Carcanet Press - Collected Later Poems

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Reviews

A moment captured strikes you unawares

but grows a form gradually in afterthought

from ‘Eurydice Perceived’

August Kleinzahler says, ‘Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. One hardly knows where to begin...’ There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language.

All quotations from the Bow-Wow Shop’s ‘Tributes to Christopher Middleton’, www.bowwowshop.org.uk, 2013

The Tenor on Horseback

For Preface a Lacuna

The Part of Gravity

The Poem Lost

Body Count

A Pair of Herons

A Sonnet of Nice Goats

Keyboard

This Confidence

The Tenor on Horseback

Metapontum: The Necropolis

Saying Goodnight to Kate

The First Portrait

Orbiana

The Aquinas Anecdote

Pseudo-Paracelsus

Imagine Mallarmé

Chekhov at Sumy

Chekhov in a Park

Judge Bean

Felo de se

Senex

The Whelk

Ancient Emigré (Irish)

Elegy with Offenbach

Pictogram for a Maquisard

Election Eve in the Lord’s Republic

Against Frenzy

A Paper Snake

The Wine Merchant’s Secret

The Incident

Whatever Moves

The Wind-Chimes

Small Change, AD 147–8

The Brink

Homily with Reeds

Marginalia:

The Third Man Reconsidered

A Demon Sniggering

A Happy Captain

Bouillons

Of Adverse Atmospheres 50

From the Cat 51

Exile (from the French of Léon-Paul Fargue)

In Memory of W.G. Sebald 56

Poems 2006–2009

The Enjoyment of Shouting

Artist Unknown

The Dance Itself

The Strategy of Apanea

Among Egyptian Cenobites

A Longer Wind

The Very Capable Waitress

Calligraphy

A Grackle with a Greek Motif

The Veil

From Rilke (March 1924)

The Holly Branch

Mole-Catching

Lyric of the Dove

Goonhilly Downs (1939)

Hammersmith

Memorabilia of February 9, 2008

Samuel Palmer’s Ghost Goes Scavenging

A Symbolist

Goldfinches

The Inventor

The Victorian Photo

Daubigny’s Mill

In a Hammock between Trees

From Doctor Clown

At 80

Of the Belovèd Someone

Savanna Rose

Some Birds

Among Events Unreported

The Boy and the Piano

Some Remaining Masonry

An Apparition

Poem Forty-Four

The Old French Wine Glass

Homage to Alkan

The Pepper Brandy

The Enjoyment of Shouting

Vestigios de España

The Vine that Lost its Elm

Today

The Laundress

Symposium

Trampoline

Pavane

From Georg Trakl

In Slow Motion

Phantom Caravan

Byzantium Revisited

Another Melancholy

Slight Poems

Prologue: Ask Herodotus

Aquatint

An Exercise in Direct Discourse

A Spider’s Web Caught in Amber

Being There

On Ceasing to Perceive

Palingenesis

A Postcard from Alexandria 1908

Update on the Phrygian Mode

Rousseau

A Stuffed Shirt

The Saint Preaches to the Birds

Rattlesnake

The Moonshine

In Old Houses

Melody

Roughly Thus was the Beauty of Certain Facts Delineated

What the Hedgehog Said, A.D. 360

The View Back from Whirling Weathervanes

Seniority

Not Forgotten

Like the Words Above their Ink

When out of Heaven (Friedrich Hölderlin)

Remembering White Chickens

On the Eve of Independence Day

Then

The Four Curios

Seniority (2)

The Halving of France

Feuilleton 10: Rather Vague About Vienna

Epilogues

Old School Remembered

In Memory of the Great Edward FitzGerald (1809–83)

