NEW FICTION
––Clancy McGilligan
January 2020
"History of an Executioner is a triumph of empathy, imagination, and lucidity. A haunting examination of a humble, civil-servant killer whose lonely existence has arrived at a crossroads. Is he the last of his kind? Would he even know how
to be his own man? Could there be any escape from this life of blood and gloom? This first book by Clancy McGilligan truly swept me away—a stunning debut from a spectacularly talented writer."
—Skip Horack, author of The Other Joseph, The Eden Hunter, and The Southern Cross
Odious Horizons ransacks and revives Horace for our contemporary world. Part translations, part re-visionings, these radical (yet often formal) lyrics offer the stoical, joyful praise for a simple life away from the insidious and toxic world of political power and material obsession. What was Roman is now American and British, and the terrifying horizonsthat were clear to Horace, the end game of greed, the downfall of the Republic, is here even more alarming as we see rivers rise and hear the drums of civil war once more.
"Odious Horizons fast-forwards Horace’s Odes, written in 23 BC, into percussive poems of today. As Horace addressed the Tiber, Maecenas or the grass of Mars, Martin Corless-Smith addresses the president, the brown Potomac, the lake of time, and Worcestershire...In luscious crossfire, with brilliant wordplay, Corless-Smith smacks down ode, the address to a particular subject meant to be sung…with masterful, acute control and unexpected ludic shifts amidst motifs of friendship, love, chronos and kairos, war and peace, and an abiding ethical insight…Odious Horizons is consummate poetry for our time." ––Norma Cole
––Geoffrey Squires
“The massive volume of Rumi’s Divan-e Shams resembles a vast field of wild flora in which the person in search of flowers to make a bouquet can easily become confused and lost. Geoffrey Squires has not only accomplished the daunting task of picking those flowers, but also domesticating them for the garden of English poetry, and has miraculously managed to retain their original scent and hue. With his free verse renditions, in these translations he beautifully captures the whirling dance of Rumi’s poetic language and music.”
––M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin
“This book should consolidate Squires’ international reputation as one of the most accomplished and sensitive translators of ancient poetry—both Persian and Irish—for the modern reader.”
––Augustus Young, author of Light Years and Heavy Years
