Year: 2026

Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

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This review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound’ – a chapbook which gives us the first sighting of Harsent’s versions of C.P. Cavafy – published in 2025 by Dare-Gale Press, was originally published in Acumen magazine. It was commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary, for which many thanks. It has been fascinating to explore these versions and to begin the process of comparing them with other translations that are widely available.

Seamus Heaney once observed that the poems of Constantine Cavafy ‘survive translation better than most’. He thought this was because of the sheer interest of his subject matter(s) and the largely relaxed colloquialism of his voice (see Heaney’s Foreword to C.P. Cavafy: The Canon (tr. Stratis Haviaras; Hermes Publishing, 2004). In fact, over the years since his death in 1933, I’m not sure either of these aspects have necessarily proved quite so ‘easy’ to bring into effective English because of our changing sexual mores over the decades and the inevitable shifts in what a reader may register as colloquial language. In The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy, David Harsent presents a small selection of his solutions to such issues.

Alexandria in Cavafy’s time

Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863. His family spent some of the 1870s in England, but the poet had returned by 1885 and rarely left the city after that. He’s perhaps best known for the poem ‘Ithaca’ (not included in Harsent’s selection here) in which the journey to the mythical island is presented as one of exploration, enrichment and experience. Such an attitude to ‘venturing’ is one of the things Heaney must have been thinking of with his comment about the relatability of Cavafy’s subject matter, our common wish for excitement, for the thrill of the voyage. The sort of content Heaney has in mind also includes ‘homoerotic amours in exotic settings, the dooms of tyrants, the . . . destinies of sophists and drifters and soothsayers’ and all conveyed in a calm, clear-sighted language, seldom figurative, never ‘over-elevated’.

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

You can tell Harsent is a fine poet in these versions. For example, ‘At the Tobacconist’s Window’ is vivid and thrillingly erotic in comparison to the Keeley/Sherrard version, though it may be that Harsent is unwontedly dialling up Cavafy’s deliberately plain statements. Here, there is an immediate entry into the scene (‘A small crowd at the brightly-lit window’) and the reference to the two men is accentuated by repetition (‘these two, these among many’). The men’s eyes meet ‘by chance’ in most other translations, but Harsent writes their ‘eyes, as if meant to, snag softly’. In fact, this works really well, raising the excitement and tension of the possible encounter and the gentle feminine rhyme in ‘softly’ is repeated 6 times in a 10-line poem, building an undulating sense of erotic possibility. The word ‘snag’ falls more harshly and this rough/tender sense is echoed in the closing line when the two men ‘fall on each other, but gently’. By the end of the poem, Harsent’s two men have driven off together and parked up somewhere more private. In Cavafy’s original, of course, they take a closed, or covered, carriage.

Another example of the changes Harsent makes can be seen in the beautiful poem, ‘The Mirror in the Hallway’, in which a delivery boy brings a package to a big house, stands in the hallway and looks into a mirror. Cavafy’s original starts slowly – supplying context, I suppose – with the size of the house, the mirror and its age (eighty years old). Only then does the delivery boy appear. Harsent begins with the ‘beautiful’ boy who, in the original is described as an ‘amateur athlete’ (surely to increase his physical allure). Harsent goes for, ‘on Sundays / he played park football’, which is wonderfully modern, but perhaps doesn’t make him quite so attractive! Left alone, the boy looks at himself in the mirror. Not in the original, Harsent repeats the phrase ‘looked at himself’ in adjacent lines, again dialling up the intensity, but is this what Cavafy would have wanted? This poem ends in the original text with a (perhaps clunky) personification of the mirror which, despite its eighty years of existence, is now ‘bursting with pleasure’ (tr. Haviaras) at having had such a ‘beauty’ before it. Harsent streamlines the moment, though he punctuates into three sentences, interrupting the original’s single flow of one. He does retain the personification, but has the mirror bask, after the event, in its own erotic pleasure:

The mirror looked back. In eighty years

it had seen a thousand faces and shrugged them off.

It held that matchless beauty

long minutes after the boy had gone.

