Modern and contemporary poetry
Seagull Books London Ltd The Anchor’s Long Chain
Book SynopsisAn experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets of his generation. Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor’s Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy’s earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical—but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life’s eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem’s meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy’s powerful, discursive poetry. Trade Review“There is a folkloric feel to this writing. As if life is a fairytale. The tone is theistic, and there’s always a narrative within the surreal. Yes, all this is Bonnefoy. His prose pieces are sharp and clear while there are transgressions folding dreams within reality.” * Washington Independent Review of Books *Table of ContentsTranslator's Acknowledgements The Disorder The Anchor's Long Chain (Ales Stenar) America Child's Play Child's Play The Long Name The Trees Mouth Agape The Painter Whose Name is the Snow The Divine Names Passerby, Do You Want To Know? Almost Nineteen Sonnets Tomb of L.-B. Alberti Tomb of Charles Baudelaire 'Facesti come quei che va di notte...' The Mocking of Ceres The Tree on Rue Descartes The Invention of the Flute with Seven Pipes Tomb of Giacomo Leopardi Mahler, the Song of the Earth Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé To the Author of 'The Night' San Giorgio Maggiore On Three Paintings by Poussin Ulysses Sails Past Ithaca San Biagio, at Montepulciano A God A Poet A Stone Tomb of Paul Verlaine One of Wordsworth's Childhood Memories Remarks on the Horizon On Leaving the Garden: A Variation Another Variation
£13.99
Troubador Publishing The Boy with the Old Guitar
Book SynopsisJohn chose the title-poem for its simple, believable story. The rest accrued in the usual way. He found those now grouped in City of Flowers particularly moving to write. John’s visits to Italy, and the many Italian stories he heard in Florence, influenced him permanently.
£9.49
Luath Press Ltd The Lonely Zoroastrian
Book SynopsisWell-known as a stand up comic and folk musician, Mike Harding is now equally known for his rich and varied poetry.Music, place, landscape, politics, memories and stories have always been Mike Harding’s creative touchstones, never more so than in ‘The Lonely Zoroastrian’, his first collection since the 2020 pandemic and lockdown, both of which feature in some of the earlier poems in this book.Storytelling is the essence of his work whether telling the true story of a lost city buried under the ice cap, the curse an old Ukrainian woman laid on a group of Russian soldiers or stories from his beloved Connemara like Islandman and St Luke’s Little Summer.From his ‘little shed of words’ here is Mike Harding ‘singing about the dark times’.
£9.49
Flapjack Press We Kid Ourselves
Book SynopsisThis is a collection about the land. This land. It’s about the politics of the UK, its identity and how it can be re-defined. It’s about the environment, social disquiet, anger, intolerance and the rise of righteousness. It’s about love and intimacy, exploring change and the passing of time. This is a collection which embraces hope and creates the future.Trade Review“Its scathing view on climate, politics and culture is unflinching, but written with care and compassion. A powerful, timely collection … a warning and a carrion call to us all.” – Michael Wilson, poet; “Tony’s words dance off the page and into your bloodstream, leaving you pulsing with anger, humanity and love. This unique and beautiful collection is essential reading.” – Charlotte Oliver, writer; “All true artists are outsiders and any of us can find ourselves feeling as though we are on the outside. Tony’s insightful poetry expresses both the delight and the uncertainty of that position.” – Neil Bell, actor; “These are poems that shouldn’t just be read. These are poems to be belted out, or chanted in unison with our loved ones at protests, or spray-painted on t-shirts for gigs. Read these so loudly you offend the neighbours.” – Geneviève L. Walsh, spoken word artist
£9.50
Everyman Uyghur Poems
Book SynopsisThe Uyghur people of Central Asia have a long and distinguished tradition of poetry - indeed, their first oral epic was circulating as early as the 2nd century BCE. In the medieval period Sufi poetry flourished, embracing Persian forms such as the ghazal, which spoke eloquently of beauty, love, loss and separation. A major poet, Alshir Navayi (1441-1501) fully established classical Turkic or Chagatai as a perfect vehicle for poetic expression. Some contemporary poets continue to find inspiration within the traditional forms, while others experiment with a freer style of verse.Uyghur poetry reflects the magnificent natural landscapes where the Uyghurs have lived for two millennia - endless steppes, soaring mountain ranges and mysterious deserts, crossed by the historic Silk Road. It is also shaped by their turbulent past, caught between warring empires or marauding warlords - and their deeply troubled present.The Uyghurs form a minority in China, where the government is now making a systematic attempt to erase their language and culture. Many intellectuals have been imprisoned, and many poets are now writing from exile, including the editor and translator of this volume, Aziz Isa Elkun, who lives in London. Uyghur Poems is not only a celebration of an ancient and vibrant poetic tradition, but also a vital witness to a culture under threat.
£10.80
Birlinn General Another Way to Split Water
Book SynopsisIn Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place. These poems are a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world. Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 and the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023 Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023, the Laurel Prize 2023 and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023Trade Review'Pirmohamed writes with a flow which is rarely interrupted. She has a fine ear for the musicality in words and knows exactly where a line should turn' -- Susan Mansfield * The Scotsman *'Pirmohamed’s achievements speak for themselves ... each poem is crafted, each word perfectly placed, flowing into one another. Dreamlike, brimming with ideas, it’s a collection that engulfs you, invites you to read more, to discover new jewels on each read' -- Heather McDaid * The Skinny *'In Another Way to Split Water a reader gets to taste arrival before arrival, a form of tenderness that refracts: "an inherited vanishing/through the slit of a dream"' -- Bhanu Kapil'Pirmohamed is an immensely gifted poet' -- Eduardo C. Corral'An electric, taut, and glimmering achievement' -- Aria Aber'You will want to map the navigations of these poems. You will be compelled to orbit their magnetic and inimitable oscillations' -- Shivanee Ramlochan'[Another Way to Split Water] inspired me so much. So many things I will think about differently now, from nature to form' -- Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House'[Pirmohamed's] language flows in elegant, mysterious ways, telling tales of heritage, history and belonging.' -- Toni Velikova, Scottish Poetry Library'An extraordinary collection... it's one that I'm very much looking forward to returning to' * Glass Bookshop Radio *'Another Way to Split Water is an homage to family, the natural world, and storytelling' -- Rebecca Mangra * Room Magazine *'[a] lyrical exploration of stories told and retold, ancestral memories reformed and transformed, and the imagined and reimagined' -- Hari Alluri * Massy Arts *'Lyrical and achingly beautiful... Another Way to Split Water is shot through with love, beauty, and deeply tender moments that live on far beyond the page.' -- Roshni Gallagher * Gutter Magazine *'The poems in this book draw you in with their incredibly vivid imagery of wilderness and water' * Fourteen Poems magazine *'Alycia Pirmohamed's Another Way to Split Water is affecting, refined, and elusive in its invocations of environmentalism, circumventing cliché through sprezzatura' * Raymound Souster Award Panel (Shortlisted, 2023) *'I'm both struck and charmed by the slow progressions of lyric observation and philosophical inquiry throughout... Another Way to Split Water' -- Rob McLellan'Pirmohamed’s writing evokes tender emotions within readers by bringing a voice to those who search for a sense of identity and belonging in multiple places at the same time ... To read her book is to give form to the unappeased diasporic yearning that we continue to come to terms with' -- Michelle Lu * Surging Tide Magazine *'Rich, vulnerable and multi-layered, the poems engage with the subject’s relation to water environments in a climactically and politically turbulent world' * Poetry School *'A long love letter to not just water that takes a multitude of shapes, but also to grief, prayer, girlhood, wind, womanhood, Allah, elks, longing, and departures... The reader's bonding to these poems, in many moments, is meditative, and almost transcendent' * Wasafiri Magazine *'Her narrative is dynamic, a vibrant act of creating, undoing, transforming, and becoming. As you move through the book, the cyclical images of nature, gentle ebb and flow of rivers, rise and fall of storms, reflections of childhood and ruminations on the future, contribute to an emblematic growth of character and voice' * Outcrop Poetry *'Alycia Pirmohamed’s Another Way to Split Water is an exciting debut that explores connections between landscape, language and the body in a series of lyrical poems' * The Saltire Society *
£9.50
Shearsman Books A Cloud of Witnesses
Book SynopsisKjell Espmark (b.1930) was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University from 1978 to 1995 and has been a member of The Swedish Academy since 1981, serving as Chairman of The Nobel Committee from 1988 to 2004. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, ten novels, and over a dozen volumes of literary criticism. His many awards include The Bellman Prize, The Tranströmer Prize, Il Premio Capri and Il Premio Internazionale Camaiore. He is an officer of L'ordre de Mérite. He has been translated into over twenty languages. Of the Spanish version of his latest book of poetry, Martin Lopez-Vega wrote in El Mundo: "The Creation confirms that we are faced with one of the most important poets of our time." Many of Espmark's poems are dramatic monologues in which the dead, some famous, some anonymous, speak to us, hoping for our attention. Another consistent feature of his poetry, and one which we can see extending over six decades, is the coherence we find within each volume, echoes and cross-references linking poems not only within a single collection but from book to book.
