HEARING EYE Publications - Richard McKane

Richard McKane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1947. A frequent traveller to Turkey in the 60s and 70s, he learned the language fluently and befriended many poets and writers. In 1978, he was the first non-US citizen to be awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University as a writer. He has translated over 20 books from both Russian and Turkish.

Richard McKane's new collection Out of the Cold Blue (Hearing Eye, 2009) amplifies and vastly expands his first book Amphora for Metaphors (Gnosis Press, New York, and Diamond Press, London, 1993). Peter Levi's words in his Introduction to that collection still hold true: 'Richard McKane's arrival has been long delayed, but now he steps into the rather crowded ranks of the most brilliant poets of the last twenty years or more.'

This new collection is a companion volume to Poet for Poet (mainly translations) also published by Hearing Eye and chosen by Helen Bamber OBE as her book on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme.

Richard McKane is a poet of the people despite a certain valuable odd quality, possibly brought on by his living in Turkey in the 70s and his immersion in Russian poetry since his studies at Marlborough and Oxford.

1989 saw the republication in an expanded version of his Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova with Bloodaxe Books. From 1988 to 2006 he also worked as an interpreter, at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, from and into Turkish and Russian.

To order this book by post, please send your name address and postcode, including payment, to:
Hearing Eye, Box 1, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, England NW5 2RX. Price is inclusive of postage and packing when ordered direct from Hearing Eye.

£9.99 (plus p&p).
ISBN 1 9050 8245 2

On the brink of the 200th Anniversary of Pushkin, Richard McKane opens his generous selection of Russian translations with a dozen lyrics of Pushkin. There follow Gumilyov, Akhmatova's poems to Isaiah Berlin, and, from this translator and poet - the book starts with 25 of his own poems to poets - Mandelstam, Pasternak, Aranzon, Sedakova and many other new voices. There is also a rich selection of the Turkish poets, including Hikmet and Rifat, and a few surprises from the Uzbek, Kazakh, Azeri, Danish and Greek.

He has translated over 20 books from both Russian and Turkish. The first collection of his own poetry Amphora for Metaphors was published in New York and London in 1993 and his Turkey Poems was published bilingually in Istanbul. Whilst continuing to translate, he also works as an interpreter at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, in London.

'Richard McKane's arrival has been long delayed, but now he steps into the rather crowded ranks of the most brilliant poets of the last twenty years or more. His poems are faultlessly alive, so fully worked out.'