Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Julian Stannard, "New and Selected Poems"



Julian Stannard has written nine volumes of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His last single collection was Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). In January 2025  Salt brought out New and Selected Poems. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward and the Pushcart. In 2024 he was awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize for his contribution to  Ligurian/Italian culture. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). In 2024 Sagging Meniscus Press (USA) brought out a campus novel called The University of Bliss.



About New and Selected Poems, by Julian Stannard
This new book brings together some twenty-five years of writing. Julian Stannard moved  to Italy in 1984 and worked  at the University of Genoa  for many years. He started teaching at the University of Winchester in 2005. Many of these poems draw on his experiences of living in Genoa / Liguria, though he also writes extensively about contemporary Britain and further afield. New poems represented here have appeared in The Spectator, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Wild Court and AN Editions.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.  


From New and Selected Poems

The Pool

The chief leaf man rises early.
A breeze in the banyan tree.
The water laps.
Skink lizard on the prowl.
 
Perfection. Blue. Perfection.
No leaves on the water.
Miles Davis - his ghost -
becoming the banyan tree.
 
Chief leaf man sees a leaf
in the corner of the pool
and shouts in Vietnamese.
Leaf man number two crouches, 
picks it out.
 
The apprentice leaf boy,
conical hat,
takes a broom from the storeroom.
Sweeps.
 
The hotel dog – a Saigon mongrel - watches.
 
Eternal – mythological – war of leaves.
The frangipani quickens.
 
I watch its petals drop upon the water.
 
A stiffening breeze from Saigon River.
The palm trees writhe and thrash.
 
 
Gigi Picetti

Actor, Genoese Activist, Molotov Cocktail 

1939-2022

I lived in the caruggi, lived in the Sottoripa
the streets pushing deeper and deeper.
 
I lived in the vicoli:
lamentation, catastrophe, chicory.
 
Ubiquitous Gigi would come and go.
He once knew Dario Fo.
 
I seem to remember Gigi Picetti
had a machete.
 
The day – in question - was hot and hazy.
He swirled it about
 
to frighten the piccolo borghese.
 

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