Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisShortlisted, Nelson Ball Prize Longlisted, Raymond Souster Award Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Poetry)Daring in form and unflinching in its gaze, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s latest poetry collection examines madness as lived experience and artistic method. Taking inspiration from Al Jaffee’s illustrated fold-ins in MAD magazine, Tysdal explores living with mental illness through a new kind of poetry: the fold-in poem. In this innovative collection, each poem does not end at the bottom of the page; instead, the reader is invited to complete the poem by folding the page to reveal the final line. From the effects of being “smiled into an elephantine line” at Pearson International Airport to the rites of official memory and forgetting at a baseball game in the aftermath of tragedy, Tysdal probes both his own psyche and the myriad environments that work to enfold those who are deemed mad.Trade Review“Daniel Scott Tysdal has done what I would have thought impossible: he’s written beautiful, musical, language-y — maddeningly to die for — poems about a life haunted by constant thoughts of killing yourself. Far from being a downer, The End Is in the Middle is playful and exuberant, a testament to poetry and art pro viding sustenance when all else seems hopeless. In Tysdal’s hands, poetry is indispensably alive and in the middle of everything.” -- Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic“Like the finest origami, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s The End Is in the Middle crimps and pleats new worlds into life. Each piece invites us to climb mountains and ford valleys along the way, rewarding us with “the possible infinity of enclosures opening on their only impossible escape.” New textures and relations unfold between each crease, producing a work that is masterful, unruly, haptic, and gorgeous.” -- Adrian De Leon, author of barangay: an offshore poem“The End Is in the Middle does the serious, revolutionary, and indeed playful work of poetry. It uses the irreverent and legendary MAD magazine fold-in form to subvert the effects and residues of mental illness in deftly crafted and incisive poems. These unique poems function on multiple levels: puzzle, physical object, art, testimony, and, snake-folded upon themselves, a map to what else could be true. Their speaker searches insistently: How might we “gather while hunted?” Warring for peace, raging against oblivion, fighting for love? And what else is humanity, if not these?” -- Tolu Oloruntoba, author of Each One a Furnace“At the corner drugstore, each new issue of MAD would come out, the last page already folded numerous times by those who got there before me (buying the fresh unfolded copy). Daniel Scott Tysdal is that rarest of birds, he is nothing but heart. This rugged terrain could readily crush most, those who lack the gravitas, good meds, or a decent pair of sneaks. Only a playful lover, a jester, The Fool themself could wield such rococo tactical hullabaloo. In flares. I dare you not to fold every fucking page of this book. Go on. I dare you. I’m simply mad about the boy.” -- KIRBY, author of Poetry Is Queer“Tysdal creates and inhabits a space where Mad magazine and madness rub against one another, where his students and Eurydice, John Clare and B-movie monsters and filmmakers belong to the same web of connection and where poetry is survival.” -- Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen * Winnipeg Free Press *

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Book SynopsisThe “insistence” in this poetry is how the language calls out the adjacency to its own presence. Each careful syllable feels right next to what surrounds it. A drum hitting out its own “unbridled association.” — Fred Wah"This is where history began again/where some were told it insisted/itself into a lifelike violence.” Eclectic, darkly fascinating, and at times apocalyptic, Only Insistence is a protean book where lines and phrases echo back on each other, where images of the natural world are bookended by investigations that delve deep into memory. In this ethereal world, the poet interrogates his relationship with his father, realigns his idea of family after the birth of his son, and bears witness to the isolation, paranoia, and surrealism of the onset of the beginning of the pandemic. Here pandemic-era streets are “beaches in early April/Bright and bleached and barren” and a lake is “a rage of waves eroding rocks to a pebble beach,/each small stone confident in immanent restoration.” At times languid, at others cunningly sculpted into towering metaphors, Lindsay’s rich metaverse experiments illuminate a world that rewards close attention with infinite possibilities.Trade Review“Only Insistence reads as a dream might — each disclosure an unfolding, with its own tightly crimped folds waiting to stretch. James Lindsay develops a language of confessions that pour out beyond their boundaries, as ‘dashes of colour clustering’ through ‘slits of vision’ can knit what's behind a slatted fence. It is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope, where bodies are known by what crowd their edges, and coldness is known by how ‘piercing light prods the blue, [...] low and whispered,’ where many geographies of are explored compellingly, and softly as water tests a shoreline. I enjoy how Only Insistence is irreverent in its disdain for borders and discrete bodies, in the same way a dream urges us to revisit its many meanings, the ‘flurries it promises.’” -- Tyler Pennock, author of Blood