History of the Hat

For Want of an Axiom

Old Dunwich / In Writing, Memory

Reminiscence Remembered

In the American Park

The Murmur of Erasmus

How Blacktop Burned Beethoven

Overheard in the Agora

Leo III Iconoclast

Daphne

Happening

Vasily Kalinnikov Composes

Variation on Orhan Veli Kanık’s Poem about Listening to Istanbul

Two Poems of Love

Zamoscz

Alt-Hermannstadt / Bukovina

Lonesome Toper, Busy Barmaid

Like Heart’s Desire

Sonnet of Irreconcilables

Figure of Relation, the Part of Speech

A Parable for Rembrandt

Banality Overwhelming

You Did Not Wake Up

A Dainty Shopper

Of Sympathy

The Shorter Breath

The Night

On the Road from Van Kure to Urga

Kangaroo

Belshazzar

Variation on Prose by Rudolf Kassner

The Ragged Verses

A Company of Ghosts

The Space of the Mandarin Duck

The Halcyons Flew Out to Sea

Homily Creek

A Kinglet

The Avocet

For the Birthday of John Keats in 1795

Whispers of Rumi

The Pendulum Stilled

Apropos The Golden Ass

A True Tale of the Anecdotes Improvised by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam

For Shuntaro Tanikawa

A Saddle for Daedalus

Faux-Naif: The Reverie

Russia and Holland

The Legend of St. Jerome

A Tarahumara Jug

An Archaic Greek Vase Painting

During The Aftermath

The Touch of Autumn before Evensong

From a Family Album

The Enchanted Scrivener 2

Into the Clay

The Game of Conkers

A Tulip Tree

Of Music from a Sunken System

Of Imminence

The Trojan Philanderer

Mother by the Lake 2

The Desolation

A Testimony for the Deaf

Promenade

Juniperus Americanus

The Leveret

The Substance Having Uncertain Signs

The Devil’s Innocence

9 (For the Crows)

Arp’s Arcs

Household Conversation

A Newcomer in the Small Port

Just Look at the Dancers

Eleven Canticles

Sumac

A Difference of Degree

Boy with a Long Pale Face

Sparrows

The Messengers

Editorial for the Snail

Ichor

O fons Bandusiae

Early Ionian

From the Grotto

Merlin

Fumes

Not to Rhyme

John Clare to his Muse

In Living Memory

The Poem of 2 a.m.

Nursing a Wound on Blue Heron Island

Over Low Thresholds Turning

The Lakeshore in Springtime

Of the Pigeon that Spoke not a Word

On a Poem by Kurahara Shinjiro

Tiepolo: Study of a Child

All Over for Falstaff

The Jerbil

The Gnats

The Wren’s Oration

Cypress by the Stairway

Petition for a Joint Passport

Café Pamparigousto

The Music Come and Gone

Reconocimiento a J.L.B.

Thrones

An Earthwork: The Devil’s Dyke

The Menander Fragment

The Stained-Glass Gyroscope

The Ride from Urga

Monostichs

Monostichs 1

Monostichs 2

Monostichs 3

Monostichs 4

Monostichs 5

Monostichs 6: Sequel to Monostichs 5

Monostichs 7

Monostichs 8

Monostichs 9

Monostichs 10

Monostichs (Spurious)

Monostichs 11

Monostichs 12

Monostichs 13

Monostichs 14

Monostichs (Spurious)

Monostichs 15

Monostichs 16

Monostichs 17

Forty Days in the Calypso Saloon

1 From the Papers of Esteban Seferiades

The Fig Tree

Ivy and Ocean

Orchards in Cappadocia

The Living Bracelet

Rising

Returning to Mycenae

A Dolphin

Theophany in Fener

Seferiades

On the Lakeshore

Esteban Seferiades Welcomes Longevity

The Saintliest of Men

Confusions 1: The Fable

Oxford 1949

A Walk from the Orangerie

Mutual Aid

Elegy: The Calypso Saloon

In the Fossil Record

Some Woodpeckers

The Ghosting of Paul Celan

Confusions 2: The Phantasm

Embers, Not Entirely in the Manner of Jean Follain

A Worm’s Theorem

Triple Hiatus

Leonardo da Vinci’s Cecilia Gallerani

From the Distant Place

A Winter Landscape, 1646

A True Tale from Schwabing

Fennel

Of the Mistaken Mendicant

The Spring Sunday

A Hatful of Spectres

A Pine Siskin

Water at Not More than Six Feet

Confusions 3: The Belief

On Setting Out by Stagecoach for the Southwestern Territories

Two Squibs

Coda

Frescoes with Graffiti

The Transfigured Don Juan

Near Oblivion

Volta

A Construction for Gnostics

Sehnsucht

An Ephemerid

Calligraphy

Sacred King and Drunken Boat

Homage to Renoir

No Say

A Bird Lantern

Souvenir of Hamburg, 1946

Near Lakenheath

The Race Across the Quicksand

From Our Imagery of Early Greeks

Remembering Johannes Bobrowski (1917–65)

