Modern and contemporary poetry

776 products


  • Serenity: Poems

    Andrews McMeel Publishing Serenity: Poems

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisSoft spoken yet powerful, Serenity perfectly captures the constant battle of fear and courage that lives within us. The seeds of Serenity were planted in F.S. Yousaf’s last collection of poetry, Sincerely. Struck by inspiration and overwhelmed by the response of dedicated fans, Yousaf wanted to continue this journey in a new collection. While tales of longing, uncertainty, and loss flow through each poem, Yousaf artfully captures the eternal question of how to face pain with courage and quiet resilience. Featuring 140 poems and accompanying illustrations, Serenity is the perfect escape from daily life, helping readers refocus energy and kindness toward themselves and their cherished relationships.

    3 in stock

    £9.49

  • A Blood Condition

    Vintage Publishing A Blood Condition

    1 in stock

    Book Synopsis'A Blood Condition is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year' Guardian, Books of the Year 2021*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 JHALAK PRIZE*The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo ChingonyiKayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances -- of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go -- and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.'A thing of beauty. It's a pleasure to read such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most celebrated young poets' Diana Evans'An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading' Telegraph'The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it' Andrew O'HaganTrade ReviewChingonyi's poetic voice finds its full-throated maturity... Deep introspection becomes the vulnerable and brave heart of the book, rendered into jewel-like poems in "Origin Myth"... An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading -- Dzifa Benson * Telegraph *A Blood Condition is a thing of beauty. It's a pleasure to read such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most celebrated young poets -- Diana Evans * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2021* *I was changed by Kayo Chingonyi's recent volume of poems, A Blood Condition. The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it -- Andrew O'Hagan * New Statesman *A Blood Condition has a dignity that honours the past without indulging in any overflow of personal feeling. Dignity is an interesting quality in a writer - it cannot be faked without presenting as pomposity. Chingonyi's authentic, reined-in passions are stirring... Chingonyi's poems grow out of gaps, out of the moments when nothing more can be done. The dead cannot be recovered, time cannot be reclaimed, the damage to the river is likely to be permanent, but a poem can be written and take its quietly powerful stand -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London... These fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we might "carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith" -- Aingeal Clare * Guardian *There is thrilling formal accomplishment on display in these poems... poignant and moving... there are brilliant evocations of the north of England -- Andrew McMillan * Poetry Book Society *Chingonyi seems to have hit upon the telling image, the poem-as-snapshot, as a means of making his writing at once more exposed and more sharply defined... This new version of Chingonyi's voice, whittled down to its essentials and built on the seen, is behind almost all the best poems here... A Blood Condition...[is] a significant development in his work -- Declan Ryan * Times Literary Supplement *Kayo Chingonyi's second book, A Blood Condition, is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year. His ability to blend music, grief and yearning is unmatched -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *

    1 in stock

    £10.44

  • The Wild Verses: Nature poems on love, hope and

    Templar Publishing The Wild Verses: Nature poems on love, hope and

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn a fast-paced world, The Wild Verses invites you to slow down, reflect and to seek solace through poetry and nature.From consoling words of hope and healing to meditations on love and friendship, this beautiful collection has a poem for every feeling. Accompanied by emotive illustrations of animals in the wild, this is a poetry collection to be returned to again and again.The perfect gift book for fans of Donna Ashworth and Charlie Mackesy.Trade ReviewThe Wild Verses... is a wonderful collection of nature poems, with magnificent illustrations by Sarah Maycock. These poems focus on the things which matter most - love, friendship, hope for the future and healing. Children and adults alike will love the images and messages written in rich, beautiful language. -- Emma Dunn and Clare Fulton * The Scotsman *

    4 in stock

    £15.29

  • Spring In Name Only

    Eyewear Publishing Spring In Name Only

    4 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    4 in stock

    £11.69

  • Honeybee: for fans of MILK ANDHONEY by Rupi Kaur

    Legend Press Ltd Honeybee: for fans of MILK ANDHONEY by Rupi Kaur

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisGoodreads Choice Award winning poet Trista Mateer "expertly exposes the intensity of first love" in this confessional collection of poetry.You will meet people in your lifetime who demand to have poems written about them. It''s not something they say. It''s something about their hands, the shape of their mouths, the way they look walking away from you.Honeybee is an honest take on walking away and still feeling like you were walked away from. It''s about cutting love loose like a kite string and praying the wind has the decency to carry it away from you. It''s an ode to the back and forth, the process of letting something go but not knowing where to put it down. Honeybee is putting it down. It''s small town girls and plane tickets, a taste of tenderness and honey, the bandage on the bee sting. It''s a reminder that you are not defined by the people you walk away from or the people who walk away from you. Consider Honeybee a memoir in verse, or at the very least, a story written by one of today''s most confessional poets.Perfect for fans of Caroline Kaufman, Atticus, Clementine von Radics, Nina LaCour, Adam Silvera, and Becky Albertalli; or anyone interested in bisexuality, heartbreak, running away from your problems, and coming out.

    3 in stock

    £9.49

  • The Complete Poems Of Anna Akhmatova

    Canongate Books The Complete Poems Of Anna Akhmatova

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisFrom the artistic passion of the St Petersburg poets and bohemians, to the collective suffering of a nation, Anna Akhmatova spoke to, and for, the soul of her people. This magnificent edition includes: more than 800 poems, half of them available in no other translated edition: translator''s preface: biographical introduction by Roberta Reeder: more than 125 photographs, including a 65 page photo biography, and ''The Artist''s Muse'' images of Akhmatova in art: memoir by Isaiah Berlin: comprehensive notes to the poems: index of first lines: bibliography.Trade ReviewWe needn't worry again about how to read Akhmatova in translation... the translations are remarkable. Reading this enormous, impeccable book, we watch her work achieve the supreme goal of lyric poetry: to transfigure loss without belittling it, commemorate love without cooling it, and embody the truth of disparate lives in a single self. -- Andrew Motion * * The Observer * *Hemschemeyer's versions are the best I have ever seen. This great lilac brick of a book is a stupendous bargain. -- Michael Hoffman * * The Times * *This edition is an enormous achievement . . . usefully annotated and well illustrated. The text is the definitive English-language edition of Akhmatova . . . a ground-breaking work. -- Elizabeth Burns * * The Scotsman * *A fitting tribute to one of the greatest poets of the century... this is a volume to be treasured. * * The Good Book Guide * *This is one of the most important publications of the year, if not the decade. -- Adam Thorpe * * Literary Review * *

    2 in stock

    £28.00

  • I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems

    Profile Books Ltd I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisA collection of thrilling verse, including both new poems and beloved favourites, from the celebrated poet, modern cult icon, and author of nineteen books including Chelsea Girls. Eileen Myles' work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. At once intimate and open-hearted, her poems are a raw, complex and compelling diary of postmodern life and invite readers into astonishing new considerations of familiar settings, from the beginnings and ends of love and the imperatives of sexual desire, to the daily wonder of a poet's life in New York City and beyond - into lush-and sometimes horrible-dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy. I Must Be Living Twice reflects Myles' sardonic, unapologetic, and freewheeling literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, I Must Be Living Twice is a prism refracting a radical world and a compelling life.Trade ReviewEileen Myles' essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn't care he has a scar down his face -- Lena DunhamWhen Myles is described as an "avant-garde" poet, it makes her art sound difficult and intimidating. It isn't. * Guardian *It has taken time for the literary world to catch up with Myles's politics and poetics... [has] a modern, light-footed technique, which delights in skilfully switching perspectives between one line and the next. * Sunday Times *Amazing -- Kim Gordon[A] new generation of public feminists, including Beth Ditto, Lena Dunham and Tavi Gevinson, cite her as an inspiration, finding in her writing a ribald and ponderous succession to the New York School' New York Times * New York Times *She and her work are unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable... She is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way. * Ben Lerner *One of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find -- Dan Chiasson * New York Review of Books *It's not often that a writer embodies the kind of trailblazing, unapologetic realness and talent that American poet Eileen Myles does. * Wonderland *Eileen Myles's poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless. For those of you who are encountering it for the first time, I envy your ride. * Maggie Nelson *

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • All The Names Given

    Pan Macmillan All The Names Given

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisFrom the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021'[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside.' Mark Haddon 'Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind.' GuardianRaymond Antrobus’s astonishing debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet’s much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.

    1 in stock

    £10.44

  • Selected Poems: Annotated Edition (Great Poets

    Alma Books Ltd Selected Poems: Annotated Edition (Great Poets

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe present selection traces the development of Yeats’s verse, encompassing the poet’s interest in Irish folklore and national identity, his engagement with the political situation of his day and the rich symbolism that is the hallmark of his work and a reflection of his lifelong fascination with the occult. It contains some of his best-known pieces, including the elegiac ‘Easter 1916’, the apocalyptic ‘The Second Coming’ and the reflective and spiritual ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Often radical in content but always traditional in form, these poems are by turns startling and affecting, and never less than inspired. Taken together, they form an ideal introduction to the poetic career of one of Ireland’s greatest literary figures.Trade ReviewYeats is like a mountain range, lying on the horizon. He can’t be emulated; you just walk around under the shade. -- Seamus Heaney

    1 in stock

    £8.54

  • The How

    Penguin Books Ltd The How

    5 in stock

    Book SynopsisA treasure trove of inspiration and an invitation for personal renewal from the acclaimed author of bone and The TerribleWe still dream though, don''t we? We are gifted with a way into ourselves, night after night after night.Yrsa Daley-Ward''s words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers around the world: through her books of poetry and memoir bone and The Terrible, through her powerful writing for Beyoncé on Black Is King and through her always-illuminating Instagram posts.In The How, Yrsa gently takes readers by the hand, encouraging them to join her as she explores how we can remove our filters, and see and feel more of who we really are behind the preconceived notions of propriety and manners we''ve accumulated with age. With a mix of short, lyrical musings, immersive poetry and intriguing meditations, The How can be used to start conversations, to prompt writing, to delve deepeTrade ReviewFor us, here is a book that gives and gives, I loved every word of this phenomenally generous, nourishing and beautiful book -- Salena Godden * author of Mrs Death Misses Death *A brilliant reminder that the answers we seek are within ourselves ... Yrsa Daley-Ward's words are a guidepost, a reminder, and a welcome home -- Stephanie Long * Refinery29 *A heartfelt, artful manifesto focused on living fully and authentically ... By turns simplistic, elegaic, and illuminative * Kirkus *In this gratifying exploration of the self, Daley-Ward excels at describing the indescribable ... this work defies genre and features a beautiful blend of lyrical prose and bold poetry... This is a tender, hopeful meditation * Publishers Weekly *

    5 in stock

    £10.44

  • Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

    Vintage Publishing Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

    15 in stock

    Book SynopsisA sensual, tender collection to be cherished by lovers new and oldPablo Neruda was probably the greatest and certainly the most prolific of twentieth-century Latin American poets. This, his third collection, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada, or, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was first published in 1924 and attracted international acclaim. Still adored the world over, the collection is ambitiously metaphorical and sensuous. Inspired by Neruda''s own personal relationships and injected with an expressive eroticism, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is evidence of a genius poet at work. A perfect present for your beloved on Valentine''s Day.Trade ReviewOne of the greatest love poets of all time * Observer *His love poems have fuelled romances around the world * Independent *The poems today remain as urgently gorgeous as freshly picked flowers * Daily Telegraph *The greatest poet of the 20th century -- Gabriel García MárquezHe was that rare thing - a public poet, and a great one, held in deep affection by every layer of Chilean society. For the skill that earned him such esteem was his ability to find beauty in ordinary things * Guardian *

    15 in stock

    £8.54

  • Red Doc

    Vintage Publishing Red Doc

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called G', into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover Sad' (short for Sad But Great), a war veteran, and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the sombre house where G's mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful picaresque verse invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.Trade ReviewI have never read a poet where there was such a sense that the material was so unruly it might overwhelm its creator. It is this that makes Carson exciting... She writes with spendthrift ease. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *To engage so originally and compellingly with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing, the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else… Carson is, simply, one of the very best. -- Sarah Crown * Guardian *[Carson’s] work over the last three decades has the flux of tidal waters. Words deceptively simple become in context an exhilarating tsunami of images with a shift in typographical structure. -- Hayden Murphy * Herald *‘A true poet, in the sense that she makes the unfamiliar seem real, and the real seem fabulous.’ * Richard Eyre, Start the Week *The narrative poem plays delightfully with form, at times approaching stream of consciousness in the vivid interplay of memory and dialogue. * Financial Times *

    4 in stock

    £12.60

  • Christmas Poems

    Faber & Faber Christmas Poems

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisFor more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation's most popular and respected poets. Christmas Poems collects together her best festive poems, including anthology favourites such as 'The Christmas Life', together with new and previously unpublished work.

    4 in stock

    £9.50

  • Second World War Poems

    Faber & Faber Second World War Poems

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe Second World War has shaped the modern world more than any other single event. This generous and haunting selection of English-language and translated poems includes verse written by servicemen who participated in the war Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Randall Jarrell as well as by survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan and civilians across Europe and beyond. It features work by important women poets Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Anna Akhmatova exiles such as W. H. Auden and Berthold Brecht, and writers reporting from London, Paris, Warsaw, Moscow and New York, dealing with the terrifying impact and legacy of the conflict. Presented with a historical critical introduction and biographical notes, the result is a vital lyric testimony to the tragic global theatre of the war.

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems

    David R. Godine Publisher Inc Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems

    3 in stock

    Book Synopsis“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.Trade ReviewPraise for Late Wonders “Not all poets are storytellers, not even close, but all of them wish they were, wish they had a better understanding of how words and images bind spells. Wesley McNair is the author of nine collections of stories in the shape of poems.” —Foreword Reviews “At 81, Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment. Wonders never cease.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “McNair’s poems are just sharp enough to open our eyes anew—and just smooth enough for us to think such wisdom arrived by grace alone. His work is melodic...both sanguine and realistic.” —Nick Ripatrazone, The National Review “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” —Philip Levine, former U.S. Poet Laureate

    3 in stock

    £16.49

  • Rapture's Road: From the author of All Down

    Vintage Publishing Rapture's Road: From the author of All Down

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland'Hewitt’s words penetrate with Nerudian passion and force' GUARDIAN'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTERAs the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.Trade ReviewStunning... shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals * Observer *Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force * Guardian *Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire’s natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture’s Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction * RTÉ *An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of ShyA writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann Ní Ghríofa, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEAn extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by... beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous -- Fiona Benson, praise for TONGUES OF FIREGorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing -- Andrew McMillan, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEI fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems... A beautiful book and Seán Hewitt is an extraordinary writer -- Liz Berry, praise for TONGUES OF FIREThe best new work of non-fiction I've read in years -- Sarah Perry, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEIntensely original... Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • Remembering Paris in Text and Film

    Intellect Books Remembering Paris in Text and Film

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisThis new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it. This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines. The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses. Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond. Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use. Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography. Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering 1. Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: Re-presenting Paris – Alistair Rolls 2. Baudelaire and the Classical Tradition: Virgil, Ovid and Sappho in Paris – Marguerite Johnson 3. Sappho in the Salons – Marguerite Johnson 4. Memory, Modernity and the City in Agnès Varda’s Paris Films – Felicity Chaplin 5. Looking (Back) at the Moon in Parisian Cinema – Alistair Rolls 6. Breathless in Paris – Christopher Falzon 7. As Sedate as Swans: The Parisian Side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée – Alistair Rolls 8. ‘La forme d’une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! […]’: Translation and the Changing Modes of Urban Cognition – Clive Scott 9. Paris, Capital of the Australian Poetic Avant-Garde: Christopher Brennan’s ‘Musicopoematographoscope’, John Tranter’s ‘Desmond’s Coupé’ and Chris Edwards’ ‘A Fluke’ and After Naptime – David Musgrave 10. Forms of Remembrance in the Sculpted Verse of Louise Colet, Anaïs Ségalas and Some of their Male Contemporaries – Daniel A. Finch-Race and Valentina Gosetti Contributors Index

    3 in stock

    £18.71

  • Life Behind the Pen

    Troubador Publishing Life Behind the Pen

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisWHAT IS ALL THAT RABBLE? What are they rabbiting on about? Disturbing my nap. My parents started reading to me before I was even born. I first entered a poetry competition at the age of 5, and 7 years later... My Life behind the Pen has just begun, A life that started with a wonderful dream. The sun is here, the moon is on the run. I'm 5, po'try fills my head, as it seems. Pictures become words, and words turn to rhymes, Various poems inside can be read, Anywhere, any which way; the good times! There is no right or wrong it can be said. Collection of pieces, written for you, This is my book; I really hope you like. Read and learn poetry then you can do and write, it's easy as riding a bike! The power of poetry - this is it. You may have noticed, you've read a sonnet.

    3 in stock

    £6.39

  • A Fire in My Head

    Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Fire in My Head

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisA powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak. In our times of crisis The mind has its powers This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems. Some of them, like 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017', are already familiar. Published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, it was played more than 6 million times on Channel 4's Facebook page, and was retweeted by thousands on Twitter. 'Notre-Dame is Telling Us Something' was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It spoke eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world. In 'shaved head poem', Ben Okri wrote of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times. 'Breathing the Light' was his response to the events of summer 2020, when a black man died beneath the knee of a white policeman, a tragedy sparking a movement for change. These poems, and others including poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barack Obama, Amnesty and more, make this a uniquely powerful collection that blends anger and tenderness with Ben Okri's inimitable vision.Trade ReviewPRAISE FOR BEN OKRI: 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali Smith. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' -- Marlon James on The Freedom Artist

    2 in stock

    £7.99

  • Invisible

    Arc Publications Invisible

    3 in stock

    Book Synopsis"Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in ‘The Creations of Sound’, that poems should ‘make the visible a little hard / To see’ […] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life..."- Mark Ford, from the Introduction to Invisible.

    3 in stock

    £9.89

  • Thoughts From The Oak

    Eyewear Publishing Thoughts From The Oak

    3 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    3 in stock

    £10.79

  • Soft Thorns

    Andrews McMeel Publishing Soft Thorns

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe poetry living within these pages tells stories of love, heartbreak, freedom, oppression, sexual assault, sexism, hope, and humanity.  Our darkest times are where we grow the most, so in this book, i share mine, and together we learn how to heal.Soft Thorns is a poetry collection that takes the reader on a journey through a young woman’s life—from reckoning with her looks and sexuality to dealing with the trauma of sexual assault, and finally through the highs and lows of young love found and lost. Bridgett Devoue shares her raw, human story and the lessons learned from living a life fully.

    2 in stock

    £9.49

  • How To Wash A Heart

    Liverpool University Press How To Wash A Heart

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisWinner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020.Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.Trade ReviewReviews'Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart catches the thinning smile of that ancient human ritual: hospitality. In a time of increasing hostility against migrants, Kapil demonstrates how survival tunes the guest to its host with devastating intimacy: ‘It’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house / Forever.’ In these lines an ancestral trauma pours from the heart of the unwelcome across a warzone, a threshold, into a spare bedroom edging its occupant out. Ultimately what Kapil teaches us is that although the heart might be where desire, gratitude, even love exist, it is an organ to which, like a country, we may never fully belong.'Sandeep Parmar'This joyous, occasionally furious, collection explores the limits of hospitality… Kapil establishes an astonishing presence, emphasising process over product, welcoming the reader to participate in the ritual of her poems’ making.' Sammi Gale, i'Brilliantly relentless… Kapil’s words sit brilliantly between the intellectual and the bodily. The eponymous phrase of this book returns again and again, to be held up to the light in different ways. Violence, exile, love and the world of literature drip out in the answers to the opening question.' Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society'Responds with brilliant acuity to the prolonged stress of the immigrant experience... In this series of precise, destabilising poems, Kapil skilfully amplifies the pressured immigrant heart, showing how precarious it is to exist in colour in a white space.' Joanna Lee, The Guardian'How to Wash a Heart addresses the world of lockdown with uncanny prescience, capturing its fragmented texture and vectors of distraction, and the constant intersection it reveals between personal and political precarity.' Dai George, Wales Arts Review'Lots of the books are forgettable. This one isn’t. It sounds like nothing else I’ve read. Initially disorientating, it soon clarifies into a novelistic tale about charity and hypocrisy, the story of an immigrant welcomed as a “guest” into the home of a woman who grows resentful of this new arrival’s friendship with her adopted daughter.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph'Bhanu Kapil’s work exceeds beyond the page; it is felt somatically, it moves and it pulses and tremors and it tears... the collection’s raw, understated tone draws attention to the harmful systematic and clinical processes of immigration.' Alycia Pirmohamed, The Scores'Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant and formally innovative How To Wash A Heart is a bold singular work… that lays bare the struggle of the immigrant… Kapil does this with a quiet brutality and stylistic flair.' Juliano Zaffino'In this emotionally-complex, lyrically-innovative, and thematically-rich collection, hospitality becomes a way of exploring the classical literary themes of arrival and departure, forcing them into a space where the question of belonging is perennially unanswered.'Devina Shah, The Poetry School'A brilliant and complex book, urgent in its message, How To Wash A Heart deserves (and requires) a wide and attentive readership.'Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'These books [How To Wash A Heart and The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems by Samira Negrouche] are gems. Both authoritative in the best sense of the word; stridently reflecting worlds of their own – that we know, and yet have never read described in this particular way, according to the contours along which our hearts move.'Khairani Barokka, The Poetry Review'How To Wash a Heart brilliantly dissects power, both ethnic and economic... It is a wise, thought-provoking collection which burrows under the skin.'Katrina Naomi'How to Wash a Heart asks extremely difficult and delicate questions that open a space for dialogue. It is also a beautiful book to hold and read. If only our public debates had Kapil’s subtlety, refinement, and distinction. How to Wash a Heart has already won an award in my heart, by merely beating, striving, pumping blood.'David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry'The book’s final pages, both the end of the sequence itself and the paratextual material, are devastating. How To Wash A Heart confronts “the link / Between creativity / And survival” – arguing that creativity is necessary for survival, but sadly not sufficient – more skilfully and innovatively than anything else I have read this year.'Dominic Leonard, The TLS'Bhanu’s book is kind of like walking into a kaleidoscope of heritage... It’s not like other books this year, subtle, nuanced and in the astro-plane only really wild poets get into. If the book was in a pub it would be the lady with the trolley full of black bags, you always wondered what was in them and now you can find out. Go on, go have a peek, let the words wash over you, let them roll through you and when you come out you will have the stench of something new and precious.'Arji Manuelpillai, Out-Spoken'How to Wash a Heart with its urgent salutory lessons about ways in which immigrants are unhoused and unmade punches above its weight of 44 pages.'Gail Low, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Kapil’s memorable protest depends upon her ability to overturn poetic expectation. She is never conventional… [in How To Wash A Heart] an assertive beauty surfaces from turmoil.'Kate Kellaway, The Observer‘Bhanu Kapil is a major writer, producing works that make you think and feel differently about the world, that end up wiring your brain differently. She explores racism, violence and the psychological effects of diaspora and uncertainty on the body of the immigrant in a poetry that is at once innovative and relatively comprehensible.’ Steven Waling, Magma Poetry'This book speaks of the wider experience of the refugee or immigrant. Notions of home and love change over time and become distorted so that the narrator becomes alienated both from their current situation and their own past. The poems capture perfectly the loneliness of being a guest in someone else’s home and in a country that is not your own. The conflicting emotions of such a situation – gratitude, indebtedness, confusion, discomfort, anxiety, fear, anger. [...] This is a beautiful, furious heart-rending book – utterly compelling.'Julia Webb, Under the Radar 'It is noteworthy, then, that How to Wash A Heart began its life in the UK, published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry. This represents a pivot in Kapil’s practice: after decades of living and working in the United States, she has also returned to the UK, a move that has coincided with her receiving greater recognition in her home country. [...] How to Wash A Heart speaks deliberately to the specifics of Britain: its racism, and its reception of immigrants. [...]What I love about Kapil is her concision, arrived at through processes of sifting which refuse to be rushed, which challenge us all to fully answer the question: What do you inherit, and what do you reproduce? The power of Kapil’s writing lies in her ability to evoke violence with a gentle touch. [...] Her books are spaces to rest, to lay down your armfuls of things. Now that she finds herself back here, on the near ground of Britain, it will be a joy and a wonder to see what she makes of it and our barrage of inheritances.'Stephanie Sy-Quia, The White Review'The poetic energy here doesn’t lie in the vocabulary but in the controlled fear that stalks those line breaks, interrupting each sentence as if the guest is choosing her words carefully, aware that someone may be listening behind the open door. [...] How to Wash a Heart tells a story about the ‘inclusive, complex, molecular’ chemistry of temporary host-guest bonds. But it produces that reality effect by hosting a series of unwelcome images that Kapil the artist can’t expel. [...] Kapil is both dissident and artist, of course: an agitator who won’t allow self-congratulation in through the back door, and the female artist using her body as a lightning conductor to pick up the violence latent in a place, or in her audience.'Peter Howarth, London Review of Books

    1 in stock

    £13.49

  • Yesterday I was the Moon

    Random House USA Inc Yesterday I was the Moon

    2 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • Thomas Hardy Faber Nature Poets

    Faber & Faber Thomas Hardy Faber Nature Poets

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisA selection of the writer''s greatest nature poetry, selected by Tom Paulin, published in a beautiful new edition by Faber.At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overheadIn a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited;An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume,Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom . . .-The Darkling Thrush

    2 in stock

    £12.34

  • Us

    Faber & Faber Us

    5 in stock

    Book SynopsisFrom the beginning, the poet was a wanderer, a storyteller, an imaginer of bridges between worlds. Zaffar Kunial is just such a poet and guide for us today. Yet his territory extends much further afield than those of the past through Kashmir, where his father was born and now lives, to the Midlands of his mother''s birth, and further north to ancestors in Orkney, as well as through language, memory and time. Already an acknowledged star of the Faber New Poets scheme, Kunial has won admirers in such measure as to ensure that Us is one of the most anticipated debuts in recent times. Across its pages, he vocalises what it means to be a human being planting your two feet upon the dizzying earth and he does so delicately, urgently, intimately in some of the most original and touching ways that you will read.

    5 in stock

    £10.44

  • Selected Poems Éluard

    Alma Books Ltd Selected Poems Éluard

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe poetry of Eluard is that of the real world and its natural sensations and feelings. The main themes that stand out are love, brotherhood and kindness. His imagery is characterized by its appeal to the senses and the importance of concrete objects and of everyday things.

    1 in stock

    £9.49

  • Material Properties

    Pan Macmillan Material Properties

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisMaterial Properties, Jacob Polley's fiith collection of poems with Picador, asks what it might mean to interpret and translate wildness into human language and human understanding. The book is a multi-faceted and vital exploration of the non-human, the elemental and the borders between existences. Through poems of parenthood at a time of environmental emergency, and poetic versions of Old English riddles in which animals, objects and natural phenomena speak, the book poses essential questions about our relationship with the living world and with each other.Praise for previous work, Jackself, from T.S. Eliot Prize judges: ‘a firework of a book, inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling’.Trade ReviewThe poems have an unforced charm, delighting in the wonder that surrounds us * Guardian *Polley’s grasp . . . is masterful, and the book is a delight. He succeeds in echoing the texture of his poetic forebears, but with a wry panache which is all his own. -- Stephanie Sy-Quia * The Poetry Review *What sustains these playful, wise, gentle lyrics is Polley’s technical skill. Longer poems are activated and maintained by their musicality and by a particular way with syntax that seeks to give texture and topography to the poems. One feels them as one is delighted by them -- Stephen Sexton * The Irish Times *How often do you come across a book you read again and again and always with increasing pleasure? It’s the quality of the writing that draws me back, both rooted and adventuring, elegant yet at ease in different registers and vocabularies … Jacob Polley’s language reaches to the heart of his subjects -- Jane Routh * The Friday Poem *

    3 in stock

    £10.44

  • The Art of Revising Poetry

    Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Art of Revising Poetry

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisUsing side-by-side pairings of first drafts and final versions, including full-page reproductions from the poets' personal notebooks, as well as an insightful essay on each poem's journey from start to finish, The Art of Revising Poetry tracks the creative process of twenty-one of the United States' most influential poets as they struggle over a single word, line break, or thought. This behind-the-scenes look into the creative minds of working poets, including African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native poets from across the US, is an essential resource for students practicing poetry, and for instructors looking to enliven the classroom with real world examples. Students learn first-hand from the deft revisions working poets make, while poetry teachers can show in detail how experienced poets self-edit, tinker, cut, rearrange, and craft a poem. The Art of Revising Poetry is a must-have for aspiring poets and poetry teachers at all levels.Trade ReviewThe Art of Revising Poetry is excellent, rigorous, useful, diverse, and entertaining by turns. Content and style are of the highest caliber. There is no question that this book is a compelling addition to anthologies of writing in contemporary US poetry and poetics, demystifying and diversifying ideas about the all-too-important process and method of revision. This is a wonderful companion and ally for engaged writers and readers in the academy and beyond. * Dr Heather Yeung, Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Dundee, UK *Table of ContentsPoet Biographies Introduction: Charles Finn & Kim Stafford. SECTION I: "I riffed, following the language where it led" Chapter 1: Bedtime Story, Joe Wilkins, Linfield University, USA. First Draft: "My Son Asks for the Story About When We Were Birds" Final Draft: "My Son Asks for the Story About When We Were Birds" Essay: Finding the Language, Finding Story: Revising "My Son Asks for the Story About When We Were Birds" Chapter 2: When Thought's Slope Steepens, Jane Hirshfield, Author and Poet. First Draft: "Counting, New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me" Final Draft: "Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me" Essay: Stepladder, Vinegar, Persimmons: Revising "Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me" Chapter 3: Increasing The Stakes, CMarie Fuhrman, Western Colorado University, USA. First Draft: "Land Acknowledgment, Valley County, Idaho" Final Draft: "Land Acknowledgment, Valley County, Idaho" Essay: Rhythm, Repetition, and the Drumbeat of Poetry: Revising "Land Acknowledgment, Valley County, Idaho" Chapter 4: Researching The Mystery, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Author and Poet. Passage from First Draft: "River Run" Passage from Third Draft: "River Run" Essay: What it Took to Get Here: Revising "River Run" Chapter 5: Creating a More Beautiful Story, Sean Prentiss, Norwich University, USA. Intermediated Draft: "The Constellations of Slate Belt, Pennsylvania" (with notes) Final Draft: "The Constellations of Slate Belt, Pennsylvania" Essay: Without Myths or Constellations: Revising "The Constellations of Slate Belt, Pennsylvania" Section II: "My first draft was a word tornado" Chapter 6: Inheritance, Frank X Walker, University of Kentucky, USA. First Draft: "InHerit" Final Draft: "InHerit" Essay: Revisions in Life and Poetry, Revising "InHerit" Chapter 7: A Matter of Inquiry, Rose McLarney, Auburn University, USA. First Draft: "The Collectors of Local Minerals Are Likelier to Find What They Seek" Final Draft: "The Collectors of Local Minerals Are Likelier to Find What They Seek" Essay: Identifying Gems: Revising "The Collectors of Local Minerals Are Likelier to Find What They Seek" Chapter 8: Gift From an Older Self, Naomi Shihab Nye, Texas State University, USA. Final Draft: "Tears, Appropriate" Essay: Gravity Changes: Revising "Tears, Appropriate" Chapter 9: A Poem's Truest Expression, Yona Harvey, University of Pittsburgh, USA. First Draft: "Hickory Street, New Orleans" Final Draft: "Hickory Street, New Orleans" Essay: True Expression as the Last Trolley Stop: Revising "Hickory Street, New Orleans" Chapter 10: An Inward Dissection, Terry Tempest Williams, Harvard Divinity School, USA. Original Prose Paragraph: "When Women Were Birds" Revision Into Poetry: "When Women Were Birds" Essay: Once Upon A Time: Revising "When Women Were Birds" SECTION III: "It felt clunky, false, but I knew I was close" Chapter 11: To See Again, Paulann Petersen, Stanford University, USA. Intermediate Draft: "A Furrier's Grandchild" Final Draft: "A Furrier's Grandchild" Essay: I Hear the Poem Speak For Itself: Revising "A Furrier's Grandchild" Chapter 12: Radiant Associations, Philip Metres, John Carroll University, USA. First Draft: "Ashberries: Letters" Final Draft: "Ashberries: Letters" Essay: Letters I Must Wait to Open: Revising "Ashberries: Letters" Chapter 13: An Act of Faith, Abayomi Animashaun, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, USA. First Draft: "Exodus" Final Draft: "Exodus" Essay: Discipline and Unknowing: Revising "Exodus" Chapter 14: Removing Details, Tami Haaland, Montana State University Billings, USA. First Draft: "Deer on Crazy Creek" Final Draft "Deer on Crazy Creek" Essay: Making the Local Exact: Revising "Deer on Crazy Creek" Chapter 15: Forging Something New, Charles Finn, Author and Poet. First Draft: "Memory's Anvil" Final Draft: "Memory's Anvil" Essay: The Winch of Imagination: Revising "Memory's Anvil" Chapter 16: Maintaining Fidelity, Shin Yu Pai, Author and Poet. First Draft: "Empty Zendo" Final Draft: "Empty Zendo" Essay: Emptying the Zendo: Revising "Empty Zendo" SECTION IV: "I asked my dreams." Chapter 17: What's at Stake, Kim Stafford, Lewis & Clark College, USA. Final Draft: "Lost in Snow" Essay: Getting More Intimate with Pain: Revising "Lost in Snow" Chapter 18: Zeroing in on Intent, Prageeta Sharma, Pomona College, USA. First Draft: "The Witness" Final Draft: "The Witness" Essay: The Poem's Psychic Center: Revising "The Witness" Chapter 19: In Thick Darkness we Listen, Shann Ray, Gonzaga University, USA. First Draft: "God of my abandonment" Final Draft: "God of my abandonment" Essay: Obscuring a Formidable Power: Revising "God of my abandonment" Chapter 20: The Serpentine Path, Todd Davis, Pennsylvania State University, USA. First Draft: "Tributary" Final Draft: "Tributary" Essay: Following a Tributary to Find a Poem: Revising "Tributary" Chapter 21: Dreaming Poetry, Beth Piatote, University of California, Berkeley, USA. First Draft: "Because our Roots are in Rivers, Not Latin" Final Draft: "Because our Roots are in Rivers, Not Latin" Essay: How Not to Write A Sonnet: Revising "Because our Roots are in Rivers, Not Latin" Index

    1 in stock

    £20.89

  • It Says Here

    Pan Macmillan It Says Here

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisIt Says Here is Sean O’Brien’s follow-up to his celebrated collection Europa, and has a vision as rich and wide-ranging as its predecessor. Set against shorter, ruthlessly focused pieces – vicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracy – are meditations on the imaginative life, dream and remembrance, time and recurrence. There are elegies for friends and fellow poets; paranoiac, brooding pastorals; other poems lay bare the maddening trials of a historically literate mind as it attempts to navigate a world gone post-content, post-intellectual, and at times post-memory. At the centre of the book is the long poem Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during and since the Second World War. Here, O’Brien charts a psychogeographic journey through the English countryside and the haunted precincts of London, mapping a labyrinth of love, madness and lost history. The result is a stirring, illuminating document of a time of immense societal flux and upheaval by one of our finest poets and most insightful cultural commentators.'In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, O’Brien is WH Auden’s true inheritor.' Irish TimesTrade ReviewIn both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, O’Brien is WH Auden’s true inheritor. * Irish Times *

    3 in stock

    £10.44

  • The Stone Age

    Pan Macmillan The Stone Age

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Highland Book PrizeJen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfield’s telling, everything – gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter.The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.

    2 in stock

    £10.44

  • The Taste of Steel • The Smell of Snow

    Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Taste of Steel • The Smell of Snow

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisPia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen’s Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow are the first two collections in Pia Tafdrup’s new series of books focussing on the human senses. While taste and smell dominate, the poems are equally about the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations. Pia Tafdrup’s previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002–2012). Written over ten years, its first two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 as Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff’s translation of The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet.Table of ContentsTHE TASTE OF STEEL I No return 15 Stages on life’s way 16 In eternal pursuit 17 Unposted letter 19 Winter blood 20 Not even in museums is there peace II Meditation 23 Stopping at the sight of swans 24 Plenty of time 25 Taste 27 Undercurrent 28 Loneliness III Off track 30 Earring 31 After frost-white shell of cold 32 Japanese cherries 33 Night country 34 Metal 36 Bodies without root nets 37 Down IV Crossroads 40 Power cut 42 Pont Neuf 44 Daily choice 45 The pets and their people 46 Time and space V War 49 The darkness machine 50 Razed city 51 The journalist’s question 52 The spring’s grave 53 A before and an after 54 View from space VI Waiting 57 Chink 58 A squirrel bids welcome 59 Despair drinks fire 60 Life with pigeons 62 Frog VII Loss 65 The anonymous part of the churchyard 66 Each in our own flame 67 Porous border 70 A display case filled with night 72 On the other side 73 Greeting from the deceased 74 Snow flowers 76 Residue 78 Threshold VIII Words 80 Crime scene 81 Mother tongue 82 Word and soul 83 Searchlight 84 Johan Borgen – a ritual 86 Poets IX Paradox 89 Harvest 90 Separation 91 The taste buds wake up 92 We are born again 93 Animal smell of light 94 Killer whales 96 Early morning THE SMELL OF SNOW I Breathe in, breathe out 101 Spirit 102 Prana 103 Fresh snow 105 Under cirrus clouds 107 Your fragrance wakes me 109 Freezing fog 110 Lovesick bird II Antitheses 112 Noses, a comparative study 114 Seduced by Gregory Pincus 115 Not a gift 116 Tags in the night 118 Cleaning poisons 120 Them or us 121 Digital odours III Meditation 125 Spring inhalation 126 Exchange of smells 127 Danish cat meets Australian stone 128 Smell of tomatoes 129 Smell-trace of a morning 131 Camellia japonica 132 Benchmarks from a long day IV Bloodstreams 137 Wrong number 138 Under the asphalt the Milky Way 139 Garlic 140 Nose to the ground 141 The cream from China V The five seasons. A catalogue of smells 145 Spring 147 Summer 149 Autumn 151 Winter 153 The fifth season VI Flashes of thought 157 Caught in the act 158 Smell blind 159 The meaning of meaninglessness 160 After showers of bullets in paradise 162 Words without smell VII Vanishing 164 The smell can be parted from the body 165 Reflection on snow and ice 167 Intense lethargy 168 Glenmorangie Highland Single Malt 169 The end of icebergs VIII Inner world, outer world 172 The smell greets me 173 Memory bank for smells 174 Insect wing 175 Nausea – a flashback 177 Stink 179 Flower shop 180 The primordial brain IX One breath makes the difference 182 Attack in Copenhagen 183 Welcome, people live here 184 I want to be a tree 185 Twelve breaths 186 The smell of books 188 There has been prismatic rain 189 The stream of smells from below 191 Notes

    3 in stock

    £11.69

  • Outlandish

    Bloodaxe Books Ltd Outlandish

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisJo Clement's first collection confronts Romantic impressions of British Gypsy ethnicity and lyrically lays them to rest. From Wordsworth to Top Gear, her poems invite us to consider notions of otherness, trespass, and craft. She steps between ancient stopping places and mardy council estates to trill elegiac Romanes, English, and birdsong about witches, wild camping, and Silver Cross prams. Compelled by a brutal Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller diasporic legacy, Outlandish tenderly praises the poem-as-protest and illuminates a hidden and threatened culture. Born in Darlington in 1986, Jo Clement received a scholarship to gain a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She has published two pamphlets, including Moveable Type (2020). She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University, Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and founded the imprint Wagtail with support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).Trade ReviewIt is very rare to find a young poet with such an alert musical ear, able to listen ahead for the shape of a sound yet to be uttered. -- Sean O'BrienHere is delight – these poems, rich and strange, brim from ‘the skim/of blood that can’t settle’. Jo Clement’s gifts shine and dazzle: amongst the darting, many-layered music of her imagery and sensuous evocation of northerly landscapes gleams a clear-sightedness politically aware and historically acute. Meaning is interrogated as a riverine process and emerges, movingly, in significances found later. Part urban fable, part re-imagining of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller culture, these poems are beautifully made to be read and re-read, savoured for their sharp, apple-bite tenderness, their truth and wisdom, their sheer originality. -- Pippa LittleThis is the word of the weathered hand and of the hard, hale youth; the tattered treasure, the grafter and the fetter-breaking wild. These intoxicating and fine-sprung poems instantly place Clement in the front rank of Traveller writers. May they also relight our wonder at the depths of all unsung Englands. -- Damian Le BasTable of Contents11 Prefatory note 15 The Impression of Water 16 Family Silver 17 Vault 20 Inheritance 21 King Faa 22 Teesdale Erratics 23 Big Fat Gypsy Swindle 24 Cobsong 26 At Eildon 27 Smithsong 28 Market 29 Mass 30 The Sly and Unseen Day 31 Tinker’s Tea 32 Knots 33 Larch 34 The Graver 35 Wild Camp 36 Ironwork, V&A 37 Outlandish 38 Haunt 39 Crown 40 Paisley 41 Vardo 42 A Stopping-Place 43 Craft 44 Pome 45 Pollard 46 Playing Cards 48 Self-portrait as 100 Travellers 49 Wonderful Fish 50 Giftorse 51 Nightjar 52 The Romani Star 53 Le Bûcher 54 Causeway 55 Periwinkle 56 Manes 57 Polished 58 Travelling Light 59 Rite 60 Singing Lesson 62 Homecoming 64 FLASH! 65 Prophet Mark 66 Shoed 67 Dirce (The Bull’s Shadow) 68 Fetlock 69 Groundsheet 70 Aubade 71 Passage 72 Caulbearer 75 Notes and dedications 77 List of illustrations

    3 in stock

    £10.44

  • Shake the Kaleidoscope

    Cinnamon Press Shake the Kaleidoscope

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisMemory, time, love and loss weave through all of G W Colkitto’s poems with a resonance that moves us fluidly from yearning to insight. The master of seeing connections, Shake the Kaleidoscope finds Colkitto taking a view across the whole of life: non-linear, sometimes fragmentary, imbued with whimsy and humour, but above all permeable to the scars and triumphs of loss and love. As the poems range back and forth across the years, one memory provoking another, it is not only the whole of the poet’s life laid out in the pieces of glass to be endlessly rearranged, but the whole of the human condition. Whether examining interior moments or negotiations with the world of work; whether writing astute commentary on political and social inequalities, or simply savouring those small moments of deep joy provoked by the simplest of things, Colkitto holds up a mirror to life—his own, and ours. Shake the Kaleidoscope is a major work from an accomplished poet: lucid, accessible, profound.

    3 in stock

    £8.99

  • Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020

    Carcanet Press Ltd Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisWinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2023. Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 is two books in one: a representative selection from seven of Carl Phillips's innovative earlier collections and a complete new book of poems, providing a powerful introduction to European readers. A seemingly gentle but resolute attention to the things of this world evokes the joyful and painful elements in the contemporary human condition, characterised by loneliness and an unquenchable thirst for love. He is a poet who knows the rules and bends or breaks them, a master of syntax and prosody, avoiding convention and pursuing the lines of desire. In a starred review of this book, Publishers Weekly said, 'These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching [...] and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work.'Trade Review'The writing dazzles with transcendent metaphors, complex connections and linguistic flourishes' - Washington Post; 'These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching [...] and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work.' - Publishers Weekly

    1 in stock

    £13.49

  • Potted Portraits

    Troubador Publishing Potted Portraits

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisDidn’t Cleopatra look like Elizabeth Taylor? Didn’t Shakespeare look like Shakespeare? Doesn’t Mazzini deserve to have a biscuit named after him? Did Napoleon pass his French exam? Did Nelson really see no ships? Van Gogh…or Van Gogh? And can you spot Hitch’s cameo appearance this time? Potted Portraits is an enjoyable saunter through a portrait gallery of varied personalities from History; revered or reviled, loved or loathed, each led a remarkable life that continues to be of interest today. In a series of light verse biographies which delight in testing the limits of tolerance with their rhymes, puns and general linguistic convolutions, discover a few new things about some familiar characters; or reacquaint yourself with some familiar stories in a new way. Included are some perhaps rather less well-known figures, though no less deserving of attention and rewarding to read about. If you want a little light didacticism, with the reasonable chance of a smile – even a laugh – this is the book for you!

    3 in stock

    £13.49

  • Limbic

    Cipher Press Limbic

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisLimbic is Peter Scalpello's glittering ode to sex, intimacy, and queer discovery. Taking us on slippery nights out fuelled by chemsex, on drunken lads' holidays, and into the quiet violence of small domestic moments, this is a world where tracksuits hide queer desire, where shame masks vulnerability, where wallets hide wraps of crystal meth. From the eager trepidation of teenage sex, to the ecstasy of parties, to the stigma around HIV, Limbic is at once a therapy and a celebration, showing how queer learning can be both soft-edged and brutal at once. An exploration of masculinity, addiction and trauma, this is a revelatory collection of poems; wise, tender, and vital.Trade Review“Limbic is a stunning first collection from a breathtaking poet. Visceral, elegant and uncompromising; an important addition to the queer canon. Buy it a drink and let it talk to you late into the night.” – Joelle Taylor;“A moving collection which, through different forms, different narratives , and different encounters, speaks eloquently and dynamically to the multiplicities our own bodies contain.” – Andrew McMillan; “At once playful and devastating, raw and complex. These poems tear open the relationship between masculinity and sex, queerness, compulsions, addictions... It would be difficult not to be moved by this collection!” – Keith Jarrett; “All the superlatives for Peter Scalpello’s tender poems. I can’t stop thinking about them.” – Niven Govinden; "Peter Scalpello’s Limbic is an extraordinary book. At times riotous and celebratory as he explores queer desire in a complex and nuanced way; at other times introspective and even erased as Scalpello examines the impact of substance use on the self and on sexuality; and at other times bristling with poetic rage and protest! ‘Wounds need air’ he writes, finding a language, both noisy and translucent, to transform these wounds into poems – poems which ultimately transform and transcend themselves, as the poet even becomes his ‘own daddy’!" - Richard Scott

    3 in stock

    £10.44

  • More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British

    Canongate Books More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisA SUNDAY TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF THE YEARIn this blistering anthology, poet, editor and DJ Kayo Chingonyi brings together a selection of exceptional Black British poets. This is his dream mixtape featuring a cross-generational span of current poets extending and inhabiting the spirits of the ancestors. Following in the tread of Lemn Sissay's The Fire People, More Fiya aims to lodge in the mind of its readers for a lifetime, radiating to touch the lives of many.Including work from: Jason Allen-Paisant, Raymond Antrobus, Janette Ayachi, Dean Atta, Malika Booker, Eric Ngalle Charles, Dzifa Benson, Inua Ellams, Samatar Elmi, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Joseph, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Vanessa Kisuule, Rachel Long, Adam Lowe, Nick Makoha, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Momtaza Mehri, Bridget Minamore, Selina Nwulu, Gboyega Odubanjo, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Kim Squirrell, Warsan Shire, Rommi Smith, Yomi Sode, Degna Stone, Keisha Thompson, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Warda Yassin, Belinda ZhawiTrade ReviewBrings together a wonderful array of poets whose linguistic flair and wide-ranging perspectives excite, inspire and challenge in equal measure -- BERNARDINE EVARISTO * * Guardian * *Kayo Chingonyi's celebratory selection here has something for everyone * * Sunday Times * *[P]assionately curated . . . The collection is rich for its array of imagery, lyricism and rhythm which brings to life ancestral homelands throughout the African continent and Caribbean isles while also highlighting what it means to be Black and British in the 21st century . . . More Fiya serves as a powerful reminder of what is possible when communities are given the opportunity to champion and celebrate themselves outside the confines of homogeneous understanding of poetrics -- Andrés Ordorica * * The Skinny * *

    2 in stock

    £10.44

  • We Play Here

    Granta Publications Ltd We Play Here

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisFour female friends navigate the political turbulence of North Belfast in the late 80s in this extraordinary, evocative verse novel We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class childhood, and a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships,in the years before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known.Trade ReviewAn extraordinary, enviably great debut. Watson has that rare ability to capture the ever-present strangeness of childhood and to use that to let us into a specific history with intellectual and imaginative generosity. There is taut, lyrical focus on every page, but overall, a game-changing narrative long poem you'll want to keep close. -- Luke KennardA unique new voice in poetry who reminds us that what some people call history, others might call memory; and what some might deem a city, others might insist is actually the individual topography of their childhood -- Andrew McMillanDawn Watson gives us a closely-mapped, child's-eye-view of a North Belfast community in the mid-1980s. Watson's sequences, in the voices of four 12-year-old girls, record this broken world innocently, movingly and often humorously - but, more than this, through their attention to beauty and wonder, they map these girls' inner lives, where imagination and poetry itself survive. -- Leontia Flynn

    2 in stock

    £11.69

  • NAKED: The Honest Musings of 2 Brown Women

    Eyewear Publishing NAKED: The Honest Musings of 2 Brown Women

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisThis impressive and enjoyable debut poetry collection by American-Tamil poet Selvi M. Bunce and Ugandan poet Mimi Mutesa is enriched with unique illustrations by Mimi. It is a fiery challenge to preconceptions of race and relationships through poems of autobiography and self-empowerment.These poems are bold, humorous, and uninhibited, charting revelatory journeys through the complexities of identity, family, love, and independence. Dedicated to all of us who are bad, brown and brazen.'

    3 in stock

    £10.79

  • The History Hotel

    CavanKerry Press The History Hotel

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisFormally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual. In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable characters—we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south. As Wormser’s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel, where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems—poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.Trade Review“The History Hotel carries a mixture of quiet humor and hard-nosed insight. There’s little decoration here, no fluff to deflect our attention from what we know that we know—just the energetic presence of Wormser’s consistently cool, keen sensibility that is both bewildered and wise. It’s easy to forget the good work words can do. Line by line, these poems resuscitate our weathered, better selves and the ability to see beyond the lurid surfaces that slowly but surely overwhelm our lives. If the current times offer us a steady stream of absurdities, if we intend to hold onto a sense of compassion while trying to make a sensible way through these days, The History Hotel has cleared a rough path for us.” * Tim Seibles, author of 'Fast Animal' and 'One Turn Around the Sun' *“‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,’ wrote Shakespeare, and in The History Hotel Wormser does just that, beholding the world’s weariness with a thousand-yard stare and an eloquence that can spit nails or rain feathers. These all-too-aware poems have something sanguine to report: amid the soul-flattening wreckage of ‘greedy nations,’ somehow there is still amorous folly, chatter, longing, picnics in graveyards, childhood, and art. The History Hotel feels like poetry written at the event horizon of a black hole, in the stark light of a Hopper painting.” * Diana Goetsch, author of 'This Body I Wore' *“Wormser is a master wizard of world poetry and his stories in The History Hotel will frighten and exhilarate you while serving their forbidden and diabolic fruit. Wormser is writing here beyond the best of his already celebrated powers established early in his career with the American classic The White Words. In these new poems, each one a multi-faceted diamond of irony, pathos, nostalgia, wit, and wisdom, Wormser is riotously and painfully funny as the world teeters on its axis and hurtles towards oblivion, observing in ‘Ode to the Stock Exchange’ ‘that the earth was the cash / machine of the universe awaiting travelers from / other galaxies in need of a loan.’ In his elegy for the great Polish poet Zagajewski—and reading Wormser we enter a landscape smoldering after bombing, or hurtling on its own blind volition—Wormser finds a way to acknowledge the positive side of the two-faced coin and contradiction of human action; ‘Thank you, you said to Life / and somewhat remarkably she thanked you back.’ In this glorious volume written at the tail end of a comet sweeping dangerously close to earth, Wormser is building a house for today's inclement weather, thanking life in line after line for the chance to comment on the follies of its self-deluded and failed human stewards.” * Indran Amirthanayagam, author of 'Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant' *"The History Hotel is philosophical and charming, the work of a master poet that serenely takes the long view of life hope and despair swirled together." * The Lake *"Accomplished poetic craft has been a hallmark of Wormser’s poetry through more than four decades, and those who fear that the art’s traditional virtues–form, assonance, rhythm, deft rhyme–are endangered species will find them alive and well here.” * The Manhattan Review *Table of ContentsBriefI.OnceTalkNow and then it rains moneyOde to the Stock ExchangeNFL Poem (Annals of Male Americana)CountingThe New WaveElegy for the Poet Adam ZagajewskiII.State SongOn a Foreseen Death, August 4, 1962Dog Is My Co-PilotFor Raymond LévyA Memorable Occasion: Opening the DoorsAcesUpon the Death of the Actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, from “Acute Drug Intoxication”Reasons of StateSentenceIII.SelfieNight, Apartment Towers, ManhattanTwo Painters:1. Hopperesque2. John Singer Sargent1910Venus Aligned with MarsA Certain Teacher Does Some BankingThe ShuffleIV.And You, Thomas HardyTwo Songs:1. Outtake from Cymbeline2. DylanesqueSay “Uncle”Self-Portrait with BallOde to WorryOn EmpireLament for an Accountant (1959)“When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced”V.Lyric1893 1. Opium Den2. Plein AirThe BodyguardHerr Plath-DoktorRecalling Sophocles“I Have Themistocles the Athenian”Pandemic, Nursing Home, Wisconsin, November, 2020The History Hotel

    3 in stock

    £12.00

  • Boy

    CavanKerry Press Boy

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisA poetry collection focused on grief and the many ways it can impact a family. The death of a youngest child. An alcoholic and distant father. A grief-stricken family. A tentative faith. These are the building blocks of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history. Inspired by the death of her own younger brother, Tracy Youngblom has written a poetry collection that serves as a companion to grief. This book is for those who love poetry and those who are intimidated by it, those interested in the way childhood experience shapes life, and those interested in the psychology of addiction.Trade Review“‘I cried into a plaid shirt,’ Tracy Youngblom writes about the funeral of her younger brother. ‘Even / birdsong tacked to air scratched / our ears.’ Defiantly observant, fiercely intelligent, we meet the speaker of this book-length sequence as the pre-teen middle sister watching her family crumble and, decades later, as the mother of her own boys grappling with the past's ‘fragmented, mosaiced / wreckage.’ Youngblom pulls no punches here. In her thoroughly engrossing narrative, we find not elegy, but the powerful and intimate chronicle of a woman seeking answers.” * Annie Kim, author of 'Into the Cyclorama' and 'Eros, Unbroken' *“When Tracy Youngblom is a child herself, her younger brother dies, in a quick and utterly random accident. And then—the world goes on. This is the intimate and unvarnished truth of how that happens in a family, and the reality is so much more complex and varied than you could imagine: cold, desperate, cynical, cyclical, beautiful. Somehow Youngblom creates poems that are both unflinching and exquisite—just please read this book, you will never forget it.” * Kirsten Dierking, author of 'One Red Eye,' 'Northern Orchards,' and 'Tether' *"Though the individual poems capture unique insights into narrative microcosms, this work’s most generous offering is its presentation of a considered thought process on death and theodicy, arriving at the ongoing existential resilience that allowed the book’s own composition." * Michael Collins, Atticus Books *Table of ContentsPrologue"Imagine a mirror dropped" 1: The Other True Story"Before his heartbeat it was Christmas" "When my melon mother finally expelled" "The moon, that big innocent eye" "Up close everything is different" "A boy in a field is just a boy" "Breeze draws everything upward: sheets" "Stairs: a way to enter" “Late June: our world is giddy" "Such portent at your birth"2: Slide Becomes Fall"Summer: it’s wild, no holds barred" "In 1972, everyone has a finished basement" "Middle sister, I had time to grow" "Late June heat. I play catch" "We think a lot. But we can’t think" 3: Barely Any Words"To get really good at something" "Memories are like this: beach" "Silence of aftermath" "It sucks to be pure and predictable" "Even when it appears, the truth" "We could tell there was snot dripping" "We didn't know him except" "His objects are hidden all over"4: Suddenly Incomprehensible"The funeral has passed, we" "Jesus and Lazarus came back” "Look, it's the moon" "That first Christmas: presents" "The moon was just past full" "September came with its flagrant" “We prayed for others, not" 5: No Leaving“Aristotle Said” 6: Shapeless as the Dark"The way the wind holds its breath" "This is how to bear losing" "Never a time I get up when" "Indian summer carves" "My sister stares at me" "There were so many who didn’t know”“First, I chose the man—leapt” "So many ways to fall: carrying" “When my oldest son fell down the stairs" "Each time one of my three boys" "His arm was in a cast from his recent fall" "They will devour the centers" 7: Cries of Such Pitch "Two things I have learned" "I may have gotten this wrong" "Suppose the carrots I tug" "Not a field—a garden" "So strange I want to" "I am 50, and I've never seen" "We go to the house of fun" "Holding onto belief" "I am still surrounded by boys”