£10.95
Shearsman Books Night Window
Book Synopsis"I go to Ian Seed's poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There's a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live 'joyously and seriously' against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops — it deserves legions of readers." —Luke Kennard "Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafés, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding 'obsession', 'unspeakable desire', erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity's transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, 'I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story' and reminds us, 'It takes a stranger to see the beauty'. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a 'poet soul'. A translator of Jacob's poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet's soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." —Cassandra Atherton
£10.95
Batsford Ltd Such a Sweet Singing: Poetry to Empower Every
Book SynopsisA beautiful collection of poems to nourish, inspire and change the women who read them.This transformative collection of poems by female poets through the ages sing to us across the centuries. These poems span the worlds of desire, love and friendship, of responsibility, hardship and care, of family and friends and lovers. Their words empower us with strength and courage, fill us with verve and spirit, and inspire creativity and imagination.Contemporary voices of Fiona Benson and Jane Yeh join the evocative imagery of Christina Rossetti, Anna Akhmatova and Emily Dickinson. Even the haunting voices of ancient Sappho, Venmaniputti and Li Qingzhao touch today's generation. Here are poems written by women, with women's lives in mind. As Gertrude Stein writes, 'such a sweet singing' is in the poetry that comes to us clear and lovely from out of the dark. Read these poems aloud. Remember them. Share them.Trade Review‘Lavishly and strikingly illustrated, this book of poems holds at least eight times its weight in thirst-slaking nourishment.’ Northwords Now
£11.69
Auckland University Press I Am in Bed with You
Book SynopsisI am in bed with you. The room varies. But I'm always on the left. I am pulling the pieces of myself into myself. In the winter I left myself behind in the 90s. I'm coming back now. You can see the light touching me. I can see layers of tissue finally making a body. And once I have a body I have a head. And in my head are these thoughts. -From 'I am in bed with you' Playful and fluid but completely serious, Emma Barnes's surreal phantasmagoria I Am in Bed with You leads us through the very personal worlds of sex, gender and the body. Barnes cracks jokes, makes us uncomfortable, shows us a little tenderness, leaves a lot unsaid and does it all with language that provokes and confounds. 'I'm a mentally ill, / married, chronically ill, queer woman with two feet underground', the author reveals. 'I birth Sigourney Weaver's android baby', they tell us next. This collection is personal and fantastical, funny and excruciating. It's poetry in the process of unravelling most of what you thought you knew.Trade Review'I Am in Bed with You signals the arrival of an extraordinary talent. Not only does Emma Barnes have the brainpower to interrogate notions of personal identity and interconnection incisively as we enter the 2020s but the sense of humour to see the comedy in our conundra and the emotional range to grasp the heartbreak in our yearnings, conflicts and confusions. Packed with quotable bons mots, quirky observations, agony aunt tips, enigmas and apophthegms, this is a book that rewards frequent re-reading.' -- Iain Sharp; 'From the first line of 'This is a creation myth', this work is stubbornly brave. Barnes stomps with bright boots over the territory of motherhood, womanhood, gender, and - unquestionably and timelessly - Sigourney Weaver. Everything is new and a little bit disgusting.' -- Sophie van Waardenberg
£20.96
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 8
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Auckland University Press The Sea Walks into a Wall: 2021
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£18.71
Auckland University Press Super Model Minority: 2022
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£18.71
Flipped Eye Publishing Limited Paper Doll
Book SynopsisProudly staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's début pamphlet, Paper Doll, strikes the poetry landscape as disruptively as a meteor scars earth with its impact. Documenting a shape-shifting existence between activist and survivor, immigrant and alien, lover and loner, this is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. Having fallen from a building as a child in Bolivia, Katherine seems to have retained an ability to stack images that zip along, only leaving an imprint of their meaning as the poem descends to its conclusion. This quality, combined with a contrasting directness makes reading Paper Doll a profoundly affecting experience. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, “she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does.”
£6.29
Barbican Press The Feynman Challenge: Poems on Science
Book SynopsisPoems about the universe: from the sub-atomic level to the cosmic, from bacteria to complex life and exoplanets.The physicist Richard Feynman challenged poets to step aside from metaphor and capture the stark magnificence of the universe. Spurred to action, James Thornton opened himself to wonders and dived deep into the intricacies of science.Let his poetry open your eyes.Complete with an essay on Poetry and Science.Trade Review"In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue." - Edward O. Wilson"A brilliant introduction to the endless wonders of our universe, from quantum levels to the cosmos. It opened my eyes to many marvels and oddities." – Eberhard Fetz, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics, University of Washington"Poets sometimes flinch at the idea of footnotes. Poems, they think, should be perfect small worlds of their own. The Feynman Challenge upends this aesthetic. Like the Pompidou Centre, it wears all its workings on the outside. Plunging into the sea of scientific knowledge, it comes up grinning and glittering with droplets of lovely information. This is a generous book, happy to serve the curiosity, the wonder and humility of science, happening here and there in words that simply send a shudder -Two black holes are about to marry, a billion years ago - through our sense of time and space." – Philip Gross, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize Table of ContentsContentsIntroductionCensus of deep lifeEmbodied semanticsOf mice and scorpionsRumination and forest bathing A dozen ways to make a living The future of clouds The jaguar sometimes bites Symbiont real estatePáramosThe apex predator guildYour inner fishTomb blossomsLong ago and under water Traumatic matingsQuartet with parasitesThe dead fish of ChadThe lodgerLike milkshakesHungry daughtersThe rolling of the dungballHead of glassFringed with teethE.O. Wilson’s favourite antEminent BritonsAerial warsPenis EnvyThe news about NeanderthalsConquering EarthA century of gorgingA bulletin from our branchWarm wet and quantumNew equilibriaThe rules of lossSpat 1ChiropteransCount those lostCoelacanths among usQ is for cryptographyRingdownThe end of time Too few to fill the skyNever forget red dwarfs The biggest star Cosmonautika A time will come By grace of the solar wind A map of peculiar velocities
£9.50
Verve Poetry Press Bennetts Hill Blues
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Fly on the Wall Press Imperfect Beginnings
Book SynopsisImperfect Beginnings lays its poems out to rest on uncertain terrain. Visa paperwork deadlines hang in the air. New-borns, torn too early from their mother's breast, learn to adapt to harsh guardianship. Belonging and exile are mirrored in the stories of having to leave one's birthmother-or motherland. From narrative poems such as 'My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis', Fogel takes us on a journey throughout history, spanning ancestry, wartime, adoption and peacetime, as life settles. Family, work, love and the natural world provide purpose, meaning and a sense of coming 'home'.
£9.49
Eyewear Publishing Anne Askew on the Kafka Machine
Book Synopsis
£8.24
Eyewear Publishing Man Animal Thing
Book SynopsisPartly inspired by Chaka, a famous South African novel from 1931, written by Thomas Mofolo, the book charts the imaginary progress of the nineteenth-century statesman and tyrant, Shaka Zulu (1787-1828). Structured around a series of daydreams and major events in Zulu's life, the poet extracts Zulu from the historical past and moves him to the modern media age where speed dating, UFOs and effervescent pain-killers are the norm. The collection is hugely diverse, from lyrical poetry to tweets to wit.
