Literature North West

David Constantine

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