It is fascinating to look closely at Harsent’s decisions in his versioning of these poems. If the criterion of judgement is that a poem should come vividly off the page, then he is succeeding here, though as I have indicated, these are not faithful to the originals in the way that some might require of a translation. But such fidelity might well have been subject to a dose of Cavafy-esque scorn. John Kittmer’s comment on this beautifully produced chapbook, enthusiastically praises the modern poet’s engagement with the Greek originals as ‘examples of exchange, cross-over, transposition, modulation, sensitive homage and daring challenge’. I’d second that emotion and look forward to seeing more of these Cavafy-Harsent poems.

September Reading Dates

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For those who’d like to hear me read my own work in the next few weeks – and those who find themselves close to the venues listed here – I am one of several readers in central London on the Tuesday 1st September (we’ll each be doing about 15 minutes each) and a more extended reading and discussion (with floor reader spots) at The Riverhouse Barn in Walton-on-Thames, hosted by Katie Griffiths on Thursday 17th September.

So first up is as follows…. on Tuesday 1st September @The Sampler event @The King & Queen pub, 1 Foley Street W1W 6DL – entry £5 on the door – with Maggie Harris, Barnaby Harsent, Christopher Horton and Mat Riches.

Secondly, I will reading on Thursday 17th September at 7.30pm at The Riverhouse Barn in Walton-on-Thames, where I will be sharing the bill with the brilliant Charlotte Ansell whose collection Amittere was recently longlisted for the Forward Prize. The evening is organised and hosted by Katie Griffiths. More details on this event can be found here.

Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)

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This review of Charles Tomlinson’s The Change of Light, published by Dare-Gale Press in 2025, first appeared in Acumen magazine, commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary. Many thanks for the invitation to write about these fine, posthumously published poems.

Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.

Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.

It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.

The quality of observation in ‘Trout II’ is likewise as freshly peeled as to feel Edenic. The fish’s ‘wirey curvature’ is held as the water’s currents ‘caress, shape, swerve’ past it. The narrator contrasts the ‘Choice’ the creature has to ride the flow with the lack of choice possessed by a rock in the same stream. The trout has an agency, deciding to hang in the water, and is ‘Willing to be no more than weed / That fluctuates beside him like his shadow’, and in so choosing, the fish transforms its environment into ‘aim, discernment, dance’. Tomlinson imagines the creature acting with ‘pleasure’, a pleasure surely also felt by poet and reader, a pleasure derived in part from the trout’s willing abandonment of its body to the water’s flow.

Tomlinson valued chance in both life and creativity (a 1969 poem is called ‘The Chances of Rhyme’) and to take advantage of chance we need to yield up control. He wrote of embracing possibility, achieved only when the ‘self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’. This self-forgetfulness, the laying aside of individual personality, is key to Tomlinson’s work (and in passing, it is what makes him a great translator). ‘Raindrops Reconsidered’ contains a pun on the seeing ‘eye (an I)’ which observes best when the ego does not bring with it ‘fable’ or the preconceptions of our daily lives and language. ‘Views’ insists that the genuinely ‘realist’ perception questions the ‘bland misprisions of the day’ so that the everyday world suddenly ‘bursts into wing, flame, flights’, into a perception that is ‘festive’.

This ‘festive’ quality refreshes our acquaintance with the world, but it also opens up vistas in which the diminishment of the self becomes not decrease but an access to something greater. In ‘The Infinite’, sitting on a hillside, beside a hedge, the narrator finds an unnerving tranquillity. The wind in the trees contrasts this, opening up a sense of ‘eternity’ and the individual self vanishes into a wider sphere: ‘In this immensity / my own thoughts drown / and it is sweet to shipwreck in this sea’. For such a poet, the loss of any access to his senses would have been devastating. In 1997, a routine cataract operation went awry and deprived Tomlinson of the sight in his left eye. The loss of binocular vision means judging distances is difficult and Tomlinson here laments the ‘flat projection’ he now has instead of full sight (‘The Accident’).

The poems in The Change of Light would appear to be late work; in ‘Courteous Death’ Tomlinson senses his own mortality. Channelling a little bit of Emily Dickinson, the personification of a surprisingly polite Death advances to greet the poet. In a sudden change of mind, Death offers complete blindness rather than demise. Tomlinson’s ‘one good eye’ refuses (at least for a while). Yet like the rock in ‘Trout II’, there comes a point at which ‘preference has no power’, no choice, though up till now, the poet says, he has expected it to ‘tip the balance / Always in my favour’. But Death allows the poet a little more time, time spent perhaps, in part, on these really fine, pleasing and profound last poems.