£10.44
FUM D'ESTAMPA PRESS On Yellow Evenings
Book SynopsisThis collection features one hundred poems selected by award-winning poet Jordi Larios. Keenly aware that we measure the world through words, he also knows that words become worn with use, and that poetry recalibrates their instrumentation, injecting them with fresh focus for graphing elusive terrains of inner and outer experience, prodding us to encounter and engage the world in a way that sustains and renews the self. Each Larios poem is a magnet, impacting us with the infixed force that its reading unleashes, subtle yet powerful in its imagery. A seagull, unfazed by the ‘crisis of the sunset,’ declares life on a greying backdrop (‘Rough Weather’), and desolate landscapes can set the scene for unexpected solace (‘Cold,’ ‘Historical Present’): pulling sunken memories to the surface and bringing poetic imagery into alignment with points of inwardness in search of outward counterparts. Along with the subtle power of imagery, Larios blends into his poems an uncanny marshalling of words, reassigning them to posts of optimal meaning and musicality. Technique underlies the poems, but the resulting art is greater than the sum of words, lifting language above ‘the clattering of / too many words,’ which, bereft of poetry, only render us alone (‘Man Alone’).Trade Review‘Larios seeks the essence and purification without glitter or shrillness because “the voice that gets heard is often the softest.” A great book to read.’ —ENRIC UMBERT-REXACH, NÚVOL.
£12.34
Penned in the Margins Out for Air
Book SynopsisOut for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARDTrade Review'Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. Like the pro skateboarder whose world is here uniquely evoked, Todd approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. These often balladic poems are gorgeously wrought and idiosyncratic, scored with the subterranean rhythms of Cumbria, California and London. The air of the book is at once as intimate as its city nightcaps and as expansive as its bay vistas. When I read Todd's poems I feel more a part of the world, the textured interaction of time and place, the 'afternoons julienned / Into cigarettes, cider trips', 'the circles we insist on travelling'. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.' SAM BUCHAN-WATTS;'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of skateable road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.'MARTHA SPRACKLAND; 'Olly Todd's wonderful Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' WILL BURNS; 'It's really weird, as I am reading Olly's poems I am engaging with a part of my brain I forgot existed. It's kinda like when you try a mindfulness app and the narrator asks you to focus on or pay particular attention to eating, say, a nut or a raisin. Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' NICK JENSEN; 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD; 'Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own' Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review
£9.49
Two Rivers Press Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery
Book SynopsisIn the title poem of Katherine Meehan's debut collection, Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery and Other Poems, the poet presents an examination of losses, failures, and griefs, all of them tempered by an unusual humour. Grounded in the particularities of location, these poems wander between urban and rural spaces, from Los Angeles and Appalachia to the English home counties. Glass eels, Grendel's mother and a host of nameless 'losers' are given voice as the collection explores the tension between the futility of the speech act and its necessity.Trade Review'Katherine Meehan is a master at turning the mundane into the transcendent. Her first collection, Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery is rich with sensual detail and striking imagery, it moves between countryside and city, fog and bright light, grief and joy. The spectre of loss haunts these poems, both in the form of grief and in delicately wrought eco poems that fear for what is yet to be lost. This is a collection of many colours, populated by trees and insects, monsters and complicated humans. There is a whirlwind of biblical floods, "the smell of rotten lamb's blood" and "all the hickories, their limbs encased in silk as if by fog." There is also, incidentally, the most atmospheric poem about a dishwasher ever written. Do not miss this fleet of perfectly made poems, give them the chance to haunt you.' - Phoebe Stuckes; 'It's an impressive trick to pull off: poems which seem both spacious and confidential at the same time, poems like doors opened into new worlds of irony, or else closed to stay - though not cancel - a constant melancholic hum. This is a brilliant, detailed collection, unafraid to address weighty matters, the whole dang thing, with wit and a hard-won understanding of loss' - James Womack
£10.44
Granta Publications Ltd Brother Poem
Book SynopsisA speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG. At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.Trade ReviewAfter the triumph of RENDANG, Will Harris takes us in this captivating new collection to a place altogether stranger, where the self is polished to a blur and memory a series of forking paths: 'Each time / you forget & remember the experience / becomes truer.' With uncommon brilliance and linguistic originality, this is a book that unpicks the myths we weave around ourselves as individuals or as nations. Harris is a poet I turn to for the solace of an idea perfectly caught. These are poems to dwell in; they challenge and restore. -- Sarah Howe, author of Loop of JadeIn Brother Poem, Will Harris questions the real in everyday life and words, through crumbs of the past, crumbs of experience, through absence and loss, through media harm, 'cloudless dream,' and 'river mind,' migrating in the lines-what to say and how or to whom to address it? When the spirit moves as they do in these poems to you, carried forth in 'I-not-I' and others, bound by Harris's scopic reach and cortical hum, crackling like lightning in a jar, released into our cells of shared feelings, we jubilate. -- Jeffrey Yang
£10.44
Eyewear Publishing Before the Cameras Leave Ukraine:: An Anthology
Book SynopsisIn February 2022, the world watched in horror as news outlets began reporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then tens of thousands of people have died, been wounded, and millions displaced. Poets worldwide rose tothe occasion, to create anthologies and compose poems to bear witness to this historic outrage. The 45 poems in this collection, ranging from polemic to artfully crafted verse (and sometimes both) have been curated by editor RebeccaGraham to express solidarity with the victims of war. This is a collection of poems about war, atrocity, trauma, survival, and being a refugee and consequently a book also about friendship, humanity, love, and the best of us. It is not a primer on hate, or a propaganda tool. Instead, it showcases how poetry can rise to historical moments, and formally engage chaos with authenticity, compassion and intelligence and above all, creativity. One hundred percent of the sales profits will go to the Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that helps to relocate Ukrainian people to safety and homes in the UK.
£11.69
Eyewear Publishing All These Things Aren't Really Lost
Book SynopsisEge Dundar is a young poet and activist from Turkey, forced to relocate to London and Berlin unable to return home for over seven years. His debut poetry collection, written in English, dives into the pain and longing that loss brings, contrasted by the beauty of all that has been found. Relating his experience with the struggle for human rights and a wider exodus of self-discovery, Dundar holds on to poetry when a titanic darkness descends and lights shine through minuscule cracks.''Space unveiled ahead, a quietude akin to death, a blue cocoon behind, vacuumed, like the shelter that is a breath.'
