Stand Magazine's 50th Anniversary Issue
Volume 4 (2) / 4 (3)
#173
(under construction; last updated 1 Jan 2003)
Editorial
About the Contributors
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in Huddersfield and burst onto the poetry scene in 1989 when Bloodaxe brought out his first book, ZOOM!. Eight more have followed, including Killing Time (Faber & Faber, 1999) and Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2001). Trained as a social worker, he wrote for his MA on television violence, and worked with as a probation officer. He currently teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University. A prior teaching stint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop helped make him one of the few contemporary English poets to crack the insular American market. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Two further collections of poetry, The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2002. The Simon Armitage Web Site contains more information.
Paul Celan (Paul Antschel, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Celan) was born in
Romania, in 1920. His second book, Mohn und Gedaechtnis (Poppy and Memory), received tremendous acclaim and helped to establish his reputation. Among his most well-known and often-anthologized poems from this time is "Fugue of Death." The poem opens with the words "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night" and it goes on to offer a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps. In 1960 he received a Georg Buchner Prize. During the 1960s he published more than six books of poetry and gained international fame. In addition to his own poems, he remained active as a translator, bringing out works from writers such as Henri Michaux, Osip Mandelstam, Rene Char, Paul ValÈry, and Fernando Pessoa. In 1970, Celan committed suicide. He is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from post-World War II Europe. IAN FAIRLEY teaches literature at the University of Leeds. He is the translator of Paul Celan, 'Fathomsuns and Benighted' (Carcanet, 2001).
Robert Crawford is co-editor of the New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse and The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. He is Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews.
Amanda Dalton's first collection, Room of Leaves (Bloodaxe) was short-listed for a Forward Prize. Her radio plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and she also writes for the theatre. She has worked as a deputy headteacher in comprehensive schools, as a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation, and is currently Education Director at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre.
Dennis Flannery is Lecturer in American and English Literature at the University of Leeds and author of Henry James: A Certain Illusion (Ashgate, 2000). He is currently writing a book to be titled Brothers and Sisters: Sibling Love, Queer Subjectivity and American Writing
Alasdair Gray born in Glasgow in 1934, has since lived mainly by painting and writing. He won both the Whitbread prize and the Guardian Fiction prize for his novel Poor Things in 1992. His novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books is widely considered one of the greatest works of our time. He has written many novels (among them The Fall of Kelvin Walker, McGrotty and Ludmilla, Something Leather, and A History Maker), collections of short stories (such as Unlikely Stories, Mostly; Lean Tales, and Ten Tales Tall & True), and works of poetry (Old Negatives). He discusses his work in depth in an epistolary interview at the Dalkey Archive. Alasdair Gray's Genesis sequence appears in Stand for the first time in its entirety.
Michael Hamburger was born in 1924 in Berlin, and moved with his family to England in 1933. He has been writing for 60 years, and also has translated many significant works of modern German literature into English, the most recent being W. G. Sebald's After Nature (Hamish Hamilton / Penguin). In 1992 he was also awarded an OBE. As a poet he has published almost twenty volumes since 1945, the bulk of which is gathered in Collected Poems, 1941-1994. His most recent collections are Late (1997) and From a Diary of Non-Events (2002) An interview conducted by Between the Lines can be found on-line.
W. N. Herbert was born in 1961 in Dundee, Scotland. His doctorate on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid was published as To Circumjack MacDiarmid (1992). In 1989, he launched the Scottish poetry magazine Gairfish with Richard Price. His poetry, written in both English and Scots, includes the collections Dundee Doldrums (1991), and The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick (1994). Forked Tongue (1994) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. It was also featured as part of the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) and McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. His poetry collection, The Laurelude (1998), won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has been involved in a number of collaborative projects with artists throughout the north of England, including the Book of the North, a multimedia project for New Writing North, and has edited various collections, anthologies and critical works. The anthology Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, co-edited with Matthew Hollis, was published in 2000. His new book, The Big Bumper Book of Troy, was published in autumn 2002.
