• ISBN13: 9781848615830
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publisher Imprint: Shearsman Books
• Publication Date: January 1, 2018
• Pages: 76
• Original Price: USD 17.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 109 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principle motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers or the three musketeers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, among others, ghost in and out of poems ordered according to the progress of the seasons. Their moods and perspectives range from the inconsequential and paradoxical to the melancholic and erotic. Almost all the poems are in some measure love poems.

Later the sky will be a light blue yearning
for the transcendence to which the river whispers.
I kiss your throat.
The black cat chases herself up and down the stairs.
Shall we get up, shower and dress
or otherwise, nakedness being no constraint
on the best or worst we can do?

Sutherland-Smith, James: - James Sutherland-Smith was born in 1948 and lives in Slovakia. He has published six previous collections of his own poetry, the most recent being Mouth, from Shearsman Books in 2014. He has translated a number of Slovak poets and Serbian poets including Mila Haugová, Ivana Milankov and Miodrag Pavlovic. For his translations he received the Slovak Hviezdoslav Prize in 2003 and the Serbian Zlatko Krasni Prize in 2014. Mouth received the Rector's Prize at Presov University in 2015. A selection of his translations of Mária Ferenčuhová's poetry, Tidal Events, are also published by Shearsman Books in 2018.