Richard Berengarten

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Biographical note:  Richard Berengarten was born in London into a family of musicians. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA. He now lives in Cambridge, where he is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College. A former Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, he has published more than 25 books.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714612
ISBN:  9781844714612
Author:  Richard Berengarten
Title:  In a Time of Drought
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  23-Nov-08
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

See also

Richard Berengarten
For the Living

Richard Berengarten
The Blue Butterfly

Richard Berengarten
The Manager

Richard Berengarten
Under Balkan Light

Main description:  Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, In a Time of Drought condemns war, destruction and dictatorship and invokes fertility, nurture and peace. The key figure is the Balkan rain maiden. This gypsy or peasant girl takes on an ancient mythological authority and a wholly modern moral presence. In the wake of waste and war she is the incarnation of hope and renewal.

In a Time of Drought has received the international Morava Charter Award. It forms the second part of Richard Berengarten’s Balkan Trilogy and is published together with the other two parts, The Blue Butterfly and Under Balkan Light. This edition is also the fourth volume in the Salt series of his Selected Writings.

Richard Berengarten used to be known as RICHARD BURNS. With the publication of this book, he now repossesses the family name of his father, the cellist and saxophonist Alexander Berengarten.

Table of contents:
Editorial Note
1 For Dodola (I)
2 For the Green Rider
3 For the Girls and Boys
4 For the Burners of Fires
5 For the Dancers
6 For Dodola (II)
7 For the Queen of the May
Postscript, Glossary and Notes
Arijana's Thread
Names Of The Celebrants
Glossary and Notes
Thanks

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Excerpt from book:  

II
Who shall be chosen as our Dodolka
Who shall be chosen as our rain maiden

Who shall be this year’s Ladaritsa
Guardian of cornfields and growing gardens

And who Perperuna the butterfly
Fluttering around iris blooms

Attendant on Perun Lord of Rain
Festooned in purple and white lilac?

                              Hey Dodie fetch her away
                              Peperuda Perperuna
                              Hey Dodie Dodie Day

Unpublished endorsement:  What Richard Berengarten is doing in A Time of Drought marks him out as someone who stands in a unique position in current British writing, a brave and inventive poet who is able to take risks in order to stay attuned to a wider European tradition.

John Burnside

Unpublished endorsement:  I can think of no other contemporary English poet who so deploys the full resources of the poet’s traditional art and brings them to bear on the events shaping and misshaping of the modern world.

Jeremy Hooker

Unpublished endorsement:  The poems move from immersion in tragic events towards catharsis, from suffering to wisdom. Their deep rhythms reach for and locate a kind of persistence: an unsubduable force that struggles from darkness into light

John Lucas

Unpublished endorsement:  These books not only confirm Berengarten’s reputation as a significant European writer but, in their handling of universal themes, herald his status as a great poet.

Aleksandar Petrov