Edward Byrne

Lyric condensations and translations composed during plague timeThe poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed by the music of reason - "the ear's judgement" (Joachim du Bellay), the "natural music" of poetry (Eustache Deschamps), "music at the heart of thinking" (Fred Wah). A major feature of this work is its incorporation and reworking - a translation - of other works of western literature and philosophy across the span of its brief, localized history. These are poems that barge into the arena of classic and modernist literary works with little regard for what is generally regarded as genius, with contempt for the ever-present misogyny and gender segregation of our collective past, with an ever-present critique, but also with a constantly renewable sense of wonder and humility. Written in a time of plagues, through dreams and daily life, these are poems to be enjoyed by anyone who observes events occurring in time, and then wonders at them.

More than ever, we need our universities to be engines of change and social justice. Universities can play a major role in making this complex and changing world a better place, helping economies and societies to adapt and respond to the grand challenges we face, from tackling climate change to harnessing artificial intelligence. This is their mission and their challenge. If universities are to remain true to their higher purpose, they must also find a higher gear. Ed Byrne and Charles Clarke show how transforming universities can change the world.

In the case of Louise Labe, the twenty-four sonnets (one in Italian, twenty-three in French) constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the entire duration of an intense love relation. In Guido's case, the sonnets are not sequential, but Byrne has selected out what he believes to be the most directly philosophical of his sonnets, those which, as has been argued, demonstrate his "radical aristotelianism" (averroism). In both cases, one pre-Petrarchan, one post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness or malady, and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relation between body and intellect. I refer to these poems as translations, rather than versions, because the depth of my engagement with them convinces me that they remain subservient to their sources - this can only be tested by reading them against their originals. A reader not compelled to do so, can read them as their poems. In doing so, they will find ninety poems, each made up of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables (with minor exceptions - only Allah is perfect). The main body of the work was written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice whereby the composing mind passes from room to room (stanza to stanza) in a kind of trance of forgetting and remembering. A distant, but undeniable precursor of this practice, in the context of translation, is Robin Blaser's les chimeres. The second version of Louise Labe's sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke's German translation, using Louise's middle French text as a "pony" (crib or gloss - necessary because the author's German ain't so great). interspersed, or intervening, within the translations, are "sonnets" by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Proust, and Jacques Lacan. In addition, between the main translations there is a sequence of wild sonnets, or nonets, taken from a separate collaboration with Kim Minkus (to be published in The Capilano Review), and a pendant of sonnets by Louise's admirers (members of her salon, such as Maurice Sceve and Clement Marot).

ExplorersOnce again they cross the wooden sea the planks of their ships knotted to each other like straw they sail in their own wake each member of the crew mounts a mast to become that part of the totem shaped into the animal he always wanted to be and above each vessel lines of clouds stretch like serpents toward gray cliffs overhanging a broken shore where the waters of the sun lie scattered