Launch reading by Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt and Laura Wittner, with translator Juana Adcock
Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt and Laura Wittner, plus Laura's translator Juana Adcock, joined us to celebrate the publication of their four new September titles. All the poets read live and discussed their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Nia Broomhall's pamphlet Backalong is the winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition.
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below, or on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/GIeiEhAvavQ
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early September). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin.
Nia Broomhall: Backalong
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/backalong-1370
Niall Campbell: The Island in the Sound
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-island-in-the-sound-1361
Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguar
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-jaguar-1353
Laura Wittner (trans. Juana Adcock): Translation of the Route / Traducción de la ruta
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/translation-of-the-route-1354
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Nia Broomhall: Backalong
Winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2023
Backalong, a dialect word from Nia Broomhall’s native Somerset, describes any point in the past – it could be this March, last March, or 1979. True to its title, her impressive debut pamphlet observes the distant past and recent past with the same eyes: the distant past through poems of place and origin; the recent through poems that track the process of grieving for someone who was right there, not so long ago. Through its musicality of language, Backalong searches for joy, finding what persists – and finding the words to pick out what shines, despite everything.
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Niall Campbell: The Island in the Sound
The Island in the Sound, the third collection by South Uist poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history.
The Sound of the title has a double meaning, both a thing that might be heard but also a body of water between islands or mainland, from the Norse word Sund. These poems rise up, then, as moments of clarity lifted out of all the noise and music and speech-patterns of our present world.
Here, mirroring the islands’ precarious future, we uncover strange links to Rome falling, Lindisfarne, and the temporary heaven found in Alamut, North Iran. The waters that churn around the islands in the poems bring strange things to their shores: saints, remnants of various types of havens, crab-boxes, and figures from the working-class lives of Uist.
It is a poetry collection attuned to the growing sense that something is changing around us and there never will be a going back. These islands in the sound are what’s left: shaped, crafted, riven by the strange tuneful sea they sprang from.
Niall Campbell’s first collection, Moontide (2014), won both the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for three other major prizes. His second collection, Noctuary (2019), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Born and raised on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he now lives in Fife.
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Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguar
With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt’s books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.
Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.
Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic.
The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. As John Kinsella has said, 'Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.'
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Laura Wittner (trans. Juana Adcock): Translation of the Route / Traducción de la ruta
Translation of the Route is the eleventh collection by the award-winning Argentine poet and translator Laura Wittner. In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age.
The ‘things’ of life – bus journeys, potted plants, thunder at night, coffee-stained books, fleeting conversations and the rest – are made full through Wittner’s ability to pinpoint in them the consequential, and even the metaphysical, manipulating language with a translator’s delicate skill. There are funny, moving pen-portraits of Wittner’s two children, suddenly grown, as well as bell-clear descriptions of the task of writing. For this is also a collection about language itself – as an interface, as a surface, and as vital communication.
The poems in this edition, Wittner’s first collection available in English translation, have been translated by the Mexican-Scottish bilingual poet and translator Juana Adcock, acclaimed author of Manca and Split.
[01 October 2024]