June/July Poetry Reading Dates

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I have two reading dates coming up in the next couple of weeks as follows:

Firstly, on Thursday, 25th June @ 7.30pm I’m looking forward to reading poems with Kate Noakes and also listening to some jazz as part of the Festival of Chichester. Thanks to Barry Smith for the invitation. Here’s the Festival blurb for the whole event…

Acclaimed poets Martyn Crucefix and Kate Noakes link with Mike Carey’s Big House Jazz ensemble to entertain and inspire. Plus the launch of Poetry & All That Jazz magazine with South Downs poets. Enjoy a delightful mix of words and music with complementary homemade cake. Based in Arundel and well-known throughout Sussex and the South, the Big House Jazz ensemble will be featuring classic jazz by Count Basie and Duke Ellington plus original tunes. Both prizewinning poets will read from their new collections – Kate Noakes, Sublime Lungs (Two Rivers Press) and Martyn Crucefix: Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman Books).

Details: The Poetry & Jazz Café, Assembly Room, North Street, Chichester, PO19 1LQ. Thursday, June 25, 7.30pm (doors 7pm). Tickets £15

Book Tickets for this event here: Focus Arts – South Downs Poetry Festival event tickets from TicketSource.

Secondly, on the evening of Tuesday, 7th July @ 7.45pm, I’m making a delightful return visit to Ouse Muse also with my new collection of poems, Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman Books). Thanks to Ian McEwen for the invitation. Ouse Muse events take place in the wonderful Eagle Bookshop, 16-20 St Peters Street, Bedford, MK40 2NN – https://maps.app.goo.gl/cAfo72bLZrSuFhoJ6.

Here’s the bookshop blurb for the evening: Ouse Muse returns, with guest reader Martyn Crucefix, for a poetry open mic night run by local poets and open to anyone with poetry or short prose to share. The night often opens with performances by guest stars before things devolve into literary chaos.

More details here: https://eaglebookshop.co.uk/events/2026/7/7/ouse-muse-july Bookshop doors open at 19:45 for an 8 o’clock start. There’s no need to book, an entrance fee of £5 is paid upon arrival. If you wanted to pick up a book or two from our shelves you can use this entrance ticket as a £5 voucher for the rest of the month. 

If you are in the areas, I hope to see you at one or other of these events.

Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

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Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). To celebrate the appearance of the book – and do please go to the Shearsman website and buy one (or a signed copy directly from me) – I’m reproducing below the Preface I wrote for the collection. And below that, one of the poem’s from the book, which happily appeared recently in Poetry Review.

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann).

I first encountered Becker’s work while translating an essay on the poet by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). Seiler reads Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps, as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range.’ I am very happy that permissions have been granted to enable Seiler’s brilliant essay to stand as an Introduction to this volume.

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

My heartfelt thanks to Tony Frazer at Shearsman Books for his enthusiasm for Becker’s work and ensuring this book came to be.

In the wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop

in the snow, when along with the snow

comes a piece of news that, this morning,

is absolutely essential. Or how

do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it

(the pear tree) responds to the wind (to the

wind). This morning, once again, the

decision has been taken. War

between magpies and crows, simply this war,

no fuss, just this clear understanding.

Another voice, the next remark; it’s all (again)

a matter of the whole. Are you standing

in the garden? Then you know, tuck tuck, the blackbird

warned at first, you know it, I’ll say it

again, in the war, in the fresh snow, in the wind.

Reading – Sunday 24th May 2.30pm in Chesham

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I have been very poor with posting on here for a while. For which apologies. But here is an event you might like to attend if you are in the Chesham area this coming Sunday afternoon. It’s part of the Chesham Festival Fringe – and I’m reading with friend and ex-teaching colleague Valerie Jack. Follow the link below for more details. Entry is FREE. My plan is to read some Rilke in translation and some poems from my new Shearsman Books collection.

Martyn Crucefix & Valerie Jack – Poetry

New Review of ‘Our Weird Regiment’

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This review has just appeared on the Everybody’s Reviewing site. Many thanks for giving this new collection such an insightful and concise reading, Gary Day.

