On Trust

A Book of Lies

Womack James

"On Trust" is a collection of poems organised around the idea of telling the truth. Inspired by the idea that poetry is often seen as being a vehicle for the articulation of individual truths, or as a medium for unvarnished and unprocessed confession, the poems in this collection play with the idea of the simple identification of the "I" of a poem with the "I" of the poet, offering a series of monologues in which the identity of the speaker with that of the poet is encouraged, but then left hanging. This collection includes poems about sleeping with the sea, the Marquis de Sade, death, the Fates, and travelling in Siberia.

About the Author

James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavik and Oxford. He currently lives in Madrid, where he teaches at the Universidad Complutense and is co-editor of the publishing house Nevsky Prospects, which produces Spanish translations of Russian literature. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Savinkov and Silvina Ocampo. A selection of his poems appeared in "New Poetries V: An Anthology" (Carcanet, 2011).

Back to the list of books