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Book SynopsisIn 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan’s Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson’s childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in My Reef My Manifest Array. That totemic image of exile feeds an interest in borders and partings that runs throughout the collection. The Cornish landscape of the poet’s childhood, loaded with new significance following the death of his sister, is Wilkinson’s primary locus, but he ventures – flees, perhaps – farther afield, to Portland (Maine), Chicago, Sydney and Busan. Combining extended sequences with brief lyrics, Wilkinson’s lines tie minuscule linguistic knots that give pleasure when unwoven. The reading becomes archaeological as layers and layers of meaning, of feeling, of reason are exposed.Trade Review'These poems knock the head around enough to cause whiplash.' - Nathaniel Mackey

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Book SynopsisSeated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in- / fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely present, spots of time which vivify him and his past. Through memory and poetry he experiences revelation of a Christian depth. England is a familiar yet now a foreign country: the author having written for years in French. 'English becomes / a strange tongue echoing readily with names / gainrising with the new-born world they name.' Distinct recollections open into one another, restored and changed in language. Music and painting, too, are evoked as windows on this world. The book includes ninety poems organised into thirty sections, each with three poems which are free-standing yet connected, speaking together. His English takes its bearings from the stress patterns of Anglo Saxon prosody. Not only the poet but his language itself returns to its beginnings.

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A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.

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Book SynopsisA Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.Trade Review'These poems are utterly distinctive, there is something at once proud and sad in them, as the reader senses that Tenderfoot loves but stands outside what he loves.' - Sasha Dugdale; 'Chris Beckett's poetry is highly original [...] The language is always fresh and surprising' - Daljit Nagra

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.Trade Review'Horrex has an imagination that's both wayward and precise, matched by the way she uses words: every line feels unpredictable yet somehow inevitable. None of her poems sound like anyone else's: things open up when she writes about them. This is more than a matter of skill - it's about the rigour with which this poet sees her feelings and her ideas through into language.' - Patrick McGuinness; 'Katherine Horrex's is unmistakeably the voice of now: uneasy, ironic, apocalyptic.' - Caitriona O'Reilly

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Book Synopsis'Borel was the sun,' said Théophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

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Book SynopsisMichael Edwards returned to the English tongue for his last book of poems, At the Brasserie Lipp (2019), after years as a French-language author. English revived many nerves of memory, and in Another Art of Poetry he explores them further, in ten chapters, each consisting of continuously numbered sections. There are 194 sections, so we can read the book as a continuous sequence, as ten discrete poems, or as single lyrics and epistles interspersed. There is something Augustan about the approach, humorous, alert, like a series of letters and reflections spoken to us. The formal variety of the sections reminds us how well Edwards knows his Eliot, Williams, Pound, his David Jones; he understands modernism and the other resources that inform the grateful poets who value our European and wider traditions. ('The godsend of influence.') Originality has to do with origins. 'Everything has been said,' he begins, 'and we come / just at the right moment.' His English re-visions once familiar landscapes in Wivenhoe, in Paris and elsewhere; it finds his antecedents, it restores access to belief and transcendence. Doorstones, an additional full collection, bridges the gap between At the Brasserie Lipp and this ars poetica.Trade Review'At the Brasserie Lipp, I am convinced, represents contemporary English poetry at its best' - Igor Vishnevetsky, Russian poet and film-maker

