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Here is the first instalment of the Summer 2022 issue of The High Window. The following new material can 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. An Essay by Edmund Prestwich on translating Dante.

4. An art feature from Rowena Sommerville, who is The High Window’s Resident Artist for 2022.

The second instalment will be published in another two weeks.

Enjoy!

David

For Paul Brookes’ challenge, 30DaysWild.

Painting by Mary Cassat

There are things we never forget

like skies, windy,
with the cutting edge of spring,
scudding clouds
and the song, drifting earthwards,
of the skylark,

still light, throbbing with heat
and only half-cool shade,
limp leaves,
sunlight sliding like melted butter,
butterflies and bee-buzz,
first blackberries,

and the heavy air, salt-sticky,
loud with gulls and the crash of the waves,
foam-hiss,
the running rippling of outgoing rills,
rolling grains of sifted sand
between bare toes.

Photo: Nathan Kosta

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I began writing regularly forty years ago, in a workshop with Peter Levitt, a Canadian poet, Buddhist teacher, and translator (see his exceptional rendering, with Kazuaki Tanahashi, of The Complete Cold Mountain, from Shambala). I lived alone, taught high school history, and wrote over weekends and summers

In the early 90s, I went to grad school (history again), and started a family. For the next twenty years, that’s where I devoted my time and attention. Then, ten years ago, forced out of my routines by a cluster of losses, I quit full time work and developed a daily writing practice. I wrote Empire of Eden between 2013 and 2018, and, in The High Window’s David Cooke, found a sympathetic, supportive, and energetic publisher.

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About these poems:

‘Police Photograph of Robert Walser, Dead’ — My dad’s grandparents were small-town portrait photographers, and my…

My poem for the sixth day of Paul Brookes’ challenge, in partnership with The Wildlife Trusts. If you have a poem about birdsong, send it to Paul here.

Summer morning

pale gold air
slants through the shutters
a boat slipping from sea to sky
and back
buoyed on waves of song
sifting through leaf-fronds
swaying tree-kelp
carrying me from dreams
into the waking.

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Jane Angué •  Loukia Borrell •  Bob Cooper • Julian Dobson • Alan Dunnett • Alexandra Fössinger • Hedy Habra • Chris Hardy • Hilary Hares • David Harmer • Rosie Jackson • Sheila Jacob • Nigel Jarrett • Maureen Jivani • Fred Johnson •  Alex Josephy • Phil Kirby • Wendy Klein • Alison Mace • Richie McCaffery • Beth McDonagh •  Gill McEvoy • Konstandinos Mahoney • Laurence Morris • Jill Munro • Alistair Noon •  Abigail Ottley  • Stuart Pickford  Les Pope • Gordon Scapens • Derek Sellen • Ruth Sharman • Susan Castillo Street • Matthew Stewart • Judith Sutherland • Mark Totterdell • Carol Whitfield • Richard Williams • Marjory Woodfield

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Previouis Poetry: Update by 3?

   THW25: March 6, 2022 • THW24: December 3, 2021 • THW23: • THW22: June 6, 2021  •  THW21: March 8, 2021 • THW20:

‘Paolo and Francesca da Rimini’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1862)

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DANTE’S COMEDY: TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION

Three things keep drawing me back to Dante’s Commedia: the skill, inventiveness and human depth of his story-telling, his lyrical genius, and the beauty of his terza rima meter. His use of terza rima can only be enjoyed in Italian, which for me involves heavy dependence on English translations and on the notes and glosses in modern Italian given in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s editions of the Commedia for Zanichelli and Oscar Mondadori. In this essay I want to focus on comparing how the narrative and lyrical aspects of the poems come through in Ned Denny’s freely adaptive poetic version, B: After Dante, and in two scholarly translations, one by Robert and Jean Hollander and one by Robert M. Durling, though I will make some more mention of the terza rima…