Collected Poems
For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.
"European Hours" represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.
George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the "Scotsman", noted his "fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true". Robin Skelton in the "Malahat Review" spoke of his work as "witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory". Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.
About the Author
Born in London in 1942, Anthony Rudolf has two children and two grandchildren. He is the author of books of literary criticism (on Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz and others), autobiography ("The Arithmetic of Memory") and poetry ("The Same River Twice" and collaborations with artists), and translator of books of poetry from French (Bonnefoy, Vigee, Jabes), Russian (Vinokourov and Tvardovsky) and other languages. He has edited various anthologies. His essay on R. B. Kitaj was published by the National Gallery in 2001, and he has published essays on other painters. He is Paula Rego's partner and main male model. He has completed a volume of short stories and is now at work on two new memoirs. His reviews, articles, poems, translations, obituaries and interviews with writers have appeared in numerous journals. Rudolf is an occasional broadcaster on radio and television and founder of Menard Press. After a lifetime of uninvolving day jobs, he became Visiting Lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University (2000-2003) and Royal Literary Fund fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Westminster (2003-2008). In 2004, he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and, in 2005, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
