The Unstill Ones Poems [Hardcover]

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English,The Unstill Onestakes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Obermans startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse.

Shaped by Obermans scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. Wulf and Eadwacer, a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as On Trans draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English,The Unstill Onesmarks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.

Miller Obermanhas received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a 92Y Discovery Prize, andPoetrymagazines John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. His work has appeared inPoetry,London Review of Books, theNation,Boston Review,Tin House, andHarvard Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Oberman beautifully renders a complex and ever-changing knot of temporalities in which past and present overlap and exert force on each other. A reflection on the meaning of welcome, this etymologically alert work is calm and joylƒ!