The Artel Press is pleased to announce the publication this summer of a remarkable first collection of poetry by the writer and academic James Dowthwaite.
Babylonian Pieces: A Dream Vision explores the persistence in our collective consciousness of ancient Mesopotamia, the forty magical poems in this collection seeking to powerfully invoke in the reader – ‘a Babylon of the mind’
Babylonian Pieces can be seen as contemporary re-telling of the Babylonian era through poetry. Dowthwaite’s new collection cleverly employs the language of prayer and divination as a bridge across the millennia:
your royal head half-tilted and your crown of cardboard,
your robe of lapis lazuli, sort of, like your eyes, the colour of a deep night’1
His careful words help speak of common cultures; these are ideas at a human scale, speaking forcibly of the endurance in the imagination of place and longing. Dowthwaite offers us a patient poetry suffused in a mythical dreamworld and inspired by the biblical Book of Daniel, with its lasting message of hope.
As James reflects:
If there is an argument, it is to value the enduringly human, in an age sceptical of both endurance and humanity.’
- From: Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar (I): On A Puppet of the King, Made in the GDR in 1983 ↩︎
Image credit : Assyrian relief panel 883–859 BCE The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (CC0)
Dr. James Dowthwaite is originally from the UK but lives in Hamburg, Germany where he is Junior Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.
Poems, essays, and reviews by James Dowthwaite have been included in Acumen, ASAP/ Journal, Literary Imagination, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Volupté. His books include Ezra Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word (Routledge, 2019) and Aesthetic Criticism (Routledge, 2026). His edited edition of the two books of the Rhymers’ Club will be coming out in 2027.