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Book Synopsis'Partial Shade' is the common gardening term for plants that in fact need a measure of sunshine. In John Birtwhistle's poems, there is a continual play of light and shadow – and even glimpses of 'full sun'. This selection from his own work does not follow chronology. It is an entirely fresh ordering, in which poems converse and argue with each other across the years. Lines about politics, parenting, mortality, art (and love, 'that bookish theme') are plaited together, intimate yet distinct. Partial Shade is a new book for new readers. It makes available poems from out-of-print collections, as well as substantial new poems. The rhythm varies from lyric and narrative poems to 'haiku-like miniatures: agile, mobile and eventful' (Hugh Haughton). 'John Birtwhistle is a marvellously versatile intellectual gadfly of a poet. No sooner do we think that we know his manner, his theme, than he is off elsewhere, teasing, amusing, throwing out possibilities like sweets strewn along a woodland path.' (Michael Glover) The poetry is distinguished by deep feeling conveyed with visual precision, careful phrasing and formal clarity. Peter Jay writes of 'These lucid, witty, tender poems, full of felicitous surprises and unexpected turns of imagination', whilst Imtiaz Dharker finds them 'So rich in scope and style, with surprising shifts and echoes'.Trade Review'an ambitious and original poet, not afraid to take chances' - John Heath-Stubbs

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Book SynopsisIf you do not release yourself from what has gone how will you hold onto what is coming?Let go of the things that let you go.An inspirational contemporary collection of words, prose and illustrations providing short, thought-provoking daily prompts for positivity, hope, happiness, and encouragement. Be the Light honours the beauty of our scars and celebrates the strength that lives inside us all.Broken into six themes: Believe in Your Power, Let Yourself Be Seen, You Deserve Happiness, Healing Old Wounds, You Are Enough and Never Underestimate Your Strength, each chapter starts with a short commentary on the theme and is followed by reflective words to encourage the reader to examine their own personal story.Each chapter features short prose and poems alongside Cay's uplifting illustrations.

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Book SynopsisOur mother's clouds and insects fly to embrace your clouds and insects. Her architecture, roads, bridges and infrastructure rush to greet yours. Her molecules on their upward trajectory entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes, hair and skin. Her language, with its past participles, figures of speech, the sounds and tremors which are its flesh and bones these words go out to greet your words and to greet you - these words which will never leave her. House & Contents is a moving meditation on earthquakes and uncertainties, parents and hats, through Gregory O'Brien's remarkable poetry and paintings.Trade Review'Since I taught Greg O'Brien almost forty years ago, his writing has matured and developed in cunning and wisdom; but it is still the work of the writer as I first encountered him. His combination of visual and verbal art was and is extraordinary. Greg loves beautiful things, and creates them of words and in paint. He has established his identity as poet, craftsman, painter, a sort of impresario of aesthetic order-in-disorder. Admired both at home and abroad, he is unique among New Zealand poets in the way he combines his two arts and makes them one, each enhancing the other. Bright, fresh and surprising, bordering on the surreal yet peculiar in its literalness, House & Contents is a challenge to the reader - one of rare quality and true originality.' - C. K. Stead

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Book SynopsisI was Dick. I teased Anne and George. I was Edmund, betrayed my friends for a sweet. Something rotten in me. — from ‘My childhood’ In his third poetry collection, award-winning poet Tim Upperton takes us to the end of the driveway, over the Manawatū – twisting like an eel – and on to Topeka and Paris. These are poems of acid wit (‘I have been to Paris / and apart from the architecture / and the food and some very fine cemeteries / and of course the language / it’s quite like Palmerston North’), intimations of loss (‘The wrong life cannot be lived rightly. I should know’) and unexpected resolution (‘like pollen, / like grace so available nobody wanted it’). Unpredictable and restive, A Riderless Horse stands in the everyday and then runs with it.Trade Review‘I greatly admire Upperton’s virtuosity as a poet (so much variety of tone, form and feeling) – and how much of the world he manages to get into his poems. This arresting, sometimes zany, sometimes mordant collection will further add to his literary standing.’ — Harry Ricketts

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Book SynopsisFrom the South Auckland Poets Collective to regional writers festivals, at poetry slams and open mic nights, in theatre works like Show Ponies and Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, performance poetry has taken off in Aotearoa. In this anthology, ninety performance poets, rappers, spoken-word artists, slam poets, theatre makers, genre blenders and storytellers come together to celebrate the diverse voices and communities within Aotearoa – including Ben Brown and Mohamed Hassan, Grace Iwashita-Taylor and Tusiata Avia, Nathan Joe and Dominic Hoey, Freya Daly Sadgrove, David Eggleton and Selina Tusitala Marsh. Rapture is a parallel narrative about contemporary poetry in Aotearoa – one that doesn’t just sit on the page, but leaps from it.

