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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


Cover scan

Click on title page for additional images

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