Booklist

John's New Year Picks 2022

Selected by John Clegg


2022 is shaping up to be a vintage year for poetry: just in the next month or so (normally a very dead period), there’s some wonderful books incoming, including Padraig Regan’s long-awaited debut and new collections from Fiona Benson and Alison Brackenbury. There are also some exciting reissues of books which have been hard to find for a long time: Harlem Renaissance legend Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, and the Vita Sackville-West translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. And there’s also The Citizen – what sounds like an indispensable guide to the construction of Roy Fisher’s masterpiece, the long poem City, including drafts, variant texts and an early precursor in prose, all edited by Peter Robinson. For Fisher enthusiasts (everybody should be a Fisher enthusiast) this will be unmissable.

From the publisher:
Translated by Vita Sackville-WestIn 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward…

From the publisher:
A new collection from this widely-celebrated and much-loved poet.

From the publisher:
Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects:whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room wehappen to be…

From the publisher:
A harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance first published in 1922, this collection of poignant, lyrical poems explores Claude McKay’s yearning for his Jamaican homeland and the bitter plight of Black and African Caribbean people in…

From the publisher:
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM*The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished,…

From the publisher:
When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in…

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