£10.79
FUM D'ESTAMPA PRESS The Silent Letter
Book SynopsisAward-winning poet, translator, and academic, Jaume Subirana is one of Catalonia’s most treasured poets, winning some of its most prestigious prizes for his poetry and essays. In an eloquent translation from accomplished poet and translator Christopher Whyte, The Silent Letter showcases Subirana’s sharp observations, delicate eye for detail, stunningly beautiful images, and poignant suspension of the moment.Trade ReviewSasha Dugdale, award-winning poet and translator "I think Jaume’s work is astounding, I was grasping for ways to describe it: delicate and profound. The Silent Letter translated by Christopher Whyte who has reproduced the wonderfully taut lyric of Jaume’s Catalonian work. My Best Poetry of 2020 list would be alarming and capacious like a great aunt’s handbag – but it would definitely include this (The Silent Letter) on this morning’s reading...” Robert Pisani. Full review here If one is unsure about poetry or is wants to explore poetry in translation then The Silent Letter is a perfect primer and once again Fum d’Estampa Press have shown that they are a publisher with a high quality rate and are slowly becoming an indie powerhouse with each release (spoiler, there will be another review from this press in the near future). Bookmunch Literary Blog. Full review here In achieving balance and perspective – cultural resonance drawn from life, nature and simple observation – the author provides inspiration to pay quiet attention and live well. From Jackie Law’s blog review. Full review here. The poems bring to life the beauty of nature and its ability to calm inner turbulence. Time is given over to watching raindrops catching light on a windowpane. Snow blankets the ground, bringing with it a feeling of peace … Such visual pleasures are presented succinctly, avoiding the garish, leaving a contrail of enchantment in what many will fail to notice as they chatter and look forward to their next experience. The poems offer a cessation in the rush and noise – the fear of missing some opportunity that blinds to what is here already. From John-Paul Davies’ review for Buzz Magazine. Full review here. Subirana’s collection is beautifully presented in the original Catalan, with the English translation on the opposite page. If, like me, you’re not so good at reading Catalan, it’s still a treat to turn the words over in your mouth, with the meaning, so well-rendered by Whyte on the opposite page, bringing clarity. Not that Subirana’s poetry is reading that feels like work. It’s best summed up in the entirety of Buson In Venice, “The gilded splendor of / the sun on stones / tired of being beautiful”. In a time when making new memories worth cherishing presents a challenge, Subirana reminds us such moments are all around us, every day. From Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Full review here. Subirana’s poetry is very immediate, something I love; and his works range in length from haiku length verses to longer works stretching over several pages. The poet discusses love, life, nature, loss – the usual subjects you’d expect. I suppose – and in beautiful, elegant and evocative lines. I marvelled, as I often do, as to how a poet can capture so much in so few words, convey so much that’s actually not spelled out in their verses. Manuel Castaño, El Pais “Subirana delights the reader because he is a poet capable of illuminating the importance of the moment, because he concentrates in but a few words the implied dimensions of often banal episodes or fleeting thoughts. The poem, 84th Street, for example, paints a scene in which someone, probably a couple, contemplates a nocturnal storm from their 21st floor flat, therefore underlining their elevation above other, daily preoccupations. It’s a moment of tranquillity, but also of worry: “how many more streets / before we meet / our destiny.” His poetry is a spark of joy in the face of the vertiginous passing of time.” Jordi Llavina, Diari Ara “In yet another glorious snapshot of poetry of the interior (Family Cinema), Subirana’s beautiful microscopic view of life associates “a popcorn explodes” with the following line: “like snow, laughter / reverberates.” … He continues to convince us of his own personal truth and his discreetly magnificent writing.” Enric Umbert-Rexach, El Nacional “Subirana’s singular poetry expresses both the enigma and the perplexity it can provoke within the patient observer of landscape. He is enchanted by the triviality of the self before the grandiosity of the surroundings, bringing form to this through an austere, timeless poetry.” Enric Umbert-Rexach, El Nacional Gerard E. Mur, El Nuvol “Subirana plays with surprise, a game he is particularly good at when working with maximum brevity in his poetry.” Jordi Galves, La Vanguardia “Subirana is ever faithful to his poetry, bringing it to lifetime and again. His work is serene, excellent, full of echoes of literary standing and precise creativity. His is a mature, important poetry. Bravo.” Jordi Carrera, Un dia en les carreras “Subirana demonstrates yet again that he is a strong, sensitive, minimalist poet who writes because he is in tune with tones and bursts of colour, of smells and aromas, and touch. He constructs his objects carefully, building them through his text, imagery and all of the efimer pleaures that, quite naturally, are impossible to otherwise communicate.” Francesc Parcerisas “Open any of Subirana’s books at random and you will feel yourself carried away by the natural current of his beautiful poetry.”
£11.39
Cameron & Company Inc Insomniac Sentinel
Book SynopsisA new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.Trade Review“This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a less than magnetic hamlet.” – Will Alexander, Pulitzer finalist for Refractive Africa and author of The Contortionist Whispers “you know, i am the giver/back of sound.” This bardic claim could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history’s storm. His song pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript, indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and shed light. That’s the sad note in this “gravy-to-cradle” threnody, this “lunged-up thud tender.” Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions, like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly on its wing, or on its song?” — Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne “I can hear Abraham Smith’s voice intoning in his breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a backbeat for music that these poems conjure up.” – Charlie Parr, Smithsonian Folkways recording artist and author of Last of the Better Days Ahead “Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read his work and thrill to hear him read it in person.” – Margo Price, Grammy nominee, Farm Aid board member, and author of Maybe We’ll Make ItTable of ContentsCONTENTSTHE INSOMNIAC SENTINEL 7THEY PAINT 16SHELL LIFE 22DOUBLE VISION 29BRAKE 4 CRANES 35NATOMY 41WHY DANCE 47RIVER BLUES 56IN TIMES OF LOVELY LOVE 68IN KEY OF WISH RABBIT SINGS 74HOODWINK AUBADE 80YOUR ANCIENT & FRANKLY BREAKING UNDERWEAR 90WESTFIELD 95PURPLE MOUTH LIFE 106TOUCHSTONE BLUES 109WHY EAT WHY KILL 121
£11.04
White Pine Press Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems: Selected
Book SynopsisStill Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.Trade ReviewIn “Elegy for the Road,” Tatiana Orono writes, “Poetry is the place where the things go that have no solution.” Her book, Still Life with Defeats, provides the solution I didn’t know I needed. What gratitude I feel to Jesse Lee Kercheval for this inspired translation. Without it, we’d be bereft of Orono’s taut, compelling poems, rich with sly surprise and haunting imagery. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Tatiana Oroño’s place amid the motherlines of Uruguayan and Latin American poetry is beyond dispute; in Kercheval’s English translations, Oroño’s svelte lyrics are revealed to be in conversation with a litany of English-language poets writing before and alongside her, from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe to Cathy Wagner. This is the poetry of cosmic concentration, in which any object, any syllable, no matter how domestic or mundane, becomes a doorway on the Infinite by being so resolutely itself. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade Tatiana Oroño's Still Life With Defeats is, like all good poetry, an attempted response to those questions that seem unanswerable. A search for unity underpins these poems, a quest for ultimate meaning, but, as in a still life painting of varied objects, there remains a gulf that cannot be bridged, a chasm that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. These poems represent an ongoing movement toward finding the connection and wholeness shared by all living things. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval has joyfully accompanied the author on this journey; uniting passion with precision, she preserves the dazzling complexity of the original while continuing to ask the questions that have no easy answers. —Jeannine Pitas, translator of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio
£12.34
Academic Studies Press I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltova
Book SynopsisThis prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023. Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.Trade Review“Alexei Parshchikov's ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ (1989), an important postmodern historical poem imbued with parodic touches, sheds a new light on Pushkin’s Poltava and its legacy. It challenges Pushkin's mythologised portrayal of the Great Northern War by presenting everyday life in late twentieth-century Poltava through the prism of palimpsestic imagination influenced by Russian cultural memory.Donald Wesling's excellent translation of Parshchikov’s ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ animates effectively the playful space created in the poem through the powerful use of metaphor, associative language and surreal overtones. Wesling shows an exceptional sensitivity to Parshchikov’s exuberant language and renders the performance-like quality of the poem exquisitely. Parshchikov’s concerns with the inevitability of change, the importance of place and the power of language to transform realities embedded in this poem make his version of the historical event—reimagined in a decolonising manner—highly appealing to the readers of the 2020s.”— Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh“When Alexei Parshchikov, perhaps the greatest poet of the Russian perestroika generation, died prematurely in 2009, he could not know that Ukraine, where he had spent much of his childhood and youth, would one day rise up against its former rulers. It was in the Battle of Poltava (1709), that Russia first seized control from Charles XII, the King of Sweden of the territory in question. Parshchikov’s brilliant Poundian ‘poem including history’—as well as geography and ecology—juxtaposes superbly surreal battle scenes with the quiet meditations of the poet, cultivating, on the site of the former battlefield, his garden, with its apricot trees, its ‘long-nosed field mice’ and ‘fruit-honey grog,’ and celebrating Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian opposition fighter, and his sweetheart Marfa Kochubey. In Donald Wesling’s excellent rhymed-verse translation, which dissolves into free rhythms in the course of the poem, Parschikov’s brilliant and highly original imagination lives again. It could not be more apropos today!”— Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics“One of great poetic achievements of the 1980s, Parshchikov’s long poem appears, in Donald Wesling’s ambitious new translation, startlingly of our time—not just because of its dismantling of Russian imperialist myths but also because of its insistence on the multifarious resilience of language in the face of its misuse and of the horrors of wars, past and present.”— Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media“From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, Ukraine has been periodically destroyed by those who would own it. Among these blood-soaked backstories, the three-way struggle between Peter the Great, Sweden’s Charles XII, and the treacherous Ukrainian Cossack Mazepa in 1709 has long been pan-European lore. In this ‘historical-geographical-ecological’ evocation by the Russian metarealist Alexei Parshchikov, the poet is tending his garden on the site of the battle. Knives, bits of cannon and bone, snatches of sexual violence and the Tsar’s largesse emerge from the black earth. Sacrificial lambs and mosquitos look on. Donald Wesling’s spectacular rendering into English, reflecting subtexts in Pushkin as well as the late Soviet poetic underground, is formally audacious and so tightly constructed that the reader can’t breathe. Exactly what is required today.”— Caryl Emerson, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsFrom the TranslatorINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE, WHICH TELLS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS1.1. The Origin of Weapons1.2. The First Cannon1.3. The Lamb Tells about the Feud of Two Brothers, Who Attempted to Catch Him for Sacrifice, and about How a Knife was Born1.4. The First Business Retreat, Written in My Garden, Located on the Field of the Battle of PoltavaCHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE 2.1.2.2. Point of View of the Observer2.3. Charles XII2.4. Ivan Mazepa and Marfa Kochubey2.5. No Saxophone Slung over the Shoulder2.6. Mosquito2.7. Copper Framework: Second Business RetreatCHAPTER THREE: THE TSAR REWARDSNotes
£12.34
Academic Studies Press Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextOsip Mandelstam: “Centuries encircle me with fire”On Translating MandelstamОсип Мандельштам (1891–1938)Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)Из книги «Камень» (стихотворения 1908–1915)From Stone (poems of 1908–1915)Дано мне тело—что мне делать с ним . . .I am given a body—what should I . . .Я ненавижу свет . . .I hate the light . . .Паденье—неизменный спутник страха . . .The fall is a constant companion of fear . . .Айя-СофияHagia Sophia. . . На луне не растет . . .. . . Not a single blade . . .ПосохThe WandУничтожает пламень . . .The fire destroys . . .Из книги «Tristia» (стихотворения 1916–1922)From Tristia (poems of 1916–1922)ДекабристA DecembristКогда в тёплой ночи замирает . . .When a feverish forum of Moscow . . .Прославим, братья, сумерки свободы . . .Hail, brothers, let us praise our freedom’s twilight . . .TristiaTristiaНа каменных отрогах Пиэрии . . .On steep stony ridges of Pieria . . .Сёстры тяжесть и нежность, одинаковы ваши приметы . . .Sisters, heaviness and tenderness, your traits are akin . . .Вернись в смесительное лоно . . .Go back to the incestuous womb . . .Веницейской жизни, мрачной и бесплодной . . .The meaning of fruitless and gloomy . . .За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать . . .Because I could not hold your hands in mine . . .Из книги «Стихотворения» (1928 г., стихотворения 1921–1925 гг.)From Poems (1928, poems of 1921–1925)С розовой пеной усталости у мягких губ . . .With the pink foam of fatigue around soft lips . . .ВекThe AgeНашедший подковуThe Horseshoe FinderГрифельная одаThe Slate OdeЯзык булыжника мне голубя понятней . . .Clearer than pigeon’s talk to me is stone’s tongue . . .А небо будущим беременно . . .And the Sky is Pregnant with the Future . . .1 января 1924January 1, 1924Нет, никогда, ничей я не был современник . . .No, I’ve never been anyone’s contemporary . . .Я буду метаться по табору улицы тёмной . . .I’ll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street . . .Из Новых cтихотворений 1930–1934 гг.From New Poems of 1930–1934Армения1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12Armenia1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12На полицейской бумаге верже. . .On the police laid paper the night. . .Не говори никому . . .Don’t tell it anyone—forget . . .Колючая речь Араратской долины . . .A prickly speech of the Ararat Valley . . .Как люб мне натугой живущий . . .How dear to me are those people . . .Дикая кошка—армянская речь . . .A wild cat—the Armenian speech . . .Я скажу тебе с последней . . .I will tell you this, my lady . . .За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков . . .For the thunderous courage of ages to come . . .Нет, не спрятаться мне от великой муры . . .No, I won’t be able to hide from a great mess . . .НеправдаUntruthПолночь в Москве. Роскошно буддийское лето . . .Midnight in Moscow. A Buddhist summer is lavish . . .Отрывки из уничтоженных стихов1 | 2 | 3 | 4Excerpts from Destroyed Poems1 | 2 | 3 | 4Еще далеко мне до патриарха . . .I am far from being as old as patriarch . . .Сегодня можно снять декалькомани . . .Today we can take decals . . .ЛамаркLamarckИмпрессионизмImpressionismБатюшковBatiushkovДайте Тютчеву стрекóзу . . .Give Tiutchev a dragonfly . . .АриостAriostoНе искушай чужих наречий, но постарайся их забыть . . .Do not tempt foreign tongues—attempt forgetting them, alas . . .Квартира тиха как бумага . . .An apartment is quiet as paper . . .Давай же с тобой, как на плахе . . .Let’s start preparing for the scaffold . . .Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны . . .We live without feeling our country’s pulse . . .Восьмистишия1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Octaves1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Стихи памяти Андрея БелогоTo the Memory of Andrei BelyУтро 10 января 19341 | 2 | 3The Morning of January 10, 19341 | 2 | 310 января 1934 [вариант 2]January 10, 1934 [version 2]Из Воронежских тетрадей (стихотворения 1935–1937)From the Voronezh Notebooks (poems of 1935–1937)Из Первой тетрадиFrom the First NotebookПусти меня, отдай меня, Воронеж . . .Let go, Voronezh, raven-town . . .Я должен жить, хотя я дважды умер . . .I have to live though I died twice . . .Лишив меня морей, разбега и разлета . . .Having deprived me of seas, flight, and space . . .День стоял о пяти головах. Сплошные пять суток . . .The day was five-headed: five unbreakable days . . .Еще мы жизнью пóлны в высшей мере . . .We are still sentenced to life . . .Римских ночей полновесные слитки . . .Solid gold bars of the Roman nights . . .За Паганини длиннопалым . . .They run like a gypsy throng . . .Исполню дымчатый обряд . . .I’ll fulfill a dim rite . . .Из Второй тетрадиFrom the Second NotebookНе у меня, не у тебя—у них . . .Not I, not you—but they . . .Улыбнись, ягненок гневный с Рафаэлева холста . . .Smile, angry lamb from Rafael’s canvas, don’t rage . . .Дрожжи мира дорогие . . .World’s golden yeast, our dear . . .Еще не умер ты, еще ты не один . . .You haven’t died yet. You are not alone . . .Что делать нам с убитостью равнин . . .What should we do with murdered plains . . .Вооруженный зреньем узких ос . . .Armed with the vision of narrow wasps . . .Из Третьей тетрадиFrom the Third NotebookСтихи о неизвестном солдатеVerses on the Unknown SoldierСквозь эфир десятично-означенный . . .Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes . . .Для того ль должен череп развиться . . .Should the skull develop its brow . . .Для того ль заготовлена тара . . .Is the packaging of charm stored . . .Я молю, как жалости и милости . . .I beg like compassion and grace . . .Я скажу это начерно, шёпотом . . .I will say it in draft and in whisper . . .Может быть, это точка безумия . . .It might be the point of insanity . . .Не сравнивай: живущий несравним . . .A living man’s unique: do not compare . . .Чтоб, приятель и ветра и капель . . .To help a friend of rain and wind . . .Гончарами велик остров синий . . .A blue island, green Crete is extolled . . .Длинной жажды должник виноватый . . .A guilty debtor of a long-time thirst . . .О, как же я хочу . . .Oh, how I madly crave . . .Нереиды мои, нереиды! . .My nereids, oh, my nereids! . . .Флейты греческой тэта и йота . . .Greek flute’s theta and iota . . .На меня нацелилась груша да черемуха . . .I’m under fire of a bird cherry tree and a pear tree . . .[Стихи к H<аталии> Е. Штемпель]1 | 2[Poems for N Е. Shtempel]1 | 2AbbreviationsBibliographyPublications of Works by Osip E. MandelstamTranslations into EnglishTranslations of Osip Mandelstam’s Poems into Other LanguagesCriticism
£78.19
University of Alberta Press Indie Rock
Book SynopsisIndie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician’s life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits. Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse. At its core, Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist’s compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.Trade Review"Joe Bishop’s poetry comes with its own musical accompaniment. You feel his rich, rhythmic poems as much as you read them. All of life is there, manifested in a musicality of language that’s as bewitching as it is transcendent. I defy you to pick up this stunning collection and resist turning each page until you’ve read all the way through." Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings"Bishop's lyrics chronicle sexual exploration amidst Newfoundland music and folklore. Indie Rock has the volume jacked, and these poems pulsate and blister long after the show's over." Aidan Chafe, author of Gospel Drunk"Indie Rock is a significant contribution to the poetry of contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador—an edge-y book, one to place on your shelf alongside Joel Hynes and Megan Gail Coles. Moving between hard-driving staccato rhythms and more meditative cadences, these poems reflect the struggles and highs of a gay musician making his way in downtown St. John’s. In the process Bishop takes a good smack at many of the cultural stereotypes manifested in our writing and our music; many of the pieces have a bracingly sardonic tone. As well the book brings into itself the brutal energies of seascape and landscape. Here is a strong and highly distinctive debut." Mary Dalton, author of Red Ledger and MerrybegotTable of ContentsI Patrick Street on St. Paddy’s Day Live at The Battery Carpentry Devil-Ma-Click After a Three-Month Friendship After Our AA Meeting Quitting Conception Bay Woman Don’t Worry About Me, Mike II Parade Street Duo (April Fools) Time-Lapse (First Sleepover) Medley for My Banshee Barely Audible Lament Lowdown, Lowdown We Idled at the Ship Boxing Day (Cabin Fever) Ash Wednesday III Remembrance Day Canada Day Pyro Yankee Boys of Argentia Dance Song Farm Museum Fundraiser Heave-Up Song Dirty Newfoundlanders Evening on Livingstone Street Gary Laps at the University Pool Gooseberry Cove Jinker Root Cellar Blues Young Feller’s Tale Little Sea-Song IV Overture Saltbox Digger Arty Relative Enlightened Poets dissociative song Outsider Art Celluloid Tango Danny Boy I Believe He Would Believe Me Not Completely V Victoria Day in Heart’s Delight Touching Lines Father’s Day Inherited Thumbnail Nuclear Runoff Off Season Pitch Release Pinnacle Or scrupulous music East Coast Trail, Midnight Notes Acknowledgements
£15.19
Goose Lane Editions Stedfast
Book SynopsisBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art — Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision. Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself. Trade Review“Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” -- Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star, Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” -- Joe Enns * British Columbia Review *
£14.39
Academic Studies Press I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltova
Book SynopsisThis prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023.Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.Trade Review“Alexei Parshchikov's ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ (1989), an important postmodern historical poem imbued with parodic touches, sheds a new light on Pushkin’s Poltava and its legacy. It challenges Pushkin's mythologised portrayal of the Great Northern War by presenting everyday life in late twentieth-century Poltava through the prism of palimpsestic imagination influenced by Russian cultural memory.Donald Wesling's excellent translation of Parshchikov’s ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ animates effectively the playful space created in the poem through the powerful use of metaphor, associative language and surreal overtones. Wesling shows an exceptional sensitivity to Parshchikov’s exuberant language and renders the performance-like quality of the poem exquisitely. Parshchikov’s concerns with the inevitability of change, the importance of place and the power of language to transform realities embedded in this poem make his version of the historical event—reimagined in a decolonising manner—highly appealing to the readers of the 2020s.”— Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh“When Alexei Parshchikov, perhaps the greatest poet of the Russian perestroika generation, died prematurely in 2009, he could not know that Ukraine, where he had spent much of his childhood and youth, would one day rise up against its former rulers. It was in the Battle of Poltava (1709), that Russia first seized control from Charles XII, the King of Sweden of the territory in question. Parshchikov’s brilliant Poundian ‘poem including history’—as well as geography and ecology—juxtaposes superbly surreal battle scenes with the quiet meditations of the poet, cultivating, on the site of the former battlefield, his garden, with its apricot trees, its ‘long-nosed field mice’ and ‘fruit-honey grog,’ and celebrating Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian opposition fighter, and his sweetheart Marfa Kochubey. In Donald Wesling’s excellent rhymed-verse translation, which dissolves into free rhythms in the course of the poem, Parschikov’s brilliant and highly original imagination lives again. It could not be more apropos today!”— Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics“One of great poetic achievements of the 1980s, Parshchikov’s long poem appears, in Donald Wesling’s ambitious new translation, startlingly of our time—not just because of its dismantling of Russian imperialist myths but also because of its insistence on the multifarious resilience of language in the face of its misuse and of the horrors of wars, past and present.”— Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media“From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, Ukraine has been periodically destroyed by those who would own it. Among these blood-soaked backstories, the three-way struggle between Peter the Great, Sweden’s Charles XII, and the treacherous Ukrainian Cossack Mazepa in 1709 has long been pan-European lore. In this ‘historical-geographical-ecological’ evocation by the Russian metarealist Alexei Parshchikov, the poet is tending his garden on the site of the battle. Knives, bits of cannon and bone, snatches of sexual violence and the Tsar’s largesse emerge from the black earth. Sacrificial lambs and mosquitos look on. Donald Wesling’s spectacular rendering into English, reflecting subtexts in Pushkin as well as the late Soviet poetic underground, is formally audacious and so tightly constructed that the reader can’t breathe. Exactly what is required today.”— Caryl Emerson, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsFrom the TranslatorINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE, WHICH TELLS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS1.1. The Origin of Weapons1.2. The First Cannon1.3. The Lamb Tells about the Feud of Two Brothers, Who Attempted to Catch Him for Sacrifice, and about How a Knife was Born1.4. The First Business Retreat, Written in My Garden, Located on the Field of the Battle of PoltavaCHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE 2.1.2.2. Point of View of the Observer2.3. Charles XII2.4. Ivan Mazepa and Marfa Kochubey2.5. No Saxophone Slung over the Shoulder2.6. Mosquito2.7. Copper Framework: Second Business RetreatCHAPTER THREE: THE TSAR REWARDSNotes
£78.19
Pan Macmillan Deep Wheel Orcadia: Winner of the 2022 Arthur C
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the YearAstrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.Trade ReviewA symphony o yotuns, peedie suns and langships tae Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles hauds the starns in the loof o thier haun, terraformin new warlds in Scots. (A symphony of giants, miniature suns and longships to Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles holds the stars in the palm of their hand, terraforming new worlds in Scots.) -- Matthew FittDeep Wheel Orcadia is a mysterious and moving novel in verse about finding home in the farthest reaches. Giles lifts us to new worlds, in space and in language, we could never have imagined. A singular and numinous work -- Morgan M Page * author of One From the Vaults *I can't remember the last time I was this beguiled, this engrossed and this inspired by a book. It's like nothing else I've ever read. It was a joy to feel so entranced by the possibilities and complexities of each and every word. Harry Josephine Giles is a true original and a vital voice – don't miss this. -- Kirsty Logan * author of The Gracekeepers *
£10.44
McGill-Queen's University Press the swailing
