European Hours

Every poem like a new geometry - of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light- very strange and unpredictable.' TED HUGHES. For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. European Hours represents a life's work...
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Every poem like a new geometry - of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light- very strange and unpredictable.' TED HUGHES. For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. European Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs. George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.