Bezdelki - Small things

Carol Rumens

Summary

In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn't purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.

Available since: 10/12/2018.

Print length: 36 pages.

Poetry & Theatre

Other books that might interest you

Structure of prayer

Diego Maenza

”Christianity, from a priest and a nun, two stories crossed by the secret, by the suffering of not recognizing themselves in their ”sins”, in denying a reality that is telling them, more and more strongly, that they are weak before the acceptance of their wrong decisions. The characters are just mere figures placed in the plot to delve into a constant and disturbing message: someone is always on top of someone else; someone who sentences with ideas conditioned to their benefit”. ALEXIS CUZME, writer ” Structure of prayer is developed in an environment of religiosity and erudition, because in relation to the famous painting The Garden of Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, the protagonist - who is a priest - interprets his own behavior and that of other human beings, from the beginning to the end of time”. VERÓNICA FALCONÍ, writer

Show book

G K Chesterton - Chapter & Verse...

GK Chesterton

Literature is a world of words and wonder, able to take us on almost unimaginable journeys from the wild and fantastic to the grind and minutiae of life.

An author’s ideas are his building blocks, his architecture of the mind, building a structure on which all else will rest; the narrative, the characters, the words - those few words that begin the adventure.

In this series we look at some of our leading classic authors across two genres: the short story and the poem. In this modern world there is an insatiable need to categorise and pigeon-hole everyone and everything. But ideas, these grains and saplings of the brain, need to roam, to explore and find their perfect literary use vehicle. Our authors are masters of many literary forms, perhaps known for one but themselves favouring another.

Story. Poems. Story. Within these boundaries come all manner of invention and cast of characters. And, of course, each author has their own way of revealing their own chapter and verse.

1 - Chapter & Verse - G K Chesterton - An Introduction
2 - The Resurrection of Father Brown by G K Chesterton
3 - The Song Against Songs by G K Chesterton
4 - The Strange Music by G K Chesterton
5 - The Song of Right and Wrong by G K Chesterton
6 - Americanisation by G K Chesterton
7 - The Englishman by G K Chesterton
8 - The Mystery by G K Chesterton
9 - Le Panto by G K Chesterton
10 - The Convert by G K Chesterton
11 - The Human Tree by G K Chesterton
12 - The Secret People by G K Chesterton
13 - The Last Hero by G K Chesterton
14 - A Prayer in Darkness by G K Chesterton
15 - A Ballad of Suicide by G K Chesterton
16 - The Rolling English Road by G K Chesterton
17 - A Somewhat Improbable Story by G K Chesterton

Show book

Common Place

Sarah Pinder

Common Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks towards what comes next.

 
‘Watch for theplaces where Pinder goes for the imperative: like the book as a whole, these commands are generous, beautiful, and difficult lifelines thrown from a fellow survivor of the present.’

 
– Jennifer Nelson, author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife

 
‘Common Place feels like the logbook of a survivor, one that shows how the intimate and the idiosyncratic persist within the post-capitalist technosphere. A tatteredrecord keeping, Common Place is friend of the abject landscape, “home of the lesser, lowercase subject.�* Grasp its compassionate disposition, and this fragmentary poem reveals the affective centre of its ingeniously dissociative fabric.’

 
– Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves

Show book

Nicholas Wright: Five Plays (NHB...

Nicholas Wright

A rich selection of work from the late 1970s and 1980s, introduced by the playwright.
The plays contained in this volume are:
The Custom of the Country
An updating of Fletcher and Massinger's bawdy Jacobean drama.
The Desert Air
A wartime comedy set in Cairo.
Mrs Klein
A play about the controversial psychoanalyst.
One Fine Day
A comedy about the gulf that separates Britain and Africa.
Treetops
A play based on the author's own rebellious boyhood in South Africa.

Show book

The World Keeps Ending and the...

Franny Choi

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival. 
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. 
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.  
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Show book

Tomcat (NHB Modern Plays)

James Rushbrooke

In the not-too-distant future, the world is better than ever. Diseases and disorders have been wiped out. But Jess doesn't belong. She slipped through the net and there's something dangerous in her DNA, something that must be 'cured'. Charlie is watching Jess. He'll do whatever it takes to keep society safe. As debate over genetic screening rages,Tomcat asks how far will we go to keep humanity healthy? When you can learn everything about a person from a computer screen, is there anything left to discover? Tomcat by James Rushbrooke was the winner of the 2015 Papatango New Writing Prize in association with Southwark Playhouse, London, where it premiered in October 2015.

Show book