Book SynopsisFirmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.Trade Review“Radiant in its ache and teeming with beauty, the swailing absorbs the haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow while delivering a stunning introspection through poems steeped in the winter of their own grief. So many of the last lines blew me away, and I found myself continually returning to savour their longing.” Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland and Yellow Rain“The swailing is a powerful, unstintingly honest exploration of memory, loss, the subtle play of presence and absence, and the risks to selfhood that longing poses, explored in poems shot through with dark humour, urgency, and exemplary precision.” John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone“Among the many virtues of Patrick Errington’s impeccably constructed debut is its nearly forensic attention to the minutest particulars: ‘Last night’s rain is pearling the spruce, the timothy.’ What is most astonishing about this exactitude is that rather than dispelling the mystery of being in the world, it fills the reader with renewed marvelling and reverence.” Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many“Patrick Errington's poems are conceived in attention, crafted in grace, and finished in wisdom. ‘They told me as a child to be exact with pain,’ Errington writes, and his poems are true to his credo, leaping wildly through the mysteries of mourning while extending to us the compassionate hand of form. Here is a poet who knows that form and freedom can be one, that sorrow can have an ecstasy within it, that hope might just be ‘loss finding what form it can keep.’ Here, in poem after poem, is truth.” Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of Lunetto“Gorgeous poems which seem to shimmer on that constantly shifting border between the body and the landscape.” Andrew McMillan, author of pandemonium“From the beginning of the book to the end, the poet sets the reader’s mind on fire with the luminous language, lyric intensity, and emotional heat of these poems. Patrick Errington’s gorgeous, superbly crafted gems each shimmer under the poet’s fierce gaze, and taken together achieve something grand and powerful.” Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House “The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism.” Poetry Foundation
£15.19
University of New Mexico Press The Empty Bowl Poems of the Holocaust and After
Book SynopsisWritten largely in the words of a fifteen-year-old survivor, these poems provide historical entry into the Holocaust. Put simply, the poems explore the reality of the events experienced by Judith Sherman in her determination to survive.Table of Contents Foreword Arthur Kleinman Preface Poems of Before This Time I Too Have a Dream Because My Grandfather Serious Men Poems of the Holocaust My Village of Kurima It Is the Law The Law of the Land My Suitcase and I Morning Mass Toothbrush Gestapo Prison Mirjam's Letter from Hiding Unhiding in the Forest Hiding in the Forest Karpu in Auschwitz Such Good Taste Wagon Train Auschwitz Lord SS Man Knew You Then Morning Prayer During Appell Appell Guard Magda Speaks kein Deutsch Come Messiah Hunger Hunger, Do Not Intrude Let Not Flowers Here The Invitation An Apple in Ravensbruck My Ravensbruck Love Song I Know a Dog Ravensbruck Jesus, Tell Your Father Stand Still, Sun The Roma Girl Ravensbruck Friend Shoes for Life The Mirror in My Right Shoe A Brief Reprieve You Are Invited to My Funeral Reluctant Witness Resistance of Prisoner 83,621 Death March I Say Damn You Liberation Trees I Say Death, Stand Aside at My Liberation Time Poems of After Once You Survive No More Hide-and-Seek Tell Me This This Year in Jerusalem That You Should Know Legacy Poem Do Something Accountability 9/11: Has Anybody Seen My Dad? My Darfur Mother Bosnia Boy To Walk in My Shoes I Smile, I Smile Fresh Washed Sheets Sunrise Summer Woods If God Is Dead Are Things Changed in Heaven How You Are? Oversight If You Apologize Let Me Win A Ladder for God We Should Talk Survivor's Voice Today Survivor's Message Say the Name Afterword Ilana Gelb Acknowledgments Contributors
£15.26
Texas Tech Press,U.S. Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring
Book SynopsisThe poet William Waring Cuney (1906-1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846-1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874-1936),the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney's maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.Cuney was born and raised in Washington D.C., just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city's Black elite, Cuney embraced his family's passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.Through 100 of his best poems, many never collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.
£32.21
Renard Press Ltd Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night: Selected
Book SynopsisThe poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light.Trade Review'[Then] the greatest living poet in the English language.' (Observer) 'He is unique, for he distils an exquisite mysterious moving quality which defies analysis.' (Sunday Times)
£7.99
Pan Macmillan WHAT
Book SynopsisJohn Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original people's poet'. Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents. Today, Cooper Clarke is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence is just as visible on today's pop culture. His new poems were collected in The Luckiest Guy Alive, which was followed by a bestselling autobiography I Wanna Be Yours and poetry collection WHAT. Aside from his trademark look' continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on the national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern life is huge.Trade ReviewA big-hearted poet of boundless humour and unmistakable style -- Kit Fan * Guardian *
£16.14
Bonnier Books Ltd I Wish I Knew: Words to comfort and strengthen
Book SynopsisTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING POETRY COLLECTION*Donna Ashworth's new book Wild Hope is out September 2023*In this fast-paced world, I Wish I Knew is a collection of poems to guide us through the wilderness of life, navigating body image, emotions, mental health and personal growth.With honest lessons learned from rock bottom, Donna Ashworth's writing helps us to find courage in chaos and rise to every challenge.Sparking joy, surprise and gratitude on each page, this collection will soothe your soul, strengthen your spirit and help you find your own unique voice.'Donna's much-needed words will no doubt empower and lift our young people today.'Lisa Faulkner'A little corner of calm within life's storm - wonderful.'Cat Deeley'Donna has a rare gift of being able to put into words how we all feel. Her writing is like a hug from a wise friend.'Samia Longchambon'Donna's wise and beautiful words help us reach a place of peace and acceptance. I would love to have read them many years ago.'Lisa SnowdonTrade ReviewDonna's much-needed words will no doubt empower and lift our young people today. -- Lisa FaulknerA little corner of calm within life's storm - wonderful. -- Cat DeeleyDonna has a rare gift of being able to put into words how we all feel. Her writing is like a hug from a wise friend. -- Samia LongchambonDonna's wise and beautiful words help us reach a place of peace and acceptance. I would love to have read them many years ago. -- Lisa Snowdon
£9.49
Many Rivers Press David Whyte Essentials
Book Synopsis
£14.25
Laertes No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen
Book SynopsisThese poems arose from the depths of incarceration, from the throat and intellect of Mohsen Mohamed (sentenced to five years of harsh imprisonment after a campus protest) and went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. They speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found (and forged) community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.
£14.24
Goose Lane Editions Poisonous If Eaten Raw
Book SynopsisWinner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry AwardIn this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother’s death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear’s Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider. While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber’s poems also expose the thorn in the flesh — the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet’s mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.Trade Review“Each poem in Poisonous If Eaten Raw is a portrait and an ecosystem that makes meaning from memory and of a relationship that is the origin of longing and is singular to each of us. How do we make sense of our mothers? The pain they endured, the pain they created? This is a poet pushing past memory into a present and deeper understanding that’s brimming with empathy and a way forward. And this is remembering in motion: vivid and audacious, moving into and out from its source.” -- Sue Goyette“There is no way for a daughter to know her mother as anyone other than a mother. But in Poisonous if Eaten Raw, Faber creates evocative portraits that attempt to bridge this gap of knowing through a process of surreal re-imagination.” -- Manahil Bandukwala * The Fiddlehead *
£14.39
McGill-Queen's University Press The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields
Book SynopsisCarol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.Trade Review"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies
£25.19
Omnidawn Publishing Genghis Chan on Drums
Book SynopsisA diverse and cacophonous poetry collection tackling subjects from identity to current events. At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese. Employing various forms, John Yau’s poems traverse a range of subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo’s imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Yau moves effortlessly from using the rhyme scheme of a sixteenth-century Edmund Spenser sonnet to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney, and to immersing himself in the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau’s poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and unsavory voices strive to be heard. Trade Review"Yau’s latest brilliant (after Bijou in the Dark) brims with social critique and the linguistic play for which the poet is known, while also being suggestive of a writer and artist eager to situate his multifaceted work in the context of a collapsing society. . . . Self-aware yet self-effacing, these necessary poems testify to the power of language to transform reality." -- Starred review * Publishers Weekly *"Yau considers history, poets of the past, aging, personal and political identity, mass shootings, and stereotypes of Chinese citizens in poems that address various crises of the times." -- Top 10 Poetry Books for Fall 2021 * Publishers Weekly *"Even knowing that John Yau is a prolific and adventurous poet, one can’t begin to anticipate the work in Genghis Chan on Drums... This poet-scholar... has gifted us with a lot to ponder." * On the Seawall *“Once again Yau delivers a spectacularly tantalizing book of poems, recent and relevant to exigencies and