The Pelt of Wasps

The prevailing mood of The Pelt of Wasps is one of unease, often elegiac, tinged with pleasure, barbed with pain. The poems hold a worried balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. The book includes David Constantine’s long poem Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man, recently broadcast on Radio 3. David Constantine writes: ‘Wasps, many hundreds of them, are pressing against the window of a room in which a lamp has been left on all night. That poem finishes: I bless my life: that so much wants in. Most of the poems in this new collection have to do with the pressure of phenomena, occurrences and other people on an individual consciousness, and the determined will of that individuality to press back and extend itself. The poems continue old obsessions, love and loss, but these in reality are never repetitious since we are always, each time, older. The long poem Lady Hamilton and the Elephant Man belongs properly with the others in this book (and with Caspar Hauser and my novel Davies). In it I have put together four figures, in an underworld, and let them interconnect. Much of my poetics, it seems to me, consists in placing things oddly side by side. Still not so oddly as life does.’

About the Author :
David Constantine was born in 1944 in Salford, Lancashire. He read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, and lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He lives in Oxford and on Scilly. He has published ten books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); and Elder (2014). His eleventh collection, Belongings, is published by Bloodaxe in 2020. His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hölderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004), his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009), his monograph Poetry (2013) in Oxford University Press’s series The Literary Agenda, and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international fiction award. Four other short story collections, Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), In Another Country: Selected Stories (2015) and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), and his second novel, The Life-Writer (2015), are published by Comma Press. His story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, while 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.

Review :
The mood is both tender and desperate, with something of the uncanny in its blend of the recognisably human and apparently Other… His religious regard for the world (not the same thing as religious conviction) produces a strange translation of its ordinary terms. Its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever, yet at the same time brought into clearer focus.