CIARÁN O’ROURKE

The Buried Breath announces the arrival of a striking new voice and poetic talent. With formal ease and a sharply engaged sense of ethical inquiry, these lucid, lyrical poems delve into art and history, remembered lives and contemporary conflicts, for illumination and insight. Featuring vivid portrayals of love, desire, grief, and mourning, the collection is hauntingly sensitive to time’s passage, and to the sometimes fragile solaces of its craft – as its supple translations from Catullus, Virgil, and Machado, and its sensually immersive array of ekphrastic pieces attest.

CHRIS AGEE

Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Chris Agee’s nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment.

SONGS AND POEMS:Translated from the Greek

CHRIS PREDDLE

Here are Sappho’s songs and poems as English poems, all her famous pieces, all the fragments that can make connected sense, and all the discoveries of 2004 and 2014. These translations set out to be good English poetry first and foremost, and succeed well beyond other current versions. They have been made directly from Sappho’s Greek, by a poet with three collections to his credit, and are relatively close to the Greek. Each piece has a concise footnote that explains references and allusions, and suggests critical appreciation. A substantial Afterword says much more about Sappho’s themes, her art and style, and her historical setting.

60 LYRICS FRAE THE CHINESE:Translations in Scots and English

BRIAN HOLTON

Brian Holton is unique in that he can translate directly into Scots from the Chinese. This anthology consists of translations into Scots and English of the first sixty poems of the standard anthology Song Ci Sanbaishou (“300 Sòng Dynasty Song Lyrics”), edited by Zhu Zumou (1924), with a Translator’s Afterword/Owresetter’s Eftirword.