Will Stone

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Biographical note:  Will Stone, born in 1966, is a poet and translator living in Suffolk. His reviews, essays and translations have appeared in various literary publications including the TLS, the Guardian and Poetry Review. His poems have been published in The London Magazine, Agenda, The Shop and Poetry Salzburg. His latest work in translation To The Silenced – Selected Poems of Georg Trakl was published by Arc in 2005.

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EAN13:  9781844715473
ISBN:  9781844715473
Author:  Will Stone
Title:  Glaciation
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  05-Jun-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  WINNER GLEN DIMPLEX POETRY AWARD 2008. Will Stone was recently named a ‘European-leaning maverick’ by Hugo Williams in the TLS, which may explain why his remarkable voice has been unjustly neglected until now. Stone’s poems have a visionary edge to them, replete as they are with a powerful imagery both sublime and unsettling. Suffused with melancholy and a sometimes apocalyptic morbidity, his poetry is also lyrically tender and elegiac, focusing on both the trauma of mankind pinioned by an ever increasing existential insecurity in a debased natural world and the consolation of revealing a poetic ‘spiritual’ essence still active in certain landscapes.

Main description:  WINNER GLEN DIMPLEX POETRY AWARD 2008. ‘Sometimes you read collections that in their ambition and concerns alert the mind to the possibility of obtaining a new perspective on what else is being written all around us and this book is such a collection …’

These words written by the poet Paul Stubbs, announce to an English readership the power, originality and rare visionary elements to be found in this remarkable debut collection from a gifted poet.

The poems gathered here under the title ‘Glaciation’, a poem itself inspired by Shelley’s masterful distillation of alpine scenery in ‘Mont Blanc’, are concerned with a world precariously close to extinction. Stone sets out with only language to meet this catastrophe and from the daunting inescapable truths faced by modern man, suggests a potential existential transcendence via poetic metaphor and striking physical imagery. This poet is also concerned with the nature of melancholy, a ‘creative’ un-nihilistic melancholy handed down to Stone from other writers and artists with whom he shares a fraternal empathy. These support ghosts who seem to continue more fervently through death their heroic struggles with the rational goliath, make their entrances and exits throughout the collection, interspersed with poems culled from the coastal ledges of England, notably the wild and unspoilt stretch of coast between Hartland Point and Bude in North Devon, ‘The Wreckers Coast’, one of the last havens which for Stone are clinging on (just) in the face of an ever accelerating sterile and tyrannically functional modernity. By contrast Stone also draws on his native Suffolk and particularly the lonely coast of shingle spits and heather clad cliffs of mysterious enclaves such as Dunwich and Covehithe, made more visible in recent times by the writings of W.G. Sebald, but also long a sanctuary for earlier solitaries such as Edward Thomas and Fitzgerald. ‘Greyfriars’ and ‘In Boulge Churchyard’ for example evoke a tender, mournfully nostalgic Suffolk landscape that is shy to show itself and garners its essence before signalling to the right receiver. In a poetry world which seems to eschew risk and ever trumpets the easily accessible, these distinctive poems are then as Paul Stubbs rightly asserts ‘as authentic as they are necessary’.

Table of contents:
The Oaks
Restoration
Winter Light
The Heart
Van Gogh’s Room
Pigs
Swifts
Storm off Speke’s Mill Mouth
Morwenstowe
Trakl — The Oval Photo
The Commander
Russian Fair Play
Glaciation
Verhaeren in Rouen
The Ceremony
Exhibit ‘B’
To Max
The Wrecker’s Coast
The Sniper’s Victim
Angelic Intervention
Translators of Baudelaire
Exploring Culture’s Wreck
The Ghosts of Tully Castle
Schopenhauer’s Reprieve
Heym’s Madness
Grave Detail
Reading of the Bourgeois Women
Regeneration
The Ipatiev House
The Hawk
The Buzzard
Natural Phenomenon
Garden and Leisure
The Sinister Blue Lake
Greyfriars
The Jetty
Hour of the old Buildings
Sudden Flight
Where the Waves End
The Monk’s Bell
SS Fort Breendonk
Frithelstock
In Boulge Churchyard
Explanation to an Academic
Sorley
At Hartland Point
Stragglers
Ducks and Geese
Reeds in November
The Deserter
In St Sulpice
Take Off
Exodus
Walser’s Last Walk
October

