Homesick for the Earth
Bilingual French-English edition
Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin.
His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity:
One day we’ll say ‘The sun ruled then.
Don’t you remember how it shone on the twigs,
on the old, as well as the wide-eyed young?
It knew how to make all things vivid
the second it alighted on them.
It could run just like the racehorse.
How can we forget the time we had on Earth?
His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterised as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment.
Moniza Alvi writes: ‘I have been making versions of Supervielle’s poems for several years, strongly drawn to his style of writing, while also finding coincidental parallels with my own life, such as his birth “elsewhere” on another continent. My aim has been to retain the spirit of the French poems, and as many of their implications as I can, while making a poem that has a life in English. I thought he was an enchanting, inspiring poet who deserved to be so much better known in this country.’
‘In her striking versions of poems by the French poet Jules Supervielle, written against the backdrop of wartime France, Moniza Alvi has found a soul-mate, a poet companion’ – Penelope Shuttle, Poetry London
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Europa
Many of the poems in Moniza Alvi's Europa relate to ancient and modern traumas, including enforced exile, alienation, rape and 'honour killing'. Its centre-piece is a re-imagining of the story of the rape of Europa by Jupiter as a bull. Her latest collection also includes a series of poems exploring post-traumatic stress disorder, and further versions of the French poet Jules Supervielle with their Second World War background. Europa is a dark, unified book whose poems move towards regeneration. It is published at the same time as Moniza Alvi's Split World: Poems 1990-2005.
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE
Shortlisted for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize
'Much of Alvi's work engages with a surreal or fantastical world of
fractured and partially recovered identity, working through sequences
in her most recent poetry.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets'
Split World
Moniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In her
early work, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are
'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the
surreal - this poet's third country' (Maura Dooley). Her less
autobiographical later books are concerned not only with divisions
between East and West but also with the interplay between inner and
outer worlds, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual. Split World is published at the same time as Moniza Alvi's latest collection, Europa, and includes poems from five previous collections: The Country at My Shoulder (1993), A Bowl of Warm Air (1996), Carrying My Wife (2000), Souls (2002) and How the Stone Found Its Voice (2005).
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Carrying My Wife
In the title-sequence she plays the role of husband to an imaginary wife. Writing from a male or "husband" viewpoint, she is able both to distance herself and to zoom into sensations and difficulties, so that surreal aspects of relationships emerge as well as the humour which might have been blurred in a head-on approach. Her poems do not attempt a male stance, but show another way of looking at oneself.
'These poems are about what is just out of reach, what cannot ever quite be captured but can be imagined with such delicacy that it becomes real' - Helen Dunmore, Observer
'She writes with a quiet, concentrated simplicity . . . an impressive debut' - Fleur Adcock, PBS Bulletin
'This poetry is deceptively simple, disarmingly truthful, full of a vivid and delicate individuality and jouissance' - Linda France, Poetry Review
As well as the new poems of Carrying My Wife, this book also includes poems from Moniza Alvi's OUP collectionsThe Country at My Shoulder and A Bowl of Warm Air.
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Souls
The souls inhabit us 'as if our faces were portraits in galleries - and stare out of us until they are tired of looking,' writes Moniza Alvi in one of these delightfully paradoxical and daringly imaginative poems . . . 'We only know about life. To the souls, we're the real immortals.'
The troubled and troublesome souls are characters in her sequence The Further Adventures of the Souls whose escapades touch different facets of life and death, exploring tantalising dualities through delicious transformations. Their moods and desires dart about on the edge of daily reality, revealing as much about ourselves as our own fantasies.
The other poems in Souls, while different in approach, are equally strong evocations of the fragility of life, exploring birth, death and parenthood with a sure wit and lightness of touch.
'Alvi is a bold surrealist, whose poems open the world up in new, imaginatively absurd ways' - Ruth Padel, Independent
'Moniza Alvi's world is a place of wild energyŠAlvi's voice has achieved a relaxed naturalness, a fluidity which allows her to present these delicious, extraordinary poems as though it were easy' - Kathleen Jamie and Hugo Williams, PBS Bulletin
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Moniza Alvi’s title sequence How The Stone Found Its Voice is a series of poems inspired by creation myths. Begun in the wake of the tragedy of 9/11, they are imbued with the dark spirit of that time, with titles including ‘How The World Split In Two’, ‘How The Answers Got Their Questions’ and ‘How The Countries Slipped Away’.
These are followed by poems in which Moniza Alvi takes a more autobiographical approach to racial conflict and the split between East and West, and by The Return of My Wife‚ a continuation of a sequence from her earlier book Carrying My Wife. Versions of the French poet Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) with their Second World War background and
exploration of personal fragility provide a linking thread. How the Stone Found Its Voice is a varied collection with echoes across its different sections, all equally vital to the whole.
‘Moniza Alvi’s world is a place of wild energy…Alvi’s voice has achieved a relaxed naturalness, a fluidity which allows her to present these delicious, extraordinary poems as though it were easy’ – Kathleen Jamie & Hugo Williams, PBS Bulletin
‘She is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday, so that we accept the miraculous as something we need…the overriding impression is of a deft, restrained language carrying ideas with metaphysical wit and seriousness’ – Leonie Rushforth, London Magazine