Barbarian Press
Past Publications
Wood engraving by Andy English
(from The Eve of St. Agnes, 2003)
Many of the titles published by Barbarian Press in
the past are now out of print. Descriptions and publication details of
some of those titles are available here for your perusal.
Please note that all of these books are
OUT OF PRINT
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Click on title page for additional images
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A
Natural History of Surprise
Four Poems & an Essay by Crispin Elsted
with a wood engraved frontispiece by Peter Lazarov
November
2002
I would wish to bring you
to a folly of joy roosted in the thorns of a morning.
But mercy is culpable kindness.
INFELIX
SIMULACRUM
The four poems in A
Natural History of Surprise were all written since 1996. “Bosnia”
is a philippic against war, occasioned by a conversation with a Bosnian
woman who saw her father killed; “Infelix simulacrum” mourns
the death of a wife while rejoicing in the continuance of love; “Woman,
& Woman with Music” is a love poem whose two parts reflect
on one another; and the title poem of the collection is a meditation
on the
ambiguities of perception and feeling:
I
had hoped, had thought
or expected the day to have a true line, and my life as well,
but once the first dibble strays from the pegged string, once
there is something unnamed and unknown,
there is riot. It can all be anything. The grass may be full
of unspoken flowers, and the beds will strive
and strangle in their excellence. This illiteracy
of looking is a natural history of surprise …
The essay, “To Judge
the Colour of Grapes”, written nearly twenty years ago after time
spent living in Assisi, concerns the Italians’ relationship to
the art and history which surrounds them.
Crispin Elsted’s selected
poems, Climate and the Affections: Poems 1970
to 1995 (Victoria, Sono Nis Press) appeared in 1996, and was short-listed
for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Canada’s highest
literary award. Here are some critical comments:
The sort of book you
know you will return to over a lifetime. ... There is beauty and simplicity
in every line. [Elsted’s] power depends not on the quick thrust
but on the slow sensual evocation of a detail or a scene.
Susan Musgrave, Vancouver Sun.
...
[Poems] that move those who care to dwell in them: releasing the breath,
unfurling the tongue, refocusing the eye, attuning the ear, opening
the mind, steadying the hand, flexing the heart, and enlarging a part
of language and the world. Few readers would ask for more.
Iain Higgins,
Canadian Literature
These poems needed to
be written and they need to be read.
James Deahl,
The Pittsburgh Quarterly
His poems are handmade
... and like their author, they live happily outside ... the mainstream.
How is one to read such an alien writer? With pleasure. With indulgence.
With delight in his Elizabethan richness, his musicianship, his ignorance
of fashion, his long reach, and his sheer determination to live a human
life despite the bottom-line temptations to do otherwise.
Robert Bringhurst
... the poems themselves often have ... a shining substance. The
best are infused with a kind of ripened silence, as though they took
shape patiently
but irresistibly in their author’s imagination over a long time.
Eric Ormsby,
Books in Canada
If one measure of a good
poem is the number of times one can come back to it and discover something
fresh, then the poems in Crispin Elsted’s Climate & the
Affections are better than good. They are remarkable.
... These are poems with ideas in them – big ideas, beautifully
put. ... Elsted’s poems are simply and complexly brilliant in
the true sense of the word: they shine.
John Harley,
Malahat Review
Thank you for your grave
and beautiful music. ... They are splendid poems.
P. K. Page
Hand set in 11/12pt Van Dijck
with Elysian and Delphian for display and printed in moss green, plum and
black on vintage dampened Barcham Green Chilham and Charter Oak handmade
papers. Bound in printed Canal Jute mouldmade paper over boards with spine
label in green. Tipped in frontispiece by Peter Lazarov, printed from the
wood.
Royal 8vo, 10 ½ by 6 ½ pages [267mm by 165mm]
28 pages. 125 copies, signed.
C$135; approx. US$106 OUT
OF PRINT
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