David Constantine's poetry is informed by a humane vision of the world. This book shows how all personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of social and political life, assert themselves, fight for survival, and seek to make a world in which humane self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible.
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. In the title-poem of his latest collection - which illuminates the themes of the whole book - the lovers are a utopian answering back against the curse (following a crime against Nature) that is carried by the ship passing above them. Throughout these poems, the personal life, with its own joys and suffering, asserts itself against a world whose characteristic forces are dispiriting and destructive. "Nine Fathom Deep" shows how all personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of social and political life in the here and now, assert themselves, fight for survival, and actively seek to make a world in which humane self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible.
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 * Constantine's peculiar vision is an uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday...the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable... Overwhelmingly the poems are intelligent and well-turned, setting out the tensions between innocence and experience with fine control. -- Elizabeth Lowry * TLS *
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); Elder (2014); and Belongings (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.
