Nameless Country

A.C. (Arthur) Jacobs was born in Glasgow into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937 and grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust. An erudite and committed poet from a young age, he became a self-made migrant, a wanderer through countries and through other people's more settled lives. He was a Jew in Scotland, a Scot in England, and a diaspora Jew wherever he travelled. Nameless Country returns selections of A.C. Jacobs' poetry to a 21st-century audience. His poems compel our attention because they bear the stamp of their long-ago moment but in their embrace of complex identities, speak clearly to our own.
Merle L. Bachman is an American Jewish poet with two full-length collections published by Shearsman Books in the UK: Diorama with Fleeing Figures and Blood Party. In addition to her scholarly work on A.C. Jacobs, she works in the field of American Yiddish literature. Syracuse University Press published her monograph, Recovering 'Yiddishland': Threshold Moments in American Literature. In 2015 she was a Translation Fellow of the Massachusetts-based Yiddish Book Center. Bachman is a Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. 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).