European Hours
Collected Poems
Published on 25. May 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
184 pages
978-1-78410-208-1 (ISBN)
Description
For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.
European Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.
George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.
European Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.
George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.
Reviews / Votes
'Every poem like a new geometry -EUR" of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light -EUR" very strange and unpredictable.'Ted Hughes 'For Rudolf, writing and painting especially, but also music, are exploratory tools that enable him to probe more deeply into his own self, his relationships, as well as all those other selves that are not ''himself.'' For he is obviously also par excellence a poet and an intellectual attracted to otherness, to what he is not.'
Antioch Review 'It moves us through time and space to the long view of a life's work...European Hours is an open book of secrets, and the remarkable intimacy Rudolf has spun through it that binds the reader to the poems.'
Paul Pines, American Book Review 'His poems are charged with the love of beauty: in paint, in the poetry he admires, and in women. His longing is almost impersonal in its intensity.'
Elaine Feinstein, JQ
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
227 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-208-1 (9781784102081)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2017
Carcanet Poetry
€11.99
Available for download
Person
Born in London in 1942, Anthony Rudolf has two children and three grandchildren. He is the author of books of literary criticism (on Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz and others), autobiography (Silent Conversations and The Arithmetic of Memory) and poetry (Zigzag, The Same River Twice and collaborations with artists), and translator of books of poetry from French (Bonnefoy, Vigee, Jabes), Russian (Vinokourov and Tvardovsky) and other languages. He has edited various anthologies. His essay on R.B. Kitaj was published by the National Gallery in 2001, and he has published essays and shorter texts on other painters. He is Paula Rego's companion and her main male model. He has completed a volume of short stories and is now at work on two new memoirs. He is co-editor and one of the translators of two new Yves Bonnefoy selections for Carcanet Press. Rudolf's reviews, articles, poems, translations, obituaries and interviews with writers have appeared in numerous journals. He has been an occasional broadcaster on radio and television and was the founder of Menard Press, now dormant after nearly fifty years and 170 titles. After a lifetime of day jobs to top up his freelance activities, he became Visiting Lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University (2000-2003) and Royal Literary Fund fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Westminster (2003-2008). He is Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2004), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2005) and Fellow of the English Association (2010).