Modern and contemporary poetry

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 SynopsisBlending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures. These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’ and Carl Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’: through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight. Amali Gunasekera was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She works in the field of Archetypal Psychology. After living in Mozambique, Kenya and India, she is now based in Cumbria. Her first collection, Lotus Gatherers, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 (under her former name of Amali Rodrigo).Trade ReviewAmali Gunasekera's second collection is a beautiful examination of the separateness and union of "I" and "You", rooted in an English pastoral tradition reminiscent of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Myth, the natural world, the ephemeral beauty of music or the filter of light on a wintry morning, unite to articulate love for the "Beloved". These are masterful poems of intimacy and joy leading to places of stillness and wisdom. -- Shash Trevett * PBS Bulletin *What makes [Gunasekera] a truly remarkable poet? In part, it's the breadth and intelligence of her vision (and broad and intelligent it certainly is, taking us to Japan, Kenya, the North Pole; from Kintsugi and Ikebana to whirling dervishes and meteor showers); in part, the deftness with which she can work that vision into a world we can marvel at, but also recognise. This is a world of paradoxes - exotic and familiar, a deeply spiritual world which delights in passion; that celebrates love, but does not hesitate to focus on unsettling histories of gender violence. Lotus Gatherers is an astonishingly sensual book, in the literal sense – these are poems we can feel; poems we can hear resonating on the page, aromatic poems, laced with breathtaking imagery; poems we can hold up to our lips and taste. -- John Glenday * on Lotus Gatherers *The first full collection from [Amali Gunasekera] – a poet who has lived between Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Kenya and India – is both formally sophisticated and impressively diverse, reflecting the breadth of cultures and traditions informing its contents. -- Daisy Lafarge * The Poetry Review *A native of Sri Lanka, [Gunasekera] writes complex iridescent poems that sidestep any routine post-colonial interpretation...This is beautiful work, unlike anything out there, wonderfully alive and so deserving of wider attention. -- Conor O'Callaghan * Poetry, The Reading List *Table of ContentsKasturi Mrugam 11 I Reading James Merrill at Curwen Woods 14 Worry Doll 20 Beloved 28 Variation on the Fact of Spring: One for Sorrow Two for Joy 35 II from Nine [Miscarried] Methods 48 III Spiegel im Spiegel 56 Bend in the River 63 Variations on the Fact of Spring 69 The Great Pause 80 Bonsai 89 Notes 93

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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 SynopsisThese intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of 21st-century living are explored here in poems by turns lyrical and earthy, yearning and angry. They mine gold from the darkness and seek luminescence in the deepest oceans. Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewVisionary, luminous and haunted, Jessica Traynor’s poems are home to a host of compelling characters: witches, changelings, the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Quick, even the grotesque is rendered with subtle delicacy – a woman whose “lungs fold like an origami bird”. These poems will give you goose-bumps. -- Helen Mort * on The Quick *Written with a lightness of touch, these poems are capable of dealing with the big themes – especially those of birth, death or illness…this poet [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary re-thinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own. -- Siobhán Campbell * Poetry Ireland Review, on The Quick *Traynor is a master at delineating these almost imperceptible but vital changes…Traynor’s fine delicate lyricism belies a social consciousness that subtly bleeds through several poems. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times, on The Quick *Table of Contents11 Pit Lullaby 12 Megalodon 13 Anatomy Scan 14 In the Birthing Room 15 Metaphysical Breast Milk Poem 16 Ophelia in Ballybough 19 Midwinter 20 Pit Lullaby II 21 A Plea for the Sanctification of the Ditches of Ireland 23 Child you cut me open 24 What It Takes 25 Patchwork Quilt 26 If You Can Tame a Wildcat, You Can Raise a Baby 27 Pit Lullaby III 28 On Poisons 37 Pit Lullaby IV 38 In the Wrong Place 39 Forecast 41 On Plastics 43 Supermoon Trifecta 45 Walrus 46 Men are Talking 47 Pit Lullaby V 48 An Island Sings 56 Pit Lullaby VI 57 The Signs 63 Pit Lullaby VII 64 Nureyev in Dublin 66 Holidaying with Dad During the Divorce 67 Dad Cars 69 Pit Lullaby VIII 70 Milk Teeth 71 Lessons 72 Zodiac 73 Rock Pool 74 Turbulence 75 Pit Lullaby IX 77 Hungry Ghost 80 Bilbea’s Response 81 Lock Years 83 Onion Poem 84 In the Bathroom Showroom 85 Hunting Lions 86 Hawthorn 87 Night Run 88 Pit Lullaby X 89 Lullaby 91 Notes 93 Acknowledgements

