Misprint

‘The only end of writing,’ Dr Johnson said, ‘is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently ‘real’ virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. ‘Eurydice’, the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together. We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: ‘I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.’

Table of Contents:
From a Notebook The Thing The Water Cycle: Variations on a Theme Halfway through the A-Feature Internet Poems Young Romance Three Epigrams The Underworld Ariadne Tourism Little Red Poem Fish The Dogs of a House in Mourning and the Naked Girl Master Chuang Found Poem: President’s Reminiscences Read Widely Property Maisky Poems Vomit Likeness Experiment Foiled again… Criticism The True Scholar from The Literary Encyclopaedia Dark and stormys Mosaic Now, / A / Poem / That is Called / ‘Of Insomnia’ Misprint Eurydice 1Was it that long ago you died? 2Pray for us sinners, that we have climbed 3The shutters falling 4After, it is you who lie in the hollow of my elbow 5Slowly and patiently we have forgotten it all 6You never told me how boring it is to be mad 7Leaving the bright town to the desert 8A garden, as a child might draw it 9I wrote to you last March in Madrid 10Thick fog. I walked down the way of all flesh 11Your smile fades and the garden is now dark 12Death is not the end; some doors are never fully closed CodaWith two bags where his two hands were Notes

About the Author :
James Womack is a poet and translator, based in Cambridge. He is the author of four collections with Carcanet: Misprint (2012); On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017); Homunculus (2020), and Why Are You Shouting? (2024). He translates widely from Spanish and Russian, and has put together anthologies for Carcanet of Vladimir Mayakovsky ('Vladimir Mayakovsky' And Other Poems, 2016) and Manuel Vilas (Heaven, 2020). He is currently working on contemporary Russian and Spanish poets and has recently completed a science fiction novel.

Review :
'James Womack is another bright young poet... he is capable of lugubrious comic inventions such as 'From the Literary Encyclopaedia', which charts an experimental novelist's doomed career, alongside 'Tourism', a clipped and chilly poem about the export of jihadis to the Middle East... on the evidence of Misprint Womack has scope, curiosity and a refreshing sense of not having foresuffered everything he encounters.' Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times 'Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist... Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that's ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious. ' Heidi Williamson, Eyewear