Inpress Newsletter
Synopsis
The UK’s leading independent poetry magazine * Including new poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Simon Armitage, Esther Morgan and Joanne Limburg * Preview of Sean O’Brien’s major new translation of Dante’s Inferno * Entry details of The Rialto Young Poets Competition The Rialto is bigger and better than ever – now 72 pages and with 60 of the best new poems from a wide range of poets. International names like Germany’s Hans Magnus Enzensberger and our own Simon Armitage, alongside work from emerging writers such as Chris Beckett, Tajinder Singh Hayer and America’s Virgil Renfroe. We’ve also a preview of Sean O’Brien’s important new translation Dante’s Inferno. Other features include an interview with Lotte Kramer, who relives her exiled childhood, the must-read Letters Page and Editorial, more Rumours, Books and Events and entry details to our annual Young Poets Competition. What’s happening in contemporary poetry? Read The Rialto. INTERFERENCE Hope would be too much to hope for, but when a double rainbow appears over the ruins of the ravaged village, they drop for a few moments their killing knives and gaze up while it slowly vanishes before their bloodshot eyes. Hans Magnus Enzensberger LOOK! A SHOOTING STAR! Under a promising moon, a sky alive with exclamation marks he talked about the stamp album bequethed him by his paternal grandfather, a collection so valuable he kept it in a locked box at the bank. Irene Rawnsley
Proving that Norwich's cultural horizons are somewhat broader than those of its most infamous (fictional) resident, Alan Partridge, The Rialto is a poetry magazine that sets its bar perennially high. The formula is simple but effective: exceptional poetry and lots of it. You'll find a page of genuinely eccentric letters ("Many of what you publish is quite boring, tasteless" moans one disgruntled correspondent), a brief-ish editorial (the ubiquitous wail about Arts Council funding), and, in this particular number, an interview with the poet Lotte Kramer, but no reviews, articles or illustrations. The poems stand, unfussily, on plain A4 pages, and frankly, with new verse from the likes of Esther Morgan, George Szirtes and Simon Armitage, who needs anything else? A couple of years back Ciaran Carson produced a lively Hiberno-English version of Dante's Inferno; here there's a taster from a forthcoming translation of the classic by Sean O'Brien. And while poems by Peter Lewis and Joan Johnston touch upon life in the 1950s, it is Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Yellow Stars", a sly, haunting evocations of the horrors of the decade before, that remained lodged in my brain days after first reading it.
Travis Elborough
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