AREHOUSE, publishers of poetry
& a f t e r i t i s
poems by Josh Stanley
£2.00 plus p&p
Four sequences of prose poem from Josh Stanley, his debut collection.
Glowing and beautiful, like this extract from the first poem of the first sequence:
What of my strength now: that I have borrowed tongue. With it do you think, touch the air or take past part in it, bit by idealised bit. Or afflict, if hammering home the nails of digression is always the best solution at hand. Scratch. Hang it all. From a tree in the forest, & it’s the choice that is making my doubt-
just
in time, for this spot in the year when the sun gets here and when the hills are there. They stay. It all gets right but maybe a little too much of manufactured salt water for a sensitive tastebud as I drip plasma after liquid, down into your eyes. & heading down stream. What of strength now as we rip down the walls. Whether they come back, will they do so
WORD IS BORN
"thanks to the love / I reft with war" (MK)
V "non-Combat is blasphemy" (RP)
WORD IS BORN from Arehouse Press: a collection from REITHA PATTISON (her first) and MICHAEL KINDELLAN (Charles Baudelaire, Bad Press 2005) containing duelling translations of eight lyric poems by the 13th century troubadour poet, heterosexual and murderer Bertrand de Born, who co-owned a castle, and died in 1215.
He says about her: "Frank O'Hara in tights". She says about him: "Bucaneer/faux romantik, one more low-grade, low-slung, shiny-epauleted noxious Casanova with a curious pecadillo: a top-hole miasma of a philology". They're not wrong. Buy now & see who wins.
Reitha Pattison lives in Cambridge with her partner and baby son. She manages the translations list of a local academic publishing house. Word is Born is her first collection of poetry.
Michael Kindellan is born in Toronto, and lives in London where he is working as a literary agent. Also works for Corriere della Sera and the Cabinet Office. He's published Baudelaire translations through Bad Press, some of which are same again in Quid, and translated Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre in Chicago Review, whereat he's contributing editorially.
"Word is Born" is no longer available. The above biographies are out of date. Here are some things people said about it:
"... an absolutely gorgeously made book, nicely set and elegantly weighted. And the concept, maan, is a serious hoot. Eight poems by notorious troubadorial schism-sower Bertran[d] de Born (I go with the authors in favouring 'Bertrand', I think; 'Bertran' sounds too much like a blue-collar programming language), translated independently by Pattison and Kindellan, and the two utterly divergent versions printed cheek-by-jowl, Pattison on the left-hand page of each spread and Kindellan on the right. There are huge swathes where it's impossible to imagine the two translations sharing a source text at all: and wherever there are more openly apparent momentary connexions, they only serve to recharge, rather than dispel, the tensions between the two sets ... It's a terrific project, full of movement and robust -- promiscuous, I almost said -- camaraderie. I still hate poetry, after all that, but mostly because so little of it is as rewarding as Word is Born." -- Chris Goode, in 'Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire' 17 July 2006 (http://beescope.blogspot.com).
"The moral life-arcs of dead personages can be examined for lessons in how to behave, but the act of literary translation is more intimate than the sorting of life-coaching bullet-points. And when, as in this book, the poets are engaged in two complementary translations, from the original and between their own versions, the forces and tensions of this intimacy are considerable. I admire this book because on one hand it quite explicitly suggests a Bertran de Born for 2006, a flawed character and moral judge we might (and do) begin to recognise; but on the other tests this parallelism of schisms and conflicts in action, and provides all sorts of reasons why his conflicts are not ours, why we would be naive in imagining them to be so. And these historical speculations arise from a text (two texts, really) which sustain the intimacy and carefully judged characterisation of successful dramatic monologue." -- Tim Morris, in Jacket 31 ( http://jacketmagazine.com/31/morris-deborn.html).
"Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison each translate/transform eight troubadour poems from Bertrand de Born [...] in a quietly but beautifully produced new pamphlet." Richard Price, at http://www.hydrohotel.net/PSInformation1.htm
And it was brilliantly essay-reviewed by Ian Patterson, in Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, ed. by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin, (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). 'Born Again, Born Better: Text Generation and Reading Strategies in Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison, Word is Born'.
Thanks to everyone who read, or wrote or spoke about, the book.
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