Tag Archives: Poetry

“for the marathon dead and wounded,” James Stotts

  mid april passing manchester the cherries have no stones washing their wings in the river wind not nearly as material as those bald merrimack pylons i am the maculate receipt of bestial capital and care barely thirty but i can already feel the worms between my legs the black mold fastened to my bones [...]

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Welcome Les Murray!

photo by Graham Carter   Les Murray is in the States on a rare visit of reading and teaching. He will appear at the Poetry Foundation on April 25, details here. Little Star has been honored to publish lots of recent poems by Les Murray. To celebrate his visit, we reproduce the whole crop in [...]

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Bumper crop of classical Japanese verse in English

Suddenly this spring, an unexpected flowering of Japanese verse in English. Two Copper Canyon editions of W. S. Merwin: Ten years in the making, the first complete bilingual edition of haiku from Yosa Buson (1716–1783), the successor to Basho and one of the great Haikuists of the Edo period, translated in collaboration with Takako Lento [...]

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A Christmas poem, by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Derek Walcott

    …………………………………………………………To Elisabeth Leonskaya The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs. We’ll cram ourselves in thick clothes, stumbling in drifts till we’re weary— better a reindeer than a dromedary. In the North if faith does not fail God appears as the warden of a jail where the kicks in our ribs were rough but what you [...]

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“Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden,” by Octavio Paz

The municipal government of Mexico City approached Octavio Paz with a proposal to build, in his childhood neighborhood of Mixcoac, a public garden whose gates and walls would be decorated with his poems. Mixcoac, once a charming village on the outskirts of the city, is now largely a desolate, anonymous corner of the spreading megalopolis. [...]

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“Epitaph,” by Kiki Dimoula

“One per cent of every kiss given, each one without exception, consists of eternity and all the rest the risk it may be the last.” Even if it’s the last it will be called a kiss all the more at least as long as memory on one hand and oblivion on the other pull it [...]

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Kiki Dimoula is a brazen plagiarist

Kiki Dimoula, one of Greece’s preeminent poets, is just now being comprehensively translated into English for the first time thanks to the exemplary Margellos World Republic of Letters series at Yale University Press, an endowed series made possible by Cecile and Theodore Margellos to bring important works of world literature into English. They have already provided [...]

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Gros-Jean ignores a warning, from “Moon-Child,” a play by Derek Walcott

Rare footage! Derek Walcott himself as the Narrator in a production of  “Moon Child (Ti Jean in Concert),” at the American Academy in Rome on April 4, 2011. Also wonderful: The silky Wendell Manwarren as the Planter and music by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. NARRATOR Deep in the forest, thick, where precious creatures are: the dove, [...]

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New translation of the Bhagavad Gita!

A new translation of the Bhagavad Gita from Norton by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin sent me into Namaste on 14th Street for a comparison. Flood and Martin’s introduction is welcoming and informative; I took note especially of their description of the poem’s form, which echoes the larger epic, the Mahabharata, in which it sits.  [...]

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Walser’s Trakl

In February we considered the poetry of Georg Trakl on the occasion of several new translations of his work. Now another door opens on this literary moment with Christopher Middleton’s Thirty Poems of Robert Walser, including this tribute to Trakl (first published in Michael Schmidt’s indispensable PN Review). Walser, whose growing recognition in English owes [...]

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