Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.
Arvustused
'The mood is both tender and desperate, with something of the uncanny in its blend of the recognisably human and apparently Other - His religious regard for the world (not the same thing as religious conviction) produces a strange translation of its ordinary terms. Its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever, yet at the same time brought into clearer focus' - Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review. 'Drawing on the sensibilities of the European poets - Goethe, Michaux, Holderlin - whose work he knows so intimately, Constantine's humane and serious volume weighs the life of the individual against the crash and tumble of the wider world and finds in favour of the subtler forces and complexities of the former' - Sarah Crown, Guardian.
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How will they view us, the receiving angels...? |
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Facing east, at the window |
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House by the ancient agora |
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Horse, man and woman, Hermes |
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Sanctuary of the Dioscuri |
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Erysichthon and his daughter Mestra |
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Our Lady of the Blackthorn and the Snow |
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High tide, early, 19 February 2011 |
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The makings of his breathing... |
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For a while after a death... |
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Cloud opening, 19 February 2012 |
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Told one of the goldfish wouldn't last the night... |
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Tomba 736, una donna, Enotria, VI secolo a. C. |
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Cast of a woman of Pompeii, Manchester Museum |
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A Romanesque church in the Rouergue |
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Roman sarcophagus of a man and wife, Salerno Cathedral |
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| Notes |
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David Constantine was born in 1944 in Salford, Lancashire. He read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, and lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queens College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He lives in Oxford and on Scilly.
He has published ten books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); and Elder (2014). His eleventh collection, Belongings, is published by Bloodaxe in 2020. His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlins Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004), his translation of Goethes Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009), his monograph Poetry (2013) in Oxford University Presss series The Literary Agenda, and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018).
He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international fiction award. Four other short story collections, Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), In Another Country: Selected Stories (2015) and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), and his second novel, The Life-Writer (2015), are published by Comma Press. His story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, while 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.
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