There’s something about Martyn Crucefix’s poetry that reminds me of a theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Two antenna detected hand movements and translated them into eerie, vocal sounds. So these poems, without quite touching the substantial world, nevertheless register it in all its oddly ephemeral density. “Our Weird Regiment,” the title work of the collection, recounts a visit to a stately home. It is an exquisite poem, mixing up past and present in images of quiet but devastating power. Who are “the weird regiment”? Tourists, the dead, the conformist crowd and more, all forming a splendid enigma. 

“Heal Thyself,” a reference to Christ’s remark in Luke 4:23, serves as a preface to the three sections which make up the collection: “Ida Belle,” “Flint” and “Homespun.” The poem articulates themes of, among others, direction, displacement, timing, loss, self-disintegration and self-renewal. The imagery is a mixture of the surreal, the matter of fact, the biblical and more. Metaphysical poets were known for their startling conceits and Crucefix is part of that tradition. In an ICU “the emptying beds / cleared swiftly as a busy table service” (“Olly and Pepper Are Safe”). He is also a brilliant imagist. In the same poem we have “the dazzling fireflies of raised phones” and in “He Made This” “naked willows / will be upholstered in inches of snow.” 

No contemporary poet makes more use of allusions than Crucefix. St Augustine, Bede, Easter Island statues, Breughel, Brecht, Henry de Montherlant are just a few examples. They are integral, not decorative, stitching together past and present, amplifying the value of both. Crucefix is a highly intelligent poet acutely attuned to the multiple disintegrations of our time. He offers little in the way of consolation but these poems, these oscillations, are one reason not to despair. 

About the reviewer: Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His poem “Spooky Action at a Distance” won last year’s International Brilliant Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines. 

Review: The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman Books, 2025)

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This review – or a shortened version of it – first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 25th December 2025. Many thanks to Camille Ralphs for commissioning it. The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in Germanis edited by Alexander Kappe, Nicola Thomas, Jana Maria Weiß and published by Shearsman Books, 2025.

Rebuff, repulsion, lacking allure – it’s a risk to call an anthology of poetry The Opposite of Seduction and perhaps Nicola Thomas’ brief Introduction to this book of new German poetry in translation suspects as much. She concedes, ‘poems here . . . may test the boundaries of Anglophone tastes’. But that depends on your taste and for most readers this anthology will seem a vigorous enjoyable collection of young(ish) voices, most hardly ever heard in English before like Nadja Küchenmeister’s delicate, flowing lyrics of existential uncertainty (tr. Aimee Chor), or Anja Utler’s sole contribution, a re-writing of the Daphne myth,  exploiting the white page, a choppy fragmentation, exclamation, and a suitably headlong, hectic delivery. A different note is struck by Uljana Wolf, in her whimsical teasing away at self-awareness, waking at four in the morning, or down on hands and knees with an English-speaking partner, to consider dust bunnies (in German ‘Wollmaus’); ‘our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-gray names’ (tr. Sophie Seita).

Friederike Mayröcker

Yet despite its brevity, Thomas’ Introduction raises questions it leaves unanswered, rather misrepresents the book’s contents, and shows signs of revisions and deletions (it’s puzzling that her two co-editors do not put their name to it). She suggests the years since the millennium have been ones of great vitality for the ‘German language lyric’ and the resulting achievements have passed unnoticed in English-speaking countries for want of translations gathered in one place. A broad survey of the genre and period would indeed be welcome, but this anthology lays claim to ‘range and variety, something for (almost) everyone’, yet makes definitive choices and has startling exclusions. The editors nominate Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, and Thomas Kling as presiding spirits, spawning a ‘genealogy’ of lyric writing in German. Born in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘50s respectively, it’s not their age that links these ‘senior figures’ and because poets included in The Opposite of Seduction have birth dates ranging from the 1930s to the 1970s/80s, the idea of inheritance is at best questionable. If ‘range and variety’ is what the editors intended, then where are other ‘senior’ candidates like Nelly Sachs, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Huchel, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jürgen Becker, Volker Braun, Durs Grünbein?

