'The only end of writing,' Dr Johnson said, 'is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.' "Misprint" offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently 'real' virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. 'Eurydice', the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together. We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: 'I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.'
James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavik and Oxford. He currently lives in Madrid, where he teaches at the Universidad Complutense and is co-editor of the publishing house Nevsky Prospects, which produces Spanish translations of Russian literature. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Savinkov and Silvina Ocampo. A selection of his poems appeared in New Poetries V: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2011).
From a Notebook The Thing The Water Cycle: Variations on a Theme Halfway through the A-Feature Internet Poems Young Romance Three Epigrams The Underworld Ariadne Tourism Little Red Poem Fish The Dogs of a House in Mourning and the Naked Girl Master Chuang Found Poem: President's Reminiscences Read Widely Property Maisky Poems Vomit Likeness Experiment Foiled again - Criticism The True Scholar from The Literary Encyclopaedia Dark and stormys Mosaic Now, / A / Poem / That is Called / 'Of Insomnia' Misprint Eurydice 1 Was it that long ago you died? 2 Pray for us sinners, that we have climbed 3 The shutters falling 4 After, it is you who lie in the hollow of my elbow 5 Slowly and patiently we have forgotten it all 6 You never told me how boring it is to be mad 7 Leaving the bright town to the desert 8 A garden, as a child might draw it 9 I wrote to you last March in Madrid 10 Thick fog. I walked down the way of all flesh 11 Your smile fades and the garden is now dark 12 Death is not the end; some doors are never fully closed Coda With two bags where his two hands were Notes