booby traps of the times: PC culture, identity politics. A poet’s aging body as he’s turning 69, and other twilight musings, razor sharp curmudgeonry, meditations on Gumshoes, Piero di Cosimo’s Sister, Carole Lombard, the language of Philosophers. All masterfully pulled off with sleight of hand, deft language, gleeful irreverence. As devil’s advocate, Yau mercilessly torques all the cliches about being Chinese, in the ‘O Pin Yin’ series. . . . Each section of this generous book has a particular intensity of shape-shifting personae. Surreal prose poems sit comfortably with ‘A Painters’ Thought,’ an especially winning section from a poet who has written expertly, profusely on art. Two pieces movingly invoke artist Tom Nozkowski, close friend who passed in 2019. . . . Genghis Chan on Drums arrives on time with a drumming shout-out for the human comedy, a perfect antidote for the enormity of our world’s woes. Yet Yau also has the heart of a humble Taoist philosopher as when ‘we become our own destiny: military sardines side-by-side sliding together in the dark.’” -- Anne Waldman, author of Sanctuary: (Addenda)“By turns gorgeous, hilarious, and enraged, this astonishing collection takes the reader on a mineshaft-deep descent past the nuanced multiform measures of racism I am humiliated to admit I had never before fathomed. Then, in short poems suggesting the richness of dreamt novels, Yau discloses his enormous inner life in a virtuosic redeployment of language that blooms on each passing page, in wave upon wave of buoyant wonders, in mischievous self-cancelling miracles of speech, until we reach the depths of English I never thought possible. This is a beautiful book in which I finally found my feeble self. It understands me and I want to stay here forever!” -- Guy Maddin“It’s hard to overstate the profound influence that Yau’s poetry has on my work, and on so many other poets and artists across generations. I’ve followed his sometime OG alter-ego Genghis Chan across many decades, many books, and it’s glorious to see him finally slouch into the spotlight for this long-awaited extended solo—a mashup of speed metal plus free improv plus paigu with the occasional brassy rimshot. But in this latest book, the propulsive beat of war-drums underlies even the vaudeville, the exquisite, the slyly cantankerous. Yau’s shots have real targets, real firepower, even when his targets hold his own consciousness hostage. From a collage of other people’s stereotypes, myths, and dissimulations, these poems emerge with breathtaking clarity and gut-wrenching force. Perhaps Yau’s most powerful book to date, this is essential reading.” -- Monica Youn, author of Blackacre: Poems
£15.00
Milkweed Editions Bright Dead Things: Poems
Book SynopsisBright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limon has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limon's work is consistently generous and accessible--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.Trade ReviewLong list selection for the National Book Award for poetry Best Poetry Book of 2015: New York Times and Buzzfeed Praise for Bright Dead Things "Effortlessly lyrical."--New York Times "These poems are, as my students might say, hella intimate. They are meticulously honed and gorgeously crafted. They marry the lyric poem's interior emotional intensity with its exterior mode of social conveyance and aesthetic beauty... The best compliment one can give a book of poems is that the book loves the reader. Bright Dead Things doesn't just love poetry; it loves the reader. My hunch is, Reader, you'll love it too."--The Huffington Post "Bright Dead Things, the fourth book of poems by Ada Limon, breeds a particular mixture of wildness. The mixture is by turns melodious and tight. Limon's poems are like fires: charring the page, but leaving a smoke that remains past the close of the book."--The Millions "Limon's work is destined to find a place with readers on the strength of her voice alone. Her intensity here is paradoxically set against the often slow burn of life in Kentucky, and the results will please readers."--Flavorwire "Poet and Critic Stephen Burt says, 'Prose sense is to poetry as tonality is to music.' And I see that sense of prose cushioned in each poem included in this leguminous compilation. The works wear complexity on their sleeves with reassuring accessibility on their faces; to say it more succinctly, there's a tough grilling of the soul and champagnes served to the measure of each one?s taste."--The Rumpus "In Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things, there's a fierce jazz and sass ("this life is a fist / of fast wishes caught by nothing, / but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug.") and there's sadness--a grappling with death and loss that forces the imagination to a deep response. The radio in her new, rural home warns "stay safe and seek shelter" and yet the heart seeks love, risk, and strangeness--and finds it everywhere."--Gregory Orr "Ada Limon doesn't write as if she needs us. She writes as if she wants us. Her words reveal, coax, pull, see us. In Bright Dead Things we read desire, ache, what human beings rarely have the heart or audacity to speak of alone--without the help of a poet with the most generous of eyes."--Nikky Finney "Limon does far more than merely reflect the world: she continually transforms it, thereby revealing herself as an everyday symbolist and high level duende enabler. At the end of one poem she writes, "What the heart wants? The heart wants/ her horses back," and suddenly even this most urban reader feels wild and free."--Matthew Zapruder "Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix."--Richard Blanco Starred Review "In her newest volume of poems, Limon (Sharks in the Rivers) delves into the divided self--self separated by geography, by loss, by change, by circumstance. VERDICT Generous of heart, intricate and accessible, the poems in this book are wondrous and deeply moving."--Library Journal "A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, Limon is at the height of her creative powers, and Bright Dead Things is her most gorgeous book of poems."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Richly written and felt."--Publishers Weekly
£11.99
The University of Chicago Press Lands End New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this comprehensive volume, Mazur demonstrates a remarkable mastery of poetic technique as she depicts human relationships in all of their ambiguities. . . . Here, as elsewhere, the speaker boldly and sensitively proclaims her own lack of understanding. It is this vulnerability, equipped and complemented with extensive erudition, that makes Mazur’s poems as poignant as they are accomplished in their craft." * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *"In her honed and arresting new collection of poetry, Land’s End, Gail Mazur rightly observes that the sycamores along Memorial Drive in Cambridge do something different than the showy blaze of other trees in fall, 'patterning the road and the old river/with their own kind of darkness and light.' . . . In these new and selected poems, Mazur, who lives in Cambridge and Provincetown, writes with sensual specificity of the Cape, its mussels and sand flats and sandpipers, a hummingbird moth, turnips grown in Eastham, the humble and sublime." -- Nina MacLaughlin * The Boston Globe *"In Land’s End, Mazur has done the hard work, building a palette of primal elements, the metaphors of place — gulls, sand, pebbles worn by tides — to express the yearnings of mortality." * Provincetown Independent *"Before I had received Gail Mazur’s Land’s End, it had already been praised to me as an artifact, a book that looks and feels handsome. In this day of cookie-cutter template publication and undistinguished design, that’s already a quality to celebrate, and not simply incidental to the poet’s own work." -- Jim Kates * Arts Fuse *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNew PoemsHall Mirror At 4 A.M. That Was Then My American Poem At Land’s End Walking Barefoot, August Thoreauvian The Conversation Nostalgia End of Summer Eastham Turnips, November Rest Stop The Breakwater * Josef Albers The High Line Snapshots There Came a Time Blue Work Shirt * Early Morning Walks More, More from Forbidden City (2016)Mount Fuji Forbidden City My Studio Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate * Shade Age On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook” Philip Guston The 70s Elephant Memory To the Charles River * We Swam to an Island of Bees Instance of Me The Self in Search of the Sublime Things Family Crucible Grieffrom Figures in a Landscape (2011)Figures in a Landscape Hermit The Age Poem Shipwreck To the Makers Borges in Cambridge, 1967 To the Women of My Family History of My Timidity Dear Migraine, Isaac Rosenberg Inward Conversation Post-Pastoral Concordance to a Life’s Workfrom Zeppo’s First Wife (2005)Blue Umbrella The Mission September Queenie Dana Street, December Zeppo’s First Wife Seven Sons Waterlilies American Ghazal Rudy’s Treefrom They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001)Five Poems Entitled “Questions” Michelangelo: to Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel Poems Maybe It’s Only the Monotony Young Apple Tree, December I Wish I Want I Need The Weskit Evening Girl in a Library Air Drawingfrom The Common (1995)I’m a Stranger Here Myself In Houston Whatever They Want Bluebonnets Poem for Christian, My Student Foliage Ice Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth’s Bedroom at Arlesfrom The Pose of Happiness (1986)The Horizontal Man Jewelweed Reading Akhmatova Hurricane Watch Fallen Angels Listening to Baseball in the Car To RTSL, 1985from Nightfire (1978)Baseball
£22.80
not a cult LLC Violet in Some Places
Book SynopsisViolet in Some Places is the life of a man enveloped in the raw, nurturing magic of matriarchs. If ever there was a guide toward masculine vulnerability, power through listening, a rosetta stone for empathy— it is here in the silky, poetic prose beautifully woven throughout this empowering collection from Cebo Campbell.
£11.39
