HAUS FÜR POESIE

Zaffar Kunial (born in Birmingham) is a poet with Kashmiri and British roots. He first attracted attention with his debut in the Faber New Poets series. Several poetry collections followed, including Us ((Faber & Faber 2022), England’s Green (Faber & Faber 2022) and the chapbook Six (Faber & Faber 2019), which is entirely devoted to the sport of cricket. In fact, cricket is a recurring theme in all of Zaffar Kunial’s books and he wanted to become a professional cricket player as a youth. The history of this particular bat-and-ball game stretches back to the densely wooded counties of Kent and Sussex in the sixteenth century. It is considered to be the most quintessentially British sport. Cricket’s highly complex rules, which were first codified in the mid-eighteenth century, remain opaque to the uninitiated, even though Robin Williams once claimed, “cricket is basically baseball on valium.” In spite of it all, cricket has always been a sport that has long held special allure for writers who themselves played cricket or wrote about it, including famous figures such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, or Simon Raven. Kunial uses the game to reflect on identity, belonging, and exclusion. One of the poems reads, “my bat felt as heavy as England.” He writes about willows, the trees cricket bats are made from, whose “flax-smelling grain” has the wind sealed in it, and how it feels to chase the unattainable leather that turns into a “small seamed planet.”

Declan Ryan (born in Mayo, Ireland) is a poet and critic, who not only writes for the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and Times Literary Supplement but also for Boxing News. His articles move effortlessly between poets such as Derek Mahon and Edna St. Vincent Millay and boxers such as Mike Tyson and Chris Eubank. His poetry debut, Crisis Actor (Faber & Faber 2023), contains numerous poems that engage with the world of boxing and the book’s epigraph, stemming from the heavyweight world championship Sonny Liston, sets the tone for what follows: “some day they’re gonna write a Blues song for fighters. It’ll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell.”

Ryan writes about Muhammed Ali when he was still called Cassius Clay and about Rocky Marciano (“They'll have him throw a right into a machine; / the energy behind his punch / will be equivalent to armour-piercing shell”). Other texts focus on legendary bouts between Joe Louis and Primo Carnera or José Luis Castillo and Diego Corrales. Crisis Actor earned high praise from critics. The poet Andrew Motion suggested that it takes boxing and boxers as its leitmotif, and develops the idea of contest to create a portrait of contemporary life which is haunted by images of violence, defeat, and a complicated sense of nostalgia. Another fellow poet, Mark Ford, wrote: “Each exquisitely orchestrated vignette delivers a punch worthy of heroes of the ring here commemorated. Wry, nimble, heart-wrenching, Ryan’s poems float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

All the poems presented at the event have been especially translated for the poesiefestival berlin.
Combo ticket for the afternoon: Combo Ticket
The event will be held in English and take place at Clubraum at the Berlin Academy of Arts.
Kindly supported by: Sportmuseum Berlin.