Passages : Poems 1969 – 2019 gathers in one volume much of Paul Rossiter’s poetry, written over the course of fifty years in many countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It includes most of the poems from the five retrospective collections and two gatherings of new work published by Isobar Press between 2013 and 2021, together with some poems that only ever appeared in In Daylight and Monumenta Nipponica, both published in 1995. A few entirely new pieces have been added.
A quiet voice, all the louder for its quietude, Paul Rossiter’s is one of the most subtle, the most centred and most needed for turbulent times. – Marius Kociejowski
Paul Rossiter is a musician and a dancer. His footprint is human but a light one. He touches down in various places across a hemisphere, picks up on the sights and sounds, and plays them straight. His is a voice you want to keep listening to. – Laurie Duggan
The poems [in From the Japanese] are so tangible, clear and precise and I love the naturalness – like human speech – of the writing. And how real their concerns are. A lovely thing to have created such a book for others to walk into. – Lee Harwood
December 2024. 508 pages. 229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-49-2 (paperback).
A review by Ian Brinton, Litter: Paul Rossiter’s monumental fifty-year collection of poems provides us with a memento written by ‘A passing traveller’ and they offer us, time and again, an echo of Pound’s Section:Rock-Drill cantos in which ‘autumn leaves blow from my hand’ and the light appears ‘almost solid’.… [The] sense of the manifest appears clearly on each page of Paul Rossiter’s Poems 1969-2019. Click here to read the whole review.
A review by BIlly Mills, Elliptical Movements: The observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry. Click here to read the whole review.
Billy Mills also says (for which I thank him!): Regular readers of these reviews will be aware that I sometimes reflect on the history of non-mainstream verse. Reading Rossiter’s work, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve never heard his name mentioned in discussions of alternative British poetries of the last half century or so, never encountered him in any of the anthologies of this ‘other’ stream. Perhaps it’s because he started publishing late and has lived outside the UK for so long; I don’t know. Even the margins have margins, it seems. It would be interesting to see his work presented in a context that included poets like Frances Horovitz, Richard Caddel, Harry Gilonis, Colin Simms and others. Without going full on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, I believe that consideration of Rossiter in that kind of context would both bring his work into focus and offer new ways to read the children and grandchildren of Albion.
Click here to buy from Amazon in the US; click here to buy from Amazon in the UK; click here to buy from Amazon in Japan.
If you’re in Tokyo, the book is available at Books Kinokuniya Tokyo (near the New South exit from Shinjuku station), and if you’re in London, it’s available from the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place WC1.