Heaven, Paperback

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak - bluntly, humorously - always alert for the fantastic. This is the first translation of Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.

Manuel Vilas is a Spanish writer, the author of several books, including fourteen collections of poetry, seven books of essays, and seven novels. His most recent novel, Alegr a, was the 2019 Premio Planeta Finalista, and its predecessor, Ordesa, was a bestseller in Spain, won the French Prix Femina tranger in 2019, and is forthcoming in a number of languages, including French, German and English. Vilas currently divides his time between Spain and the United States, where he teaches at the University of Iowa. / James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation at university, and received his doctorate, on W.H. Auden's translations, in 2006. After ten years in Madrid, he has recently returned to the UK, where he teaches Spanish and translation at Cambridge University. He is a freelance translator from Russian and Spanish, and helps run Calque Press, which concentrates on poetry, translation and the environment. His debut collection of poems, Misprint, was published by Carcanet in 2012, and On Trust: A Book of Lies came out in December 2017. A third collection, Homunculus, is due out in August 2020.