LITERATURE
Books of Literature
HAIKU
Harry Thomas
Sixty-three original poems by Harry Thomas.
Harry Thomas is the translator of Joseph Brodsky’s masterpiece, “Gorbunov and Gorchakov” (To Urania, Penguin, 1987). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 1993), Montale in English (Penguin, 2002) and Poems about Trees (Knopf, 2019). His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Handsel Books, an imprint of Other Press as well as an affiliate of W. W. Norton. Also from Harry Thomas and Un-Gyve Press: SOME COMPLICITY: POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS (2013), THE TRUTH OF TWO (2017) and HAIKU (2020).
Un-Gyve Press is pleased to offer HAIKU also in a limited, signed edition with a number of the poems translated into Japanese by TAMURA Nanae.
The Truth of Two
Selected Translations
Harry Thomas
Harry Thomas's translations of Catullus, Li Bai, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Giacomo Leopardi, Salvador Díaz Mirón, Paul Valéry, Antonio Machado, Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pedro Salinas, Eugenio Montale, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Primo Levi, Yves Bonnefoy, Joseph Brodsky.
Harry Thomas is the author of May This Be (Jackdaw Press 2001); the translator of Joseph Brodsky’s “Gorbunov and Gorchakov” (To Urania, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1987); and the editor of Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin 1993) as well as of Montale in English (translations by various hands, Penguin 2002). His critical work includes Berryman’s Understanding (Northeastern 1988). Some Complicity: Poems & Translations by Harry Thomas from Un-Gyve Press. The Truth of Two: Selected Translations by Harry Thomas from Un-Gyve Press.
Some Complicity - Harry Thomas
Harry Thomas's own poems and his translations of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi, Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, and Primo Levi. Some Complicity (Un-Gyve Press) is hand bound hardcover volume of 83 pages ISBN: 978-0-9829198-2-8.
Harry Thomas is the author of May This Be (Jackdaw Press 2001); the translator of Joseph Brodsky’s “Gorbunov and Gorchakov” (To Urania, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1987); and the editor of Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Penguin 1993) as well as of Montale in English (translations by various hands, Penguin 2002). His critical work includes Berryman’s Understanding (Northeastern 1988). His most recent work The Truth of Two: Collected Translations is forthcoming from Un-Gyve Press.
in Prose - Kasia Buczkowska
Kasia Buczkowska's first book is a collection of “short takes,” so named by Rosanna Warren — with a quality of foreignness to the voice that forms quirky folk-tales and vignettes, urban and pastoral, in Prose. A 78 page softcover; ISBN: 978-0-9829198-3-5.
Kasia Buczkowska is a writer and translator in New York City, who writes very short fiction in Polish and English. She studied English Philology at the University of Warsaw and English Literature and Film at Columbia University and she says that she “fell into writing fiction, felicitously” living in New York. She has published her “short takes,” so named by Rosanna Warren, in Literary Imagination, Clarion, and in Przegląd Polski, the cultural supplement to Nowy Dziennik in New York, to which she also contributes articles and reviews. Her first book is a collection of such short takes — with a quality of foreignness to the voice that forms quirky folk-tales and vignettes, urban and pastoral, in Prose.
From in Prose:
The Fly Bit the Cow
A cow stood on the grass. Grandma was milking the cow. The milk was flowing into the bucket. A fly was cruising around the cow. Granddaughter was chasing the fly with a birch branch. “Grandma, where is God?” “God lives in your heart and he will always whisper to you whenever you move away from him.” The cow was stretching its ear. “God is also in this grass, on which the bucket stands, and in this milk that fills the bucket to the brim, and in this cow that gives the milk, and everything wants to live its own life.” The cow nodded. The girl held the branch still. The fly bit the cow. The irritated cow swung its tail. Grandma knocked over the bucket. The milk spilled on the grass. “Nobody will drink milk today. Everything has its boundaries,” Grandma said. The cow nodded.
Selected Delanty
Poems and translations by Greg Delanty chosen and introduced by Archie Burnett.
softcover edition
A sense of vital, actual experience is in fact wonderfully sustained in Delanty’s verse in its notable linguistic energy, product of a distinctive fusion of a literary lexicon (even Latinate at times) with contemporary demotic, Cork argot, Irish language phrases, place names, craft cant and North American slang (baseball lingo in one poem, ‘Tagging the Stealer’). The language of his verse functions indeed as the verbal equivalent of the printer’s hellbox (subject of one of the nest of Delanty’s poems), which the poet tells us ‘was a container in which worn or broken type was thrown to be melted down and recast into new type’. For in Delanty’s work a world in constant transition (the ‘simultaneous going and comings of life’) is realized in a vocabulary and variegated tonal register that displays language itself in the process of being re-made.
— Terence Brown, “Greg Delanty and North America”, Agenda, 2008
Following upon his Guggenheim Fellowship, Agenda devoted its Summer/Autumn issue in 2008 to the celebration of Greg Delanty’s 50th birthday. In a sense it was a twain celebration, language being re-made and voice re-born by Atlantic Crossings.