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

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Book SynopsisHot on the heels of her previous collection Men Who Feed Pigeons, Selima Hill's Women in Comfortable Shoes is her 21st book of poetry, presenting eleven contrasting but well-fitting sequences of short poems relating to women: Fishface: A disobedient young girl is sent to a Catholic convent school to give her mother a break. My Friend Weasel: The 50s. A girls' boarding school where the girls are somehow managing to make new friends. Susan and Me: On friendship. Two close friends, one of whom, Susan, is heading for a nervous breakdown. Dolly: Dolly is a duck. The other 29 women are, in their various ways, human. My Mother with a Beetle in Her Hair: A daughter's passion for swimming – despite of her mother hating every minute. Fridge: Lorries, geese and fridges speak of death, grief and absence. My Spanish Swimsuit: A daughter fears her rabbit-trapping father.. The Chauffeur: A pair of bad-tempered sisters, a parrot and a cat. Girls without Hamsters: An older woman's obsession with a spider-legged young man. Reduced to a Quivering Jelly: Vera is old, and getting older, but she doesn't seem to care. Dressed and Sobbing: A woman is surprised to find herself getting older and lazier. The book is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewThe collection is by turns surreal and direct, but always arresting. Her trademark humour is present throughout, but its wit can often surprise the reader, conveying truths in hilarious and sometimes shocking ways. The judges were impressed by Selima's mastery of the portrait in miniature - one of the judges calling her 'the UK's Emily Dickinson'. -- Forward Prize judges * on Selima Hill's Men Who Feed Pigeons *Like the authors of the classical epigrams that are these poems’ ultimate model, Hill uses a spare, brief span that can give gravity to light matters as well as supporting the weightiest. Hill’s poems, however small, feel complete. -- William Wootten * Literary Review, on Men Who Feed Pigeons *Born in 1945, Hill might be the heir to Stevie Smith: both are wholly original voices who pay no heed to anyone else’s idea of what a poem should be; funny writers whose humour can leave the reader startled, puzzled or uneasy as often as amused. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph, on Men Who Feed Pigeons *Table of ContentsFishface 25 My Mother with a Pair of Scissors 25 The Green Bear 26 Ponies 26 The Boiled Egg 26 Good Morning, Reverend Mother 27 Wasps 27 Real Cherries 27 Edith 28 The Blessed Virgin Mary’s Ears 28 Melted Chocolate 29 What Other Things? 29 Mother Mary 30 Mountaineering 30 People in Taxis 31 What to Wear in Bed 32 My Mother on the Verge of Tears 32 Lambs 33 Clocks 33 The Man in the Veil 34 The Toot of the Jag 34 The Word Laburnum 35 Rounders 35 Ants 36 This Nasty Chair 36 Switzerland 37 Fishface 37 Zvuv 38 Notes My Friend Weasel 40 Perfection 40 The Plait 40 The New Assistant Matron 41 Flamingos 41 The Daughter of the Chauffeur 42 My Mother Visits My Father 42 Gravel in Our Hair 42 The Pilot 43 Those Who Love Their Fathers 43 The Queen 43 What We Do After Church 44 One Hot Day 44 Tennis 44 Horses 45 The Shimmering Plains of Africa 45 Golf 46 Out of Reach in Their Enormous Coats 46 Hula-hooping on the Log-shed Roof 47 Rabbit Pie 47 Hairbrushes 47 Brigitte Bardot 48 Summer Term 48 Sherbet Lemons 49 People at a Cat Show 49 Mosquitos 49 Lights Out 50 My Friend’s Uncle’s Tortoise 50 Young Ladies 50 Rudolf Nureyev’s Hair 51 Swimming in the Lake 51 Sunday 52 Mothers, Mothers, Mothers 52 Candelabra 52 Summer 53 Violets 53 Fleas 53 Marriage 54 Mouse 54 End-of-term Concert 55 Train 55 Toilets, Waterloo Station 55 Uzbekistan 56 The House Susan and Me 59 The New Girl 59 Her Bedside Locker 59 The Horse 60 Her Late Mother’s Mason Pearson Hairbrush 60 Like Painted Barges 60 Without Sin 61 A Man with a Palm 62 The Love of One Potato for Another 62 The Blood-stained Mower 63 Disobedience 