Misprint

By James Womack

'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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847776693

James Womack

James Womack was born in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation at university, and after living in Madrid for a decade now works as an editor, teacher and freelance translator in Cambridge. He has translated widely, including self-help books, popular fiction, Latin American classics and poetry. His first book of poems, Misprint, came out in 2012, and his book of versions ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and Other Poems appeared in 2016, both from Carcanet.