Balkan Poetry Today #1 is here

Now here's a thing ... Red Hand Books has just released the limited first edition print copies of 'Balkan Poetry Today 2017'. It features work by some contemporary 30 poets from a dozen countries across SE Europe translated into English - some of whom are being published in English for the first time. This issue also includes sections focusing on poetry from Bulgaria and Macedonia, as well as an essay about other recent translations of SE European poetry into English.
The idea for this annual publication probably originated about ten years ago when I first became interested in the region and realised that, despite the heroic efforts of a few individual translators and a handful of dedicated anthologists, it's still pretty difficult to track down English translations of contemporary SE European poetry. A decade of contact-making, chance meetings and quite remarkable coincidences and a huge amount of support from the publisher (Richard Eccles), the contributing poets and the translators later - and 'Balkan Poetry Today' has arrived as a 120-page volume with an e-book version to follow shortly. You can find out more - including who's featured in #1 - by following the Facebook page and Twitter @BalkanPoetryTdy A huge thank you from one very relieved editor to everyone who has helped to make it happen.

Blue pause

The empty geography

of a once crowded street

resembles a gallery

after it’s closed.

Who knows what

is going to happen?

I’m looking for signs

but none appear.

Silence embraces the world.

Absolute illusion!

The lights change.

The traffic returns.

Noisily, angrily,

it rushes by

like ambulances

carrying pregnant women.

And then another pause,

a pause for thought, for breath,

and on the opposite pavement

a boy strokes the face

of his girl –

they’re holding hands

in the shadow of the offices

where they work,

and carry on doing it

even when the skies open

and the rain hits the windscreen

of car after car.

Once again

the lights are changing.

Tom Phillips, July 2017

A snippet of autobiography

I don’t know why I write. My parents weren’t what you’d call ‘arty’. My mother loved the theatre and painting flowers, but aside from the Desert Island Discs pairing of The Bible and Shakespeare, the books in the living room were mostly by Alistair Maclean and Hammond Innes. My father once bought an anthology of “story poems”, but this, it turned out, was because he wanted to learn a stretch of narrative verse to perform at one of the village amateur dramatic society’s music hall evenings. That said, my mother was descended from a family of art dealers and occasionally mentioned a book – a catalogue raisonné of Dutch and Flemish painters – which one of her forebears had published in the nineteenth century. It was simply known as “the book” and every time it was mentioned she’d wonder who had written it or whether any copies remained extant. My father – who was a flight engineer with what was then BOAC and travelled a lot – also began bringing home paintings by an artist in Tehran. Our living room was slightly unusual in having a portrait of an imam over the fireplace and a winter scene from rural Iran in the hall. When my mother felt like it, we would sometimes take out the complete works of Shakespeare and read plays together, she and I alternating lines. For some reason, she also asked me to write a poem to read out at one of the Christmas parties that they held – largely because everyone else in our street held Christmas parties – and that must have been the first poem I ever wrote. Its rather conventional – and presumably borrowed – gist is that Christmas has lost its meaning and become an orgy of materialism – although reading it now, I can’t help but detect the origins of a much later poem about suburban life, ‘Portishead’.

Whatever its satirical intent, the poem seemed to go down well enough and I wrote another, rather similar one about package holidays for one of my parents’ summer parties – also held because everyone else in our street held summer parties. This would have been when I was around 14 or 15 and writing a novel called ‘It could happen here’ in which my secondary school had become a prison camp. I bashed that out on an old manual typewriter that my father picked up at an auction in Leighton Buzzard. Large sections of the manuscript are in red ink because I never fully mastered how to change the ribbon and had to resort to using the red ribbon when the black one ran out. At some point, I also wrote a poem – plagiarised almost entirely from D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot – called ‘Look, weed entwines in the tide’. My aunt – who worked in a pharmacy in Richmond that was frequented by rock stars on methadone scripts – showed it to someone who was the nephew of someone who was possibly quite important in a major publishing house. Whoever it was detected the DHL and TSE traces immediately, but suggested that, with a bit of practice, I might get the odd poem published somewhere (although not by his major publishing house).

Now eighteen, I went to Australia. I didn’t write anything much while I was there – aside from long, overly detailed letters to my father (so over-detailed that he insisted on several occasions that I fly home immediately) – but once I was back in England, the sparse landscapes around Dubbo in New South Wales and the end-of-the-road atmosphere in Cairns in Queensland (not then a go-to holiday destination) started making demands. Somehow I had to make sense of those places and writing about them seemed to be the only way to do it. I’m sure that I didn’t do them justice, but those flat horizons with intermittent trees, the smouldering tail-ends of bush fires and the St Andrew’s Cross spiders clacking their legs like knitting needles above us on a terrace in northern Queensland were probably what started this whole business of thinking that it’s possible to make small corners of sense in the world.

Tom Phillips

European Union

At first it might have been coincidence

that we heard so many car horns

shifting through the Doppler effect,

or checked in at hotels where girls

in Sunday best held hands and sang

interminable folk tunes.

Only, the following day, new couples

emerged from a scaffolded church

with candles lit, and family groups

assembled in a park for photographs

where filigree blossom coincidentally

obscured the Stalinist backdrop.

Thirty, forty weddings eased

from municipal ceremonies to pose

beneath late-flowering cherry trees,

anticipated pleasures, and advice

they’d hardly need, being of an age

when all has seemed so changed.

Such innocence again around the square,

these brand new starts, this expectation,

Romanian sunlight on dove-grey dresses. 

Tom Phillips

From Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012)

Some various things

Recent online publications, in short:

Eight poems translated into Bulgarian by Bozhil Hristov and published in Literaturen Vestnik in Sofia: http://www.bsph.org/members/files/pub_pdf_1533.pdf

Confessions of a rooky translator at Versopolis: http://www.versopolis.com/panorama/330/confessions-of-a-rooky-translator

A poem in London Grip: http://londongrip.co.uk/2017/02/london-grip-new-poetry-spring-2017/#phillips

Two poems in Snakeskin: http://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/236leavetaking.html

A paper on writing and place from our conference in Montenegro in June: http://www.folia.ac.me/arhiva15.html

And coming soon ... Balkan Poetry Today #1: https://www.facebook.com/balkanpoetrytoday/?fref=ts