63 Her Green-and-white-striped Dress 64 The Lesson 64 Sailing 65 Acne 65 Flapjacks 65 Pig 66 Her Father’s Car 66 The Art Galleries and Churches of Central Europe 67 Her Little Suitcases 67 Along the Fringes of This Dazzling World 68 Bedsit 68 Solid as a Rock 69 Curd 69 Tinned Fish Dolly 73 When I Was a Girl I Was Adorable 73 Mother Mary 74 Olivia on the Coach 74 Mrs Potter the Cook 75 Georgina’s Mother 75 My Friend Eva 76 Lucinda in the Wood 76 Great-Aunt T. 77 Miss Gee, Matron 77 Bernadette Upstairs 78 Doctor Kay 78 Mrs Lawrence, Landlady 79 Sophia, Prefect 79 Cousin Helen 79 Miss de Vos, Headmistress 80 Marta My Room-mate 80 Kitty in Term-time 81 The Woman on the Mountain 81 Mrs A., Abandoned 81 Carlotta, the Pianist 82 Lizzie, Widow 82 Jean, Out-patient 83 My Friend Annie 84 Edna in the Loo 84 Penny in the Opposite Bed 84 Billie My Rival 85 Angelina, My Tutor 85 Isabel, My New Boss 86 Dr Davey 86 Linda My Mother with a Beetle in Her Hair 88 Owls 88 My Uncle the Doctor 89 My Mother’s Hands 90 The Man with Tiny Books 90 Winter Afternoons at the Pool 91 My Mother Wearing More than One Coat 91 The Pool Attendant at Night 92 The Man Who Looks Like a Baby 92 The Woman from the Nail Bar 93 Walnut 93 The Girl Who Stroked Cows 94 Her One Desire 94 The Stranger on the Bus 95 Different Kinds of Honey 96 My Mother’s Daughter 96 The Bony Woman with the Tiny Waist 97 My Mother and the Sheep 97 Looking at Each Other’s Breasts in the Changing-room 98 My Mother as a Daisy 98 Café in the Snow 99 The Man with Snow-white Skin 100 A Woman with a Bunch of Red Roses 100 Having Fun with Babies 101 An Old Man Blue with Cold 102 The Woman with the Plait 102 Rabbits 103 Friday Night at the Swimming-pool 104 The Man in Purple Swimming-trunks 104 The Photograph of My Dog in My Duffle-bag 105 A Very Dark Blue 105 The Silent Couple No One Really Knows 106 The Woman in the Salmon-pink Underwear 106 Delicate Questions from the Young Doctor 107 Expensive Swimwear 108 No More Potatoes Fridge 110 The Beach 110 Rabbits 111 Tiny Children 111 The Letter 112 Other People’s Mothers 112 My Father Dreams He is a Lorry 113 Men with Saws 113 Standing in the Presence of My Father 114 My Father’s Roses 114 My Father’s Death 115 A Dream of Forgiveness 115 Kate 116 Being Fast Asleep in the Daytime 116 J.J. 117 M. 117 My Friend H. 118 Getting Used To It 119 Babies with Buckets 120 The Person in the Drawing-room 120 The Goose 121 How To Be Tidy 121 Maybe I Should Give It a Try 122 My Mother Playing Tennis 123 Babs 124 The Dead 124 Telepathy 125 The Room 126 Her Being Dead My Spanish Swimsuit 128 The Earwig 128 My Little Sister 128 The Box of Assorted Plasters 129 Tea on the Lawn 129 My Father, God 129 Betrayed 130 Saluki 130 Shadow 130 Which Is Worse? 131 My Pet 131 Smarties 131 Adults 132 My Mother and Small Children 132 Courting 132 Ringlets 133 My Father 133 Rabbits 133 The Head of the Table 134 The Girls in the Churchyard 134 My Spanish Swimsuit 134 Shoulders 134 Yes to the Carpenter 135 My Father’s Rabbit 135 I’m Sorry It Has Had to Be Like This 135 Moths 136 My Girlfriends’ Boyfriends 136 My Father is Right 136 The Lonely Dog in the Empty House The Chauffeur 139 Tiny Girls Singing Hymns 139 Girls in Shorts 139 The Draughtsman 140 Fish 140 Shells 141 The Land of Fun 141 My Sister’s Bedroom 142 Ducks 142 Rotty the Rottweiler 143 Smile, Smile 143 Marquetry 144 I Send My Sister Cards 144 Smile, Smile, Smile 145 The Wedding-dress 145 In the Hotel Bedroom Something Soft 146 Hippo 146 Ann 147 The Suitcase 147 Tommy 148 Those Who Choose Not to Have Husbands 148 Our Sparkling Eyes 148 Queue 149 My Sister’s Nipples 149 Tinkle, Tinkle 149 Tea-time 150 She Moves Away 150 Horses’ Ears 150 St Petersburg 151 The Photograph 151 Wild Horses 152 Georges 152 Lips 152 Gladioli Girls without Hamsters 1 | Dancing Lessons for the Very Shy 156 The Visitor (1) 156 Dawn 156 The Little Beanie 157 The Handsome Spider 157 Tiny and Forlorn 157 The Visitor (2) 158 The Sofa 158 The Wasp 159 The Top Two Things I Like About