EDWARD LARRISSY is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds. His most recent publications are Romanticism and Postmodernism (ed.), published by Cambridge in 1999, and the Oxford World Classics edition of W. B. Yeats: The Major Works (2001).
E.A. Markham, who also writes as Paul St. Vincent, is a poet, novelist and short-story writer. He was born on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1939 and has lived in Britain since 1956. His poetry collections include Human Rites: Selected Poems 1970-1982 (1984), Living In Disguise (1986) and Towards the End of a Century (1989). His most recent books of poetry are Misapprehensions (1995) and A Rough Climate (2002), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is the author of three collections of stories: Something Unusual (1986), Ten Stories (1994) and Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs (2002). His memoir, A Papua New Guinea Sojourn: More Pleasures of Exile (1998), is an account of his time in New Guinea. He has also edited Hinterland (1989), a collection of Caribbean poetry, and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories (1996). A Selected Poems is forthcoming from Salt (Australia). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.
Edwin Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920, and became the city's first poet laureate in 1999. Notable collections include Sonnets from Scotland (1984). His most recent book, from Carcanet, is Cathures (2002), and the range of his inventiveness and playfulness can also be found at his website, http://www.edwinmorgan.com/.
Andrew Motion, was born in 1952. His work has received the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 1994 his biography of Philip Larkin, A Writer's Life, was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Biography, and shortlisted for the NCR Award. The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award. Andrew Motion was appointed as Poet Laureate in May 1999, and has written in that capacity a commemoration of the victims of September 11. A Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, his most recent collection is Public Property (Faber, 2002).
Rodney Pybus, a native of Newcastle upon Tyne and former editor of Stand, has had his poems collected in Cicadas in Their Summers: New & Selected Poems, 1965-1985 and Flying Blues: Poems 1988-1993, both from Carcanet. He has worked in journalism and television in England and Australia, and served as literature officer for Cumbria. He currently lives in Suffolk. He was featured in the Australian on-line journal Jacket in 1998.
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in 1963 in Preston, Lancashire. In 1998 he won the Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, for British poets under thirty. His work has appeared in many periodicals, from TLS to Poetry Wales, as well as on BBC Radio 3 (the "Poetry Proms"), Radio 4, and the World Service. Soft Keys - was published by Secker and Warburg in 1993. After the first book, Roberts developed a continuing collaboration piece - a song cycle called Raising Sparks, which was premiered in 1997 at the Royal Festival Hall, and subsequently went on to win the South Bank Show Music Event of the Year Award.
Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957. Idols, appeared from Oxford University Press in 1996, followed by a second collection, Plato's Ladder, in 1992. Romer has taught in Poland, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Tours in France. He has translated many French poets, including Philippe Jaccottet, Jean Tardieu, and Jacques Dupin. His latest collection, Tribute, came out in 1998; more current work appears in Oxford Poets 2001. His anthology 20th-Century French Poems, appeared from Faber & Faber earlier this year, and is reviewed in this issue of Stand.
C.K. Stead is one of New Zealand's most notable writers, and has published a collection of short stories, The Blind Blonde with Candles in Her Hair, and novels such as, Talking about O'Dwyer (a runner up in the Fiction category of the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards), and Smith's Dream (filmed as Sleeping Dogs, 1977). He has published much poetry and works of non-fiction as well. His most recent collection of poetry is entitled The Right Thing (1999), and in 2001 he won The King's Lynn Poetry Prize. His collection of essays, The Writer at Work (2000) mixes autobiography with literary criticism. His newest work is Kin of Place, Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers (2002). He is Professor of English at the University of Auckland.
Anne Stevenson is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, most recently Granny Scarecrow (2001), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread and Eliot Prizes. Others include The Collected Poems, 1955-1995, Four and a Half Dancing Men,
and Correspondences. She is the author of several volumes of literary criticism as well, and also of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. A longtime supporter of Stand, she is pictured here at the reading at Leeds University to commemorate Stand's fifty years in November of 2002.