The 30DaysWild challenge today is an ode to trees. A sonnet in my case.

On the beauty of poplars

Without the poplar trees there’d be no song,
no fluting call of orioles, no wild
and wanton dancing by the stream, no wreaths
of black and yellow through the leafy green.

Without the poplar trees, how would we know
the wind was pouring, rolling from the west?
The oaks stand firm, immobile, poplars sigh,
their topmost branches trembling silver sea.

And when the trembling grows, a rising tide
of waving boughs and hissing with the foam
of unseen water-wind, cold ocean-born,
the poplars raise their slender boughs to show

the wind take form, we see it in the sky,
an ocean, weed-strewn, flotsam flying by.

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With this  final instalment all the new material in the  Summer 2022 issue of The High Window can now be accessed via the top menu:

1. A selection of homegrown and international Poetry from 39 poets.

2. Poetry by Tom Laichas, the Featured American Poet.

3. Translations of French-language Poetry from Africa and the Arab World edited by Patrick xxWilliamson.

4.  An Essay by Edmund Prestwich on translating Dante.

5. A comprehensive Reviews section.

6. Poetry from Michał Choiński, the second Featured Poet.

7. An art feature from Rowena Sommerville, who is The High Window’s Resident Artist for xx2022.

To coincide with this isssue the High Window Press is publishing two new books by Mervyn Linford and Timothy Dodd. Details will be found on the Press page.

Enjoy!

David

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The editor of The High Windowwould like to thank Patrick Williamson and his team of translators for all their hard work in putting together this supplement of poetry intranslation. [Ed.]

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INTRODUCTION

Curating this supplement was a great pleasure, and a special thanks to Tahar Bekri for guiding my selection. I am grateful to the contemporary poets, many of whom I know personally, for their kind contributions, and to my fellow translators for their exceptional work.

This supplement endeavours to present representative poetic voices in French-speaking countries of Africa and the Arab World. For it is an anomaly to separate North Africa from Sub-Saharan Africa. The poetry included here is written in French, for evident historical reasons, but clearly only one dimension of an overall poetic landscape shared with other national languages: Arabic, Fula, Bambara, Berber, Wolof, etc.

Past generations are represented by Leopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), a…

My contribution to Day 21 of Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge.

I think we all know what we as individuals can do to help slow down climate change, famine, floods and mass migration for the poorest populations in the world. It’s simply that most of us won’t do it unless we’re forced.

I was going to post a very short, non-exhaustive list, but I won’t. We all know it by heart. Nor will I write a poem about saving nature, because poetry makes not one iota of difference.

There’s nothing that’s impossible or even difficult in being reasonable and humane. It’s not fascist or Medieval to stop wasting resources. It is simply the plain truth that our throw away clothes are produced in sweat shops often by children, that abattoirs are hell on earth, that those floating luxury palaces destroy everything they come in contact with.

And it’s depressing that we…

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Michał Choiński teaches literature at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). He has written two books on the history of American literature: Rhetoric of the Revival (V&R, 2016) and Southern Hyperboles (Louisiana State University Press, 2020). His first pamphlet, Gifts Without Wrapping came out with the Hedgehog Press in 2019, as a winner of a poetry competition. His second pamphlet Too Many Rooms is one of the finalists for Wolfson Press Chapbook Competition 2022. Choiński’s poems and translations of poems have appeared in journals in Poland, USA, UK and Canada (including Neon, Alba, The High Window or The Ekphrastic Review). He has taught literature and creative writing in the USA, in Italy, in the UK, and in Germany. In 2022, he’ll be a Fulbright Fellow at Yale University, writing his next book.

Website: https://michalchoinski.com/

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Michał Choiński writes in English, although Polish is his native language. In one…