European Poetry Anthology (Croatia PEN Centre)

Nine years in the making, the 500-page European Poetry Anthology Ima li pjesnika u Monte Carlu?, edited by Damir Šodan, was published by Croatia PEN Centre this summer. It includes four poems from my first book Spitting Out the Mother Tongue (Wurm Press, 2011), in Šodan's translation into Croatian.

The anthology - whose title roughly translates as Are There any Poets in Monte Carlo? - gathers poetry from across the continent through the work of one poet 'representing' each European nation, or in some cases like Cyprus and Ireland of two (one for each official language). It was conceived by Šodan in the wake of Poetry Parnassus, a week-long festival at Southbank Centre part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, in which (almost) every nation in the world was represented by one poet, and in which Šodan and I both participated. The anthology was launched in Zagreb last June on what was the tenth anniversary of Poetry Parnassus.

(Incidentally, in 2018 I wrote on the problematic concept of poets representing nations, in the process also reflecting on my participation in Parnassus, in an essay commissioned by Versopolis, which you can now read here.)

The four poems of mine translated for the book are 'Mötley Crüe', 'The Last Divided Capital', 'The Cheeses of Cyprus', and the sequence 'Masculine Biography Vol. 1'.

Some of the other poets featured in the anthology and whom I've had the pleasure to meet at Poetry Parnassus and/or at other festivals and occasions over the years include Luljeta Lleshanaku, Sylva Fischerová, Aurélia Lassaque, Matthew Sweeney, Elisa Biagini, Kārlis Vērdiņš, Jean Portante, Nikola Madžirov, Immanuel Mifsud, Sinéad Morrissey and Simon Armitage.

I wish I was able to understand the discussion and readings from the book in Zagreb, or the 8-page anthology foreword by Šodan - always a warm, generous and highly knowledgeable companion. My thanks to him for the inclusion and his engagement with my work.

For copies of the book please contact Croatia PEN Centre.