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The world has a way of getting into you; these poems document the process of prying it out. Whether that be from an ash tree’s trunk or a rabbit’s warren, or behind an abandoned shipping container on the way to work, or in a dusty noiseshow basement, Good Listeners leads you through the afterlife of trauma and disability. You will meet many strangers to guide youinto a world where you may suddenly find yourself coping.

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Book SynopsisA Path of Shadows is writer and mountaineer John Porter's first poetry collection. Exploring the natural world, family ties and physical science as well his climbing life, A Path of Shadows is a reflection of Porter's sharp and broad intellect, and of his desire and ability to express his feelings, beliefs and life experiences through poetry

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Book Synopsis“A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.”—Booklist“Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones.”—Elle“[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New YorkerNAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDan aunt teaches me how to tellan edible flowerfrom a poisonous one.just in case, I hear her say, just in case.From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a

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Book SynopsisA Bird''s Idea of Flight describes a circular journey in a sequence of 25 poems. Twelve poems chart the outward journey, the thirteenth is pivotal, and twelve poems bring the traveler back. The subject of his quest is thanatology; in particular, he is deeply curious about the business of his own death. It is an adventure of discovery and disillusionment, during which the figure of death, as companion, mentor and guide, appears along the way, and in various guises.

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Book SynopsisA dual-authored volume of poems from the multi-award winning Dickman twins - leading voices in America''s outstanding generation of younger poets.Although the brothers extol differing inspirations (Matthew writes with the ebullience of Frank O''Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Michael with the control of William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson), they are unified by the unflinching, remarkable verse they wrote when their older sibling tragically took his own life. It is these moving, grieving but life-affirming poems that solely comprise this dual-authored volume. Published in an inventive tête-bêche edition, the poems appear head-to-toe, communing in the middle, making Brother a searing but ultimately up-lifting journey of grief, love and family.''Michael''s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew''s are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, sp

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Book SynopsisDoves is Lachlan Mackinnon's most candid and affecting volume of poems to date, and follows on from Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010. Formally dexterous and inventive, these inclusive, approachable poems welcome all-comers in their broad-minded address: refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, a marriage. Wherever it turns, the poetry remains courageously sociable and moral, ever concerned with honouring lives and good deeds, and asking what can be saved from the ruins of what is lost by individuals, cultures and civilisations. But for all its outward gaze, its cares speak privately too of crises in personal action and belief, of friends and intimacies disturbed and renewed and, underpinning it all, an urging to account for our behaviour and to start to answer / to ourselves for what we have made of life.'Doves is an uplifting account of recovery that makes n

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Book SynopsisExhilarating fourth collection of poems from the ''intriguing, funny, prophetic'' man of letters Mark Ford.

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Book SynopsisMichael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most respected poets one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century', TLS is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world. One Lark, On

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Book SynopsisN.B. No men were harmed in the writing of this list.

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Book SynopsisA magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet.

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThere’s magic here, a towering and welcoming imagination, the best kind, the kind that takes your hand into strange places, knows that fear makes sense, and helps you see what’s here. * The Boston Globe *Strange and sly, the poems in Mikko Harvey’s collection Let the World Have You are mocking, hopeful, and entertaining … Moving from the absurd image to the sharp and piercing comment, Harvey’s poems are always a pleasure here. * The Miramichi Reader *Dazzling, heartfelt poems populated by inventive narrative and uncanny imagery. Let the World Have You is a treasure trove of playfully serious odes to being. -- Mark Leidner, author of Returning the Sword to the StoneMikko Harvey is a poet with a quirky sensibility. To me, his casual, melancholic, funny poems are like sugar water for the hummingbird. -- Henri Cole, author of BlizzardMikko Harvey’s Let the World Have You is a catalog of (im)possibility that makes the dead world new again … Offering a language for our shared bewilderment in this life, this is a vulnerable work, equally brutal and gentle as it keeps turning toward the most remarkable things. * Orion Magazine *