Old Shrines

‘If From The Distance…’

Go with Isaac Rosenberg

Among Signs

On the Futility of Pathos

Haikus

Poems Without a Subject

Two Antiques

On Two Strips of Parchment

Items in a Showcase

Rilke on the Street

Çanakkale

Three Translations

Prometheus Saxifrage

Claudius the God (Zbigniew Herbert)

Avowal

A Keeper of the Reliquary

Two Poems Mistakenly Omitted from Collected Poems

The Child at the Piano

January 1919

Three Tributes

The Lost Elegy

Gingo Biloba

Excavated Poem

Interim

The Path Long Overgrown

Dilemma after a Serious Accident

Our Rain Crow

The Wicker Chair

Caducity

Fragment for a Lost Girl

The Typesetter’s Visit to Cavafy

Eurydice Perceived

Notes

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King’s College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in ... read more

'The poet's ancestry, his Englishness, is relegated without denial. But the movement, whether it is generated in America, Provence or Cappadocia, is always of encounter...if an eroticism, with the inner and the outer, a profound in-touchness with the multiplicities of existence... a mark of all important poets'
Tom Lowenstein 'Poems, translations, essays - Christopher Middletonâs are among the most visited books on my shelves; always dependable for re-exciting the possibilities of language.'
Jennie Feldman
Praise for Christopher Middleton 'a poet with a disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem'
John Lucas, New Statesman 'His work is at once rich and sparse, elegantly economic in its subtle shifts from discrete object to discrete object, yet, by contrast with mainstream English realism, striking for the boldness and brio of its imaginings.'
Terry Eagleton, Stand 'Metrically inventive and various, these poems are remarkably alive to "the unknown thing beside us", they listen for "the due sound", and, as if watching birds, register "the timed flight of words". A motto for reading Middleton's work might be: purify the source, then trust to luck.'
Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books 'Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years.'
August Kleinzahler, Threepenny Review

