Booklist

John’s Summer Picks 2022

Selected by John Clegg


Here are six books I’ve either just read or am looking forward to reading this summer: Don Paterson’s best collection since 2003, Holly Hopkins’ long-awaited debut, the follow-up to Jee Leong Koh’s wonderful Steep Tea, an unclassifiable novel / memoir / load of old nonsense from 1933 (republished by the incomparable Boiler House Press), the latest collection from Shane McCrae (which I was very pleased to see nominated for a Forward Prize), and a 12th-century Arthurian romance in Burton Raffel’s lively-looking translation.

From the publisher:
'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through' Kate Kellaway, Guardian Writing you I give the death I take I know I should feel wounded by your death I write to you to make a wound write back…

From the publisher:
Pull Devil, Pull Baker is one of the most innovative autobiographies/biographies ever written.The novelist Stella Benson first encountered an eccentric Russian nobleman, Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine, in…

From the publisher:
"The English Summer shimmers with exquisite revelations" PASCALE PETITA Poetry Book Society Special CommendationSeaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A 'pie-faced' St George upstaged by the horse.The English Summer confronts the…

From the publisher:
Jee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain…

From the publisher:
‘The Arctic’ in Don Paterson’s powerful new collection is the name of a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of apocalypse. The poems gathered here are as various as the clientele: elegies for the poet’s…

From the publisher:
Translated by Burton RaffelThe twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the…

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