The Owl and the Nightingale, translated by Simon Armitage; Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück; Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles; Five Books by Ana Blandiana
The Owl and the Nightingale translated by Simon Armitage (Faber, £14.99)
This new work follows Simon Armitage’s earlier versions of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in making the creative case for the readability of long Middle English poems. The Owl and the Nightingale is a comic disputation in 900 rhyming couplets: the joke – that the different orders of bird lack mutual respect, just like humans from different communities – has plenty of time to wear thin, especially as this translation has to work with the poem’s rural setting, which could appear to contemporary perspectives to lack edge. That we want to keep reading is thanks largely to Armitage’s way with language. Plain-speaking and laconic, it retains the metre and rhyme scheme of the original, while making it sound easy: it is not. This thoroughly poetic feat, rather than Faber’s somewhat twee illustrations or the arch self-references, ensures this graceful, elegant translation is a success.
Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück (Carcanet, £12.99)
A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate’s work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that’s really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark: “Downward and downward and downward and downward / is where the wind is taking us.” This new collection once again examines close relationships without the sweetener of correct sentiment, recording the universal stages of human life through a woman’s experience. We’re back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry, as “the world goes by, / All the worlds, each more beautiful than the last”.