NEPC Member News, week of 10/16/17

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1. Alfred Nicol will be reading at the following upcoming events:
  • Thursday, October 19, 2017, 7 PM. The Custom House, 25 Water Street, Newburyport. A Melopoeia with Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol, and John Tavano.
  • Friday, April 6, 2018. Boston National Poetry Month Festival, The Boston Public Library: A Melopoeia with Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol, and John Tavano.

    2. Ellin Sarot will be one of the contributors reading from the new anthology, “Black Lives Have Always Mattered,” on Tuesday, October 24th @ 7pm at Porter Square Books. 

    3. Anna M. Warrock has a new chapbook, “From the Other Room,” out from Slate Roof Press. Her book is available for purchase at Porter Square Books (also see order card below for mail ordering).From Nina MacLaughlin’s literary column in The Boston Globe:
 “From the Other Room wades into the waters of grief … Though suffused with sorrow, Warrock’s lines aren’t leaden. They move with the simplicity of haiku. At the center, the poems suggests how it is possible to become at home with loss.”

    4. Atar Hadari has a new book, “Lives of the Dead,” out from Arc Publications.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1908376643Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, trained as an actor and writer at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwrighting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have won awards from the BBC, Arts Council of England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was Young Writer in Residence. Plays have been staged at the Finborough Theatre, Wimbledon Studio Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum (where he was a Mentor Playwright), Nat Horne Studio Theatre (New York) and Valdez, Alaska. His “Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik” (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his poems have won the Daniel Varoujan award from New England Poetry Club, the Petra Kenney award, a Paumanok poetry award and many other prizes.  His nineteen-page translation of Hanoch Levin’s “Lives of the Dead” filled a third of Poetry magazine in 2009.

    5. Jonas Zdanys has published four new books in 2017:

  • Preliudai po lietaus / Preludes After Rain. (Macau, China and Markwell, Australia: Flying Island Books, ASM, and Cerberus Press 2017. Pocket Poets Series).
Selected poems in English and Lithuanian. I write and publish poetry in two languages and this book illustrates that bilingual work. Some of the poems in this volume were originally written in English and some were originally written in Lithuanian, with versions of those poems in both languages appearing on facing pages.  
 
  • St. Brigid’s Well. (Chicago: Purple Flag Press 2017). 
A lyrical-narrative poem, in sections. The poem’s focus on the Dingle Peninsula, past and present, the vistas along the Ring of Kerry, and the literal as well as metaphorical pilgrimage eastward to St. Brigid’s Well in Kildare is linked to the figure of Brigid, who serves as a touchstone in that exploration both as Christian saint and as pagan goddess.
 
  • Two Voices/Du Balsai.  Jonas Zdanys and Kornelijus Platelis.  Poems and translations.  (Chicago: Purple Flag Press 2017).
Two Voices/Du Balsai is a literary celebration of a thirty year friendship between poets and translators Jonas Zdanys and Kornelijus Platelis. In this bilingual volume, published in English and Lithuanian, Zdanys and Platelis engage with one another as poets and as translators. Each presents himself as well as the other, through original poems and through their respective translations on the facing pages in the other language. The poems include the most recent published texts by each poet as well as some yet unpublished work, and the respective translations are new and made especially for these pages.
 
  • Three White Horses.  Poems by Jonas Zdanys, Paintings by Sou Vai Keng.  (Beaumont: Lamar University Literary Press 2017).
Three White Horses is a collection of 70 poems that constitute a lyrical-narrative sequence. In many ways, this book is a natural outgrowth of my last two books: in it, I combine the impulse toward the epiphanic moments of Red Stones and the explorations of internal and external geographies of St. Brigid’s Well. The poems tell a story while relying on the various techniques and commitments of lyric poetry. The Chinese painter Sou Vai Keng has made 26 inkbrush paintings for the book. Her paintings do not illustrate the poems but instead are parallel explorations of some of the ideas considered in the poems. Vai Keng uses brushstrokes and lines of ink to capture the impulses and implications of the kinds of lyrical moments and insights the texts present.