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    Misprint
    Misprint
    Misprint
    Ebook76 pages34 minutes

    Misprint

    By James Womack

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    About this ebook

    '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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Poetry
    Release dateJul 1, 2012
    ISBN9781847776693
    Misprint
    Author

    James Womack

    James Womack lives in Cambridge, where he teaches Spanish and study skills. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017) and Homunculus (2020). He also translates widely from Spanish and Russian, most recently Camilo José Cela's The Hive (NYRB Classics, 2023).

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      Book preview

      Misprint - James Womack

      JAMES WOMACK

      Misprint

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to PN Review and The Wolf, where some of these poems, sometimes in slightly different shapes, have appeared. Poems very like ‘Experiment’, ‘The Dogs of a House in Mourning and the Naked Girl’, ‘Tourism’, ‘Vomit’, ‘Little Red Poem’, ‘Now, / A / Poem / That is Called / Of Insomnia’ and sections 5 and 12 of ‘Eurydice’ were published in New Poetries V: An Anthology (Carcanet, 2011). Versions of ‘Young Romance’, ‘The True Scholar’, ‘Dark and stormys’ and sections 6, 7 and 8 of ‘Eurydice’ appeared in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009).

      None of these poems would have been written without the support, forbearance and love of my wife, Marian.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Acknowledgements

      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

      About the Author

      By the Same Author

      Copyright

      From a Notebook

      What can we do to this word?

      Only when you start to write

      The poem like a landscape under

      fog The grain of the paper

      Why not possible to make a poem

      like a study for a painting?

      Some brilliant areas of detail and

      the rest nothing, plastered, scrubbed out,

      full of details that will not

      exist without the reader to make

      them. A poem that is only

      a farrago of hints.

      Who owns the copyright to an erratum

      slip? Nuance Stubbs and his horses

      The Thing

      My favourite B-movie, one of those designed

      to pass the time, rather than say anything,

      is a sci-fi romp set in Tudor England

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