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Collected Later Poems Christopher Middleton 10% off eBook (EPUB) Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, British Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback 0 (Pub. Jan 2014) 9781847771520 Out of Stock eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jan 2014) 9781847775160 £25.00 £22.50 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Excerpt Author Contents Reviews A moment captured strikes you unawares but grows a form gradually in afterthought from ‘Eurydice Perceived’ August Kleinzahler says, ‘Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. One hardly knows where to begin...’ There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language. All quotations from the Bow-Wow Shop’s ‘Tributes to Christopher Middleton’, www.bowwowshop.org.uk, 2013 The Tenor on Horseback For Preface a Lacuna The Part of Gravity The Poem Lost Body Count A Pair of Herons A Sonnet of Nice Goats Keyboard This Confidence The Tenor on Horseback Metapontum: The Necropolis Saying Goodnight to Kate The First Portrait Orbiana The Aquinas Anecdote Pseudo-Paracelsus Imagine Mallarmé Chekhov at Sumy Chekhov in a Park Judge Bean Felo de se Senex The Whelk Ancient Emigré (Irish) Elegy with Offenbach Pictogram for a Maquisard Election Eve in the Lord’s Republic Against Frenzy A Paper Snake The Wine Merchant’s Secret The Incident Whatever Moves The Wind-Chimes Small Change, AD 147–8 The Brink Homily with Reeds Marginalia: The Third Man Reconsidered A Demon Sniggering A Happy Captain Bouillons Of Adverse Atmospheres 50 From the Cat 51 Exile (from the French of Léon-Paul Fargue) In Memory of W.G. Sebald 56 Poems 2006–2009 The Enjoyment of Shouting Artist Unknown The Dance Itself The Strategy of Apanea Among Egyptian Cenobites A Longer Wind The Very Capable Waitress Calligraphy A Grackle with a Greek Motif The Veil From Rilke (March 1924) The Holly Branch Mole-Catching Lyric of the Dove Goonhilly Downs (1939) Hammersmith Memorabilia of February 9, 2008 Samuel Palmer’s Ghost Goes Scavenging A Symbolist Goldfinches The Inventor The Victorian Photo Daubigny’s Mill In a Hammock between Trees From Doctor Clown At 80 Of the Belovèd Someone Savanna Rose Some Birds Among Events Unreported The Boy and the Piano Some Remaining Masonry An Apparition Poem Forty-Four The Old French Wine Glass Homage to Alkan The Pepper Brandy The Enjoyment of Shouting Vestigios de España The Vine that Lost its Elm Today The Laundress Symposium Trampoline Pavane From Georg Trakl In Slow Motion Phantom Caravan Byzantium Revisited Another Melancholy Slight Poems Prologue: Ask Herodotus Aquatint An Exercise in Direct Discourse A Spider’s Web Caught in Amber Being There On Ceasing to Perceive Palingenesis A Postcard from Alexandria 1908 Update on the Phrygian Mode Rousseau A Stuffed Shirt The Saint Preaches to the Birds Rattlesnake The Moonshine In Old Houses Melody Roughly Thus was the Beauty of Certain Facts Delineated What the Hedgehog Said, A.D. 360 The View Back from Whirling Weathervanes Seniority Not Forgotten Like the Words Above their Ink When out of Heaven (Friedrich Hölderlin) Remembering White Chickens On the Eve of Independence Day Then The Four Curios Seniority (2) The Halving of France Feuilleton 10: Rather Vague About Vienna Epilogues Old School Remembered In Memory of the Great Edward FitzGerald (1809–83) History of the Hat For Want of an Axiom Old Dunwich / In Writing, Memory Reminiscence Remembered In the American Park The Murmur of Erasmus How Blacktop Burned Beethoven Overheard in the Agora Leo III Iconoclast Daphne Happening Vasily Kalinnikov Composes Variation on Orhan Veli Kanık’s Poem about Listening to Istanbul Two Poems of Love Zamoscz Alt-Hermannstadt / Bukovina Lonesome Toper, Busy Barmaid Like Heart’s Desire Sonnet of Irreconcilables Figure of Relation, the Part of Speech A Parable for Rembrandt Banality Overwhelming You Did Not Wake Up A Dainty Shopper Of Sympathy The Shorter Breath The Night On the Road from Van Kure to Urga Kangaroo Belshazzar Variation on Prose by Rudolf Kassner The Ragged Verses A Company of Ghosts 1 The Space of the Mandarin Duck The Halcyons Flew Out to Sea Homily Creek A Kinglet The Avocet For the Birthday of John Keats in 1795 2 Whispers of Rumi The Pendulum Stilled Apropos The Golden Ass A True Tale of the Anecdotes Improvised by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam For Shuntaro Tanikawa 3 A Saddle for Daedalus Faux-Naif: The Reverie Russia and Holland The Legend of St. Jerome A Tarahumara Jug An Archaic Greek Vase Painting 4 During The Aftermath 5 The Touch of Autumn before Evensong From a Family Album The Enchanted Scrivener 2 Into the Clay The Game of Conkers 6 A Tulip Tree Of Music from a Sunken