Ulster people are British and Irish people are Irish, and never the twain shall meet.
An adaptation of
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
— Rudyard Kipling, ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’ (1892). But what, when the twain meet, of Greg Delanty and North America.
Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland, in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. He became a US citizen in 1992, and retains his Irish citizenship. He now lives most of the year in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Poet in Residence at St. Michael’s College. He returns to his Irish home in Derrynane, County Kerry, each summer. Delanty has either written or edited seventeen books and has received numerous awards for his poetry including The Patrick Kavanagh Award (1983), The Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award (1997), and a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry (2008). He has received an Irish Arts Council Bursary, and has been widely anthologized.
Greg Delanty’s papers up to 2010 are housed in The National Library of Ireland. His papers from 2010 to 2015 are housed in the Boole Library of University College Cork.
He is Past President of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).
Archie Burnett is Director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University. He took a first in English at Edinburgh University before doing a DPhil at Oxford on Milton’s language. From 1974 to 1978 he was Junior Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Oxford, and subsequently Lecturer and eventually Professor at Oxford Brookes University. His major publications are Milton’s Style: The Shorter Poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1981), the Oxford editions of The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997) and The Letters of A. E. Housman (2007), and Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (Faber, 2012). His editorial work has drawn the highest praise. He is currently preparing a multi-volume edition of the collected prose of T. S. Eliot for Faber.
The Goldkorn Variations: a trilorgy.
Leslie Epstein
The Goldkorn Variations collects in one definitive volume, with a new afterword by the author, three previously published novels (originally from E.P. Dutton and Norton presses) about an aged European flautist, his music and his loves, from childhood to age one hundred and four. The author, Leslie Epstein, introduced Leib Goldkorn in his novella The Steinway Quintet, which received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature, and which later became one of the three tales collected in the first of these volumes. That in turn spawned what came to be known as Goldkorniana. The illustration by Pablo Picasso, “Scène Erotique II 02-08-1962,” 1962, appearing on the cover of The Goldkorn Variations courtesy of the Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), and the Pace Gallery, is one which the author, Leslie Epstein feels “particularly captures the undying energy of a man who never seems to grow old—in that sense, perhaps, Leib Goldkorn is like Picasso himself.”
The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom
Edited by Ben Mazer, the first-ever complete edition of the poems of John Crowe Ransom, restoring to the world – in the name not of mercy but of justice – a great many poems that he himself had once (and quite rightly) judged perfectly worthy of publication, poems that, joining now his select poems, will enjoy a renaissance. This first edition is a cloth-covered sewn hardbound book ISBN: 978-0-9829198-6-6 (Un-Gyve Press).
Of the tread of the dark wood mold and turfy rye,
Rich smell of horse in his nostril, wind in his eye,
– from In Air, John Crowe Ransom
The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom
Edited by Ben Mazer
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), poet, critic, and teacher was born in Pulaski, Tennessee. He entered Vanderbilt University at the age of fifteen, received his undergraduate degree in 1909, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and crowned his academic career at Kenyon College where he founded and edited the Kenyon Review. His criticism – The New Criticism – was revered and feared. His poems are at once ancient and modern while never modernist (T.S. Eliot: “I have probably a higher opinion of your verse than you have of mine”). They won high esteem and deep delight for their fineness, their humor, their individuality of manner and movement, and their unforced poignancy. Poems About God (1919), Chills and Fever (1924), and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927) led in due course to his Selected Poems (1947), of which the revised reissue was to win the National Book Award in Poetry in 1964.
Robert Graves: “The sort of poetry which, because it is too good, has to be brushed aside as a literary novelty”.
Howard Nemerov: “His verse is in the best sense ‘private’, the judgment upon the world of one man who could not, properly speaking, be imitated”.
Robert Lowell: “so many lyrics that one wants to read over and over”.
So many? But there exists a greater yield than was preserved by Ransom himself. For the poet, in a fierce act of purgation, force-slimmed his poems to 68 pages. Selected with a vengeance. Presented here now is the first-ever complete edition of the poems of John Crowe Ransom, restoring to the world – in the name not of mercy but of justice – a great many poems that he himself had once (and quite rightly) judged perfectly worthy of publication, poems that, joining now his select poems, will enjoy a renaissance.
Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964, and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His poems have been widely published in international literary periodicals, including Verse, Stand, Leviathan Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, Jacket Magazine, Fulcrum, Pequod, The Boston Phoenix, Thumbscrew and Agenda. He is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. His first collection of poems, White Cities, was published by Barbara Matteau Editions in 1995. His most recent collections of poems are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books), both published in April 2010. His edition of Ransom’s poems was effected at the Editorial Institute, Boston University.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery has said of Mazer’s work: “Like fragments of old photographs happened on in a drawer, these poems tap enigmatic bits of the past that suddenly come to life again. To read him is to follow him along a dreamlike corridor where everything is beautiful and nothing is as it seems.”
The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom is published in cooperation with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. / Knopf Doubleday Publishing and by CO-OPPRODUCTION.