You 159 The Bath (1) 159 I Know It Isn’t Right 160 Cats in Crates 160 The Most Important Thing 160 A Person with a Key 161 The Visitor (3) 161 The Crane 161 The Ginger Cat 162 Us 162 The Fly 162 The Suitcase 163 Elephants 163 The Man with a Pomegranate 163 The Coat 164 The Giraffe 164 The Hat 165 Tenderness 165 The Visitor (4) 165 When I Saw You in the Street I Fled 166 Silence 166 The Man I Mustn’t Meet 166 The Path to the Woods 167 Knees 167 Although You’re Shy 167 The Dachshund 168 The Snail 168 What I Did When I Saw You Again After So Long 169 Swimming at Dawn 169 Attention 169 The Bath (2) 170 Her Only Son 170 Violins 170 Your Rock 171 Peacefully Tucked Away 171 My Life With You 171 One Hundred Words 172 Never Love a Mathematician 172 Grasses 173 Precious Jewels 173 Most of the Time 173 Socks in the Snow 174 If You Were a Pig 174 Everything Makes Me Think of You 175 The Enchantment 175 Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal 175 The Visitor (5) 176 In a Calm Way 176 The Person on Our Right 176 The Rat 177 Articulated Lorries 177 The Bath (3) 177 The Clock 177 Nose 178 Shrieks of Laughter from Inside the House 178 Completely Out of the Blue 2 | My Mother’s Knives 180 T. 180 Mole 180 My Mother’s Knives 181 The Older Woman 181 T.’s Room 182 Bucket 182 Please Forgive Me 183 Tiers of Expensive Trainers 183 I Worry 183 The Visitor 184 Into the Depths of the Sea 184 His Tiny Mouth 185 Through the Damp Woods 185 Bedtime 185 People Won’t Like It 186 Chick 186 Fish 186 Paint 187 What Is Longing? 187 Beetles 187 Heron 188 Certain Older Women 188 Hope 188 A Precious Living Man 189 And To Agree 189 My Father 190 Confessions of a Fly 190 The Courting Spider Purrs 190 Cranny 191 Dreams 191 Mouse 192 Round and Round the Woods 192 If T. Is Like a God 193 When Older Women Talk About Their Lovers 193 Legs 194 Every Time You Move 194 Cranefly 195 T. on the Beach 195 When He’s Quiet 195 Dog 196 My Obsession with T. 196 The Acrobat 3 | The Passion Fruit Hotel 198 Record-breaking Kisses 198 My Mother and Hotels 199 The Passion Flower Hotel 199 The House on the Hill 200 And Be Ye Lift Up, Ye Everlasting Doors 200 My Mother Was Right 200 The Lovesick Toad 201 Crayfish 201 Ducklings 202 The Goose 202 Way Up in the Heavens 202 Fathers and Sons 203 Honky 203 Chandeliers 203 Margaret 204 Sunday Afternoon at the Beach 204 T’s Neck 204 What People Think About 205 The Slug 205 Shoebill 206 My Friend T. 206 Wiry 206 The Holiday 207 The Lizard 207 The Oyster 208 Soft Upturned Bellies 208 My Mother’s Voice 208 The Woman in Tiny Shorts 209 My Boring Uncle 209 What I Really Want to Know Reduced to a Quivering Jelly 213 The Red MG 213 The Fox 214 The Blanket 214 Quivering Jelly 215 A New Pair of Shorts 216 Lime-ade 217 Men in Shorts 217 Duckling 218 Oral Sex 218 The China Doll 219 Walkies 219 The Penis of a Large Horse 220 The Top of the Hill 220 Mother 221 Lola 221 The Sponge Cake 221 The Ambulance 222 The Tennis Dress 222 The Pearl Necklace 223 The Lagonda 223 The Question 223 The Smell of Cows 224 Crying for No Reason 224 The Sultan’s Fragrant Concubines 225 Truffles 225 Yellow Ducks 226 The Leotard 226 The New Pair of Shoes 227 The Silver Hair 227 What Vera Needs 228 Arboriculture 228 Froth 229 The Suitcase 229 The Lovely Nurses 230 Vera in the Bathroom with Her Puzzle Book Dressed and Sobbing 232 Woman on a Sofa 232 Orange Juice 233 Large and Small and Medium-sized Facecloths 233 The Woman in the Bathroom Mirror 234 What’s That Hand Doing in My Sock 235 A Grandmother in Jeans 236 The Pianist 237 Women in Blankets 238 A Story about Moose 239 The Visitor 240 Pies 240 Lying on my Back in the Dark 241 Forgiveness 241 Naughty Girls in Dark Woods 242 Suitcase 244 Hootie 245 How to Attract Men 246 The Woman on the Bus 247 My Mother’s Naked Body 248 Semolina 249 Athletic, Chaste, Untroubled 249 Divorcee 250 Lilies 250 Howls of Laughter 251 Women in Pyjamas 251 Violet 252 The Rooms Downstairs 252 How to Float 253 Little Squeaks 253 True Love 254 Cheese 254 Dressed and Sobbing