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Book SynopsisMalcolm Guite’s eagerly awaited second poetry collection includes poems that seek beauty and transfiguration in the everyday; sonnets inspired by Francis and other outstanding saints; poems centred on love, parting and mortality. A further group, ‘Word and World’, searches for the life of the spirit in the midst of modernity and includes an ode to an iPhone, while others wrestle with the problem of evil and the difficulty of prayer. Throughout, the poet seeks to celebrate the world of which he is made, find heaven in the ordinary and echo a little of its music.Trade Review'The Singing Bowl celebrates the recovering of what was never lost. Over and over, Malcom Guite invites us to rediscover what is most constant. These poems are a mantra, a chorus, a celebration and a lyrical reminder to pay attention to what is most important.' -- Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Book Synopsis"Poetry is the antagonist of denial. Complicating the familiar world purely with the evidence of eye and insight, it insists upon the Spirit of things, even as life desolates our spirits with coarse familiarity. Pam Rehm, in this magnificent book of Showings, reveals new content and new contours in the breaking day. Her voice is a guide and guarantor." -Donald Revell

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his “Stalin Epigram” in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to Mandelstam’s consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however, they also bear the marks of Mandelstam’s attempts to somehow reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts and in the memory of Mandelstam’s wife and executor, Nadezhda. Alistair Noon’s translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018, with two further volumes, in 2022 – the current volume and Occasional and Joke Poems. His own poetry has appeared in two collections, Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press, and a dozen chapbooks from various presses. He lives in Berlin. Praise for Concert at a Railway Station “To my mind this is the best Mandelstam ‘selected’ yet and belongs on the bookshelves of everyone with an interest in 20th-Century Russian verse.” —Ross Cogan, Poetry Wales “Alistair Noon’s translations of Mandelstam are an important contribution to the study and appreciation of this vital writer.” —Anton Romanenko, B O D Y “Noon daringly replicates Mandelstam’s formal stanzas, using slant rhymes with a zingy freshness of diction that stops the poems from ever sounding like trans-lationese.” —Henry King, Glasgow Review of Books The cover design is based on that for the Soviet Museum Bulletin published in 1930 by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and designed by artist Boris Ender. Ender also designed the cover for Mandelstam’s children’s book, Two Trams, in 1925.

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Book SynopsisThe Feels The Moon & My Soul is a collection of raw vulnerability. Covering topics of self-love, self-accountability, love, heartbreak and more. Each page you flip is a different story. Some you may find yourself in and some you may sympathize with the pain the writer endured. It''s a collection of poems, journal entires, quotes, and free thoughts. Take a ride, one with many emotions, and discover how beautiful it is to love and let go.

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Book SynopsisThough still in his mid-twenties Jacob Polley is already in possession of a remarkably mature talent. Formally graceful, but unself-conscious, his poems come at the reader from all angles, wholly alive to the unique possibilities of their subjects - the sea, the land, the home, the very brink of things. This debut collection gives us the first opportunity to see his transforming imagination in action, where a jar of honey becomes '... the sun, all flesh and no bones / but for the floating knuckle / of the honeycomb / attesting to the nature of the struggle'.

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Book SynopsisWhile Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O’Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before. With Downriver, his fifth collection, O’Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain - and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisSelected Poems by John Pudney (1909 - 1977)

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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

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Book Synopsis''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, New Yorker''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''m made of murderers I''m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother''sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book''s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and pTrade 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 *

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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

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Book SynopsisSpanning fifty years of work, Collected Poems sees Clive James make his own rich selection from across his exceptional career in poetry.From his debut collection in 1986 to his dazzling achievements in the 2010s, Clive James steadily built his reputation as one of the nation's best-loved and most highly-acclaimed poets. In this selection, made by the author himself, the very best of his talents are on show.From his early satires to heart-stopping valedictory poems, Clive James proves himself to be as well suited to the intense demands of the tight lyric as he is to the longer mock-epic. Included is perhaps amongst his finest works, 'Japanese Maple', a poem which became a global sensation upon its publication in the New Yorker.Collected Poems displays James's fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope, his lightly worn erudition and his emotional power; it undoubtedly cements his reputation as one of our most versatile and accomplished writers.'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesClive James (1939–2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collections Sentenced To Life and Injury Time and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, a Sunday Times bestseller. 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. Trade ReviewJames writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force * The Times *A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone -- Robert McCrum * Observer *After writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured * Independent on Saturday *He is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *A verse highlight of my year -- Keith Bruce * Herald *

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