Adélia Prado new book in English

A very nice holiday surprise is that Bloodaxe Books have collected 2 volumes of Adélia Prado's work as The Mystical Rose. This is available now and would make a very nice belated gift.

I like this quote: ‘Brazil has produced what might seem impossible: a really sexy, mystical, Catholic poet’ — Robert Hass. Although not that surprising to my mind...

And she and her translator Ellen Doré Watson read in Newcastle but that is another story!

You can find out more here http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=178037240X.

The squirrels are dead by Miriam Gamble

Having a wonderful trawl through a list of contemporary poets and this collection by Miriam Gamble just stood out. Not only for the title but the way the poems imagine the fantastic in the every day.

A sleeper is described (in her poem Interface)...

                                                       Your breath gutters

like a stuck pig's , your eyelid leaks an underwater tear.
There is havoc at the gallery you say, taking
my wrist. And Plato's on the river bed. Then you roll over
                                                       without so much as a 'Help me'.

Another poem imagines a journey to make a call on The Confidential telephone - this act becomes more and more impossible as the poem describes it happening - a nicely-judged paradox that also chills in the manner of some of Peter Bennet's darker moments.

And that is without even mentioning the squirrels.

Miriam Gamble now lives in Glasgow. Lucky Glasgow! You can get hold of the book from Bloodaxe here http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248688