Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisFreedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.Trade Review"Brookins’s debut full-length collection explores what it really means to be free in America, particularly as a Black, queer, trans writer living in Texas; their writing style is urgent and timely while still holding space for the possibility of a life lived on one’s own terms." —Emma Specter, Vogue "KB Brookins’s Freedom House is an unapologetic, forward-dreaming manifesto for a better, shared future." —Chaney Hill, Southern Review of Books

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Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In The Coming of the Little Green Man, his eighth Bloodaxe collection, we enter a world of play and parable – in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders – in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance. Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind? Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, he brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary. His Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009) was followed by Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016).Trade ReviewIf Agard had not already been forged in the roller-coaster aftermath of empire, there would be an urgent need for society to invent someone like him.’ – William Wallis, Financial Times

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Book SynopsisLouis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, following his selected poems, Rogha Dánta (2012), voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium. This new dual-language selection is mainly drawn from two other collections, Cúpla Siamach an Ama/The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar/Crooked Love, with translations made by Louis de Paor with Kevin Anderson and Biddy Jenkinson. It shows a paring back of language and a greater flexibility of form in his poetry, as well as a preoccupation with the passage of time and its implications for both familial and sexual love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence 'Lá dá raibh/One day', which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, collide. This was adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021.Trade ReviewThere is a great deal of narrative play and wit. The imagery is taken from common life as observed at first hand mostly, but transformed by a delight in resemblance and transformation… there is a Chagallian inclusiveness and generosity in the poems that is more than its incidents. The poetry can turn to darkness and the public world as well as to the intimate village or street. -- George Szirtes * Poetry Ireland Review, on The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue *While poetry should always be romantic (there never is a practical reason for the stuff) he always avoided the romanticism of the mushy line and the soft tone and the fuzzy diction. There was always something wire-taut about his work. No floss here. -- Alan Titley * The Irish Times *De Paor has for long been a master of the short lyric in which the literal and the figurative combine in a tight nexus of images that distil the character of a particular individual, relationship or encounter. The highly sensuous poems from the early collections set the scene for a body of work where sight and touch and smell are often invoked and where intense moments or intimate states are exposed by flashes of light or by dramatic physical contrast. The collection Rogha Dánta is a rich representation of the work of a poet who is now in his prime and still producing fresh and challenging poems that speak to and across different generations. It is a mark of major achievement and a sign that there is much more to come. -- Máirín Nic EoinTable of ContentsClár |Contents I Don gcéad ghlúin a mhairfidh tréis 8 | For the first generation to survive bhás na Gaeilge the death of Irish Caora finiúna 12 | Grapes Fuarán 16 | Fountain Iascaire is ea m’athair le ceart 20 | My father is a fisherman by right Cloigíní 24 | Bells Luascáin 28 | Swings II Multi-tasking 34 | Multi-tasking Hataí 38 | Hats off Bóithre 42 | Chaos theory Matamaitic 46 | Mathematics Lánúintí 48 | Couples Bratacha 52 | Flags Iníon Deichtine 54 | Deichtine’s daughter III Lá dá raibh… 56 | One day… IV Luck 102 | Luck Ar Oileán Bruny 108 | On Bruny Island Garbhach, Inis Cara 112 | Garbhach, Inis Cara Aesthetics 118 | Aesthetics Mise agus an leabhar i gCafé na Beatha 126 | The Book and I in Café de la Vie V Macalla 134 | Echoes Pluaiseanna 136 | Caverns Ar cuairt 142 | Visiting Rósanna 146 | Roses Téada 150 | Strings Paidir Ameiriceánach 154 | American prayer Nótaí 157 | Notes

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Book SynopsisWhen Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.Trade ReviewCity's subject matter is urban, the technique a blend of the surreal, expressionist, realist and cubist, the whole thing almost cinematic in its abrupt transitions and dislocations… Most of the lineaments of Fisher's mature work are present in City…a remarkable achievement for a writer in his twenties. He sets out to write about an actual city but to "dissolve" its particulars and make them strange, until it becomes as much an inner perceptual field as a post-industrial Midlands wasteland… 'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more. -- August KleinzahlerFisher stands outside, or alongside, whatever else is happening, an English late modernist whose experiments tend to come off. He is a poet of the city – his native Birmingham, which he describes as "what I think with". He is a redeemer of the ordinary, often a great artist of the visible… His range is large: he suits both extreme brevity and book-length exploration; his seeming improvisations have a way of turning into architecture. The best place to start is The Long and the Short of It. It might look and sound like nothing on earth at first, but then it becomes indispensable. -- Sean O'Brien * The Guardian *Roy Fisher's The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010 should be read by anyone with a serious interest in post-war English poetry. -- William Wootten * Times Literary Supplement *I was proud to be able to choose his Selected Poems, The Long and the Short of It... as my book on Desert Island Discs, and I know that I'll be returning to that book over and over again in the next few weeks and months, now that one of the most important inhabitants of the island has gone. -- Ian McMillan * paying tribute to Roy Fisher *Table of ContentsIntroduction Note on texts The Citizen (1959) From a Citizen notebook (1960) Five city poems: The Fog at Birmingham Midlanders Sea Monster in Hospital Shed Where We Are Lost, Now City (1961) ‘CITY by Roy Fisher’ City (1969) Notes Roy Fisher’s published comments on City Secondary bibliography

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Book SynopsisFairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. The book’s fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz’s thoughts, and pieces of dialogue. A folkloric representation of God and the devil acts as a wry counterpoint, touching on questions of morality. Fairoz is a powerful portrayal of human vulnerability.Trade ReviewShe is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday, so that we accept the miraculous as something we need… the overriding impression is of a deft, restrained language carrying ideas with a metaphysical wit and seriousness. -- Leonie Rushforth * London Magazine *One of the few British Poets whose work could currently be described as essential reading, not least as we try to grasp what fractures of cultural difference might have contributed to the July 7 bombings. -- Tim Robertson * Magma *Europa made the most difference to me as a writer. It showed me one way of writing about trauma and violence, how to circle around a central concern and explore it from different angles […] when I came to write my own poetry about violence I returned to this collection many times to study how it had been done before. -- Kim Moore * The North *Table of Contents11 Driving the devil away 12 In the present tense 14 Indoors 16 Hair 17 What do you do with a heap of stones? 18 ‘It was a house of female habitation’ 20 Questions in the wood 21 The Devil and the gleams 22 The Devil’s soup 23 The white cat 24 Not enchantment 25 In the morning 26 Home 27 Fairoz and Annat 29 As summer 30 School lunchtimes 31 Listening to Fairoz and Tahir 33 Pilgrims 35 Does the Devil know what he is? 36 The notice 37 When they meet 39 A story of God and the Devil 40 Ripe 41 Wolves-of-the-woods 42 What runs under her skin 43 She pictures Jannah 44 Absent and present 47 Her absences 49 ‘where the swarm is thickest’ 51 The dark patch 52 The plants 53 It was long ago 54 A conversation 56 A punch 58 Ice age 59 He’s ‘v v sorry’ 60 The short long story 61 The loping wolf 62 A tale reduced to a sliver 64 God’s eyelids 65 This woman will speak to you, he says 67 The bride 68 Gone 69 A task 71 The viewing 71 He was 72 The contest 73 A change 75 Classroom scorpions 77 Cherry stones 78 Who’s there? 79 DANGER 81 The eye 82 She’s heard nothing from Tahir 83 Call him three times 84 What’s real? 85 The Devil’s news 87 Witnesses 89 In the snow 90 Her whole life 91 Urgent question 92 Like a mark on her kameez 93 What she’d like to say 94 The room in her mind’s eye 95 The woods 96 Cold song 97 Her future 98 ‘Over every soul there is a watcher’ 99 My imagined Fairoz 102 Notes and acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisWilliam Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: `He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’ Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw `the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.’ Tomlinson’s take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of `sensuous cerebration’ as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.Trade Review`Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. His quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come.’ - Edward Hirsch

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Book SynopsisHomunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.Trade Review'On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.' - Sean O'Brien

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Book Synopsis**WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019**'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water - fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.one person has the character of dustanother has an arrow for a soulbut their sto ries all endsomewherein the sea 'An invigorating book-length poem' Sara WheelerTrade ReviewAlice Oswald is at the height of her powers in…this electrifying new work… It is out of this world – and in it. It is mythical and realistic, ancient and modern. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *Sometimes the rush of unexpected language is thrilling… It is a wonderfully skilful tarantella of syllables and images… Nobody is Oswald’s most formally freehand work, a fragmentary gathering of murmurings searching for the excitement of new meaning. -- Jeremy Noel-Todd * Sunday Times *[Oswald is] a revolutionary, an eco-poet whose ideas are alive with sensory experience. Her new book, Nobody, is a kind of verse novel which refuses even the conventions of storytelling. * Guardian *[Nobody] is a paean to water, to the fluidity of language and the porousness between beings and stories… Both form and language echo the ceaseless drift, flitting movement and translucence of their uncontainable body…and, as with any memorable trip, the effects of reading Nobody linger in and around the mind long after the experience has passed. * Financial Times *The text (and characters) ebb and flow as mesmerically as the sea, a fluid abstraction that speaks to the power of the ocean. * i *

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Book SynopsisThe University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets. Many of them were members of staff (for instance, Geoffrey Hill), some were students (Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Jeffrey Wainwright, Ian Duhig), others creative writing fellows (James Kirkup, John Heath-Stubbs, Thomas Blackburn, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, David Wright, Pearse Hutchinson and Wole Soyinka among them). The poetry archives in the Brotherton Library are extensive and valuable. The Academy of Cultural Fellows has included Helen Mort, Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo, Zaffar Kunial and Matt Howard. Its long association with the magazine Stand continues. The Brotherton Poetry Prize is the University's latest expression of commitment to poetry as a living art.

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Book SynopsisIn Tristram Fane Saunders' first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are 'trying to tilt toward love', but 'can't help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest’. They discover wry humour in that struggle.Trade Review'Tristram Fane Saunders is a joyfully idiosyncratic new voice in contemporary poetry; cultured, wry, formally adept, and adroitly musical. But what I love most is the deep compassion beneath the play. Many of these poems seek remedy for their suffering beloveds, only to be openly frustrated by their own limitations. These moments of radical kindness and vulnerability completely floored me, and make this a collection to cherish.' - Fiona Benson; 'Before We Go Any Further would be a striking debut on the strength of its formal confidence and original phrasemaking alone; but what separates it from the competition is its shamelessly bold return to a poetry of the imagination, to poetry's old tradition of making it new. These poems see it as their business to make connections, shed light and extend their empathies into the world; that they do so with such originality and flair makes for one of the most purely enjoyable and invigorating first collections I've read in a long time.' - Don Paterson

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry of Mr Minevar is a collection of light reading poems laced with humour, all based on a wide range of subjects from Art, Literature to Science. An ideal birthday or Christmas gift!

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Book Synopsis'High-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich [...] What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct.' - Kayo Chingonyi In myth, the Pillars of Hercules near the Straits of Gibraltar mark the edge of what was then the known world, with the warning Ne plus ultra - No more beyond. Beyond power, beyond the sublime, beyond love, PLUS ULTRA begins where other poetry gives up. Sarah Fletcher's dazzling debut collection pushes at the world, reaching towards the 'beyond' of its title poem to explore questions of power, romance, pain and the sublime. These poems challenge, play and press, but also carry an anxiety around borders: what is 'beyond'? What happens when you reach the boundary and keep going? With a sharp, Plathian interrogative voice Fletcher's poems prowl the bars and night-haunts of Madrid and London, and in rich, mythic language plumb the below-places where discoveries are made, drowned, and left behind.Trade ReviewSarah Fletcher's poems are highly mobile, troubled, troubling, rich and fraught -- Chris Kraus, author * I Love Dick *'PLUS ULTRA is an alarming, accomplished and brilliant first collection. Fletcher's ambition, formal invention, erudition and technical precision offer a compelling scaffold for poems that fizz and flit between vulnerability, wit and a brutal willingness to confront the world, and others, with a dark honesty that is frequently refreshing and, occasionally, genuinely menacing. These are poems that demand the reader's full attention, but that also deliver.' * Ahren Warner *PLUS ULTRA is a wild, exciting, lyrical book, free-associative and narrative at the same time ... Fletcher is a poet of the future, and lucky for us, she's arrived just in time. * Matthew Dickman *Cool, sexy, dangerous and brilliant [...] PLUS ULTRA is essential reading. * Victoria Kennefick *The high-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich poems collected in PLUS ULTRA confirm my long-held suspicion that Sarah Fletcher is engaged in the life-long enterprise of mastering the various things a poetic line can do. What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct. * Kayo Chingonyi *

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Book SynopsisA visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetryBeguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.Trade ReviewI've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power -- Maggie Nelson, author of THE ARGONAUTSThis is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears -- Anne Boyer, author of THE UNDYINGCAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead -- Thurston MooreI can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book? -- Bernadette Mayer, author of MEMORY

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Book SynopsisJohn chose the title-poem for its simple, believable story. The rest accrued in the usual way. He found those now grouped in City of Flowers particularly moving to write. John’s visits to Italy, and the many Italian stories he heard in Florence, influenced him permanently.

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Book SynopsisWell-known as a stand up comic and folk musician, Mike Harding is now equally known for his rich and varied poetry.Music, place, landscape, politics, memories and stories have always been Mike Harding’s creative touchstones, never more so than in ‘The Lonely Zoroastrian’, his first collection since the 2020 pandemic and lockdown, both of which feature in some of the earlier poems in this book.Storytelling is the essence of his work whether telling the true story of a lost city buried under the ice cap, the curse an old Ukrainian woman laid on a group of Russian soldiers or stories from his beloved Connemara like Islandman and St Luke’s Little Summer.From his ‘little shed of words’ here is Mike Harding ‘singing about the dark times’.

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Book SynopsisThe Uyghur people of Central Asia have a long and distinguished tradition of poetry - indeed, their first oral epic was circulating as early as the 2nd century BCE. In the medieval period Sufi poetry flourished, embracing Persian forms such as the ghazal, which spoke eloquently of beauty, love, loss and separation. A major poet, Alshir Navayi (1441­-1501) fully established classical Turkic or Chagatai as a perfect vehicle for poetic expression. Some contemporary poets continue to find inspiration within the traditional forms, while others experiment with a freer style of verse.Uyghur poetry reflects the magnificent natural landscapes where the Uyghurs have lived for two millennia - endless steppes, soaring mountain ranges and mysterious deserts, crossed by the historic Silk Road. It is also shaped by their turbulent past, caught between warring empires or marauding warlords - and their deeply troubled present.The Uyghurs form a minority in China, where the government is now making a systematic attempt to erase their language and culture. Many intellectuals have been imprisoned, and many poets are now writing from exile, including the editor and translator of this volume, Aziz Isa Elkun, who lives in London. Uyghur Poems is not only a celebration of an ancient and vibrant poetic tradition, but also a vital witness to a culture under threat.

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Book SynopsisIn Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place. These poems are a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world. Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 and the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023 Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023, the Laurel Prize 2023 and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023Trade Review'Pirmohamed writes with a flow which is rarely interrupted. She has a fine ear for the musicality in words and knows exactly where a line should turn' -- Susan Mansfield * The Scotsman *'Pirmohamed’s achievements speak for themselves ... each poem is crafted, each word perfectly placed, flowing into one another. Dreamlike, brimming with ideas, it’s a collection that engulfs you, invites you to read more, to discover new jewels on each read' -- Heather McDaid * The Skinny *'In Another Way to Split Water a reader gets to taste arrival before arrival, a form of tenderness that refracts: "an inherited vanishing/through the slit of a dream"' -- Bhanu Kapil'Pirmohamed is an immensely gifted poet' -- Eduardo C. Corral'An electric, taut, and glimmering achievement' -- Aria Aber'You will want to map the navigations of these poems. You will be compelled to orbit their magnetic and inimitable oscillations' -- Shivanee Ramlochan'[Another Way to Split Water] inspired me so much. So many things I will think about differently now, from nature to form' -- Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House'[Pirmohamed's] language flows in elegant, mysterious ways, telling tales of heritage, history and belonging.' -- Toni Velikova, Scottish Poetry Library'An extraordinary collection... it's one that I'm very much looking forward to returning to' * Glass Bookshop Radio *'Another Way to Split Water is an homage to family, the natural world, and storytelling' -- Rebecca Mangra * Room Magazine *'[a] lyrical exploration of stories told and retold, ancestral memories reformed and transformed, and the imagined and reimagined' -- Hari Alluri * Massy Arts *'Lyrical and achingly beautiful... Another Way to Split Water is shot through with love, beauty, and deeply tender moments that live on far beyond the page.' -- Roshni Gallagher * Gutter Magazine *'The poems in this book draw you in with their incredibly vivid imagery of wilderness and water' * Fourteen Poems magazine *'Alycia Pirmohamed's Another Way to Split Water is affecting, refined, and elusive in its invocations of environmentalism, circumventing cliché through sprezzatura' * Raymound Souster Award Panel (Shortlisted, 2023) *'I'm both struck and charmed by the slow progressions of lyric observation and philosophical inquiry throughout... Another Way to Split Water' -- Rob McLellan'Pirmohamed’s writing evokes tender emotions within readers by bringing a voice to those who search for a sense of identity and belonging in multiple places at the same time ... To read her book is to give form to the unappeased diasporic yearning that we continue to come to terms with' -- Michelle Lu * Surging Tide Magazine *'Rich, vulnerable and multi-layered, the poems engage with the subject’s relation to water environments in a climactically and politically turbulent world' * Poetry School *'A long love letter to not just water that takes a multitude of shapes, but also to grief, prayer, girlhood, wind, womanhood, Allah, elks, longing, and departures... The reader's bonding to these poems, in many moments, is meditative, and almost transcendent' * Wasafiri Magazine *'Her narrative is dynamic, a vibrant act of creating, undoing, transforming, and becoming. As you move through the book, the cyclical images of nature, gentle ebb and flow of rivers, rise and fall of storms, reflections of childhood and ruminations on the future, contribute to an emblematic growth of character and voice' * Outcrop Poetry *'Alycia Pirmohamed’s Another Way to Split Water is an exciting debut that explores connections between landscape, language and the body in a series of lyrical poems' * The Saltire Society *

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Book SynopsisKjell Espmark (b.1930) was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University from 1978 to 1995 and has been a member of The Swedish Academy since 1981, serving as Chairman of The Nobel Committee from 1988 to 2004. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, ten novels, and over a dozen volumes of literary criticism. His many awards include The Bellman Prize, The Tranströmer Prize, Il Premio Capri and Il Premio Internazionale Camaiore. He is an officer of L'ordre de Mérite. He has been translated into over twenty languages. Of the Spanish version of his latest book of poetry, Martin Lopez-Vega wrote in El Mundo: "The Creation confirms that we are faced with one of the most important poets of our time." Many of Espmark's poems are dramatic monologues in which the dead, some famous, some anonymous, speak to us, hoping for our attention. Another consistent feature of his poetry, and one which we can see extending over six decades, is the coherence we find within each volume, echoes and cross-references linking poems not only within a single collection but from book to book.

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Book SynopsisA beautiful collection of poems to nourish, inspire and change the women who read them.This transformative collection of poems by female poets through the ages sing to us across the centuries. These poems span the worlds of desire, love and friendship, of responsibility, hardship and care, of family and friends and lovers. Their words empower us with strength and courage, fill us with verve and spirit, and inspire creativity and imagination.Contemporary voices of Fiona Benson and Jane Yeh join the evocative imagery of Christina Rossetti, Anna Akhmatova and Emily Dickinson. Even the haunting voices of ancient Sappho, Venmaniputti and Li Qingzhao touch today's generation. Here are poems written by women, with women's lives in mind. As Gertrude Stein writes, 'such a sweet singing' is in the poetry that comes to us clear and lovely from out of the dark. Read these poems aloud. Remember them. Share them.Trade Review‘Lavishly and strikingly illustrated, this book of poems holds at least eight times its weight in thirst-slaking nourishment.’ Northwords Now

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Book SynopsisI am in bed with you. The room varies. But I'm always on the left. I am pulling the pieces of myself into myself. In the winter I left myself behind in the 90s. I'm coming back now. You can see the light touching me. I can see layers of tissue finally making a body. And once I have a body I have a head. And in my head are these thoughts. -From 'I am in bed with you' Playful and fluid but completely serious, Emma Barnes's surreal phantasmagoria I Am in Bed with You leads us through the very personal worlds of sex, gender and the body. Barnes cracks jokes, makes us uncomfortable, shows us a little tenderness, leaves a lot unsaid and does it all with language that provokes and confounds. 'I'm a mentally ill, / married, chronically ill, queer woman with two feet underground', the author reveals. 'I birth Sigourney Weaver's android baby', they tell us next. This collection is personal and fantastical, funny and excruciating. It's poetry in the process of unravelling most of what you thought you knew.Trade Review'I Am in Bed with You signals the arrival of an extraordinary talent. Not only does Emma Barnes have the brainpower to interrogate notions of personal identity and interconnection incisively as we enter the 2020s but the sense of humour to see the comedy in our conundra and the emotional range to grasp the heartbreak in our yearnings, conflicts and confusions. Packed with quotable bons mots, quirky observations, agony aunt tips, enigmas and apophthegms, this is a book that rewards frequent re-reading.' -- Iain Sharp; 'From the first line of 'This is a creation myth', this work is stubbornly brave. Barnes stomps with bright boots over the territory of motherhood, womanhood, gender, and - unquestionably and timelessly - Sigourney Weaver. Everything is new and a little bit disgusting.' -- Sophie van Waardenberg

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisProudly staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's début pamphlet, Paper Doll, strikes the poetry landscape as disruptively as a meteor scars earth with its impact. Documenting a shape-shifting existence between activist and survivor, immigrant and alien, lover and loner, this is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. Having fallen from a building as a child in Bolivia, Katherine seems to have retained an ability to stack images that zip along, only leaving an imprint of their meaning as the poem descends to its conclusion. This quality, combined with a contrasting directness makes reading Paper Doll a profoundly affecting experience. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, “she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does.”

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Book SynopsisPoems about the universe: from the sub-atomic level to the cosmic, from bacteria to complex life and exoplanets.The physicist Richard Feynman challenged poets to step aside from metaphor and capture the stark magnificence of the universe. Spurred to action, James Thornton opened himself to wonders and dived deep into the intricacies of science.Let his poetry open your eyes.Complete with an essay on Poetry and Science.Trade Review"In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue." - Edward O. Wilson"A brilliant introduction to the endless wonders of our universe, from quantum levels to the cosmos. It opened my eyes to many marvels and oddities." – Eberhard Fetz, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics, University of Washington"Poets sometimes flinch at the idea of footnotes. Poems, they think, should be perfect small worlds of their own. The Feynman Challenge upends this aesthetic. Like the Pompidou Centre, it wears all its workings on the outside. Plunging into the sea of scientific knowledge, it comes up grinning and glittering with droplets of lovely information. This is a generous book, happy to serve the curiosity, the wonder and humility of science, happening here and there in words that simply send a shudder -Two black holes are about to marry, a billion years ago - through our sense of time and space." – Philip Gross, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize Table of ContentsContentsIntroductionCensus of deep lifeEmbodied semanticsOf mice and scorpionsRumination and forest bathing A dozen ways to make a living The future of clouds The jaguar sometimes bites Symbiont real estatePáramosThe apex predator guildYour inner fishTomb blossomsLong ago and under water Traumatic matingsQuartet with parasitesThe dead fish of ChadThe lodgerLike milkshakesHungry daughtersThe rolling of the dungballHead of glassFringed with teethE.O. Wilson’s favourite antEminent BritonsAerial warsPenis EnvyThe news about NeanderthalsConquering EarthA century of gorgingA bulletin from our branchWarm wet and quantumNew equilibriaThe rules of lossSpat 1ChiropteransCount those lostCoelacanths among usQ is for cryptographyRingdownThe end of time Too few to fill the skyNever forget red dwarfs The biggest star Cosmonautika A time will come By grace of the solar wind A map of peculiar velocities

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Book SynopsisImperfect Beginnings lays its poems out to rest on uncertain terrain. Visa paperwork deadlines hang in the air. New-borns, torn too early from their mother's breast, learn to adapt to harsh guardianship. Belonging and exile are mirrored in the stories of having to leave one's birthmother-or motherland. From narrative poems such as 'My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis', Fogel takes us on a journey throughout history, spanning ancestry, wartime, adoption and peacetime, as life settles. Family, work, love and the natural world provide purpose, meaning and a sense of coming 'home'.

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Book SynopsisThis collection features one hundred poems selected by award-winning poet Jordi Larios. Keenly aware that we measure the world through words, he also knows that words become worn with use, and that poetry recalibrates their instrumentation, injecting them with fresh focus for graphing elusive terrains of inner and outer experience, prodding us to encounter and engage the world in a way that sustains and renews the self. Each Larios poem is a magnet, impacting us with the infixed force that its reading unleashes, subtle yet powerful in its imagery. A seagull, unfazed by the ‘crisis of the sunset,’ declares life on a greying backdrop (‘Rough Weather’), and desolate landscapes can set the scene for unexpected solace (‘Cold,’ ‘Historical Present’): pulling sunken memories to the surface and bringing poetic imagery into alignment with points of inwardness in search of outward counterparts. Along with the subtle power of imagery, Larios blends into his poems an uncanny marshalling of words, reassigning them to posts of optimal meaning and musicality. Technique underlies the poems, but the resulting art is greater than the sum of words, lifting language above ‘the clattering of / too many words,’ which, bereft of poetry, only render us alone (‘Man Alone’).Trade Review‘Larios seeks the essence and purification without glitter or shrillness because “the voice that gets heard is often the softest.” A great book to read.’ —ENRIC UMBERT-REXACH, NÚVOL.

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Book SynopsisOut for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARDTrade Review'Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. Like the pro skateboarder whose world is here uniquely evoked, Todd approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. These often balladic poems are gorgeously wrought and idiosyncratic, scored with the subterranean rhythms of Cumbria, California and London. The air of the book is at once as intimate as its city nightcaps and as expansive as its bay vistas. When I read Todd's poems I feel more a part of the world, the textured interaction of time and place, the 'afternoons julienned / Into cigarettes, cider trips', 'the circles we insist on travelling'. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.' SAM BUCHAN-WATTS;'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of skateable road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.'MARTHA SPRACKLAND; 'Olly Todd's wonderful Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' WILL BURNS; 'It's really weird, as I am reading Olly's poems I am engaging with a part of my brain I forgot existed. It's kinda like when you try a mindfulness app and the narrator asks you to focus on or pay particular attention to eating, say, a nut or a raisin. Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' NICK JENSEN; 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD; 'Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own' Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisIn the title poem of Katherine Meehan's debut collection, Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery and Other Poems, the poet presents an examination of losses, failures, and griefs, all of them tempered by an unusual humour. Grounded in the particularities of location, these poems wander between urban and rural spaces, from Los Angeles and Appalachia to the English home counties. Glass eels, Grendel's mother and a host of nameless 'losers' are given voice as the collection explores the tension between the futility of the speech act and its necessity.Trade Review'Katherine Meehan is a master at turning the mundane into the transcendent. Her first collection, Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery is rich with sensual detail and striking imagery, it moves between countryside and city, fog and bright light, grief and joy. The spectre of loss haunts these poems, both in the form of grief and in delicately wrought eco poems that fear for what is yet to be lost. This is a collection of many colours, populated by trees and insects, monsters and complicated humans. There is a whirlwind of biblical floods, "the smell of rotten lamb's blood" and "all the hickories, their limbs encased in silk as if by fog." There is also, incidentally, the most atmospheric poem about a dishwasher ever written. Do not miss this fleet of perfectly made poems, give them the chance to haunt you.' - Phoebe Stuckes; 'It's an impressive trick to pull off: poems which seem both spacious and confidential at the same time, poems like doors opened into new worlds of irony, or else closed to stay - though not cancel - a constant melancholic hum. This is a brilliant, detailed collection, unafraid to address weighty matters, the whole dang thing, with wit and a hard-won understanding of loss' - James Womack

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Book SynopsisA speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG. At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.Trade ReviewAfter the triumph of RENDANG, Will Harris takes us in this captivating new collection to a place altogether stranger, where the self is polished to a blur and memory a series of forking paths: 'Each time / you forget & remember the experience / becomes truer.' With uncommon brilliance and linguistic originality, this is a book that unpicks the myths we weave around ourselves as individuals or as nations. Harris is a poet I turn to for the solace of an idea perfectly caught. These are poems to dwell in; they challenge and restore. -- Sarah Howe, author of Loop of JadeIn Brother Poem, Will Harris questions the real in everyday life and words, through crumbs of the past, crumbs of experience, through absence and loss, through media harm, 'cloudless dream,' and 'river mind,' migrating in the lines-what to say and how or to whom to address it? When the spirit moves as they do in these poems to you, carried forth in 'I-not-I' and others, bound by Harris's scopic reach and cortical hum, crackling like lightning in a jar, released into our cells of shared feelings, we jubilate. -- Jeffrey Yang

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Book SynopsisEge Dundar is a young poet and activist from Turkey, forced to relocate to London and Berlin unable to return home for over seven years. His debut poetry collection, written in English, dives into the pain and longing that loss brings, contrasted by the beauty of all that has been found. Relating his experience with the struggle for human rights and a wider exodus of self-discovery, Dundar holds on to poetry when a titanic darkness descends and lights shine through minuscule cracks.''Space unveiled ahead, a quietude akin to death, a blue cocoon behind, vacuumed, like the shelter that is a breath.'

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Book SynopsisA new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.Trade Review“This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a less than magnetic hamlet.” – Will Alexander, Pulitzer finalist for Refractive Africa and author of The Contortionist Whispers “you know, i am the giver/back of sound.” This bardic claim could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history’s storm. His song pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript, indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and shed light. That’s the sad note in this “gravy-to-cradle” threnody, this “lunged-up thud tender.” Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions, like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly on its wing, or on its song?” — Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne “I can hear Abraham Smith’s voice intoning in his breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a backbeat for music that these poems conjure up.” – Charlie Parr, Smithsonian Folkways recording artist and author of Last of the Better Days Ahead “Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read his work and thrill to hear him read it in person.” – Margo Price, Grammy nominee, Farm Aid board member, and author of Maybe We’ll Make ItTable of ContentsCONTENTSTHE INSOMNIAC SENTINEL 7THEY PAINT 16SHELL LIFE 22DOUBLE VISION 29BRAKE 4 CRANES 35NATOMY 41WHY DANCE 47RIVER BLUES 56IN TIMES OF LOVELY LOVE 68IN KEY OF WISH RABBIT SINGS 74HOODWINK AUBADE 80YOUR ANCIENT & FRANKLY BREAKING UNDERWEAR 90WESTFIELD 95PURPLE MOUTH LIFE 106TOUCHSTONE BLUES 109WHY EAT WHY KILL 121

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Book SynopsisStill Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.Trade ReviewIn “Elegy for the Road,” Tatiana Orono writes, “Poetry is the place where the things go that have no solution.” Her book, Still Life with Defeats, provides the solution I didn’t know I needed. What gratitude I feel to Jesse Lee Kercheval for this inspired translation. Without it, we’d be bereft of Orono’s taut, compelling poems, rich with sly surprise and haunting imagery. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Tatiana Oroño’s place amid the motherlines of Uruguayan and Latin American poetry is beyond dispute; in Kercheval’s English translations, Oroño’s svelte lyrics are revealed to be in conversation with a litany of English-language poets writing before and alongside her, from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe to Cathy Wagner. This is the poetry of cosmic concentration, in which any object, any syllable, no matter how domestic or mundane, becomes a doorway on the Infinite by being so resolutely itself. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade Tatiana Oroño's Still Life With Defeats is, like all good poetry, an attempted response to those questions that seem unanswerable. A search for unity underpins these poems, a quest for ultimate meaning, but, as in a still life painting of varied objects, there remains a gulf that cannot be bridged, a chasm that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. These poems represent an ongoing movement toward finding the connection and wholeness shared by all living things. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval has joyfully accompanied the author on this journey; uniting passion with precision, she preserves the dazzling complexity of the original while continuing to ask the questions that have no easy answers. —Jeannine Pitas, translator of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio

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Book SynopsisThis prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023. Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.Trade Review“Alexei Parshchikov's ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ (1989), an important postmodern historical poem imbued with parodic touches, sheds a new light on Pushkin’s Poltava and its legacy. It challenges Pushkin's mythologised portrayal of the Great Northern War by presenting everyday life in late twentieth-century Poltava through the prism of palimpsestic imagination influenced by Russian cultural memory.Donald Wesling's excellent translation of Parshchikov’s ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ animates effectively the playful space created in the poem through the powerful use of metaphor, associative language and surreal overtones. Wesling shows an exceptional sensitivity to Parshchikov’s exuberant language and renders the performance-like quality of the poem exquisitely. Parshchikov’s concerns with the inevitability of change, the importance of place and the power of language to transform realities embedded in this poem make his version of the historical event—reimagined in a decolonising manner—highly appealing to the readers of the 2020s.”— Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh“When Alexei Parshchikov, perhaps the greatest poet of the Russian perestroika generation, died prematurely in 2009, he could not know that Ukraine, where he had spent much of his childhood and youth, would one day rise up against its former rulers. It was in the Battle of Poltava (1709), that Russia first seized control from Charles XII, the King of Sweden of the territory in question. Parshchikov’s brilliant Poundian ‘poem including history’—as well as geography and ecology—juxtaposes superbly surreal battle scenes with the quiet meditations of the poet, cultivating, on the site of the former battlefield, his garden, with its apricot trees, its ‘long-nosed field mice’ and ‘fruit-honey grog,’ and celebrating Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian opposition fighter, and his sweetheart Marfa Kochubey. In Donald Wesling’s excellent rhymed-verse translation, which dissolves into free rhythms in the course of the poem, Parschikov’s brilliant and highly original imagination lives again. It could not be more apropos today!”— Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics“One of great poetic achievements of the 1980s, Parshchikov’s long poem appears, in Donald Wesling’s ambitious new translation, startlingly of our time—not just because of its dismantling of Russian imperialist myths but also because of its insistence on the multifarious resilience of language in the face of its misuse and of the horrors of wars, past and present.”— Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media“From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, Ukraine has been periodically destroyed by those who would own it. Among these blood-soaked backstories, the three-way struggle between Peter the Great, Sweden’s Charles XII, and the treacherous Ukrainian Cossack Mazepa in 1709 has long been pan-European lore. In this ‘historical-geographical-ecological’ evocation by the Russian metarealist Alexei Parshchikov, the poet is tending his garden on the site of the battle. Knives, bits of cannon and bone, snatches of sexual violence and the Tsar’s largesse emerge from the black earth. Sacrificial lambs and mosquitos look on. Donald Wesling’s spectacular rendering into English, reflecting subtexts in Pushkin as well as the late Soviet poetic underground, is formally audacious and so tightly constructed that the reader can’t breathe. Exactly what is required today.”— Caryl Emerson, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsFrom the TranslatorINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE, WHICH TELLS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS1.1. The Origin of Weapons1.2. The First Cannon1.3. The Lamb Tells about the Feud of Two Brothers, Who Attempted to Catch Him for Sacrifice, and about How a Knife was Born1.4. The First Business Retreat, Written in My Garden, Located on the Field of the Battle of PoltavaCHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE 2.1.2.2. Point of View of the Observer2.3. Charles XII2.4. Ivan Mazepa and Marfa Kochubey2.5. No Saxophone Slung over the Shoulder2.6. Mosquito2.7. Copper Framework: Second Business RetreatCHAPTER THREE: THE TSAR REWARDSNotes

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextOsip Mandelstam: “Centuries encircle me with fire”On Translating MandelstamОсип Мандельштам (1891–1938)Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)Из книги «Камень» (стихотворения 1908–1915)From Stone (poems of 1908–1915)Дано мне тело—что мне делать с ним . . .I am given a body—what should I . . .Я ненавижу свет . . .I hate the light . . .Паденье—неизменный спутник страха . . .The fall is a constant companion of fear . . .Айя-СофияHagia Sophia. . . На луне не растет . . .. . . Not a single blade . . .ПосохThe WandУничтожает пламень . . .The fire destroys . . .Из книги «Tristia» (стихотворения 1916–1922)From Tristia (poems of 1916–1922)ДекабристA DecembristКогда в тёплой ночи замирает . . .When a feverish forum of Moscow . . .Прославим, братья, сумерки свободы . . .Hail, brothers, let us praise our freedom’s twilight . . .TristiaTristiaНа каменных отрогах Пиэрии . . .On steep stony ridges of Pieria . . .Сёстры тяжесть и нежность, одинаковы ваши приметы . . .Sisters, heaviness and tenderness, your traits are akin . . .Вернись в смесительное лоно . . .Go back to the incestuous womb . . .Веницейской жизни, мрачной и бесплодной . . .The meaning of fruitless and gloomy . . .За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать . . .Because I could not hold your hands in mine . . .Из книги «Стихотворения» (1928 г., стихотворения 1921–1925 гг.)From Poems (1928, poems of 1921–1925)С розовой пеной усталости у мягких губ . . .With the pink foam of fatigue around soft lips . . .ВекThe AgeНашедший подковуThe Horseshoe FinderГрифельная одаThe Slate OdeЯзык булыжника мне голубя понятней . . .Clearer than pigeon’s talk to me is stone’s tongue . . .А небо будущим беременно . . .And the Sky is Pregnant with the Future . . .1 января 1924January 1, 1924Нет, никогда, ничей я не был современник . . .No, I’ve never been anyone’s contemporary . . .Я буду метаться по табору улицы тёмной . . .I’ll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street . . .Из Новых cтихотворений 1930–1934 гг.From New Poems of 1930–1934Армения1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12Armenia1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12На полицейской бумаге верже. . .On the police laid paper the night. . .Не говори никому . . .Don’t tell it anyone—forget . . .Колючая речь Араратской долины . . .A prickly speech of the Ararat Valley . . .Как люб мне натугой живущий . . .How dear to me are those people . . .Дикая кошка—армянская речь . . .A wild cat—the Armenian speech . . .Я скажу тебе с последней . . .I will tell you this, my lady . . .За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков . . .For the thunderous courage of ages to come . . .Нет, не спрятаться мне от великой муры . . .No, I won’t be able to hide from a great mess . . .НеправдаUntruthПолночь в Москве. Роскошно буддийское лето . . .Midnight in Moscow. A Buddhist summer is lavish . . .Отрывки из уничтоженных стихов1 | 2 | 3 | 4Excerpts from Destroyed Poems1 | 2 | 3 | 4Еще далеко мне до патриарха . . .I am far from being as old as patriarch . . .Сегодня можно снять декалькомани . . .Today we can take decals . . .ЛамаркLamarckИмпрессионизмImpressionismБатюшковBatiushkovДайте Тютчеву стрекóзу . . .Give Tiutchev a dragonfly . . .АриостAriostoНе искушай чужих наречий, но постарайся их забыть . . .Do not tempt foreign tongues—attempt forgetting them, alas . . .Квартира тиха как бумага . . .An apartment is quiet as paper . . .Давай же с тобой, как на плахе . . .Let’s start preparing for the scaffold . . .Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны . . .We live without feeling our country’s pulse . . .Восьмистишия1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Octaves1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Стихи памяти Андрея БелогоTo the Memory of Andrei BelyУтро 10 января 19341 | 2 | 3The Morning of January 10, 19341 | 2 | 310 января 1934 [вариант 2]January 10, 1934 [version 2]Из Воронежских тетрадей (стихотворения 1935–1937)From the Voronezh Notebooks (poems of 1935–1937)Из Первой тетрадиFrom the First NotebookПусти меня, отдай меня, Воронеж . . .Let go, Voronezh, raven-town . . .Я должен жить, хотя я дважды умер . . .I have to live though I died twice . . .Лишив меня морей, разбега и разлета . . .Having deprived me of seas, flight, and space . . .День стоял о пяти головах. Сплошные пять суток . . .The day was five-headed: five unbreakable days . . .Еще мы жизнью пóлны в высшей мере . . .We are still sentenced to life . . .Римских ночей полновесные слитки . . .Solid gold bars of the Roman nights . . .За Паганини длиннопалым . . .They run like a gypsy throng . . .Исполню дымчатый обряд . . .I’ll fulfill a dim rite . . .Из Второй тетрадиFrom the Second NotebookНе у меня, не у тебя—у них . . .Not I, not you—but they . . .Улыбнись, ягненок гневный с Рафаэлева холста . . .Smile, angry lamb from Rafael’s canvas, don’t rage . . .Дрожжи мира дорогие . . .World’s golden yeast, our dear . . .Еще не умер ты, еще ты не один . . .You haven’t died yet. You are not alone . . .Что делать нам с убитостью равнин . . .What should we do with murdered plains . . .Вооруженный зреньем узких ос . . .Armed with the vision of narrow wasps . . .Из Третьей тетрадиFrom the Third NotebookСтихи о неизвестном солдатеVerses on the Unknown SoldierСквозь эфир десятично-означенный . . .Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes . . .Для того ль должен череп развиться . . .Should the skull develop its brow . . .Для того ль заготовлена тара . . .Is the packaging of charm stored . . .Я молю, как жалости и милости . . .I beg like compassion and grace . . .Я скажу это начерно, шёпотом . . .I will say it in draft and in whisper . . .Может быть, это точка безумия . . .It might be the point of insanity . . .Не сравнивай: живущий несравним . . .A living man’s unique: do not compare . . .Чтоб, приятель и ветра и капель . . .To help a friend of rain and wind . . .Гончарами велик остров синий . . .A blue island, green Crete is extolled . . .Длинной жажды должник виноватый . . .A guilty debtor of a long-time thirst . . .О, как же я хочу . . .Oh, how I madly crave . . .Нереиды мои, нереиды! . .My nereids, oh, my nereids! . . .Флейты греческой тэта и йота . . .Greek flute’s theta and iota . . .На меня нацелилась груша да черемуха . . .I’m under fire of a bird cherry tree and a pear tree . . .[Стихи к H<аталии> Е. Штемпель]1 | 2[Poems for N Е. Shtempel]1 | 2AbbreviationsBibliographyPublications of Works by Osip E. MandelstamTranslations into EnglishTranslations of Osip Mandelstam’s Poems into Other LanguagesCriticism

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Book SynopsisIndie Rock candidly focuses on a queer poet/musician’s life in Newfoundland and his personal struggles with addiction, OCD, and trauma. This intelligent and punchy collection is steeped in musicality and the geographies and cadences of Newfoundland. With an astute attention to form, rhythm, and aesthetics, Joe Bishop tells an honest and contemporary coming-of-age story about an artist alienated from, but fascinated by, the world he inhabits. Readers dealing with grief and living through recovery will find solace in these poems, as will those conflicted by faith, curious about the rigid confines of masculinity, or yearning to hear a voice like theirs in verse. At its core, Indie Rock is about keeping records, an artist’s compulsion to make art, and the power of love and imagination to overcome death.Trade Review"Joe Bishop’s poetry comes with its own musical accompaniment. You feel his rich, rhythmic poems as much as you read them. All of life is there, manifested in a musicality of language that’s as bewitching as it is transcendent. I defy you to pick up this stunning collection and resist turning each page until you’ve read all the way through." Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings"Bishop's lyrics chronicle sexual exploration amidst Newfoundland music and folklore. Indie Rock has the volume jacked, and these poems pulsate and blister long after the show's over." Aidan Chafe, author of Gospel Drunk"Indie Rock is a significant contribution to the poetry of contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador—an edge-y book, one to place on your shelf alongside Joel Hynes and Megan Gail Coles. Moving between hard-driving staccato rhythms and more meditative cadences, these poems reflect the struggles and highs of a gay musician making his way in downtown St. John’s. In the process Bishop takes a good smack at many of the cultural stereotypes manifested in our writing and our music; many of the pieces have a bracingly sardonic tone. As well the book brings into itself the brutal energies of seascape and landscape. Here is a strong and highly distinctive debut." Mary Dalton, author of Red Ledger and MerrybegotTable of ContentsI Patrick Street on St. Paddy’s Day Live at The Battery Carpentry Devil-Ma-Click After a Three-Month Friendship After Our AA Meeting Quitting Conception Bay Woman Don’t Worry About Me, Mike II Parade Street Duo (April Fools) Time-Lapse (First Sleepover) Medley for My Banshee Barely Audible Lament Lowdown, Lowdown We Idled at the Ship Boxing Day (Cabin Fever) Ash Wednesday III Remembrance Day Canada Day Pyro Yankee Boys of Argentia Dance Song Farm Museum Fundraiser Heave-Up Song Dirty Newfoundlanders Evening on Livingstone Street Gary Laps at the University Pool Gooseberry Cove Jinker Root Cellar Blues Young Feller’s Tale Little Sea-Song IV Overture Saltbox Digger Arty Relative Enlightened Poets dissociative song Outsider Art Celluloid Tango Danny Boy I Believe He Would Believe Me Not Completely V Victoria Day in Heart’s Delight Touching Lines Father’s Day Inherited Thumbnail Nuclear Runoff Off Season Pitch Release Pinnacle Or scrupulous music East Coast Trail, Midnight Notes Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art — Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision. Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself. Trade Review“Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” -- Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star, Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” -- Joe Enns * British Columbia Review *

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Book SynopsisThis prize-winning historical-lyrical poem of 1985, on the unequal power-relations between Russia and Ukraine, darkly resonates in 2023.Alexei Parshchikov's long historical poem, which dates 1985, is one of the major literary documents of the last years of the USSR. Alexandra Smith, in an article of 2006, has called it "perhaps the most important achievement of Russian post-perestroika poetry." Its significance is historical in its irony towards Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden in their 1709 battle at Poltava and towards the writer's own dual allegiance to Ukrainian soil and the Russian language. While all previous translations of parts of the poem are in free verse, translator Donald Wesling here carries over the rhyme and meter of the original whole poem. To aid the reader, this volume contains the Russian text, and also the translator's commentary and notes.Trade Review“Alexei Parshchikov's ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ (1989), an important postmodern historical poem imbued with parodic touches, sheds a new light on Pushkin’s Poltava and its legacy. It challenges Pushkin's mythologised portrayal of the Great Northern War by presenting everyday life in late twentieth-century Poltava through the prism of palimpsestic imagination influenced by Russian cultural memory.Donald Wesling's excellent translation of Parshchikov’s ‘I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava’ animates effectively the playful space created in the poem through the powerful use of metaphor, associative language and surreal overtones. Wesling shows an exceptional sensitivity to Parshchikov’s exuberant language and renders the performance-like quality of the poem exquisitely. Parshchikov’s concerns with the inevitability of change, the importance of place and the power of language to transform realities embedded in this poem make his version of the historical event—reimagined in a decolonising manner—highly appealing to the readers of the 2020s.”— Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh“When Alexei Parshchikov, perhaps the greatest poet of the Russian perestroika generation, died prematurely in 2009, he could not know that Ukraine, where he had spent much of his childhood and youth, would one day rise up against its former rulers. It was in the Battle of Poltava (1709), that Russia first seized control from Charles XII, the King of Sweden of the territory in question. Parshchikov’s brilliant Poundian ‘poem including history’—as well as geography and ecology—juxtaposes superbly surreal battle scenes with the quiet meditations of the poet, cultivating, on the site of the former battlefield, his garden, with its apricot trees, its ‘long-nosed field mice’ and ‘fruit-honey grog,’ and celebrating Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian opposition fighter, and his sweetheart Marfa Kochubey. In Donald Wesling’s excellent rhymed-verse translation, which dissolves into free rhythms in the course of the poem, Parschikov’s brilliant and highly original imagination lives again. It could not be more apropos today!”— Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics“One of great poetic achievements of the 1980s, Parshchikov’s long poem appears, in Donald Wesling’s ambitious new translation, startlingly of our time—not just because of its dismantling of Russian imperialist myths but also because of its insistence on the multifarious resilience of language in the face of its misuse and of the horrors of wars, past and present.”— Jacob Edmond, author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media“From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, Ukraine has been periodically destroyed by those who would own it. Among these blood-soaked backstories, the three-way struggle between Peter the Great, Sweden’s Charles XII, and the treacherous Ukrainian Cossack Mazepa in 1709 has long been pan-European lore. In this ‘historical-geographical-ecological’ evocation by the Russian metarealist Alexei Parshchikov, the poet is tending his garden on the site of the battle. Knives, bits of cannon and bone, snatches of sexual violence and the Tsar’s largesse emerge from the black earth. Sacrificial lambs and mosquitos look on. Donald Wesling’s spectacular rendering into English, reflecting subtexts in Pushkin as well as the late Soviet poetic underground, is formally audacious and so tightly constructed that the reader can’t breathe. Exactly what is required today.”— Caryl Emerson, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsFrom the TranslatorINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE, WHICH TELLS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF WEAPONS1.1. The Origin of Weapons1.2. The First Cannon1.3. The Lamb Tells about the Feud of Two Brothers, Who Attempted to Catch Him for Sacrifice, and about How a Knife was Born1.4. The First Business Retreat, Written in My Garden, Located on the Field of the Battle of PoltavaCHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE 2.1.2.2. Point of View of the Observer2.3. Charles XII2.4. Ivan Mazepa and Marfa Kochubey2.5. No Saxophone Slung over the Shoulder2.6. Mosquito2.7. Copper Framework: Second Business RetreatCHAPTER THREE: THE TSAR REWARDSNotes

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the YearAstrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.Trade ReviewA symphony o yotuns, peedie suns and langships tae Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles hauds the starns in the loof o thier haun, terraformin new warlds in Scots. (A symphony of giants, miniature suns and longships to Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles holds the stars in the palm of their hand, terraforming new worlds in Scots.) -- Matthew FittDeep Wheel Orcadia is a mysterious and moving novel in verse about finding home in the farthest reaches. Giles lifts us to new worlds, in space and in language, we could never have imagined. A singular and numinous work -- Morgan M Page * author of One From the Vaults *I can't remember the last time I was this beguiled, this engrossed and this inspired by a book. It's like nothing else I've ever read. It was a joy to feel so entranced by the possibilities and complexities of each and every word. Harry Josephine Giles is a true original and a vital voice – don't miss this. -- Kirsty Logan * author of The Gracekeepers *

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