Bøker i Small Stations Poetry-serien

There are three main branches in Karen Harrison's poetry - mythological interpretation, journeying and intimate experiences. These sometimes intertwine, sometimes stay parallel. And the crown is full of movement with falling leaves at the edge of summer (her primordial sorrow) and elegant trembling of language. The movement is often a pulse. Some poems maintain their distance, others crush you with their closeness. But this is not a feminine poetry of attraction and sentiment, anticipating and inducing, it is a traveller's poetry in which the poet floats free with her images and readers solely dependent on the river's currents. A confirmation of Heraclitus' 'Everything is one.' Where rivers are trees from above. This is Karen Harrison's first poetry collection in English, originally published in 2011 and now reprinted in 2018. Her second poetry collection, Night-Singing Bird, is also available from Small Stations Press.

There are three main threads in Karen Harrison's poetry, which intertwine: nature, God and her personal life. But they are not simply ontological, they belong to each other, they widen each other, they talk amongst themselves. In Harrison's nature, there is room for many birds, but the most important are those that sing at night (hence the title of the book), just as God made darkness His home. Her God is a long pilgrimage starting with an entire belonging, but also allowing for a critical mind: she will protest in front of the United Nations about Him, who permitted such diversity in faith, but accepts only true believers. In her intimate moments, she suffered a terrible illness, but this is not a reason for closing herself off; for Harrison, it is a source of communication. The soul of this poet is open towards the other. It is a poetry - and a life - of relation. In this way, she confirms that most Christian postulate: that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. We hold in our hands a book of aesthetic poetry, a silent book that sounds more like messages than conversation. This is autobiographical poetry, but it has deeper roots in the Spirit, which Church Fathers describe as a fish swimming in the open sea, in God. "Like a fish in an aquarium, I am a thing of the Spirit," writes Harrison.

In 2003 the Galician writer Manuel Rivas, well known for his novels The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly, published in his native Galician language his collected poems, five books of poetry and a selection of recent poems, under the title Do descoñecido ao descoñecido (From Unknown to Unknown). This anthology in English, From Unknown to Unknown, gathers together eighty of those poems and is introduced by the Scottish writer John Burnside, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, who writes, 'Again and again, as we listen to the account Rivas gives of the world, we come across the beautiful surprise, the breathtaking renewal of some process or way of seeing we normally take for granted… It is an enormous privilege to have this selection of poems in this attentive and imaginative translation… Here is an essential poet whose work illuminates the world and the condition of those who live it.' This English edition was first published in 2009 and is now reprinted.

An anthology of Cork-based Galician poet Martín Veiga's poetry from the last thirty years in a bilingual Galician-English edition, Alfaias na lama: Poesía selecta 1990-2020 / Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. The poems are selected and introduced by Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo; the parallel English translation is by Keith Payne.

In these two poetry collections, Fossil Time (2018) and Book of Devorations (1996), the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés takes us into the nooks and crannies of time. She splices open time to reveal the innards. We are transported to another self that we didn't know existed. The poetry is so weighty that it becomes light, as if the space between the atoms had ballooned and risen upwards. Pilar Pallarés defines Galician poetry of the last thirty years. The Galician language has been a vehicle for poetry since the medieval troubadours and the lament of a woman on St Simon's Island waiting for the waves to arrive. Pilar embodies the voice of that woman, gives it a home, which is all we can do as the breath enters and leaves our lungs, hums, vibrates. Both these books received the Spanish Critics' Award for Galician poetry in the year that they were published; Fossil Time won the Spanish National Book Award for Poetry in 2019. Pilar Pallarés is considered a major poet in the Galician language. She has published five collections to date: In the Dusk (1980), Seventh Solitude (1984), Book of Devorations (1996), A Leopard Am I (2011, also available from Small Stations Press) and Fossil Time (2018). In 2019, the Galician-Language Writers Association made her a 'Writer in Her Land'. Carys Evans-Corrales has translated several major Galician authors into English. Her translations of prose by Xurxo Borrazás, Miguel-Anxo Murado and Anxos Sumai are published by Small Stations Press, as is her autobiography, Talking Girl.