Smokestack Books Bücher

Accursed Poets: Dissident Poetry from Soviet Russia 1960-80 is an anthology of dissident and samizdat poetry in Russian and English translation, featuring work by Gennady Aigi, Yuri Aikhenvald, Yuli Daniel, Vladimir Earle, Yuri Galanskov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Igor Kholin, Victor Krivulin, Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Rea Nikonova, Victor Nekipelov, Grigory Podyapolsky, Genrikh Sapgir, Ian Satunovsky, Mikhail Sokovnin and Kari Unksova. Accursed Poets captures the frustration, suppressed ambitions and hidden energy of the 'accursed' generation of poets living a life outside or against society. Because so many of these authors not allowed to publish their work openly, they had to write 'into the table.' The work collected here documents Russian poetry in the 1970s and 1980s responding to the challenges of the time by forging a radical new poetic, reconsidering writing techniques and the purpose of language itself.

Following their widely ignored 2019 anthology The Call of the Clerihew, George Szirtes and Andy Jackson make another doomed attempt to interest the world in the ridiculous four-line biographical poetic form known as the Clerihew. Invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) when he was a schoolboy, the Clerihew is a childish and pointless anti-Panegyric consisting of flat-footed, Hudibrastic quatrains designed to lower the tone and cut everyone down to size. Some have called the Clerihew a mini-epic in four lines. Others have called it the Limerick's smarter cousin. WH Auden once wrote an entire book of the bloody things. This new selection of short, satirical and often scurrilous poems throws together poets like Michael Rosen, WN Herbert, Jacqueline Saphra, Tom Deveson, Mark Totterdell, Adam Horovitz and Anne Berkeley as they take down various actors, architects, chefs, comedians, detectives, puppets and philosophers