Prospectus, Recent & Retrospective

Forthcoming and recent releases and from the archives of Un-Gyve Press. See the prospects, the latest, and prior catalogues for download on this page.

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As to Empson

Select works and correspondence between William Empson and Christopher Ricks with contributions from Steven Isenberg and photographs by Judith Aronson. Edited by Jeffrey Gutierrez and Christopher Ricks.

“The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this.”

― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“Empson’s own magnanimity is his element; the magnanimity of others is often his subject, and he can tease the matter out for us beautifully….

Of course he is immeasurably more capacious than the rest of us. Those of us who revere him and delight in him, then and now, are not the ones who need to be told how far short we fall of his genius and goodness.”

― Christopher Ricks, “It’s great to change your mind” London Review of Books

Sixteen Poems

Roger Lonsdale

The Roger Lonsdale archive, at Balliol College, Oxford, includes his reflections, in 2005, on his poetry, with lists of his ninety poems—alphabetically by first lines, and chronologically—as well as his notebooks as a poet; and, at that time, he noted, in reference to these sixteen poems from Un-Gyve Press in a numbered, limited edition of seventy-five: “At present the following seem worth preserving for one reason or another.”

Roger Harrison Lonsdale (6 August 1934 - 28 February 2022) is remembered by University of Oxford, Faculty of English: A pre-eminent figure in the study of eighteenth-century literature, Roger Lonsdale was one of the greatest scholars in the history of the Oxford Faculty of English — though as a man of notorious self-deprecation he would certainly have demurred at any such praise. He was born in 1934 and educated at Lincoln College; following national service in the RAF and two years at Yale, he joined Balliol College in 1960, first as a Research Fellow and then as a Tutorial Fellow. Here he stayed until his retirement in 2000, a much-loved member of the Common Room and a wry, discerning observer of the Oxford scene. His publications were numerous: among the most celebrated was an unrivalled edition of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith for the Longman English Poets (1969). His monumental edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (Oxford, 2006) won several awards, including the Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize from the MLA, and was described by Frank Kermode as “quite simply a marvellous scholarly performance”. He also edited two major, extraordinarily comprehensive anthologies—The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Anthology (1989)—which effectively re-defined a whole period of literary history. Roger Lonsdale was deeply musical, an interest reflected in his life of Charles Burney (1965) as well as in much dedicated concert-going. He was a man of great modesty and kindliness whose immense scholarly generosity was valued by innumerable students of the subject; his distinction was recognised by elections to the Fellowship of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Everything he said was graced with a wonderfully dry, self-directed humour that belied the quite unrivalled authority of his scholarship. His loss will be lamented by very many friends and admirers across the globe. Roger Harrison Lonsdale FRSL FBA, MA DPhil Oxf, Andrew Bradley Junior Research Fellow of Balliol 1960-1963, Tutorial Fellow in English 1963-2000, Vice-Master 1978-1980 and Emeritus Fellow from 2000.

SELECTED DELANTY

Poems and translations by Greg Delanty chosen and introduced by Archie Burnett.

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 finest 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.
Daniel John Gregory Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. He obtained United States citizenship in 1992 while retaining his Irish citizenship, returning for three months of each year to his home in Derrynane, County Kerry. He lives most of the year in Vermont where he teaches at St. Michael’s College. Delanty attended University College Cork (UCC) where he edited the magazine Quarryman and published his first poems there and in The Cork Examiner. His books include Cast in the Fire (1986), Southward (1992), American Wake (1995), The Hellbox (1998), The Blind Stitch (2001), The Ship of Birth (2003), Collected Poems 1986 - 2006, The New Citizen Army (2010), and Loosestrife (2011). His latest collection The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (November 2012) is published by Carcanet. Delanty won the National Poetry Competition in 1999, and, in addition to the 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, the poet is the recipient of numerous other awards including the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award (1983), the Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry prize in 1996, the Wolfers-O’Neill Award (1996–97), an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary (1998–99), and an award from the Royal Literary Fund (1999). His poems have been widely anthologized.

Archie Burnett, Professor of English and Co-director, Editorial Institute, Boston University, MA, English Language and Literature, University of Edinburgh, PhD, English Literature, University of Oxford is the editor of Selected Delanty for Un-Gyve Press. Born in Scotland in 1950 he studied at the University of Edinburgh before completing his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1977, with a thesis on Milton's language. He was Junior Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford 1974-8 then Lecturer and eventually Professor in English at Oxford Brookes University 1979-2000. His scholarly editions, Milton’s Style: The Shorter Poems, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes (1981); The Poems of A. E. Housman (Oxford English Texts edition, 1997); The Letters of A. E. Housman (2 vols., 2007) the introduction to A Variorum Commentary on The Poems of John Milton, vol. 3, Samson Agonistes (2009); Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012) have earned him high praise — "Burnett is the new gold standard." Classical Review — and he is "currently preparing a collected edition (so far, text only) of the prose of T. S. Eliot in 5 or 6 volumes" which is certain to raise the bar.

Un-Gyve Press is pleased to be publishing this first Selected Delanty.

Publication date: October 26, 2017

Essays and Reviews

Eric Griffiths

Edited by Jeffrey Gutierrez

Eric Griffiths (11 July 1953 – 26 September 2018), British academic and literary critic, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than 30 years.

“… a literary critic generally considered to be one of the greatest of his age … Griffiths was an old-school don who would certainly fare ill in an age of student feedback forms and an academic culture of publish or perish.”

— Ian Sansom, the Guardian

“… known to some of his students as “Reckless Eric”; very much the bachelor don, he was demanding, charismatic, passionate, witty and humorous, capable of great kindness – but also famous for having the sharpest tongue at the university....”

— Telegraph Obituaries

“He was known to be brilliant and a protégé of Christopher Ricks, with a slightly dark reputation for having a wild side.”

— Hugh Thomson

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.

Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets, Oct. 19 1850.

Published in two volumes, in London by Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty and in New York by Harper & Brothers, William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets is illustrated with engravings made by H. W. Hewet (engraver of numerous editions, publisher, and patentee of the Improved Screw-Wrench) in the New York edition. The London edition credits “The Illustrations by W. and G. Measom.”

George Samuel Measom, known for his illustrated railway guides, and his charity,  collaborated with his brother, William, an engraver and a painter.

The collected work Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets, Oct. 19 1850., found by Christopher Ricks in the little bookshop in Nailsworth just a few miles from his home in Gloucestershire, contains the original mixed media/watercolour illustrations for the Howitt Haunts and Homes, presumably made by either one or both of the Measom brothers and bound for preservation in 1850, after the publication of the two Howitt volumes.

From our Un-Gyve archives, the original sequence of thirty-nine illustrations, the home or haunt and the poet being identified by hand in blue ink on the tissue leaf that precedes each illustration. These lovely vignettes are bound, the pages with gilt edges, and the album secured with a brass clasp. This loving series of associations opens with Geoffrey Chaucer (Tabard Inn — Southwark), and closes with Alfred Tennyson (Birthplace at Somersby). 

1850 was Tennyson’s annus mirabilis, a year to marvel at: May had seen the publication of In Memoriam, and June his wedding.  In November he was to succeed William Wordsworth (who had died in April) as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate, bestowing and receiving many true tributes for the next forty-two years.

Un-Gyve reproduces in faithful facsimile this tribute to the  centuries’ poets and to their spirits of place.

Publication date: October 19, 2018

The Truth of Two                                            

Selected Translations

Harry Thomas

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.

Publication date: November 7, 2017

Collected Works

Joan Goldin

Representing more than three decades of never before seen work by Joan Goldin, with an essay by Christopher Ricks.

"It takes a long time to peel a melon, and skill not to break the fine tissue that holds its form. The color is exquisite and the membranes intricate. I had the same feeling when observing the dissection of the human body: awe and respect." — Joan Goldin

For further on this forthcoming work follow the below link to the -logue entry:

Prospectus: Collected Works Joan Goldin

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.”

Cruiskeen Lawn

By MYLES NA gCOPALEEN

Edited by Catherine Ahern and translations from Ian Ó Caoimh

"The Un-Gyve edition will be printed in full-format and at a limited run of 250, and will collect a small selection of the columns, in full, as they were originally published in September 1941. We'll be reproducing the entire newspaper page upon which each column appeared, as well as that day's newspaper's front page for the benefit of context ... visual and temporal context from the columns.... Since Myles also included drawings and so often referred to the paper itself."

The NO Show

Mark Chester

“As words go NO is short and to the point, perhaps more so than any other. Put into its varied context — the pithy and the pastoral — by the brilliantly observant Mark Chester, NO guides us from our first roller coaster ride right up to the cemetery gates with humour and humanity.” 

— the -logue 

Presented in Boston by The Isole Gallery of Art + Industrial Design, The NO Show features select images from the book No in America, a collection of 150 images accompanied by George Toomer’s text, newly presented photographs from the NO archives, as well as new additions to the NO portfolio.

The NO Show is curated by the Un-Gyve Limited Group as a touring exhibition.

Forthcoming from Un-Gyve Press, a newly designed deluxe edition, with full focus on the photographs that speak for themselves, a resounding NO.