Misprint
"The only end of writing", Dr Johnson said, "is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it". Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently "real" virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. "Eurydice", the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together.
We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: "I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in".
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).
Reviews
"James Womack is another bright young poet... he is capable of lugubrious comic inventions such as 'From the Literary Encyclopaedia', which charts an experimental novelist's doomed career, alongside 'Tourism', a clipped and chilly poem about the export of jihadis to the Middle East... on the evidence of Misprint Womack has scope, curiosity and a refreshing sense of not having foresuffered everything he encounters" – Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times
"Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist... Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that's ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious" – Heidi Williamson, Eyewear