System Of Imminence The Trojan Philanderer Mother by the Lake 2 The Desolation 7 A Testimony for the Deaf Promenade Juniperus Americanus The Leveret The Substance Having Uncertain Signs 8 The Devil’s Innocence 9 (For the Crows) Arp’s Arcs Household Conversation A Newcomer in the Small Port Just Look at the Dancers Eleven Canticles Sumac A Difference of Degree Boy with a Long Pale Face Sparrows The Messengers Editorial for the Snail Ichor O fons Bandusiae Early Ionian From the Grotto Merlin Fumes Not to Rhyme John Clare to his Muse In Living Memory The Poem of 2 a.m. Nursing a Wound on Blue Heron Island Over Low Thresholds Turning The Lakeshore in Springtime Of the Pigeon that Spoke not a Word On a Poem by Kurahara Shinjiro Tiepolo: Study of a Child All Over for Falstaff The Jerbil The Gnats The Wren’s Oration Cypress by the Stairway Petition for a Joint Passport Café Pamparigousto The Music Come and Gone Reconocimiento a J.L.B. Thrones An Earthwork: The Devil’s Dyke The Menander Fragment The Stained-Glass Gyroscope The Ride from Urga Monostichs Monostichs 1 Monostichs 2 Monostichs 3 Monostichs 4 Monostichs 5 Monostichs 6: Sequel to Monostichs 5 Monostichs 7 Monostichs 8 Monostichs 9 Monostichs 10 Monostichs (Spurious) Monostichs 11 Monostichs 12 Monostichs 13 Monostichs 14 Monostichs (Spurious) Monostichs 15 Monostichs 16 Monostichs 17 Forty Days in the Calypso Saloon 1 From the Papers of Esteban Seferiades The Fig Tree Ivy and Ocean Orchards in Cappadocia The Living Bracelet Rising Returning to Mycenae A Dolphin Theophany in Fener Seferiades On the Lakeshore Esteban Seferiades Welcomes Longevity The Saintliest of Men 2 Confusions 1: The Fable Oxford 1949 A Walk from the Orangerie Mutual Aid Elegy: The Calypso Saloon In the Fossil Record Some Woodpeckers The Ghosting of Paul Celan Confusions 2: The Phantasm Embers, Not Entirely in the Manner of Jean Follain A Worm’s Theorem Triple Hiatus Leonardo da Vinci’s Cecilia Gallerani From the Distant Place 3 A Winter Landscape, 1646 A True Tale from Schwabing Fennel Of the Mistaken Mendicant The Spring Sunday A Hatful of Spectres A Pine Siskin Water at Not More than Six Feet Confusions 3: The Belief On Setting Out by Stagecoach for the Southwestern Territories Two Squibs Coda Frescoes with Graffiti The Transfigured Don Juan Near Oblivion Volta A Construction for Gnostics Sehnsucht An Ephemerid Calligraphy Sacred King and Drunken Boat Homage to Renoir No Say A Bird Lantern Souvenir of Hamburg, 1946 Near Lakenheath The Race Across the Quicksand From Our Imagery of Early Greeks Remembering Johannes Bobrowski (1917–65) Old Shrines ‘If From The Distance…’ Go with Isaac Rosenberg Among Signs On the Futility of Pathos Haikus Poems Without a Subject Two Antiques On Two Strips of Parchment Items in a Showcase Rilke on the Street Çanakkale Three Translations Prometheus Saxifrage Claudius the God (Zbigniew Herbert) Avowal A Keeper of the Reliquary Two Poems Mistakenly Omitted from Collected Poems The Child at the Piano January 1919 Three Tributes The Lost Elegy Gingo Biloba Excavated Poem Interim The Path Long Overgrown Dilemma after a Serious Accident Our Rain Crow The Wicker Chair Caducity Fragment for a Lost Girl The Typesetter’s Visit to Cavafy Eurydice Perceived Notes Index of Titles Index of First Lines Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King’s College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in ... read more 'The poet's ancestry, his Englishness, is relegated without denial. But the movement, whether it is generated in America, Provence or Cappadocia, is always of encounter...if an eroticism, with the inner and the outer, a profound in-touchness with the multiplicities of existence... a mark of all important poets' Tom Lowenstein 'Poems, translations, essays - Christopher Middletonâs are among the most visited books on my shelves; always dependable for re-exciting the possibilities of language.' Jennie Feldman Praise for Christopher Middleton 'a poet with a disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem' John Lucas, New Statesman 'His work is at once rich and sparse, elegantly economic in its subtle shifts from discrete object to discrete object, yet, by contrast with mainstream English realism, striking for the boldness and brio of its imaginings.' Terry Eagleton, Stand 'Metrically inventive and various, these poems are remarkably alive to "the unknown thing beside us", they listen for "the due sound", and, as if watching birds, register "the timed flight of words". A motto for reading Middleton's work might be: purify the source, then trust to luck.' Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books 'Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years.' 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