Kirjahaku

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025 The Greek Anthology, marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, is a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by about 300 authors, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine. For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. He has quite often taken the liberty of bringing already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction. Several times he expanded a Greek text; once or twice combined two poems into one; or wrote a poem of his own which he could not have written had he not read and translated the ancient words first. But most often he kept close, doing his level best to bring into his English what was so livingly there in the Greek. The Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws. These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it’s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty. A Bird Called Elaeus is David Constantine’s seventh translation from Bloodaxe, following three editions of Friedrich Hölderlin, and collections by Henri Michaux, Philippe Jaccottet and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, including two books for which he received the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe’s Faust is published in Penguin Classics and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is published by Norton. His own poetry is published by Bloodaxe and his fiction by Comma Press. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013.

David Constantine is one the finest poets writing in English. His poetry stands outside the current literary climate, and like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, it is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Its mood is often one of unease, elegiac or comically edged, barbed with pain or tinged with pleasure. His poems hold a worried and restless balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. His Collected Poems spans three decades, including work from seven previous Bloodaxe titles and two limited editions, as well as a whole collection of new poems. He has since published two later collections, Nine Fathom Deep (2009) and Elder (2014).

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. David Constantine's three lectures have to do with the chief end and means of poetry: a lively and effective language. In the first, Translation Is Good For You, drawing mainly on the life, letters and poems of Keats, he considers translation as a way to a poetic identity and a language of one's own. In the second, Use and Ornament, Constantine looks at the particular case of a poet, Brecht, who wanted his writing to be useful but who understood better than most what the peculiar resources and responsibilities of the lyric poem are Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas are also considered in this context. The third lecture, Poetry of the Present, largely concerned with Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence, discusses the ambition of free verse to convey the abundance and quickness of life in the truest (liveliest) way. The sonnets and other fixed forms used by Rilke are offered as an alternative. In all three lectures there is a continual effort to define the good effects a poem may have when, by whatever means, it achieves its ends.

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. In the title-poem of his latest collection - which illuminates the themes of the whole book - the lovers are a utopian answering back against the curse (following a crime against Nature) that is carried by the ship passing above them. Throughout these poems, the personal life, with its own joys and suffering, asserts itself against a world whose characteristic forces are dispiriting and destructive. "Nine Fathom Deep" shows how all personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of social and political life in the here and now, assert themselves, fight for survival, and actively seek to make a world in which humane self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible.