Modern and contemporary poetry
Central Avenue Publishing What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems
Book SynopsisHow do you untangle the real you from the curated you? In this introspective yet whimsical collection, poet Grant Chemidlin takes readers into the thicket of self-discovery. What We Lost in the Swamp is a lush and vibrant collection of poems that examines the many manifestations of green: nature, inexperience, jealousy, burgeoning love, and exploring sexuality. It is a slow unfurling. It is a love letter to growth, to rediscovery, to finally learning how to speak the truth. These astonishing poems ask the reader: Who do you want to be in this world? How do you want to build a life? This is not a coming out. This is a coming in to one’s truest self.
£12.71
Andrews McMeel Publishing I Hope This Reaches Her in Time Revised Edition
Book SynopsisNew York Times bestselling author, r.h. Sin, presents a revised and expanded edition of his bestseller I Hope This Reaches Her in Time.There will come a time when the weariness of your soul will urge you to seek out a sign, some sort of indication that things will get better. Your heart will be drawn to this place, to these pages. These words were written for you, this book is your manifesto. I hope this reaches you in time.
£13.49
Andrews McMeel Publishing Nocturnal
Book SynopsisThe poems of Nocturnal—newly revised and expanded—are constellations to guide those on a journey of healing and self-discovery, no matter how dark the night. From @wilderpoetry comes a heavily expanded revised edition of Nocturnal, a collection of poetry and beautifully illustrated black-and-white imagery inspired by darkened days and sleepless nights. Poetry meets presentation in each of the four sections ("Dusk," "Northern Lights," "Howl," "Lucid Dreams,"), which trace the author's continuing journey of self-discovery while illuminating a path for others along the way. Ink stains, landscapes, dreamlike animals, blackened pages, and textured spreads create a multifaceted reading experience. And true to the moniker, these poems are linked by a motif of "the wild." Celebrating the art of self-love poetry with both word and image, Nocturnal will leave readers comforted, curious, and inspired to explore the world around them.
£9.49
Pan Macmillan Nine Horses
Book SynopsisBilly Collins is one of the world’s most popular poets. While his poems often begin in the everyday and domestic, fans know that they might end anywhere - and that they will lift their heads from the book to a world startlingly different from the one they had left moments before. Billy Collins’ previous collection, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, was an extraordinary success, introducing thousands of readers to his exhilarating poetry for the first time. By turns wildly funny and intensely moving, Nine Horses has won Billy Collins even more admirers.Trade Review‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ Carol Ann Duffy‘Delightfully direct, he won’t lose you in his lyricism but will transport you to a better place’ The Times
£10.44
Hodder & Stoughton Life is Sad and Beautiful: THE SUNDAY TIMES
Book Synopsis** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER **THE DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION FROM THE ORIGINAL MUMMY'S BOY, HUSSAIN MANAWER.'I remember the day I wrote my first ever poem, I was sitting on my bed in the attic and started jotting down lines on this little notepad, little did I know where it would lead me professionally, personally and also psychologically. This is my life's work to this date, all my notes, my favourite pieces that have served me through my darkest nights and carried me through every moment of pain, suffering, anxiety, panic and hardship.'Hussain's debut poetry collection will invite readers on his journey through depression and grief, and out the other side to a better place - there will be joy, hope, tears and laughter - the emotions that make up the fabric of human experience. His words will remind readers, that even in your lowest moments you can find the gold dust, Life is Sad and Beautiful will shift outlooks and stand as a powerful vehicle for growth and change.ABOUT HUSSAIN:Hussain Manawer is a globally acclaimed Poet, Mental Health Advocate and Producer - who was born in Newham and shortly after grew up in Ilford, Essex. Tagged 'The Original Mummy's Boy', Hussain derives much of his inspiration from his own experiences and intense grief at the sudden loss of his mother. Dignitaries, major brands and broadcasters seek him out to articulate the mental health struggles our world is facing. Amongst the credits to his name, commissions and collaborations include The Royal Family, The BAFTAs, The FA, Global Citizen, One Young World, Burberry, Anthony Joshua, Marcus Rashford, Tyson Fury, England FC, Peaky Blinders, Soccer Aid For UNICEF, Apple TV+ and many more.He most recently appeared alongside Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey in the mental health docu-series, 'The Me You Can't See', alongside Lady Gaga, Glen Close and others. Hussain's poetry can also be heard on the Archewell Audio Podcast Christmas Special with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Manawer was called upon earlier this year by The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to create the 'Mental Health Minute' which was broadcast on all radio stations with an all-star line-up including David Beckham, Joanna Lumley, Shirley Bassey, Jessie Lingard, Jamie Oliver, Anne Marie and Charles Dance.Trade ReviewAn important exploration of navigating the darkest places - and coming through with hope. -- Red MagazineIt's powerful stuff, piercing the heart of what it means to experience grief, articulating the most confusing parts of the fog. -- I-D
£15.29
Faber & Faber Shoulder Tap
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS'' WEEKThroughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is unpredictable and thrilling, at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read. Riordan a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in his wake affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.
£10.44
Andrews McMeel Publishing The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective
Book Synopsis“I thought 2020 would be the year I got everything I wanted. Now I know 2020 was the year I appreciated everything I have.” From the author of Self Love Poetry comes a new collection of transformative poetry focused on reframing thoughts and seeing post-pandemic life through a rich, new, kaleidoscopic lens. The world has changed – but thankfully so have we. The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective embodies the best of who we are now. From Melody Godfred, author of Self Love Poetry: for Thinkers & Feelers, comes a collection of poems designed to reframe how we see and move through this brave new, post-pandemic world. Each pair of poems inspires a shift from the old way of thinking to the new: from guilt to gratitude, resistance to surrender, and fear to love. The left side of every spread is dedicated to the old way. The right side offers a shift in perspective that lovingly illuminates the new. Each seemingly simple poem instantly elicits a profound reset, and is coupled with beautiful line drawings that awaken not just the mind, but also the heart. The Shift’s unique poem pairings uplift the soul by offering a hopeful salve for our collective burnout. Whether you read a pair of poems a day, or consume the entire book in one sitting, The Shift will be your trusted companion as you bravely navigate the great unknown that lies ahead in the months, years and decades to come.
£10.79
Faber & Faber The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 9
Book SynopsisAuden, George Barker, William Empson, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward, James Laughlin, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, Ezra Pound, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Michael Tippett, Charles Williams and Virginia Woolf.
£45.00
HarperCollins Publishers Swimming Lessons Poems
Book SynopsisI seem to be your new favorite novel.One that keeps you up at night,turning my pages.Fingers lingering on me so you don't lose your place.In her first collection of poetry, Lili Reinhart explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion.Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-size yet profound, these beautiful poems are about growingup, falling down, and getting back up again. They capture what it feels like to be a young woman in today's image-obsessed world with Lili's trademark honesty, optimism, and unique perspective.Accompanied by striking and evocative illustrations, the poems in Swimming Lessons reveal the depths of female experience, and are the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own.Trade Review‘Reinhart is committed to authenticity…and candid about her battles with anxiety and depression.’―Harpers Bazaar ‘There's a reason her fans feel they know her. She's been outspoken on various platforms about deeply personal topics.’ ―Glamour ‘Reinhart is a force to be reckoned with.’ ―Who What Wear ‘She's a breath of fresh air. Navigating her way through fame her own way, not for a second trying to be anyone she's not, and showing every one of her millions of fans that it's OK to be who you are. In fact, it's the only way.’ ―ASOS
£11.69
Penguin Books Ltd Selected Poems
Book SynopsisStevie Smith was one of the few modern poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.
£11.69
Penguin Books Ltd The House with Only an Attic and a Basement
Book SynopsisKathryn Maris is originally from New York and has lived in London since 1999. Her previous collections are The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006) and God Loves You (Seren, 2013), and a selection of her poetry appeared alongside the work of Frederick Seidel and Sam Riviere in Penguin Modern Poets 5: Occasional Wild Parties (2017). Her poetry has been published widely, including in Granta, The Nation, The New Statesman, Poetry, The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber).Trade ReviewThe funniest book I've read in years. Maris flexes her wit and wisdom to create a litany of nervous characters in a style that's mordant, sarcastic, satiric yet often compassionate . . . a poet of risk, she is dark, deep and often laugh out loud -- Daljit NagraHer dry, droll, clinically deadpan manner is all her own; but her themes - obscure hurts, implacable dissatisfactions, hardwired propensity for victimhood and suffering - reflect the experience of humanity at large -- Christopher ReidIt's like being in a cage with a jaguar - both the car and the animal: one is very fast, the other very hungry. It's highly dangerous, but strangely, you don't mind. Bloody readable anyway -- Hugo Williams
£7.59
Penguin Books Ltd 1919
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd Wicked Enchantment
Book Synopsis''Essential reading'' Roger Robinson''Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent'' Mary Karr''Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy'' Caleb Azumah Nelson''Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent'' Washington PostNobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world.This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as ''the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles''.Trade ReviewIn this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book -- Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATERWanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent * Washington Post *Wanda Coleman's peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts - hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent. All honor to her name -- Mary Karr, author of THE LIARS' CLUBWanda Coleman gives literary voice to thoughts on survival, as a Black woman who suffers economic, racist and misogynistic attack. Essential reading for all -- Roger Robinson, author of A PORTABLE PARADISEOne of the greatest poets ever to come out of LA * New Yorker *Coleman is master of telling unvarnished truths - about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future * Los Angeles Times *Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did * Poetry *Her works crackle with life ... aching and meditative * Booklist *Sassy, funny, and wickedly sharp ... there are more than a dozen poems in Hayes's astute gathering that should be widely anthologized, certainly as much as any poem by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, or [Frank] O'Hara ... Wicked Enchantment should help set the record straight: Coleman is a great American poet -- John Yau * Hyperallergic *
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd StereoTYPE
Book Synopsis The award-winning poet''s darkly riotous debut, exploring stereotypes of Black male identity and sexuality in a corrupt systemLyrical, loud and radically urgent, Jonah Mixon-Webster''s debut aims its sights at the words and images that shape us and the corrupt forces that stand in the way of our freedom. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force. It is a revision of our most sacred mythologies - and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster''s hometown of Flint, Michigan, where untainted tap water is still not guaranteed and the legacies of racist policies persist. Challenging stereotypes through scenes scattered with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster explores the places where space and body, race and region and sexuality and class meet and intersect. He invents visual/sonic forms, recasts poems as FAQs and transcripts, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies. Interrogating language and tTrade ReviewA master of experimentation . . . This work is alive
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd The Tower
Book SynopsisThe Tower was W. B. Yeats''s first major collection of poetry as Nobel Laureate after the receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923. It is considered to be one of his most influential collections. The title refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917 and later restored. The Tower includes some of his greatest and most innovative poems including ''Sailing to Byzantium'', a lyrical meditation on man''s disillusionment with the physical world; ''Leda and the Swan'', a violent and graphic take on the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus and ''Among School Children'', a poetic contemplation of life, love and the creative process.
£11.69
Orion Publishing Co R S Thomas
Book SynopsisR. S. Thomas was a major figure in the landscape of contemporary poetry - attested by his Nobel Prize for Literature nomination. His poetry, coloured by personal experience of rural Wales, is stark but passionate.Trade ReviewOne of the best half-dozen poets now writing in English -- Kingsley Amis
£9.25
Faber & Faber The Universal Home Doctor
Book SynopsisThe Universal Home Doctor is Simon Armitage's most personal collection of poems yet. The poems journey across the globe but are ultimately set against the most intimate of landscapes - the human body.
£8.54
Faber & Faber Fire Songs
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry''A writer we should treasure.'' Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph''With every book [Harsent''s] stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable.'' Fiona Sampson, IndependentThe poems in David Harsent''s new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that ''belong to one another'', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of ''Songs from the Same Earth'', the troubling fractured narrative of ''A Dream Book'', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled ''Fire'', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of ''Sang the Rat'' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.
£10.44
Faber & Faber The Seasons of Cullen Church
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize, this new collection of expert lyric poems from Whitbread Poetry Award winner Bernard O''Donoghue movingly animates the scenery and characters of his childhood in County Cork. The mythologies of family are here: the relative who maybe emigrated to America to be ''set upon at his arrival / for the few pounds sewn inside his coat''; the memory of ''Barty, a hopeless speller'', caned so hard he dances; the big top come to the town park; the stolen apples raided from the orchard near the old school. Here too are the collective myths, the groundwater of older texts - Virgil''s Aeneid, the Riddles of the Exeter Book, Dante''s Purgatorio, the lives of the ancients and the gods - all of which in O''Donoghue''s dexterous and discerning care reach forward from their long-ago origins to echo down our own lives.Many of these poems speak in elegy: for Connolly''s Bookshop closed down and mourned or for lost friends; for th
£10.44
Faber & Faber The Unaccompanied
Book SynopsisThe most popular English poet since Larkin.' Sunday TimesAfter more than a decade and following his celebrated adventures in drama, translation, travel writing and prose poetry, Simon Armitage's eleventh collection of poems heralds a return to his trademark contemporary lyricism. The pieces in this multi-textured and moving volume are set against a backdrop of economic recession and social division, where mass media, the mass market and globalisation have made alienation a commonplace experience and where the solitary imagination drifts and conjures. The Unaccompanied documents a world on the brink, a world of unreliable seasons and unstable coordinates, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction, where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire, and where alarm bells for ailing communities go unheeded or unheard. Looking for certainty the mind gravitates to recollections of upbringing and family, only t
£11.69
Faber & Faber New and Selected Poems 19772022
Book SynopsisThis comprehensive edition draws on Andrew Motion's distinguished body of work from Secret Narratives (1983) to his most recent volume, Randomly Moving Particles (2020), and includes a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems.Certain preoccupations unite the book, which from first to last is particularly concerned with the ways in which our lives are shaped by loss by wars, by accidents, by the erosion of time and by grief. Motion is an energetic and protean spirit, a listener and a watcher, and while his poems mostly develop his themes by using intimate and lyric forms, they also sometimes adapt from direct speech and documentary sources. In every case, and especially movingly in the long poem Essex Clay', Motion uses acts of personal witness to reflect the vulnerabilities of the world at large.These are extraordinary poems of and for our times, enlarging our sense of the cost of human experience even as they refine those sensibi
£13.49
Faber & Faber House of Lords and Commons
Book SynopsisExquisite' (New Yorker), breathtaking' (Los Angeles Times), baroque and moon-lit' (Boston Globe) House of Lords and Commons enthralled readers in the Americas when it recently appeared, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and being widely applauded in books of the year'. No wonder this first British publication is a significant and much anticipated event. Ishion Hutchinson's book is a profound engagement with culture and landscape, seascape and language, inheritance and race. It speaks as its title implies to a pursuit of justice and rebalance of a world in which lords and commoners must live side by side, and where the distance between those who have' and those who have not' is a more breaching and surprising journey than we perhaps once thought. The poems convey the complex allure of Hutchinson's native Jamaican landscape, and the violent forces that shaped its history, with remarkable lyric precision. But they sp
£10.44
Faber & Faber Peaches Goes It Alone
Book SynopsisThis is the End of Days.This is what we've been waiting for always.I walked over to the Hudson River, heading for Mars.Each poem of mine is a suicide belt.I say that to my girlfriend Life.Peaches Goes It Alone, Frederick Seidel's newest collection of poems, begins with global warming and ends with Aphrodite. In between is everything. Peaches Goes It Alone presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, and elegiac, Peaches Goes It Alone adds new music and menace to Seidel's masterful body of work.
£10.44
Faber & Faber The Poems of Dorothy Molloy
Book SynopsisDorothy Molloy was a star in the making when Faber prepared her debut Hare Soup (2004) for publication, before tragedy struck, and she died four days before advance copies arrived.
£10.44
Faber & Faber Lines Off
Book SynopsisLines off' is a term used for lines spoken from the wings of a theatre, or off-camera in a film. It was while Hugo Williams was out of circulation following transplant surgery that he wrote the poems for this new collection the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. From youthful days upside down in the Crazy Room, / rising and falling on the Haunted Swing', he takes us to distant countries, both actual and metaphorical; participates in the mortal pantomime' of the hospital ward with humorous frankness; and offers a percipient account of growing older, with all its attendant doubts and disturbances. Autobiographical, psychological, remedial, Lines Off heralds the return of this acclaimed poet, back to the stage of the page, offering us the performance of a lifetime'.
£10.44
Faber & Faber The Missing Months
Book SynopsisMany of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.
£10.44
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press Plot
Book SynopsisIn her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. The couple's journey is charted through conversations, dreams, memories, and meditations, expanding and exploding the emotive capabilities of language and form. A text like no other, it crosses genres, combining verse, prose, and dialogue to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.Trade ReviewPraise for Plot: "Plot is inexhaustibly complex, varied, and difficult—and as fearlessly and even grimly inventive and searching as one can conceive any book of poems as being. It instantly joins the few contemporary works . . . whose gravity is synonymous with the passion and integrity of their intelligence." —Calvin Bedient, Verse"To read her work is to be drawn deep into a thought's unfolding, into the eerie landscape of a dream; the dislocation one feels is tempered by the assurance of the writing, the deftness of Rankine’s experiments with words and ideas." —Indiana Review"I am awestruck. Quite simply, I have never read anything like Plot. Its stupendous intelligence . . . marks it as a masterpiece." —Mary Gordon"Plot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine’s instinct for poetic surprise." —Barbara Guest"A startling and eloquent exploration of states in, about, and around maternity. . . . This is an unsettling poetry of the body wrestling itself in the making of thought." —Charles Bernstein
£11.04
Pan Macmillan Wound is the Origin of Wonder
Book SynopsisI can’t undo all I have done to myself,what I have let an appetite for love do to me.I have wanted all the world, its beautiesand its injuries; some days,I think that is punishment enough.Maya C. Popa's poems explore the capacity of wonder to reawaken our appetite for the world, at a time that is fraught with the threat of endings, engaging lucidly with the most profound questions we face in our collective responsibilities and our relations with each other.She writes with love and wonder of a world poised at a perilous moment: “My children, will they exist by the time / it’s irreversible?” she asks. “Will they live / astonished at the thought of ice / not pulled from the mouth of a machine?” Popa takes seriously the poet’s duty to pay attention, to seek what Seamus Heaney called “the images... adequate to our predicament”.To read her poems is to pause again and again aTrade ReviewWhitman declared ‘what I assume you shall assume’ and Popa’s audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience. -- Daljit NagraBeautiful, musical, imaginative and blink-back playful poems. A very original voice in real lyric conversation with the self, with the other, with life and the creaturely world. A joy of a book. -- Ruth PadelMaya C. Popa’s new book is an astonishment. In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure . . . Wound is the Origin of Wonder reflects to us our own historical moment with unusual clarity, even as its lyric exploration of psychic and social landscapes stand outside of time. -- Meghan O'Rourke''Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is stunning for how it miraculously balances tenderness and terror, poems of hovering anxiety and longing that also allow themselves to be turned toward pleasure. I am now, as always, thankful for poems that balance the fullness of the human experience. Maya C. Popa has done that here.' -- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Little Devil in America 'I am stuck in an almost life, / in an almost time,’ Maya C. Popa writes in the titular poem from Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. Suspended in the uncanny amber of such a time, such a place, we readers encounter ourselves, endlessly reprocessing our own pasts and worrying our futures as the vast roiling moment corrodes both. Still, Popa insists upon, if not hope exactly, then a world beyond the hopelessness this one inspires: ‘There are still things that cannot be imagined.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a complex, searching collection, one I will be returning to for years.' -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell '"Dear Life," the opening poem of Maya C. Popa’s stunning Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, is worth the price of entry on its own. If I’d stopped there, this book would have given me more than I’d hoped for, but who could stop? Each poem, every single one, startled me with its precision and clarity. At times I gasped. Of course wonder is related to wound, awe to pain, and ‘every bright thing has at its heart a hiddenness / it offers when you’ve just about stopped looking.’ So we keep looking. We keep going. When I reached the end of this book, I wasn’t ready for its spell to be broken, not yet, so I began it again. -- Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod 'Wound is the Origin of Wonder showcases Popa’s ability to weave together rich internal reflections with finely wrought observations of the natural world. True to its title, Popa’s collection traces the titular emotion all the way back to its origins, shedding light on the wound so that we may look with wonder on the fuller picture that emerges' * Harvard Review *'In Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, Popa's elegant and moving exploration of grief and its causes and manifestations is more nuanced than simply observing that loss and living go hand-in-hand.' * New York Journal of Books *'Subtle and gorgeous... The ecstatic language of these meditations and confessions is animated as much by pain as by joy.' * Publishers Weekly *A reader will leave these poems hungry with the desire to see, to notice wildly – not only as a writer, but as a human being. * Mslexia *
£10.44
Pan Macmillan Musical Tables
Book SynopsisFrom the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love comes a collection of more than 125 small, incisively brilliant poems which, in his own words, “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.”Trade Review'America's favourite poet' * Wall Street Journal *‘Billy Collins’ medium is a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I’d follow this man’s mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised’ -- Michael DonaghyBilly Collins 'puts the "fun" back in profundity' -- Alice Fulton'Chatty, witty, wholly dependable' * Guardian *'Collins remains the most companionable of poetic companions' * The New York Times *'The treat of treats. Unlike the wedding guest waylaid by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the reader emerges from encounters with Collins as a wiser and far happier person.' * New Statesman *'A writer . . . fully aware of his work’s power to delight' * The New York Times *‘A poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace’ * New Yorker *‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ -- Carol Ann Duffy‘Delightfully direct, he won’t lose you in his lyricism but will transport you to a better place’ * The Times *‘The most popular poet in America’ * The New York Times *‘Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides’ -- John Updike‘Smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm voiced, easy to love’ -- E. Annie Prolux'Imaginative thinking gives this collection its richness.... The work also shows a variety of styles...[that] provide both pleasure and a vivid example of how one's thoughts, when unrestrained, can lead to unexpected destinations' * The Washington Post *‘Funny but serious, accessible but rich in meaning, consistently surprising – the world looks slightly different after reading a Billy Collins poem. He’s a one-off, an American treasure’ -- Nick Laird
£11.69
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Advanced Poetry
Book SynopsisA text for practiced poets, this book offers a springboard beyond the basics into more daring poetic traditions, experimentation and methods. It lays out the myriad conversations influencing contemporary poetics, paying attention to its roots in historical and theoretical thinking. With a focus on innovation and breaking established boundaries, Advanced Poetry introduces you to the poetics shaping the contemporary literary moment, first guiding you through the contexts and principles of these forms using a range of practical examples, before prompting you to pick up the pen yourself. Spanning decades and continents, and covering the rich field of poets writing today, this book shows how to read, explicate, and write poetry and includes discussion of: - received traditions and innovative forms- confessional and epistolary poetry - aesthetic experimentation with voice - methods and theories developed by early Surrealists-deep image and the poeticTrade ReviewIn the charged intimacy of whispered dish or conspiracy, Nuernberger and Zeller geek with robust gusto and gleeful rigor over poetry: its making and what it makes of us. Here’s a fleet textbook that inspires possibility, offers generous guidance with a light-touch, and in the process, sneaks in a sly, keen, and often subversive anthology of poems gathered from a wide view of time and place. This is more than a textbook; it’s a compelling invitation. * Douglas Kearney *Advanced Poetry “offers readers a radical methodology to studying poetics, one that simultaneously breaks boundaries for what textbooks might achieve (similar, perhaps, to Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey), while also harkening back to formal and historical poetics.” It is “conversational, and it somehow simultaneously introduces you to new poets and traditions without ever making you feel inadequate for not knowing something.” I “love that it starts each chapter with poems” and that these poems are “diverse and contemporary.” And “while some craft books feel technical and dry, this one never loses its focus on poetry’s magic.” * From Laura Read’s M.F.A. Poetry Workshop students (Laura Read, Professor of Poetry, MFA program at Eastern Washington University, USA) *Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology authored by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller offers readers a way to think about our own work in the context of our collective lineage as poets. I love the way each chapter opens with a diverse selection of poems, which allows the reader the chance to experience the poems before reading the editors’ discussion of them. And I also loved the writing in this book: it is both scholarly and accessible, poetic and sometimes personal. I will read and teach this book for the rest of my career. * Laura Read, Professor of Poetry, MFA program at Eastern Washington University, USA *Table of ContentsCONTENTS PATHWAYS INTO POETIC LINEAGES Foreword: The End and the Beginning An Invitation to Compose an Ars Poetica Before Reading Introduction and Notes to Readers, Writers, and Teachers Who is this book for? How is this book organized? Why begin each chapter with poems . . . ? Do I need to read the book in order? What pedagogical principles guide this textbook? Some Notes on Teaching This Book Chapter 1: Sound, Shape, & Space: Received and Invented Forms Chapter 2: Telling Secrets: Confessions, Epistolaries, & the Lyric I Chapter 3: The Poem in Telephone Lines & Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry Chapter 4: Writing Out of Surrealism Chapter 5: Duende, Deep Image, & The Poetics of Spells Chapter 6: The Poetics of Liberation Chapter 7: Writing the Body Chapter 8: The Racial Imaginary Chapter 9: Writing in the Field Chapter 10: Docupoetics & Other Forms of Lyric Research APPENDICES: MAPPING YOUR WRITING LIFE Practical Matters Creating an Inspiring and Supportive Workshop Community Strategies for Revision Some Notes on Assembling a Collection Potential Assignments & Professional Materials Submitting Poems for Publication Writing an Artist Statement Acknowledgements Index
£21.84
Little, Brown Book Group Too Young Too Loud Too Different
Book Synopsis''We knew that black and brown bodies, working class voices, women''s voices, did not have a space where they could be heard - and so this writing collective was a necessary and political act''In the early years of the new millennium, poets Malika Booker and Roger Robinson saw the need for a space for writers outside of the establishment to grow, improve, discuss and learn. One Friday night, Malika offered her Brixton kitchen table as a meeting place. And so Malika''s Poetry Kitchen was born.''Kitchen'', as it became known, has ushered in a new generation of voices, launching some of the most exciting writers, books and initiatives in British poetry in the past twenty years. Today, Kitchen is a thriving writers'' collective, with a wealth of talented poets and branches in Chicago and India.Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different is a celebration of Kitchen''s legacy, an appreciation of its foundational spirit and a rallying cry for all writers to dreTrade ReviewThis magnificent book is a celebration of community, collectivism, reading, rereading, learning, talking, thinking, drafting and redrafting. Above all it's a song of praise to the power of poetry to remind us who we are and who we can become -- Ian McMillanA critical and urgent moment . . . Malika's Kitchen is as much a gift to poets of colour in the UK as it is a gift to British poetry . . . this anthology is a loud proclamation of the aesthetic value of embracing difference -- Kwame DawesLike the best kitchens, Malika's fills and satisfies with a mixture of the raw and the sizzling. The tastes are new, the fusion is fun and the heat is transformative -- Samuel WestFor two decades now, British poetry has been flavoured by the products of Malika's Kitchen. Without that Kitchen we would have been blander; we would not have understood as deeply, how much craft and urgency and ambition belong in the same pot. Gather now at this most important table. Sit. Feast. -- Kei Miller
£11.69
Little, Brown Book Group Sometimes I Never Suffered
Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2020''Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation'' Garth Greenwell''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI think now more than halfOf life is death but I can''t dieEnough for all the life I seeIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae remains ''a shrewd composer of American stories (Dan Chiasson, New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of JeffeTrade ReviewOut of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation -- Garth GreenwellShane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis -- Rabih AlameddineShane McCrae is a shrewd composer of American stories . . . He is a prospector for speech rhythms, collecting his material wherever he can. But American attics are full of old boxes of diaries and letters; and testimony, no matter how arresting, is not itself poetry. What makes McCrae's compositions so ingenious are their marvels of prosody and form, learned from the English Renaissance poems that he read in libraries when he was just starting out. The result is beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech -- Dan Chiasson * The New Yorker *Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands - earns - our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world -- Nick Ripatrazone * The Millions *This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump . . . In McCrae's timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims * Publishers Weekly *
£10.44
Little, Brown Book Group Promises of Gold
Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD''[Promises of Gold] has put Olivarez at the forefront of not only first-generation poetics, but of all poetry. This one here is for us -- the ones who hide garden shears in their poems'' Javier ZamoraLove is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled, misrepresented, or narrowly defined. In the words of José Olivarez: ''How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love -- but what about our friends? Those homies who show up when the romance ends to help you heal your heart. Those homies who are there all along -- cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.''Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, Promises of Gold explores many forms of love and how ''a promise made isn''t always a promise kept,'' as Olivarez lays bare the ways in which ''love is complicated by forces larger thTrade Review"My people I am poly with the tortillas" might be my favorite single sentence I have ever read in a poem. Get the book for that line alone. Promises of Gold is a heartfelt and hilarious series of odes to the large and small joys of life. It is also a battle rap and a clapback to all the death-making institutions we live under at every level. I could call this book soft and I would only be telling a half-truth. This is a collection that delights in the softness of every kind of love from familial to homie to culinary to romantic. But this is also a book that is hard on colonizers, and cruel billionaires, and capitalist exploitation. This book shines bright as the gold that got us into all this colonial mess. -- Nate Marshall, author of FINNAVisceral and moving -- Kate Baer, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of What Kind of WomanIn his preface, José Olivarez writes: "despite my best efforts, I am who I am". And what we see unfold through the book, who we see José is through his writing, is someone who is charting a journey of complicated love - sometimes specific, sometimes funny, sometimes cutting, sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, sometimes soft, sometimes yearning - but always, love. A love built in honesty, a love built without myth or fable. This book pushes us to think beyond love as we've known it, as the overly romantic always lighthearted love that's been sold to us for generations. Instead, it shows us a map into loving at the end of the world, in isolation, in fear, when our backs are cornered to the wall. And still then, Olivarez chooses to love, to hope, to dream. This book is a necessary dream, one that is a gift to the world -- Fatimah Asghar, author of When They Come For UsThe truth is: Technically, I don't understand poetry. I never have. I miss everything in it. It's a language I can't process. And, for me anyway, that's what makes Jose special. Because when he writes poetry, I don't need to understand it - at least, not in the traditional sense - because I FEEL it. I feel his words under my fingertips like velvet. I feel his words in my chest like I'm looking at a painting that moves me in a way I can't fully explain. And, again, for me anyway, that's more important -- Shea Serrano , NYT Bestselling author of The Rap Year BookOut of Calumet City, weighing in at around 160 plus Promises of Gold, in both English and Spanish, the one that's poly with his tortillas, the masterfully playful, the uniquely imaginative, the one that bets everything he has on his people, the one, the only, José Olivarez is the undisputed Mexican champ. The cypher that straddles between dólares and dolores, this quintessential second collection has put Olivarez at the forefront of not only first generation poetics, but of all poetry, in and outside the stringent confines of academia. This one here is for us -- the ones who hide garden shears in their poems -- Javier Zamora, author of The New York Times bestselling memoir, Solito
£15.29
Orion Publishing Co W. B. Yeats
Book Synopsis''Tread softly because you tread on my dreams'' is one of the most well-known and repeated lines of poetry ever written. Less haunting, but still so relevant: ''Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.''W B Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. Winner of a Nobel prize, he was also a political figure, and, as is evident from his earlier work, fascinated by Irish folklore and the occult. He was also deeply affected by the First World War and the Anglo-Irish and Irish civil wars. It is a testament to the greatness of Yeats'' poetry that he attempts to bear witness to these emotional and historical forces.This perfectly pitched collection includes some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century.
£6.99
University of Nebraska Press Mine Mine Mine
Book SynopsisMine Mine Mine is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners. Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes. As inheritor of the migrant labor lineage, she uses her experience to explore how Black women carry intergenerational trauma of racial capitalism in their bodies and intersects the personal and national, continental and diasporic narration of this history within a critical race framework.Trade Review“In Mine Mine Mine Uhuru Portia Phalafala pulls off a small miracle of craft: an intimate poem and yet also an epic. In the tradition of composers like Zim Ngqawana and poets like Okot p’Bitek, this work is personal narrative, a musical composition, an operatic libretto, simultaneously original and yet drawing from the lineage of griots, inyosis, and imbongis, with perfect play between soloist and chorus. An incredible book that spans self, history, and unknown dimensions, part spirit and part human.”—Chris Abani, author of Smoking the Bible and The Secret History of Las Vegas“History lies in our bodies, Uhuru Phalafala shows in Mine Mine Mine. Her words are insistent, alive, as necessary as breathing. She draws in startling depth the two worlds her grandparents lived in, her grandmother as one of millions of ‘widows with living husbands’ and her grandfather, banished to the city of men whose families are forbidden from living with them, and who descend each day to the subterranean country whose gold they gather and whose dust they breathe in and carry in their lungs. Refusing his death sentence by breathing, Phalafala addresses her grandfather directly, always in the present tense, noting how he and his comrades are made ‘animal’ by mining and apartheid. Her words hail her grandfather, refuse the theft of him by golden death, diamond-sharp death, death in the womb of the earth and death above the surface. The charge of Mine Mine Mine is to possess the self against the theft of the body by the underground cities and their mass graves a mile down, their gold dust carried in bodies that are a treasure to those they never see except at Christmas and at the end to die, coughing. Phalafala writes a new history, tenderly filling in what was lost, the births and generations missed during the long absences, bearing witness to the links from the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades to the dust of the mines, tracing centuries of history in one body breathing.”—Gabeba Baderoon, author of The History of Intimacy and A Hundred Silences“Mine Mine Mine grabs my heart by its throat and tells it who it is. . . . The breadth of Phalafala’s twelve-year academic devotion to the study of words is evident in the precision with which she wields her tremendous sonic and literary gifts. The mind’s ear hears the repetitive machinery of the mines. It connects to the sharp edge that Blackness gave birth to in the city. Phalafala guides the reader across the complex contours of womanhood, the embodiment of the land in Setswana, and mourns a lost cyclical relationship to both. Canons of Black feminist memory, music, and pan-African influences converge in a treatise so tight the only word that can crown this elegant elegy is ‘truth.’”—Lebogang Mashile, award-winning poet and performer“These poems exist as a single aching narrative that traces the poetics of memory and geography and the sheer weight of them is both brutal and beautiful—like history itself. There are stanzas that are impossible to forget. . . . It is a rare gift, this—to be able to say the hardest things in the most difficult of ways, to be unyielding and unbowed and to be unashamed. It is a wonder to behold, this way of writing that weaves time and place and joy; that notes what has been lost and revels in what might yet come. . . . This work is a catalogue of loss but it is also a tally of what we have gained. It maps the past just as surely as it marks out the terrain of our future. It is a beginning, a way of doing anew what has always been done. This work is indeed a way to ‘sing our resurrection.’”—Sisonke Msimang, author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home and The Resurrection of Winnie MandelaTable of Contents Part 1. Mine: A Litany of Loss Movement 1. Lekarapa Movement 2. Moletelo Movement 3. Makgolwa Movement 4. Black Rage in Swallow Movement 5. Ancestral Suite Movement 6. Lefa la ntate Coda. Unburied Part 2. State of Mine: Deeds Notes
£13.29
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc One Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry
Book SynopsisGiven that the Surrealists were initially met with widespread incomprehension, mercilessly ridiculed, and treated as madmen, it is remarkable that more than one hundred years on we still feel the vitality and continued popularity of the movement today. As Willard Bohn demonstrates, Surrealism was not just a French phenomenon but one that eventually encompassed much of the world. Concentrating on the movement's theory and practice, this extraordinarily broad-ranging book documents the spread of Surrealism throughout the western hemisphere and examines keys texts, critical responses, and significant writers. The latter include three extraordinarily talented individuals who were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Andre Breton, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Like their Surrealist colleagues, they strove to free human beings from their unconscious chains so that they could realize their true potential. One Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry explores not only the birthTrade ReviewOne Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry is at once an anthology and a beautifully accessible handbook, providing guidance, insights and information on essential aspects of surrealist theory and practise. From automatic writing and objective chance to mad love and black humour, the topics explored are exemplified by astonishing poems and oneiric prose from French, Hispanic and Portuguese writers, all translated by Willard Bohn with characteristic flair and empathy. * Peter Read, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts, University of Kent, UK and author of Picasso and Apollinaire The Persistence of Memory (2008) *With his characteristic clarity, as well as formidable aesthetic and linguistic breadth, Bohn has produced a major work for serious students and scholars of Surrealism. Using important examples from many different cultural and theoretical sources, he offers new, wide-ranging perspectives on the origins and later history of the movement throughout the world. He also presents close readings of several key texts, many of which incorporate, and often surpass, analyses published by some of the most influential critics (Riffaterre, Bonnet, Balakian, Jenny, Caws, Murat ) who have worked on these often mysterious, enigmatic works. I highly recommend it, therefore, to anyone working in comparative literature, art history, even film studies, thanks to his explanations of surrealist images in a variety of art forms. * Stamos Metzidakis, Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature, Washington University in Saint Louis, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. André Breton and Automatic Writing 2. Revisiting the Surrealist Image 3. Paul Eluard and Surrealist Love 4. Surrealism and the Poetic Act 5. José María Hinojosa and Early Spanish Surrealism 6. Federico García Lorca 7. J. V. Foix and Catalan Surrealism 8. Portuguese Experiments with Surrealism 9. Octavio Paz 10. South American Surrealists Coda Acknowledgments Bibliography Index
£48.75
Pan Macmillan Chorale at the Crossing
Book SynopsisWhen Peter Porter died in 2010 his reputation as one of the greatest Australian poets had long been settled. Chorale at the Crossing gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his widely-praised final collection Better than God, and shows a remarkable and capacious mind - apparently furnished with half the contents of Western culture - still working at full tilt, despite the imminence of his own passing. Chorale at the Crossing contains love poems, comic excursions, and meditations on art, death, music and nature, all written with Porter's phenomenal technical facility and immense good humour. Chorale at the Crossing is the last word from one of our wisest and most compassionate poets - and is, quite simply, necessary reading.
£9.49
Pan Macmillan The River in the Sky
Book SynopsisA single book-length poem, The River in the Sky sees Clive James face up to his final moments of life with all the wisdom, lightly-worn erudition and good humour that defined his extraordinary career.Close to death for a number of years, Clive James wrote about the experience in a series of deeply moving poems. In this volume, we find him in ill health but high spirits. Though his body found him bound to his Cambridge home, his mind was free to roam. On a grand tour of 'the fragile treasures of his life', James is animated by powerful recollections. He presents a flowing stream of vivid images, moving from emotionally resonant personal moments, such as listening to jazz records with his future wife, to unforgettable encounters with all kinds of culture: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sits alongside 'YouTube's vast cosmopolis'. James shares his passions with enormous generosity, making brilliant, original connections and fearlessly tackling the biggest questions: the meaning of life and how to live it. In the end, what emerges from this autobiographical epic is a soaring work of exceptional depth and feeling.'The River in the Sky is superb, an epic lament, written in late life, filled with exact and moving observations about life and culture' – New York TimesClive James (1939–2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collection Sentenced to Life and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, both Sunday Times bestsellers. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook, and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy. Praise for Clive James:'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times'Wise, witty, terrifying, unflinching and extraordinarily alive' – A.S. Byatt, critic and author of Possession: A Romance'Clive James is a true poet' – Peter Porter, London Review of BooksTrade ReviewClive James’s book-length poem The River in the Sky is superb, an epic lament, written in late life, filled with exact and moving observations about life and culture. “If my ashes end up in an hour-glass,” he wrote, “I can go on working.” -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *A collection of intellectual agility, playfulness and high jinks -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, Poetry Books of the Year, 2018 *This ranging poem moves like a river, dawdling sometimes then opening out into its full force. Clive James is gathering a life full of event, people, humour and remorse, books and writing: all now present in the copiousness of memory. It is a book written in the knowledge that death is coming near. It feels, and communicates, the pleasures of being alive in your one inimitable life. -- Gillian BeerClive James delivered another book-length poem from the abyss, The River in the Sky, defying death again while revealing himself to be one of the most vital poets writing in English. -- Christopher Merrill * Paris Review *
£10.44
Graphic Arts Books Gitanjali
Book SynopsisGitanjali (1912) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore and published with a groundbreaking introduction by Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Gitanjali is the collection that earned Tagore the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Yeats discovered Tagore’s work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore’s poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless: “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.” Whether or not we admit it, his words never fail to remind us: to be human is to be vulnerable. “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.” The essence of Gitanjali is humility. Written following the deaths of his wife and two children, the collection unites poetry and prayer in search of peace. Grounded in Hindu tradition, his poems remain recognizable to readers of all faiths and nations. His subjects are love and loss, life and death, belief and despair. Through them, he approaches truth. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.
£6.78
Graphic Arts Books The Gardner
Book SynopsisThe Gardener (1915) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore and dedicated to Irish poet W. B. Yeats, The Gardener is a collection of earlier poems republished following his ascension to international fame with the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Yeats discovered Tagore’s work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore’s poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless. Whether or not we admit it, his words never fail to remind us: to be human is to be vulnerable. “In the morning I cast my net into the sea. I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty—some shone like a smile, some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride. […] Then the whole night through I flung them one by one into the street. In the morning travellers came; they picked them up and carried them into far countries.” In his landmark collection Gitanjali, Tagore explored the realm of the spirit, paring down language to its clearest, purest form. In The Gardener, he gives expression to more worldly themes. Here, he is a fisherman, a restless wanderer, a servant and queen, an observer of life in all forms. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.
£6.78
Graphic Arts Books The Burning Wheel
Book SynopsisThe Burning Wheel (1916) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Published when the poet was only twenty-two, The Burning Wheel captures the mind of an artist at its earliest fertile stage, enthralled with a world either blooming with change or wilting with all-out war. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words. “The Burning Wheel” opens the collection with a kaleidoscopic vision of life and creation, illuminating the poet’s debt to the French Symbolists. “Weary of its own turning,” the burning wheel slows for a moment’s rest. This wheel, both machine and pure, wild flame, is the poet compelled to create, the mind that “[w]akes from the sleep of its quiet brightness / And burns with a darkening passion and pain.” In “Quotidian Vision,” Huxley returns to earth to remark: “There is a sadness in the street / And sullenly the folk I meet / Droop their heads as they walk along.” In these simple, rhyming couplets, the poet channels the verse and vision of William Blake to see, despite the “mist of cold and muffling grey,” a “dead world move for him once more / With beauty for its living core.” The Burning Wheel is a compelling collection from an artist whose poetry is no less remarkable for having gone mostly unnoticed. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Burning Wheel is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
£6.06
Graphic Arts Books Songs of Jamaica
Book SynopsisSongs of Jamaica (1912) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published before the poet left Jamaica for the United States, Songs of Jamaica is a pioneering collection of verse written in Jamaican Patois, the first of its kind. As a committed leftist, McKay was a keen observer of the Black experience in the Caribbean, the American South, and later in New York, where he gained a reputation during the Harlem Renaissance for celebrating the resilience and cultural achievement of the African American community while lamenting the poverty and violence they faced every day. “Quashie to Buccra,” the opening poem, frames this schism in terms of labor, as one class labors to fulfill the desires of another: “You tas’e petater an’ you say it sweet, / But you no know how hard we wuk fe it; / You want a basketful fe quattiewut, / ‘Cause you no know how ‘tiff de bush fe cut.” Addressing himself to a white audience, he exposes the schism inherent to colonial society between white and black, rich and poor. Advising his white reader to question their privileged consumption, dependent as it is on the subjugation of Jamaica’s black community, McKay warns that “hardship always melt away / Wheneber it comes roun’ to reapin’ day.” This revolutionary sentiment carries throughout Songs of Jamaica, finding an echo in the brilliant poem “Whe’ fe do?” Addressed to his own people, McKay offers hope for a brighter future to come: “We needn’ fold we han’ an’ cry, / Nor vex we heart wid groan and sigh; / De best we can do is fe try / To fight de despair drawin’ night: / Den we might conquer by an’ by— / Dat we might do.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.
£7.49
Pan Macmillan Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisAimless Love is Billy Collins’ first compilation of poems in twelve years, and a wonderful successor to his first, the bestselling Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. Aimless Love presents more than fifty new poems together with generous selections from his four previous books. No poet writing today communicates so directly and effectively, and no living poet has managed to both enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and expand it so dramatically: his poems appeal to readers and live audiences across the globe, and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. By turns playful, ironic and serious, Collins’s poetry unearths the wonder in the everyday: in his own words, his poems ‘begin in Kansas and end in Oz’. Weaving the themes of love, loss, joy and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this ‘poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace’.Trade ReviewThe treat of treats. Unlike the wedding guest waylaid by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the reader emerges from encounters with Collins as a wiser and far happier person. -- Geoff Dyer, Books of the Year * New Statesman *This collection of new and selected poetry is a perfect introduction for the reader . . . a wry, understated often dark humour emerges * Belfast Telegraph *
£10.44
Pan Macmillan The Mizzy
Book SynopsisPaul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual it is impossible to summarize in terms of theme, as his interests are too various: there’s an air of ‘the innocence of childhood’ being viewed through the corrective lens of worldly middle age, though, and also of mid-life, its creeping self-consciousness and decrepitude, and the distortions of perception that attend it; confusing encounters with tech, modernity and its accelerated rate of change; satirical excursions critiquing the way business and digital communications have debased language. Farley is also interested as ever in the peripheral and marginal and no-man’s-lands – the lives of others, and their strange occupations; the birds and unsung-by-the-pocket-guides fauna and flora you miss. The Mizzy encapsulates one of poetry’s most capacious and eclectic imaginations.
£13.49
Pan Macmillan Oak
Book SynopsisOaks are some of our oldest companions, and have been rooted in human imagination and language for millennia. Their great, slow lives have always demanded our careful consideration (indeed Virginia Woolf’s Orlando took 300 years over their own quercian epic). Katharine Towers’ new sequence of poems accompanies the oak from acorn to grave, and into its afterlife; playful, lyric and lucid, Oak is also shot through with an ecocritical awareness that renders it utterly contemporary. Towers’ precise eye and gift for sharp comparison allows us to enter into the life of the tree, and the birds and insects and plants it hosts; it shows how its seven ages echo and rhyme with our own, and how, by implication, we may also be tied to the same cycle of death and renewal. Oak wins its power through an extraordinary act of imaginative voicing, and accomplishes the most important work of the nature poem: to take the reader out of themselves, and into the larger world they also inhabit.Trade ReviewInventive, capacious and full of the surprises witnessed only by the truly observant, Oak is an arboreous atlas for our age -- Sasha Dugdale * author of Deformations *In Oak, the poet's life is equal to the tree's, and the two meet in delicate reflection on the page. Like the acorn it begins with, this poem is a plucky epic -- Rachel Genn * author of What You Could Have Won *Oak is the most beautiful thing. A long poem at once fragmentary and whole, with all the sophistication of folklore and all the play of true poetry. Katherine Towers is one of the most original and gifted poets now writing. Her brilliant book is something no other could do, “an outburst of words” so old and English and fresh. -- Conor O'Callaghan * author of Nothing on Earth *
£10.44
Pan Macmillan Embark
Book SynopsisA new collection by Sean O’Brien – ‘Auden’s true inheritor’, and one of our wisest poetic chronographers – is not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential one: there is no other poet currently writing with O’Brien’s intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric, where the larger crises of the planet – the pandemic and the terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them – impact all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still afforded by the imagination – and, through O’Brien’s own exemplary model, of poetry itself.
£10.44
Pan Macmillan Elegies
Book SynopsisIn Elegies Carol Ann Duffy, one of the English language’s best-loved living poets arrays from her own archives, in chronological order, her favourites among her poems on death, grief and loss, drawing on work written over four decades, and adds to her selection one wholly new poem. It makes for a sequence that is warm, vibrant, alive.
£10.44
Pan Macmillan Politics
Book SynopsisIn Politics, Carol Ann Duffy, one of the English language’s best-loved living poets presents from her own archives, in chronological order, her favourites among her poems on the theme of politics and protest, drawing on work written over four decades. Duffy also adds to the selection her poem written for Danny Boyle’s Pages of the Sea memorial for The Great War. It makes for a sequence that is searching, memorializing, healing.
£10.44
