Woman Bathing Light to Dark

WOMAN BATHING LIGHT TO DARK prose poems by Paul Eluard translated from the French by Justin Vicari 21pp paper, staple-bound. Cover photo courtesy of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Toad Press 2006, $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Woman Bathing Light to Dark here & add the book to your Goodreads list, here.

About: Paul Éluard was born in France in 1895. In 1920 he met Andre Breton, the influential founder of the Surrealist movement. Éluard became an official member of this movement in 1924. Éluard’s many books include: Duty and Disturbance (1917), Animals and Their Men, Men and Their Animals (1920), Repetitions (1922), Dying of Not Dying (1924), Capital of Sadness (1926), Love, Poetry (1929), Immediate Life (1932), Public Rose (1934), Fertile Eyes (1938), Political Poems (1948), and The Phoenix (1951). He died in 1952. Excerpt: From Zero He places a bird on the table and closes the shades. He fixes his hair, his hair in his hands is softer than a bird. She tells the future. And I’m in charge of making it come true. The bruised heart, the aching soul, the broken hands, the white hair, the prisoners, the entire water covers me like a raw wound.

Of the Same Mind

-- click book cover to read OF THE SAME MIND online --

OF THE SAME MIND

poems by Jóhann Hjálmarsson
translated from the Icelandic by C.M.Burawa

41 pp. paper. staple-bound.
cover photograph by Jóra Jóhannsdottir
Toad Press 2005, $5.00

We're sold out of this title, but there are a couple copies left at The Lost Bookshelf.
Even better, you can read it online via ISSUU, here.
You can purchase our other titles here.
And, don't forget to add the book to your Goodreads list, here.

About:

JÓHANN HJÁLMARSSON is one of Iceland’s premier poets. He has published 18 books of poetry and seven collections of international poetry in translation. In 1961, after his first book, Hjalmarsson moved to Spain to study romance languages at the University of Barcelona, where he began translating the French post-symbolists, French and Latin American surrealists, modernist and post-modernist American poets into Icelandic. He returned to Iceland and began a career as an arts reviewer and travel writer for the country’s largest circulating newspaper, Morgunblaðið. He was presented with an Icelandic Parliament Award in 2003 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Icelandic literature as a poet and translator.


Read more about Jóhann Hjálmarsson and see some translations by C.M. Burawa on the Project for Innovative Poetry blog.

Read an interview with C.M. Burawa at The Writer's Center.


Lyle Daggett writes that these are "Remarkable poems, quiet and meditative, by a poet of contemporary Iceland, filled with ocean waves and rock, gray sky and birds' wings, blackberries and silence, mingled with sudden scenes of the modern busy world." Read more on his blog.




Excerpt:



OF THE SAME MIND


I once saw birds of like mind arrive.
I hid

as they flew in from the south
bound for the north
to their summer on the glacier.

Those that made it were met by storm,
yet still sang to each other
as they recovered by the bare trees.

The trees began shooting the youngest birds
when I—
who had intended to flee with them—
noticed that July was over.

A young girl with red lips
laughed at me
from below the surface of a blue spring.

I drank from her shadow.

Martial Artist

MARTIAL ARTIST, Martial's epigrams translated from the Latin by George Held 

31pp. paper. staple-bound Toad Press 2005, $5.00. In English and Latin.

You can purchase a copy of Martial Artist here & add this book to your Goodreads list, here.

 

MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIALIS (A.D. 40-104), or Martial, was born in Spain and flourished in Rome. His greatest achievement remains his 1500 epigrams, in which he depicts, often satirically, the behavior of his fellow Romans and perfects the form in Latin. His influence appears in the work of virtually every epigrammatist since. The poems in Martial Artist collect some of his many epigrams about his own work and his life as a poet. This book includes both the English and the Latin. Excerpt: VII.90 Mathew says my book is unbalanced. If it’s true, Mathew praises my poems. Calvin and Shade write balanced books. A balanced book, Curtis, is a bad book. Iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho. aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Umber: aequales liber est, Cretice, qui malus est.

Twenty-Five and One Poems

 

poems by Tristan Tzara, translated from the French by Nick Moudry 

 39pp. paper. staple-bound. C

over design by Becky Rosen Toad Press 2004, $5.00 SOLD OUT

You can purchase our other titles here & add Twenty-Five and One Poems to your Goodreads list, here.

 

About: Orginally published as Vingt-cinq poèmes (Zurich: Collection Dada, 1918) with ten woodcut prints by Hans Arp. Republished as Vingt-cinq et un poèmes with the addition of “la grande complainte de mon obscurité trois” (Paris: Collection l’Age d’or, 1946). Noah Eli Gordon (in Jacket ) calls Moudry's translation "mind-bendingly fresh". Excerpt: SPRINGTIME to h arp put the child in the vase in the depths of midnight and the wound a rose of winds with your beautiful fingernails thunder in feathers see a horrible water runs down the antelope’s legs to suffer below have you found cows birds? the thirst the venom of the caged peacock the king in exile by the well’s brightness slowly mummified in the vegetable garden sow broken grasshoppers plant ant hearts the salt fog a lamp drags its tail across the sky the little sparkles of glassware in the belly of the fleeing deer on the ends of the short black branches for a cry