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Book SynopsisSerious, comic, brave, cowardly, engaged, disengaged, urgent, unurgent, chattering chiffchaff, talking horses, unpretentious, pretentious, all of God’s creatures are here. There’s also an almost – but not quite – dialogue between the poems and the laconic (and sometimes furious) musings of the passages which punctuate them. There are a series of fairytale poems, and others which give unfettered voice to Marcie, a character who has appeared in Mark Waldron's previous books. Behind the humour and playfulness, there is always something deeply unmeant, meant.Trade ReviewI get nervous for Mark Waldron's readers – I can hear them begin to laugh a little, becoming too comfortable too quickly, while reading a poem of his and I want to warn them. I want to yell at them to get out of the way, tell them that what's really happening is that they are about to get their hearts broken. Poor monkeys. -- Matthew DickmanClearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something. -- Sean O’Brien * Guardian, on Meanwhile Trees *His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language…. And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book. -- Carol Rumens * Observer, Poetry Book of the Month, on Meanwhile, Trees *He has since been publishing books steadily every few years and his latest, Sweet, Like Rinky-Dink, continues to develop his distinctive voice…. [an] accomplished and entertaining collection that showcases Waldron’s mercurial poetic voice. -- Kit Toda * TLS *Table of Contents11 Panic Room 13 Hippopotami at the Water Hotel 16 Swapping Clothes with a Friend 18 How a Poem Works 19 (Implacable doom-trod sky notwithstanding 21 A Feather in My Cap 23 Tender is the born 25 A Trap or a Net eleven grim poems 29 Blossom 30 The Garrulous Horse 31 The Bitten Ball 33 A Goodly Fly 34 gone off 35 The Traumatised Fox 38 The Woodman Prince 40 Fungi 42 The Piece of String 46 Little Men 48 The Princess and the Pea 51 Is it Honey 53 Burn Down 55 Contingency 57 In the wayward place 60 When you were dead 63 Puppetry 66 The Trees 67 No kind of cow 69 Quids in 71 We listened to the cows 73 I adore 74 I miss I am not a bad bird 77 Marcie says 79 Marcie says 80 Marcie says 81 Marcie says 82 Marcie says 85 Bluebottle Modus Operandi 88 Cadavre Exquis 89 Turkey Shoot 91 All your life is out 93 Henry 95 A Poisonous Midnight 98 Hôtel des Champignons 104 Crocodeelio 106 I don’t know 108 Bacon and Egg

