Description
Piotr Sommer is one of Poland's leading poets. Continued extends and enlarges the achievement of his earlier Bloodaxe selection, Things to Translate, and spans his whole career to date. The translations were made with the help of leading British and American poets, including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn and D.J. Enright.
About the Author
Piotr Sommer is a Polish poet and translator of contemporary Anglo-American poetry. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including one earlier selection in English, Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books, 1991), and two books of essays. He lives outside Warsaw and works for Literatura na Swiecie, a magazine of international writing. He has translated many British and American poets into English, including Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara and Charles Reznikoff, and has edited an anthology of modern British and Irish poets translated into Polish as well as a collection of interviews with leading British and Irish poets. He is a frequent visitor to Britain and Ireland, where he has given many readings as well as holding residencies.
Reviews
It might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last twenty years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale - and find out why. -- Tomaz Salamun
Piotr Sommer is the great poet of "everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps". Like Frank O'Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls "improper names" - the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us. -- John Ashbery
Sommer's main subject is the "quandary-ness" of "ordinary life": an old dog, the colour and texture of a lemon, a lift in a dilapidated block of flats, the crash of toiletries on a bathroom floor. The art of the poetry - and its art is considerable, singular and memorable - is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object, and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity. It is a poetry that engages large subjects through its attentiveness to seemingly small or minor events... There is a quality of otherness in the poetry, or the suggestion of otherness. Boundaries are continually being crossed. There are sallies and retreats. What at first may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is very much the poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and travelling incognito. -- August Kleinzahler
Book Information
ISBN 9781852247027
Author Piotr Sommer
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
About the Author
Piotr Sommer is a Polish poet and translator of contemporary Anglo-American poetry. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including one earlier selection in English, Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books, 1991), and two books of essays. He lives outside Warsaw and works for Literatura na Swiecie, a magazine of international writing. He has translated many British and American poets into English, including Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara and Charles Reznikoff, and has edited an anthology of modern British and Irish poets translated into Polish as well as a collection of interviews with leading British and Irish poets. He is a frequent visitor to Britain and Ireland, where he has given many readings as well as holding residencies.
Reviews
It might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last twenty years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale - and find out why. -- Tomaz Salamun
Piotr Sommer is the great poet of "everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps". Like Frank O'Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls "improper names" - the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us. -- John Ashbery
Sommer's main subject is the "quandary-ness" of "ordinary life": an old dog, the colour and texture of a lemon, a lift in a dilapidated block of flats, the crash of toiletries on a bathroom floor. The art of the poetry - and its art is considerable, singular and memorable - is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object, and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity. It is a poetry that engages large subjects through its attentiveness to seemingly small or minor events... There is a quality of otherness in the poetry, or the suggestion of otherness. Boundaries are continually being crossed. There are sallies and retreats. What at first may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is very much the poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and travelling incognito. -- August Kleinzahler
Book Information
ISBN 9781852247027
Author Piotr Sommer
Format Paperback
Page Count 144
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
