Vesna Goldsworthy

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Biographical note:  Vesna Goldsworthy, born in Belgrade in 1961, is the author of two widely translated books, Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale, 1998); and a memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries (Atlantic, 2005), describing her youth in communist Yugoslavia and emergence as a Serbian poet. Serialized in The Times and read by Vesna herself as Book of the Week on BBC Radio Four, it has been a bestseller in several European languages. She lives in West London with her husband and young son.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718788
ISBN:  9781844718788
Author:  Vesna Goldsworthy
Title:  The Angel of Salonika
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-11
Extent:  64pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Angel of Salonika is a prize-winning first collection of poetry by a bestselling memoir writer who grew up in Yugoslavia. Telling the story of her vanished homeland, this evocative, bitter-sweet collection also celebrates contemporary London and learning to live, love — and write poetry — in a new language.

Main description:  The Angel of Salonika is a haunting, multi-layered book about place, language and remembrance, and the way they make us who we are. Winner of the Crashaw Prize, it is a first collection of poetry by a bestselling memoir writer, broadcaster and British university professor who grew up in communist Yugoslavia but then moved to London.

The collection begins and ends with the same summer in Macedonia thirty years ago, and tells the story of a vanished Balkan homeland but it also describes learning to live, love – and write poetry — in a new language. Goldsworthy’s poems are both melancholy meditations on a lost world, deeply permeated with a Chekhovian feeling of transience, and witty and often acerbic celebrations of London here and now — of its rivers of humanity, the secrets lurking behind its terraces, in its churches, mosques and temples, its street markets and railway stations, and almost empty restaurants during late afternoons. This is a well-travelled book, packed with memory and incantation, conjuring landscapes and people. It is beautifully written and, like all great poetry, it forms an ideal, entertaining companion.

Table of contents:
Summer on Pelion
Notebooks
Black Linen
The Windfalls
He Stands So Thin and Waits
Paperweight Snowstorm
West London Afternoon
Departure Board
A Winter Postcard from Istanbul
Lullaby
Yugoslav Nocturnes
Three Eighteen
Venice, Intermezzo
Rebecca in Macedonia
Out of the Blue
The Birthday Concert
Germany
The Angel of Salonika
Afterword

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Excerpt from book:  

Black Linen

Long shot: a formation of Canada geese,
A perfect victory sign above the weeping willows,
The bird’s eye view of palaces and artificial lakes
Hidden beyond the contour lines of suburban streets,
Then the Cotswolds, where the river begins,
The Heart of England, wherever that may be.

Mid-range: the stillness of a summer afternoon,
The surface tension of water between the tides,
A spider mid leap, a dowsing pendulum
Suspended on silk cord from the perfect orb of home,
Above the trunk of a fallen sycamore tree
Which finds both the east and the estuary
But stays unmoving at the river’s edge,
To gather flotsam from a decomposing world,
And tremble like a needle in the compass,
Held in place by the moon, here too already,
Unlit and unlooked for in the eastern sky.

Of the many futile projects underway,
Which one got us talking of the properties of magnets
And magnetic fields?

Finally, the close up: the smell of your linen shirt,
The washing soap and — deeper in its threads —
Sea salt, bergamot, neroli, petitgrain.
What do we know, what do we know, you start
But halt on the cusp of some other sentence.


Beneath our feet are tunnels and underground trains,
Bodies pressed against each other, eyes averted,
As if to say this is how it must be. Their unwanted intimacy
The exact opposite of the pose we strike so casually
While London burns and melts at thirty six degrees,
As though not trapped at all, as though completely free.

Unpublished endorsement:  The Angel of Salonika moves on the shadowy borders where the wounds of separation turn into the scars of loss. European in sensibility, elegiac in tone, these poems mark the arrival of a welcome new voice in English poetry.

JM Coetzee

Unpublished endorsement:  Vesna Goldsworthy bursts into the poetry world fully formed. Her poems are ravishing meditations, written with deftness and assurance. The poems are cultured in the best way and stem from a deep engagement with history, held in balance with love and loss. Wonderful.

Gwyneth Lewis

Unpublished endorsement:  These poems are lovely. Freighted with history and personal experience, they move with great clarity and control and are gorgeously precise… Reminiscent of Cavafy.

George Szirtes