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Excerpt from book:  

SS Fort Breendonk
In memory of W G Sebald

As today when the reeds rustled on the moat
no-one listened.
Men like us but not like us howled
only for the ears of the others, the rest
who howled inside and drew blood unseen,
whose fingers bored into the mildewed brick.
One screamed ‘I’m too young to die.’
But the guard replied ‘This is hell and I am the devil!’
He was a seventeen year old burglar from Essen.
They propped the condemned at the stake,
and afterwards got the Jews in
to collect the clogs, hose down the posts.
And birds sang after the execution,
as was the custom.

Now I go down these surgical tunnels,
so straight the time taken to proceed
from one end to the other at walking pace
cannot be measured. Drawn into
this echoing mine where nothing remains
but the squandered sound of tape recorded
voices, screens with grey haired men
droning on in ill-lit cells to no-one.
Death comes, the statistics … death
His meaty hand chose the torture weapon.
All language was fluff, the names … the names …
In order to knowingly exist he had to beat
with his truncheon that body until lifeless,
calmly enter it like poison, unchallenged.
Then to the SS mess for a night of song
and a snapshot to celebrate the execution.

‘The complexities of human nature are displayed here.’
states the tourist literature.
‘We welcome schoolchildren.’ And
‘It must never happen again.’
That sort of thing, or else the ardent witness
who recalls the commandant’s dog named ‘Lump’
left seventeen bite marks on the body.
This is where a man fell, and here, one of us
though we cannot be sure of their names.
The butcher leads a prisoner past spooked
whitewashed walls, springing back pain,
this way my lad, now it’s coming …
The unfurling joy of freedom miles away.

In a gloomy recess the inadvertent sculpture
of discarded coffins embossed with a cross,
left for those who three days in fell across barrow
or later swung remorseless from a rope,
giving a last superfluous Hitler salute,
or filed from a court room in the roar of the void,
or heard whatever remains in the prison yard, only air
and the looped barking of dogs, virtual spades
clattering in the shadows of buttresses and blind spots.
They found a belt buckle near the sentry box,
The words they could only just make out
through mud and rust —
‘God is with us’.

Unpublished endorsement :  Will Stone is the lycanthrope of contemporary poetry, a haunter of the haunted, at loose in the European necropolis. He is drawn to the darker edge of genius, attuned to the shades of Kleist and Trakl, of Rodenbach and Verhaeren, and to the landscapes they have evolved in their image. Transfixed by moments of physical and mental dissolution, he is their elegist, and a true initiate in the noble science of melancholy.

Stephen Romer

Unpublished endorsement :  Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shore of our self-destruction. Read him before the tide comes in.

Hugo Williams

Review quote:  Stone has a definite flair for the striking image and, taken one by one, his jarring visions of a profligate civilization trapped in a fatally debased environment are rawly compelling.

Sarah Crown
The Guardian

Review quote:  Some say the world will end in fire / … ice / Is also great / And would suffice.’ Will Stone too warns apocalyptically of ice … Frost is detached and wryly witty; Stone is hard, urgent and angry: expressions of righteous indignation are rarely attractive and we may not thank Stone immediately for lifting our blinkers, but Salt are to be congratulated for recognizing this important new voice.

Simon Darragh
The London Magazine

Review quote:  The title poem elaborates with frightening savagery on Shelley’s Mont Blanc, and throughout the volume it is clear that Stone has, as poets must, thoroughly absorbed poetic tradition in order to produce a new voice that, while it owes almost nothing to what has come before, is nonetheless entirely original.

Simon Darragh
The London Magazine

Review quote:  Stone continually walks us back through the ‘European’ continent of his imagination as one walks through a half ruined nave, or bombed arcade. His own poetical form is exact, engaged, and accessible; but it is the author’s exemplary eye for what interposes itself between subject and imagination that lifts these poems into another realm.

