Sign-In
Cart
After Beowulf
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781552454428
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: Apr 5 2022
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
hw t, another Beowulf translation? Not exactly...
Welcome to Denmark's Heorot Hall, where King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel, Saxon's cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a predictable and monstrous backlash, a Medi val fracas that only the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he arrives to quell and queltch and quatch the Grendel beast.
Beowulf, that still-recognizable hero, embodies a blank function, a motive-driven yet motiveless megastar. He's the young, fit, male, self-sacrificing protagonist-interloper who will fight any monster to protect his people. Or to defend strangers. Or to gain a reputation. Or because he just really wants to...
In her rendering of Beowulf, Nicole Markotic offers a rollicking cover song of fantastical text. These pages will surprise readers as they introduce new ways to embrace, challenge, or click with Anglo-Saxon heroics. Writing original poems, Markotic de-stories the story of one man, who mostly does not play well with others, who fights monsters (and defeats their mothers, too), and who practically invents the poetic tradition of entitled bravery.
Upending the tale with her fresh and enchanting style, Markotic gives a nod to previous translations, winks at canonical critics, bares historical biases, all while gifting transmogrifying pages that will whet your whimsy!
Nicole Markotic takes the original English-language epic and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines, rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time. The result is the story re-understood. The phrasing and incantation is Markotic's own (and our era's own), deployed with deliciously textured and diverse registers of language. Blake saw infinity in the palm of his hand. Markotic puts a millennium in yours. --Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour
Beowulf, with its unfathomable monsters and monster-slaying hero, its bro world of mead, boasting, weapons, and booty, remains a stubbornly relevant template for much of our contemporary scene. Nicole Markotic's After Beowulf handles all this with dazzling sprezzatura. It is a pleasure to follow the narrating, condensing, commenting voice as it sashays through a range of verbal registers from high Olsonic to comic book pratfall, snark to scholarship. After Beowulf provides an up-to-date reading of Beowulf through the eyes of a feminist poet. And it continually suggests what things might be like after Beowulf. --Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy
The collision of ancient and colloquial language creates bursts of humour as my dude Beowulf makes his way into the banquet hall and beyond. Linger here to experience the aesthetics of poetry in action: vibrant and intensely moving, we feel the wrenching pain of Grendel's mother. Markotic's language is thick with meaning and light with humour: a creation of the most projective of verses. --Jacqueline Turner, author of FlourishAlso in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback