Carcanet online book launch: Eccolo: Poems by Hal Coase

Described by its publisher Carcanet as “an auspicious debut”, here’s your chance to hear from and about Eccolo: Poems by Hal Coase in an online event hosted by poet and Faber editor Lavinia Singer.

An Italian expression, ‘Eccolo!’ means ‘There it is!’ of ‘Here it is!’ Introducing the new book on the Carcanet Substack (so trendy) – as well as telling us he wrote it during his twenties – Hal Coase explains of Eccolo (minus exclamation mark): “It’s what you shout in your head when you glimpse the sea from the car window at the end of an August day’s drive, or when you find that book you were looking for (a book which may also now be called Eccolo, if you like), or when you spot your friend in a crowd as they step out towards you. Everything is newly as it was. It’s a little deliverance. A commonplace epiphany. It’s the sound an object makes when it enters a scene. It’s a little childish and pathetic (both good and precious things). It’s about being lost and found.”

Summed up by the extract ‘If difference, / then resistance’, the blurb explains that Coase has a gift for catching the rhythms of speech and exchange, an eye for a telling image and an immediacy, all wrapped up the poems’ revelatory quality. They say: “These are poems and sequences which relish the ways in which we (try to) communicate and know one another, emulating the techniques and effect of some of the mid-century New York School and Roman poets he admires. Coase’s writing – as playwright, translator, critic and poet – aspires to be both beautiful and conscientious.”

From Carcanet’s 2020 anthology New Poetries VIII, we’re taken by the poem “2nd January”, particularly the lines: ‘Your doubts held / hope like January.’ His poetry has also been published by Prototype in Prototype 5 (2023). In 2018, he was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize. In 2024, he received the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John’s College, Cambridge. Born in Surrey, he grew up in the Black Country and now lives in Rome.

Lavinia Singer is the author of Artifice (Prototype, 2023) and Ornaments: a handbook (If a Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020). She is an editor of poetry at Faber.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.