Book description
Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the
two collections published as Les Fenêtres (The Windows) and Les Roses.
The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather
than the terminus for Jo Shapcott's new collection, Tender Taxes,
which re-imagines Rilke's brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems.
The occasion is Rilke, but these are more than versions: Shapcott's
poems address this, arguing with the originals, crossing and
re-crossing the frontier between translation and origination. Rilke
and Shapcott are brought together in the shared incognito of a foreign
language, 'speaking English through a French mouth'.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning
collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My
Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000).
She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth
Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best
Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes,
her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001; Of Mutability in 2010.
