Welcome to Starborn Books

Don't miss these two Starborn events

This will be a poetry reading with a difference. Both events will include live music and more.

We will also be introducing our new books from 1911-1912.

TEASE IT FREE

SUPERB NEW HARDBACKS FROM STARBORN!

"... the appeal of his work is in the hallucinatory attention to detail, combined with disorientating shifts of focus ..."

(Zoë Skoulding in Skald, Issue 16)

Of Peter Oram's first collection, White, Professor Ian Gregson wrote: "Peter Oram is restlessly inventive - each new attempt he makes at writing is a new start, so that he deploys a different structure for each poem, and a new angle of vision ... his sense of musical form works brilliantly ..." (New Welsh Review, Spring 2005). But in this new collection he has chosen from his work of the last two or three years poems of one form only: the sonnet. His themes range from simple portraits of fellow-patients during periods in hospital to those revealing an obsession with pain and death as the unavoidable companions of daily life, and each sonnet is yet another attempt at concentration on the essential, at the distillation of a single thought or image.

RAINER MARIA RILKE: Vol. I: VALAISIAN QUATRAINS

The French-language cycles in three volumes, translated by Peter Oram and Alex Barr Translating poetry is notoriously difficult, especially when the translator wishes to maintain metre and rhyme scheme: it takes a great deal of skill to accomplish this while the tone and meaning of the original... Oram has provided excellen retaining translations of these poems." (From theTLS review)

The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (    ) spent the last years of his life in the Canton of Valais, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Here he completed his two most important works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies. Both as a kind of postscript to these and as a homage to the region that had now become his home, he wrote four cycles of short poems; these werehowever not in his native German, but in French, and it is one of these cycles, the Valaisian Quatrains, that is presented in this book in the original French, together with an English translation by Peter Oram.

These poems reveal a spacious, light-filled landscape that is not only a portrait of this part of Switzerland but is also Rilke's vision of a transfigured countryside that lies beyond the merely physical and geographical. The apparent simplicity which may be the impression of a first reading is deceptive, and each time one comes back to these verses one is rewarded with rare new insights into a transcendent world.

RAINER MARIA RILKE: Vol. II: ORCHARDS

Of the over 400 poems that Rilke wrote in French, the cycle Vergers is probably the most important. Orchards is a new translation of that work, in which Rilke explores in concise and almost epigrammatic verses the relationship between the poet, his sources of inspiration and the reader.

Also included in this volume is an essay by Peter Oram which discusses the extraordinarily complex structure, based on principles of symmetry and the Golden Section, underlying this work.

RAINER MARIA RILKE: Vol. III: ROSES available online soon!

The third book in our series of translations from Rilke's French poetry contains the short cycle of 24 poems known as Les roses.is a kind of monograph, a sequence of intimate and at times erotic encounters with the essence of the rose blossom, at the same time exploring its role as a symbol of purity and transience, and as a reflection of the idealised human psyche.

LULL OF THE BULL

by Paul Steffan Jones
Starborn Books is proud to announce the publication of Paul Steffan Jones' first poetry collection.

"He writes like no one else. Paul Steffan Jones' poems in their squeakily hinged way... smash a poetry-shaped fist through the dull inertia found on ninety-nine percent of bookshops' poetry shelves..." (Peter Knaggs, editor, The Slab)