In fact, the reader is here presented with a particular slant on the lyric: these are poets inclined to collage-form, whose subject is as much language as world, who ‘resist limpet-clinging to past metrics, self-satisfied irony, the self-regarding ego . . . [standing for] resistance to habitual responses . . . without a safety-net for the poet or reader’. Thomas can make it sound as if the English-speaking poetry world has somehow missed out on such millennial developments, but the latter quotation comes from Eric Mottram’s description of writers included in the new british poetry, published over thirty years ago. So any English-speaking reader familiar with Mottram’s anthology of ‘marginalised’ poets will feel at home in (rather than tested by) The Opposite of Seduction.

Elke Erb

As to the poems themselves, we have far more examples of Gedankenlyrik (poems of ideas) than Erlebnislyrik (poems of experience). It’s Mayröcker’s style (closely followed by Kling) of dismantling language, of fragmentation, the avoidance of closure, narrative, or simple affirmation, that is the order of the day. Language is foregrounded, pushed to its limits with capitals (or avoidance of), italicisation, referential leaps, allusions, repetitions, abrupt switches of tone and subject matter. Monika Rinck’s long prose-y lines (punctuated, no capitals) stand out. They carry a stream of consciousness voice with a self-deprecating humour. It’s one of her poems that provides the anthology title; a lament for neglected office pot plants that manages to encompass Psalm 23, dog breeding, coffee grounds and human fallibility: ‘they all say: / i’ll bring some peat tomorrow. the morrow never comes. no one brings peat.’ Iain Galbraith’s brilliant renderings of poems by Peter Waterhouse are also a revelation. His is a voice delivering slightly crazed, swift, pseudo-socratic dialogues as poems, wearing a sly smile, and exploring questions of identity, language and spatial relationships: ‘With regard / to the room the stranger thinks: I could enter myself. Thus / answering the ancient question. What question? The question / of the exceptions to be borne in mind. The question / of borders’.

Technique dominates rather than subject matter, though the selection is organised by subjects such as Heart, Body, Soul, Beast, Season, Machine, Home. Oswald Egger writes lush, musical celebrations of the natural world which in Ian Galbraith’s renderings evoke Hopkins, even Dylan Thomas. Dinçer Güçyeter brings material from the migrant experience (tr. Caroline Wilcox Reul) and Ulrike Almut Sandig creates a genuine split-screen reading experience, playing poem texts off against story board instructions either side of the page (tr. Karen Leeder). Given the breadth of experimentation going on here, there are inevitable failures. These are poets working to free both writer and reader from conventions, to open up novel realms of human experience, a liberation from history. Occasionally, Jan Kuhlbrodt’s nightmare vision of a man hoarding books and newspapers hovers behind some poems, so intent on their own language are they, perhaps in need of a ‘reminder of a reality that knows more than paper’ (tr. Alexander Kappe).

Upcoming Dates and ‘Our Weird Regiment’ is now published

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I will be contributing to an event in London next week which will mark 100 years since Rilke’s death. I will read from my translations of Rilke as published in Change Your Life (Pushkin Press, 2024).

To quote from the Goethe-Institut’s publicity for the evening: Please join us us for a vibrant evening celebrating Tanzt die Orange —a groundbreaking new anthology that brings Rilke’s poetry into the language of today. Curated by award-winning poets Jan Wagner and Norbert Hummelt, the collection features reinterpretations of Rilke’s verses by 75 leading voices in contemporary German-language poetry.

At this special London event, Wagner and Hummelt will read selections from the anthology and discuss the enduring resonance of Rilke’s work. Co-presenting the event are the acclaimed translators Karen Leeder and Martyn Crucefix, who will guide the conversation and provide English translations of the poems, opening a dialogue between Rilke’s legacy and today’s poetic voices. The event will be presented in both German and English. Tickets £6, £3 concessions and for Goethe-Institut language students & library members. For more information and booking click here.

Venue: Goethe-Institut London Library, 50 Princes Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PH

Also on the horizon is the launch reading for my new full collection of original poems, Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman Books). This will take place on Tuesday 10th March at 7.30pm at the Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. (See map here.) Admission is free.

The reading will be hosted by Tony Frazer, publisher of Shearsman Books, as one of Shearsman’s regular programme of launches and readings. I will be reading alongside Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez.