Odes To Opposites

Aritha van Herk explores other texts, other bodies, other moments arising from the otheredness of the writer in the uneasy position of critic.

This is a unique collection: combining a detached intimacy with a formal grandeur, Rollings addresses the opposition of stasis and action, depression and activity, sorrow and joy, and inquires into their power to shape both individual life and society as a whole.

What happens when poetry and philosophy connect? In 'Opposite,' award-winning poet Helen Mort and Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics Aaron Meskin set out to answer that very question. Whilst meeting at the Opposite café in Leeds, they came up with an intriguing idea for a creative dialogue: Aaron would introduce Helen to a range of philosophers who write about art and aesthetic matters, Helen would respond imaginatively to their ideas with original poetry, then the philosophers would write their own responses to Helen's poems. The result was an engrossing and multi-faceted series of conversations, which (like all the best coffee-shop discussions) took a variety of unexpected turns - topics included the art of tattooing, graffiti, Belle & Sebastian, food, rock climbing and whether there's such a thing as bad art.

“When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.” In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.

The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez). "In his work a continent awakens to consciousness," wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers and political figures-a loyal member of the Communist party, a lifelong diplomat and onetime senator, a man lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." Born Neftali Basoalto, Neruda adopted his pen name in fear of his family's disapproval, and yet by the age of twenty-five he was already famous for the book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which remains his most beloved. During the next fifty years, a seemingly boundless metaphorical language linked his romantic fantasies and the fierce moral and political compass-exemplified in books such as Canto General-that made him an adamant champion of the dignity of ordinary men and women. Edited and with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, this is the most comprehensive single-volume collection of this prolific poet's work in English. Here the finest translations of nearly six hundred poems by Neruda are collected and join specially commissioned new translations that attest to Neruda's still-resounding presence in American letters.