Hot off the press! "Venus Transit" was recently chosen to be on the cover of Joan Margarit's most recently published collection of poems.

One of Spain's foremost poets, "in Strangely Happy, Margarit builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. His poetry confronts the worst that life can throw at us, yet what lingers in the mind is its warmth and humanity".

A stunning collection of poetry—well worth reading!

About the Author

Joan Margarit was born in 1938 in Sanauja, La Segarra region, in Catalonia. He is an architect, and from 1968 until his retirement was also Professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona's Technical School of Architecture. He first published poetry in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965, but after a silence of ten years switched to writing and publishing in Catalan. From 1980 he began to establish his reputation as a leading Catalan poet. As well as publishing many collections in Catalan, he has translated most of his own books into Spanish. Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), the first translation into English of his Catalan poetry, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Strangely Happy, a selection of his later poems, also translated by Anna Crowe, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2011.