Books published by Arc Publications

In its geographical sweep ¿ from Israel-Palestine ("Where a hillside's being shaken /out of the dream") westward across Europe ¿ No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of estrangement, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean ("Sea Between the Lands") that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West."A beautiful and extraordinary piece of work, written with such attentiveness to the world, to sound, to the poetic legacy. Many of the poems are touched with sharp sadness, a deep and philosophical awareness of how things are. Human politics, especially in the potent opening poems, speak through the natural world. Finely crafted, meticulously written and trimmed down to the essence of observation and emotion ¿ I don¿t read much in contemporary poetry that is so hard won. Time and time again I was struck by the power of individual poems, but simultaneously by their lightness and wryness."- Sasha Dugdale"Jennie Feldman¿s writing has an exactitude of word to thought, thought to feeling, that makes her poetry entirely her own, fed as it is by so many different cultures and traditions. As a translator and as a citizen of the world, she travels between languages, histories and places. But her poetry brings something into English that was not here before."- Patrick McGuinness

¿The world of Little's poems is a dark one, for sure, where "the harm / the damage" we humans inflict ¿ on the environment, on one another ¿ is rendered unflinchingly. Her poems about family, for instance, make it clear that 'social distancing' is not just a phenomenon of the past two years. Love is present too, often inextricably bound up with the pain it can cause ("I keep loving you like an old bruise / still tender") but expressed in such rich and startling language, it is its own reward.¿ Esther Morgan ¿Opening a book by Pippa Little I know I will find the kind of directness one can trust. There will be images that make the world of a page real¿ That is what Pippa Little does so well. And she does it with wide range, with different modes, various poetics¿ we find that the landscape therein is our solitude: however inventive it is also bare, like a person who cannot sleep and stares and stares all night at a blank wall. Which is to say, we recognize ourselves in these pages, our days, our questions. And the pages fortify. Why? Because they are honest.¿ Ilya Kaminsky

"Forrest Gander knows that the poet's first duty is "to see what's there and not already patterned by familiarity" - and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today."John BurnsideYour Nearness is the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander's most recent collection, and his first to be published in the UK. Throughout the book, in poems of emotional intensity, delicacy and tenderness, Gander addresses the relationship of the personal and the environmental; the opening poems link human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens, while some later poems focus on the emotional and ecological trauma resulting from the devastating wildfires in California where the poet lives. This is a collection that illuminates the tangled interrlations that bind us to others and the natural world, celebratory in tone and charged with exultation. Forrest Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. In 2017, he was elected as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and in 2019, he was awarded The Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He taught at Providence College and at Harvard University before becoming the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literatures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

James Byrne is a widely-travelled poet and editor, and in this, his 4th book from Arc, he reflects on the places, their histories and people that have made a lasting impression on him. So vivid are his descriptions of his travels that the reader is enveloped in colours, sounds, scents and surrounded by people.

The poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway.

"Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in ¿The Creations of Sound¿, that poems should ¿make the visible a little hard / To see¿ [¿] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life..."- Mark Ford, from the Introduction to Invisible.

Marking the 700th centenary of Dante's death in 1321.

With a number of highly-acclaimed poetry collections to his name, this well-known poet has produced a chapbook of enigmatic and beautifully-crafted poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by the poet who reveals himself as an accomplished artist. This will undoubtedly be a collector's piece.

An unsentimental, forensic account of the breakup of a marriage, told without rancour and with a humanitarian resolution. An exceptional first book.

This bilingual (German / English) chapbook of 20 poems makes for an exciting introduction to Kathrin Schmidt's work. Thanks to Sue Vickerman's daring translations, we are able to appreciate Schmidt's irrepressible poetic style as she ranges across the themes of gender, identity, the body, eroticism, her own personal history and language itself.

TBC

This anthology showcases sixty poets writing in twenty-five languages from countries across Europe. A feat of European intercultural exchange, it is also a fitting celebration of the Versopolis ethos: an extraordinary variety of themes, styles, and subjects finding common ground in a shared idea of what poetry - and a poetry community - can be.

The poet Ian Crockatt uses the same highly-wrought form here developed by the Skalds (the professional poets employed by the kings and earls of the Viking courts of the 9th to 13th centuries) to tell a quasi-Viking tale set in the landscapes and seascapes once under Viking control.

These poems were written to accompany the Los Caprichos images, originally published by Francisco Goya on February 6th, 1799. The images are part of the original `Prado' manuscript, republished by Dover Publications in 1969.

¿The Rohingya poets gathered here for the first time in English hold a mirror to the light for the rest of humanity, flashing their poems of misery and warning from the genocidal zone and refugee camp of Cox¿s Bazaar. Their songs are more accurate than news reports for word of the plight of the most oppressed. These are poems that begin with the fragrance on the bird¿s handkerchief and end by walking among the mass graves. They write from a dire present to a possible future, wondering in their peril if the world outside was too quiet to hear them. Let the world not be quiet, let the world listen to these poems.¿ Carolyn Forché¿I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These poems have no alternative but to speak out, they are from a crisis that must be addressed. There is brilliance in here!¿John Kinsella

Stein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing on love, desire, and despair he combines classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of potent emotions.

L'Abbe Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore's masterly translation.

Evocative, spiritual poems from a Pakistan-born poet living and working in the Scottish Highlands. Latif's work captures the moments of beauty, alienation, distance and intimacy he finds in the wilderness and remote towns of a region so often associated with emptiness, but which the poet shows us is rich with vivid life.

Never published in verse form before, these translations of some of the earliest known German poetry give us a rich glimpse of a life that, while alien in so many ways, was not so different after all. A beautiful, lyrical journey through the passions and fears of pre-Medieval German life, told by some of its finest poetic voices.