Published 2022. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50
ISBN 9781848618503 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1,000 years. But a sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time ever in English, is a suite of twenty-four of them. The delicate instrument of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao Yuanming, Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine, who lived more than 1,500 years ago.
"Poetry inspired by wine is almost a genre in Chinese literature. The Chinese pastoral poet Tao Yuanming (365?–427) pioneers what may be called ‘alcoholyricism’. Berengarten’s drinking songs are not just a fitting tribute to and admirable emulation of Tao Yuanming’s poetic theme and art. Their evocation of idyllic rural scenes and deep reflections on humanity’s relation to mother nature entitles him to be called a Tao Yuanming in English garb."
—Ming Dong Gu
"In these beautiful, lucid poems, Richard Berengarten exploits the scope of the villanelle in a profound engagement with nature and mortality, in which past, present and future voices resonate across East and West. Accompanied by ‘old friends’, he fills the wine jug and considers existential realities of love and loss, imagination and creativity, where his thought and form are testimony to a life-long intimacy with Daoism and the I Ching
."
—Lucy Hamilton
"There is an elegiac if not valedictory tone abroad and at home in these beautiful poems. We are in the aural territory of an ageing song-bird – the most musical of our older poets – gathering his forces to sing, like Shakespeare’s lark, at heaven’s gate. He is our host and guest, as we age along with him."
—Anthony Rudolf
"This imposing and evocative set of twenty-four villanelles produced by one of the leading poets writing in English today is a superbly crafted collection of poems written in a most demanding poetic form. The ideas and meanings behind the subjects of Berengarten’s individual villanelles are at one with the cyclic pattern and echoing rhetoric of the intricate, long-established, French form. This collection is a triumph of technical virtuosity and imaginative, intellectual expressiveness." —Ian Gordon
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