Joe Winter

Joe Winter is a British poet, literary critic and translator of poetry.

A recent long poem is At the Tate Modern.

His translations of the Bengali poets Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das are published by Carcanet Press, and his versions in modern English of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and the Middle English poem Pearl are with Sussex Academic Press.

SAP has also published Two Loves I Have: a new reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hide Fox, and All After: What lies concealed in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'?

Winter was born in 1943 and educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford and Exeter College, Oxford.

Winter began to write poetry in 1961.

He taught English in London comprehensive schools from 1967 to 1994, when he went to live in Calcutta, India (now Kolkata), returning to England in 2006.

While in India he taught part-time in a variety of schools, wrote articles of literary and general interest (in particular for The Statesman of Kolkata), and translated a number of volumes of the poetry and prose of Rabindranath Tagore and the poetry of Jibanananda Das from the Bengali original (see website Publications), having learnt Bengali during the period.

Back in England he continues to teach, and now does so part-time.

He has never stopped writing poetry.

His first book publication was A Miracle and the Tree with Anvil Press in 1972.

While in India he wrote literary articles and general essays for the press, in particular The Statesman of Kolkata.

Writers Workshop of Kolkata has brought out all his original poetry (currently 21 volumes).

Winter is gradually uploading all his original poetry onto his website.

Winter composed a number of poems during his Calcutta life some of which have been published under the title Guest and Host.

The book cover suggests they record 'the experience of being welcomed into the household of another country'.

They appear to deal with the commonplace and to touch on the numinous.

The volume comprises four long poems.

The first is a sonnet-sequence, Guest and Host; the next, Earthquake at Kutch, is a response in five parts to the 2001 disaster in Gujarat.

The Undefeated is a first-person Memoir of an old Indian Infantry Officer of the British Raj (so subtitled at the subject's request).

The concluding poem, Meditation on the Goddess, is an exploration of the annual festival in celebration of the goddess Durga in the state of West Bengal.

The last-mentioned poem begins:

Goddess, Durga, lightning-eyed

in the dark fortnight of the moon,

mother, daughter, maiden, bride,

come.

Invisibly you ride

a lion to the noble house

of first belonging.

Mountainous

it is, and river-full, and wide.

Come

Grant me beauty, glory, fame and destroy my enemy.

Mother Durga, who appears

like the sun at burning noon,

whose sidelong looks will hurtle spears

through enemy hearts --- yet whose light rears

the heart in pure leaf --- come to us,

revisiting your first-born house.

We wait in joy, we wait in tears.