitman (1819-92) is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals. Whitman's broad humanity, his love of cities (especially Manhattan), his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary - even prophetic - sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War ...
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(P/B) SEFERIS: COMPLETE POEMS
'In their final form, these translations carry the accumulated authority of the previous editions, the admiration that has justly accrued to them, and more distantly, the sanction of the poet himself.' (RODERICK BEATON, MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION) George Seferis (1900-1971) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. Truthful and magical, his poetry has captivated both Greek and foreign readers. Aptly described by Charlotte Du Cann as 'the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages', Seferis was for Peter Levi 'one of the great...
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(P/B) POEMS FROM THE DIWAN
Yehuda Halevi, who wrote both secular and devotional poems, is considered one of the finest poets in post-biblical Hebrew literature. Suffused with warmth, moving easily between the mundane and the otherworldly, and, above all, delicately elegiac, the poet's voice cuts across all the literary genres and religious modes on which he drew. Born in the second half of the 11th century, Halevi wandered in his youth between Muslim and Christian Spain before settling in Cordoba around 1110. Towards the end of his life, to the amazement and conster...
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(P/B) AMORGOS
Nikos Gatsos’s profoundly mysterious and magnetic poem Amorgos, named after a Greek island he never visited and written during the Nazi occupation, is the single work on which his reputation rests. It is a wonderful incantation on the theme of loss and hope - a unique blend of surrealism, symbolism and folk song - lyrical and erotic, sometimes celebratory, sometimes bitter. It was much admired by the Nobel laureates Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis, and was hugely influential on the postwar generation of Greek poets. However, after its p...
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(P/B) THE COMPLETE VERSE
"Les Fleurs du mal" (1861) was the first great modern work of poetry and one of the few books of poems to become an international bestseller. This edition contains all of Baudelaire's poetry in verse with Francis Scarfe's scrupulous and inventive prose translations at the foot of the pages. Together with his detailed and authoritative introduction, this presentation makes an ideal edition both for the student and for the general reader who wishes to tackle the French original with a reliable prose guide at hand. The companion volume, "Par...
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(P/B) A GUIDE TO THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND
In this essential guide to one of the most difficult yet rewarding poems of the twentieth century, William Cookson (who began corresponding with Pound as a schoolboy in 1957) draws on a deep and intimate knowledge of Pound’s life and work. This edition incorporates much new information and has been substantially revised and expanded. William Cookson gives lucid critical overviews to the various sections of the poem, clarifying its purpose and structure and explaining the views on literature, history and economics that inform Pound’s poetry...
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(P/B) POEMS
"He is an exquisite poet, a deliverer of nations ... a father of light", said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T.S. Eliot. Part symbolist and part impressionist, his associative method, speech-rhythms and boldly heterogenous diction make him not only one of the most individual of French poets but also among the most entertaining. Notable also for his early protests for the liberation of women, Laforgue died in Paris in 1887 aged...
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(P/B) WOMEN/MEN
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) wrote three secret collections of verse, of which Femmes and Hombres remained almost unobtainable even in France until the 1970s. These strangely unrespectable poems celebrate the pleasures of sex, with women and men respectively, in loving detail - reversing the old view of Verlaine as a limp impressionist. Alistair Elliot's metrical translations brilliantly echo the vigour, good humour and skill of the originals, which accompany them in this bilingual edition. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) POEMS AND FRAGMENTS
Michael Hamburger was engaged in translating the poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) for over half a century. This lifelong preoccupation culminates in this fourth bilingual edition, incorporating revisions, new translations and other supplementary material. It is the classic English edition of Hoelderlin’s poetry for our age. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) APOLLINAIRE: SELECTED POEMS
Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his calligrammes. Subtle and complex, yet often direct, his poetry is still fresh and memorable. (From the publisher) MAY In May lovely May on a boat on the Rhine There were ladies looking from high on the mountain You are so very pretty but the boat ...
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THE PERFECT ORDER
EINSTEIN Where are you going in that cloud of hair? Your pure mind reached and held the perfect note to counterpoint your animal desire, leaving those terri?ed of dark in doubt. You saw as one, in?nity and nought and chaos ('shady garden of the void') blossomed forth resplendent in your thought with wilderness and city uni?ed. Beyond thisness and elseness, here and there, radiant and magni?cent you rowed into the universe's heart of dark where no rain ever falls, or sleet or snow, and time itself lies open everywhere, a wide and waveless o...
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