Bloodaxe Books | David Constantine: poems on environmental destruction @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded January 2021 | Updated October 2024, 3 minutes ago.
David Constantine is an English poet known also for his translations of poets such as Enzensberger, Brecht, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Jaccottet. His poetry stands outside the current literary climate, and like the work of the European and English poets who have nourished him, it is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Its mood is often one of unease, elegiac or comically edged, barbed with pain or tinged with pleasure. His poems hold a worried and restless balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. His early influences included Graves, Lawrence and Edward Thomas, poets he admired ‘for their passion and attention to the real and the mythic world’; other poets important for him and his work would include Keats, Wordsworth, Clare and Hardy.
Neil Astley filmed Constantine reading selections of his poems from his books at his home in Oxford in June 2018. There are separate videos for poems from each of his collections. In this video he reads two prophetic poems on environmental destruction, ‘Dominion’ from his Collected Poems (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-777) and ‘Pity’ from Nine Fathom Deep (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/nine-fathom-deep-917). Both poems are also included in Neil Astley’s anthologies Earth Shattering: eco poems (2007) and Staying Human: poems for Staying Alive (2020).
David Constantine is an English poet known also for his translations of poets such as Enzensberger, Brecht, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Jaccottet. His poetry stands outside the current literary climate, and like the work of the European and English poets who have nourished him, it is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Its mood is often one of unease, elegiac or comically edged, barbed with pain or tinged with pleasure. His poems hold a worried and restless balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. His early influences included Graves, Lawrence and Edward Thomas, poets he admired ‘for their passion and attention to the real and the mythic world’; other poets important for him and his work would include Keats, Wordsworth, Clare and Hardy.
Neil Astley filmed Constantine reading selections of his poems from his books at his home in Oxford in June 2018. There are separate videos for poems from each of his collections. In this video he reads two prophetic poems on environmental destruction, ‘Dominion’ from his Collected Poems (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-777) and ‘Pity’ from Nine Fathom Deep (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/nine-fathom-deep-917). Both poems are also included in Neil Astley’s anthologies Earth Shattering: eco poems (2007) and Staying Human: poems for Staying Alive (2020).
