The Briar Patch
Selected Poems & Translations by J. Kates
Rule Number One: Everything’s attached.
In the briar patch whichever way
you turn, somebody gets scratched.Volume V of the Granite State Poetry Series brings together selected poems by J. Kates with some of his best translations.
“I have always admired the clarity and quiet intensity of J. Kates’s poetry. This long-overdue collection includes a generous sampling of not only his own wry, precisely-worded poems that bring to mind Seamus Heaney (“Starting School” is one of my favorites in that vein) but also his accessible translations, ranging from the ancient Romans to some of Russia’s finest voices. This volume should bring him more of the attention he has long deserved.”
—Joseph Bruchac“Kates brings the same poised, witty, erotic, compassionate skills masterfully into play in the poems that are his own and in his distinguished translations.”
—David Ferry“It’s not the first thing one notices, the craft. That comes with returning to these poems, as one would lift to the light a cherrywood box with dovetailed joints or admire a finely-turned spindle . . . because the turns of phrase, the rhymes, the often formal constructs and the sly wit are subtle undercurrents in work that is ambitious and daring in its emotional range and variety of subjects. Kates brings an almost fierce attention to what matters in art and life, and never turns away from the hard truths (All art is mortal / And most of art honors mortality); yet everywhere in these poems there is abundant love and laughter.”
—Marie HarrisThe Briar Patch is released along with the fourth volume in the series: Cathedral of Nervous Horses byW. E. Butts.
About the Author
J. Kates is a poet, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing) and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; and Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry.
112 pp, Paperback
ISBN 978-0-9845921-8-0 / Price $16
Publication Date: September, 2012
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Reviews:
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, Review by Dennis Daly
