Carcanet Launch: Simon Smith & Harry Gilonis

Contact: jazmine@carcanet.co.uk

New work by two of Carcanet's brilliant poets, plus a rare opportunity to hear them in conversation, with readings from their recent books: Rough Breathing: New & Selected Poems by Harry Gilonis & The Books of Catullus, a new translation by Simon Smith.

This is a free event; wine will be served on the night.

For over three decades Harry Gilonis’s poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time. Gilonis’s work has a light, lucid beauty underpinned by formal and procedural invention, with lyrics written from love and landscape as well as poems made from the innards of language. There is collaged bird-song, experimental versioning from the ancient Chinese and text written by a ‘bot’. Borders between ‘original’ and ‘translation’ are straddled, or blurred, in intriguing and innovative ways.

Harry Gilonis is a poet, editor, publisher, and critic writing on art, poetry, and music. His books of poetry include Reliefs (1988), Pibroch (1996), Reading Hölderlin on Orkney (1997), walk the line (2000), eye-blink (2010), and For British Workers (2017), as well as collaborations with both poets – such as from far away (with Tony Baker, 1998) – and visual artists, such as Forty Fungi (with Erica Van Horn, 1994), Axioms (with David Connearn, 1995), and The Leiermann (with David Rees, after Schubert, 1998).

The Books of Catullus is the first full English translation to take the Roman poet at his word. Simon Smith’s versions are scholarly yet eccentric, mapping theme and register to contemporary equivalents (such as poem 16, which echoes Frank O’Hara). He divides Catullus’s complete verses into three ‘books’, the form in which it is thought the poems were originally received. ‘Smith gets the all-important rhythm of Catullus, whose meters, like all else about this poet, are deceptively complex’, writes Vincent Katz. ‘He achieves a delicious frisson again and again by fusing the classical and the contemporary. The reader is repeatedly pleasured by unexpected felicities.’ (Peter Hughes)

Simon Smith has published five collections of poetry. His third collection, Mercury (Salt Publications), was longlisted for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2016, and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage, 2016). Simon Smith is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow in 2009, and a judge of the National Poetry Prize in 2004. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.

Read more about Harry and his book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784103729

And more about Simon and his book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784105501

Entry: Free

Time: 6:00pm