Paul Stubbs
The Wolf Magazine

Review quote:  Will Stone has created a collection of poems here of oblique and uncomfortable beauty, in which he has managed to successfully capture the dislocation and bewilderment felt in the modern era confronted with the ever accelerating decline of the natural world.

Paul Stubbs
The Wolf Magazine

Previous review quote:  In an attractive booklet from Menard Press, Will Stone has tried his hand at Englishing Nerval’s grandiloquent and myth-encrusted sonnets known as ‘Les Chimères’. In his remarkable Translator’s Note, not unaffected perhaps by his Master’s own grandiloquence — ”Like a partly submerged crocodile with one amber eye half open, the foreign line sits, waiting for the anxious translator to make a move”…Stone talks a good deal of sense. Having played with the idea of modernising or “freeing up” Nerval, he rejects it as being in effect impossible, because Nerval’s poetic essence is inextricably locked into the obscure imagery, and to dilute it in any substantial way would be to risk losing everything at once. Nevertheless, echoing Walter Benjamin he makes a memorable case for translation as a means whereby a work can take on fresh resonance, revivifying the original which “does not want to become a monolith. A dead thing in the old landscape of language, smothered in creepers and half forgotten myths”…

Stephen Romer
Times Literary Supplement

Previous review quote:  Will Stone (whose translations of the German of Georg Trakl can be found in the present issue of MPT) has produced versions that are more than usually at home in the disputed territory between languages, that no-man’s land that translators at their best cultivate. Stone neither foreignizes nor domesticates but is open to and takes full advantage of the possibilities offered by English today. He does what gifted translators are best fitted to do, producing something new, not just because it originates in another culture but because the host (target) language is legitimately changed by it. I was much taken for instance, with his argument in favour of bilingual presentation, far more persuasive now, I think, than it was thirty-five years ago, when Ted Hughes and I began MPT.

Daniel Weissbort
Modern Poetry in Translation

Previous review quote:  He is arguably most successful in his grasp of the moments of uneasy calm that nonetheless pervade the verse. Versions of the most famous poems “Grodek”, “To the Boy Elis” and the “Kaspar Hauser Song” reflect this admirably, and Stone has a sure touch with the distinctive Trakl tone of ominous threat. The extended “Helian” cycle gives a real sense in English of the subtlety of Trakl’s art.

Robert Vilain
Times Literary Supplement

Previous review quote:  Stone’s approach to Trakl’s work and to its translation is idiosyncratic, it is very much that of the poet-translator, and important for being so. He is saying ‘this is what Georg Trakl means to me as a poet in English and I am translating it to share with you.’ We should be grateful to him for this. It is an approach that widens ‘translation’ out into our language and that therefore also widens out the language of our poetry. And this surely is one of the most fruitful roles translation can have.

Stephen Watts
Wolf Poetry Magazine

Previous review quote:  Will Stone’s introduction to his translations from Trakl contains an admirable declaration of principle: “As a translator of poetry I must in the end have a real poem to show for my struggle, not a collection of carefully constructed lines which read like a poem but are in fact already decomposing before they reach the page.” He has struggled with considerable success. His versions of Trakl do read like real poems, and, to a very large extent, are valid equivalents to the haunting and mysterious originals.

Ritchie Robertson
Translation and Literature

Previous review quote:  The translator Will Stone subtly and beautifully ushers us into those ‘pure spaces’ where the projection of Trakl’s mind is forever being played out. Stone has given us almost a bone-by-bone crib rather than a word-by-word one. Like a Palaeontologist reconstructing the image of a creature from a distant past, Stone assembles this wonderful resurrection, always allowing Trakl’s voice to be spoken through the two now assimilated minds.

Paul Stubbs
Agenda

Previous review quote:  Will Stone has become best known in this country for his translations of such fiercely subjective European luminaries as Nerval, Rodenbach, Verhaeren, Baudelaire and most recently the Selected Poems of Austrian poet Georg Trakl (To the Silenced, Arc Publications, 2005). Yet what his own work proves is that the interrelationship between poet and translator is not, in this case, an unbalanced one.

Paul Stubbs
The Wolf Magazine