New From Barque Press

New from Barque Press:

J. H. Prynne - GEORGE HERBERT, LOVE [III]: A Discursive Commentary

'Herbert for his part has put into suspense these "unchangeable rules" because the completeness of God's love for man is offered as a perfect and equitable freedom on both sides: but service once freely entered into is ordered by just these rules of divine equity. The example and model for the alternative, non-conditional sense of then and where it leads, is the unreckoned offering by Love of God's unreserved and unqaulified loving-kindness towards men. There are some traditional interpretative schemes in which God's love is conditional, upon sincere contrition, full repentence, upon justification through faith, and eventual sanctification. But in Herbert's scheme the invitation is unencumbered by reckoning: there are no special premiums or discounts or forward contracts, it is an offer made out of pure love - and, as such, hard for the guest to believe or accept because hard for him to comprehend. Yet it is not an indifferent act, because it is motivated by God's will towards man, that man should return a pure love, if so he wills, as the matching response to God's willed offering.' (excerpt from the Commentary, p. 69)

£10.00 (£2 P&P), April 2011 (92 pp.)

Tim Atkins - Petrarch

'Tim Atkins' translations of fourteenth-century Italian scholar and poet Franciso Petrarcha’s sonnets (in Petrarch) open an entirely different kind of functional space within the gap between media, and inject it with wit, contemporary vulgarity, and not a little libido. ...Love here is for men, women, and poems. Atkins pulls the poetry of his friend and lover into messy interfaced languages of multiple historical moments ("I won the Eurovision poetry prize in 1341"), employing a criss-crossing gang of references as company (Bach, YouTube, Henry James, Futurism...). If there is a systemic translation methodology employed across the various, non-chronologically arranged sonnets, I have yet to discover it; the sharpness of the poems allows them to stand solidly outside of any framework, while taking place at high volume, with nerve, emotion, and wit all equally maximized.' Eddie Hopely, Poetry Project Newsletter 233 (Dec 2010)

£10.00 (£2 P&P), April 2011

ISBN 978-1-903488-78-2