A Blaze in A Desert: Selected Poems
Price : £14.99 & postage in UK £2.50 (or free collection)
Availability : In Stock

Published Date :
Published By Pm Press
ISBN : 9781629633824
Category : Poetry and Comedy
Format : Paperback
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The poems reflect a life filled with challenging political and personal circumstances. They are beautiful and often suffused with strong feelings of great sadness, aching, and longing and he moves from anger, sorrow, and grief to love, occasionally displaying flashes of wry humour. -- Socialist Review

Victor Serge was a major novelist, a revolutionary, and a historical witness, so it is perhaps not surprising that his poetry has been overlooked. But his poetry is for real. It is as grounded in specifics as you might expect from a fighter in some of the twentieth century's great struggles, and as visionary as you'd hope from a disciple of Rimbaud and a friend to the Surrealists. Reading it is like coming upon an unsuspected corridor in the house of literature. James Brook's lucid translation does it full justice. -- Luc Sante, author, The Other Paris; translator, Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon

In these dark times, the poetry of Victor Serge illuminates the deep continuum of revolutionary history. As all great work, it shows the power of both resistance & acceptance. Serge is noted for his prose but his poetry is in many ways more moving. It inspires the reader to stay true to the revolutionary spirit and will in its compassion, defiance, and outrage. -- David Meltzer, author, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, When I Was a Poet, and Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook

In this meticulously translated collection of Victor Serge's poetry, emotion is the force that swells beneath the poet's acute observations and his reasoning, sobriety, and restraint. -- Summer Brenner, author, Nearly Nowhere and My Life in Clothes

The voice of Victor Serge is needed now more than ever, and James Brook provides a fine edition and translation of his poems, bringing out the close relation between poetic expression and sensibility, and humane, revolutionary political engagement. History and the cosmos, individual and collective hopes, dreams and loss trace a subtle dance in this moving collection. -- Bill Marshall, author, Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent and Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity

An international rebel with a cause, ever the champion of the downpressed and foreclosed, and of 'all the broken young wings,' Victor Serge - deported, exiled, hounded from country to country and continent to continent - inhabited a 'planet without visas.' But in A Blaze in a Desert Serge's poetry, which witnessed the rise of modern totalitarian political ideologies and ideologues, comes home to Walt Whitman's band of brothers. And James Brook's erudite introduction guides us well through Serge's engagement with poetry and poets and the enduring struggle for justice. --Gloria Frym, author, Mind over Matter and The True Patriot

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was an anarchist firebrand, who wrote three novels, was arrested, and lived in precarious exile throughout his life. James Brook (translator and editor) is a poet whose translations include works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, and Benjamin Peret. He is the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life (with Iain Boal) and Reclaiming San Francisco (with Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). The New York Times named his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman a Notable Book. Richard Greeman (afterword) is the translator of five novels by Victor Serge, including Men in Prison and Birth of Our Power from PM Press. He has published literary, political, and biographical studies of Serge in many languages.



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