David Constantine is an award-winning poet and translator. His volumes of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts and the epic poem Casper Hauser. He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Enzensberger, Michaux and Joccottet. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and in the same year won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. In 2004 his poem ‘Trilobite in Wenlock Shales’ was shortlisted for Best Individual Poem in the Forward Prize.

Under The Dam is his second collection of short stories.

Listen to David read 'The Loss'

Titles by David Constantine

Under The Dam

David Constantine's stories freeze-frame lives just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present, like the dam of the title, collapses under its own weight.
A girl's body re-appears in the ice where she fell 50 years before - melting the life of the lover who survived her.
A tourist staggers through an Athens marketplace transformed into a vision of Hell.
During a speech a businessman feels his soul abandoning him.
Constantine's landscapes are as alive and fluid as his prose, which swells and surges like unsettled water throughout. His characters are solitary figures drawn against stark and disquieting backdrops. Whether oppressed or emancipated by their surroundings, many seem to be seeking a kind of asylum from themselves or the unsustainable pressures on their lives.

'I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started reading them again and again.... The description of the estuary is one of the best descriptions of the surface of the Earth I have ever read' - AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian

'A superb collection'- The Independent

 

List Price £7.95
Price £5.00

Details

• ISBN 0954828011
• Publisher Comma Press
• Genre Short Fiction
• Setting Greater Manchester
• Extent 208pp

The Shieling

‘Perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form’
– The Reader

Many of the characters in David Constantine’s new collection seem driven to absent themselves, to abscond from the pressures of their lives into strange ideas, distant places, even private languages. There are involuntary absences too, in grief and speechless old age. Viewed from without, his characters may appear absurd – like the vicar who starts conversing with the Devil – or unreachably lonely – like the man drowned in the black waters of the Irwell. But such is the force of Constantine’s compassion, we cannot help but enter fully into each peculiar fate. And as we descend through the strata of these different lives, there, in the depths, are forces of hope and redemption also: like the spring starting deep in a quarry that in time will become a lake or the secret haven of the title story, a safehouse for dreams.

'Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be. Reading them is a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure...'
– AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian

'Flawless but unsettling'
- Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year 2005, The Independent

'Constantine is writing for his life. Every sentence and paragraph is shaped, tense with meaning and unobtrusively beautiful, his images of the natural world burning their way into the reader’s mind...'
- Maggie Gee, The Times

List Price £7.99
Price £6.75

Details

• ISBN 9781905583218
• Publisher Comma Press
• Genre Short Fiction
• Setting Greater Manchester
• Extent 240pp