    3 in stock

    £12.00

  • Hollywood or Home

    Poetry Wales Press Hollywood or Home

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisWelcome to Kathryn Gray? s?Hollywood or Home, a collection with as much ruthless glamour as any Old Hollywood movie. These poems?reflect on the glamour and heartbreak of the movie industry,?questioning?celebrity culture, and ideas of success and failure.

    2 in stock

    £9.49

  • the witch doesnt burn in this one

    Andrews McMeel Publishing the witch doesnt burn in this one

    4 in stock

    Book Synopsis2016 Goodreads Choice Award-winning poet Amanda Lovelace returns in the witch doesn't burn in this one — the bold second book in her 'women are some kind of magic' series.  The witch: supernaturally powerful, inscrutably independent, and now—indestructible. These moving, relatable poems encourage resilience and embolden women to take control of their own stories. Enemies try to judge, oppress, and marginalize her, but the witch doesn’t burn in this one.Trade Review“A feminist celebration of the magic of womanhood.Fans of The Princess Saves Herself in this One will be thrilled with The Witch Doesn’t Burn in this One! The poet spreads her wings in her second book, moving from an intimate portrait of girlhood into a complex portrayal of feminism. Mixing mysticism and lore, the poems follow a natural progression from the themes explored in Lovelace’s debut. With connections to current events and real life, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in this One, expands on Lovelace’s woman-as-magic motif and moves beyond the personal narrative to a heartbreaking and uplifting portrayal of womanhood through the ages.” (Danika Stone, author of All the Feels)"To everyone in range of this tweet: go and buy THE WITCH DOESN’T BURN IN THIS ONE by the immensely gifted Amanda Lovelace (@ladybookmad). I don’t care if you don’t usually read poetry. You will after you read this. You’re welcome. #TeamWitch" (Deborah Harkness, author of All Souls Trilogy)“In this liberating collection of poetry and prose, Amanda Lovelace taps into the suffering of our mothers and spares us none of the gory details. Writing from a place of anger and tenderness, she expertly crafts a coven you’ll want to be a part of. Lovelace’s The Witch Doesn’t Burn In This One is a self-love potion for the women in your life.” (Trista Mateer, author of Honeybee)"Filled with glorious imagery and incredible fire, this beautiful book is exactly what every woman and every survivor needs to read right now. Amanda Lovelace takes poetry to a whole new level with The Witch Doesn't Burn In This One, revealing her impressive skills with language and art once again as well as her breathtaking evolution as a writer. With a heart-wrenching yet empowering take on the very real and prevalent issues in society today whilst weaving magic with her pen, The Witch Doesn't Burn In This One is Amanda Lovelace's triumphant return as a poet, and what a splendid return it is!" (Nikita Gill, author of Your Soul Is a River)"Amanda Lovelace's new book is a flammable clarion call, a prophetic and ominous text depicting the day fast approaching (or already here?) that the women of the world reclaim all the fire in it as their own. Frantic and powerful, clear and accessible, Amanda has given the world a good reason to read her poetry again. Beware of matches." (Iain S. Thomas, author of I Wrote This for You)“This book spoke to my seething soul. Full of powerful feminist rage and wisdom, The Witch Doesn't Burn In This One made me want to set fire to the world and dance in its ashes. I'm buying a copy for all my female friends!” (Sandhya Menon, New York Times bestselling author of When Dimple Met Rishi)"What's the most dangerous thing women can do? Love themselves enough to fight back. Amanda Lovelace's new poetry collection is a fiery, accessible call-to-arms in a time where young women need every rebellious spark." (Nicole Brinkley, bookseller at Oblong Books & Music)

    4 in stock

    £9.99

  • Sincerely

    Central Avenue Publishing Sincerely

    1 in stock

    Book Synopsis"Sincerely is passionate. Honest. Charming. F. S. Yousaf has beautifully encapsulated in a book what it feels like to fall in love."—Madisen Kuhn, author of Almost HomeFans of top-selling Sincerely are saying "unexpected perfection", "not your basic poetry book", "breathtaking", "helped me appreciate my marriage". Searching for a profound way to propose to his love, F.S Yousaf reread the letters she had written him. In them he found his proposal, and inspiration to write his own prose and poetry. This is a compilation of letters and love poems that exemplifies the spirituality and the magnitude of how much one person can mean to another.It carries messages of positivity, hope, and most of all, true love.Trade Review"Sincerely is passionate. Honest. Charming. An uplifting and comforting collection filled to the brim with warmth. It is a celebration of love. As I turned each page, I felt happy, optimistic, and empowered, as though the words were written for me. Ultimately, it made me want to write more love poems. F.S. Yousaf has beautifully encapsulated in a book what it feels like to fall in love." Madisen Kuhn, Author of Almost Home

    1 in stock

    £11.86

  • How to Cure a Ghost

    Abrams How to Cure a Ghost

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisTrade ReviewWhen I first encountered Fariha’s writing, I let out a sigh of relief. Was it refreshing? Yes. But there was something more. Her words allow us to feel visible. Fariha’s writing has the power to heal and transform. She pulls you into her stories until you’re at the edge of your seat, emphatically rooting for her subjects. -- Rupi Kaur“A moving poetry collection by a queer Muslim writer exploring all the facets of her identity.” * Domino *“[Roisin’s] writing is intensely vulnerable and through revealing her own experience she reflects so many others.” * Bustle *“…a collection of poems that aims to heal..." * Vogue online *“…heart-aching and emotional while offering a sense of hope in a world that desperately needs it.” * Little Infinite *“In these short and potent stanzas she makes it clear that while she’s been able to lay down the ghosts that have haunted her own self-worth, loving herself back to health after the mental and physical exhaustion of weathering constant aggressions is a long and continuous process.” * Teen Vogue *

    2 in stock

    £10.79

  • W.B. Yeats Selected Poetry

    Flame Tree Publishing W.B. Yeats Selected Poetry

    7 in stock

    Book SynopsisLittle treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The original text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. The poetry of W.B. Yeats is among the most-loved literature of the twentieth century. At times dream-like, at others political, his verse has a rich sense of identity, infused with myth, mysticism and lyrical skill. This gift edition of selected poetry gathers some of the finest works by the Irish poet, including ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘When You Are Old’, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 'Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', ‘Easter, 1916’, 'The Second Coming' and 'A Prayer for my Daughter'. In place of the glossary are included selected notes by Yeats himself, and indexes of titles and first lines.

    7 in stock

    £9.49

  • Zonal

    Faber & Faber Zonal

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisZonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life.Trade Review'Dynamic, interrogative and unsettling; crafted yet open-ended; fiercely smart, savage and stirring - from the get-go, Paterson's poetry has been essential reading.' - Guardian'An immensely skilled poet of craft and restraint, who speaks with a stunning lyrical voice.' - Daily Telegraph

    2 in stock

    £10.44

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