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Book SynopsisThe Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year 2017Velkom to Inklandt is a collection of poems in which Sophie Herxheimer brings to life the voice of her German Jewish Grent Muzzer Liesel, whose somewhat abrasive but eminently humane perspektiff she's been unable to forget.Liesel came to live in Britain in 1938, with her young family. Her husband was one of many scientists saved by the speedily set up Council for Academic Refugees.Playing on the difficulties of the English lenkvitch and vokebulerry, the poems tell of an immigrant's attempts to fit in and make her home in a new country at war with her own.This fascinating sequence addresses alienation, survival, friendship, marriage, motherhood and loss against a backdrop of a London which has almost disappeared but at the same time remains straynchly familiar.

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

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Book SynopsisLynne?Hjelmgaard? s?The Turpentine Tree ?offers ?portraits of family, friends and relationships ? of? Hjelmgaard? s uprooted life, including a life at sea, subsequent displacement, widowhood and search for connections.

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Book SynopsisGod? s Little Artist is a biography in verse of Welsh painter Gwen John (1876 ? 1939). Illustrated with precision, authenticity and a keen painterly eye, God? s Little Artist is a celebration of John? s life and work, by poet, novelist and art critic Sue Hubbard.

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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 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 SynopsisAlison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, Dreams of Power, gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on `a thrumming lorry'. The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.Trade Review`Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.’ - Gillian Clarke (National Poet of Wales)

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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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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold. The collection marks an adventurous departure for a pen-and-paper poet. These texts are the fruit of collaborative experiments in theatre, dance and other performance, drawing on burlesque and mime as well as Capildeo's fascination with Caribbean masquerade. The poems are astir with voices and bodies usually kept `between the lines' of poetry: a weeping poltergeist disrupting the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-towercity road. Novels are turned inside out to become dramas of sleaze and surveillance.Trade Review'Capildeo is a demanding writer, someone who stretches the conventions of the lyric poem in unprecedented ways; [...] a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.' - David Wheatley, The Guardian; 'This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it's like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.' - Malika Booker [on Measures of Expatriation], Chair of the 2016 Forward Prize judging panel

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Book SynopsisNineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.Trade Review'The poems in Nineveh take ancient clay and sculpt vigorously innovative shapes: how very refreshing to plunge into a collection which re-thinks historical Jewish religion and culture with such subversive, witty originality. `Revelatory’ is not too strong a word.' - Carol Rumens

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.Trade Review'Dugdale proves herself a powerful voice by writing about visual art, poetry, and history, 'in reverse'' - Antony Huen

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Book SynopsisSince C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning. Feminist and queer scholars have since laid claim to Rossetti; but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti's ambition while attending, too, to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist and fantastical elements in her work.

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Book SynopsisThis dual language edition is reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitán as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.

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Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.

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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 SynopsisThe teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poems in this collection before his wife's sudden death from cancer in 2019. He developed the themes and fragmenting style of his previous book, Glass is Elastic (2012), where language was always quizzing itself and how it might relate to the actual and the historical world. Intense, playful, unpredictable, the poems surprised. Here, in the disturbing environments of Upstate New York, Calgary Bay or his Bolton front room the poet confronts illness (his own), hospitals (his visits) and wonderful ambulances (his transports). He resists attempts to see hints or destinies. Then bereavement throws up an actuality of a different order. The collection ends with a mock-sonnet sequence, written during the pandemic, in which the poet tries all the doors and windows to find her, to speak with her - love poems where love has not changed but its circumstances have. 'Will I want ever to get out of this place - the past of the poems in this book?' the poet asks. There are no answers, yet.

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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 SynopsisPoetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, Fury is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer'.Trade Review'Morley brings Romany vocabulary fizzing and crackling into our consciousness.' - Tim Liardet; 'Morley is a master of the integrity of wholes and parts.' - Dundee University Review of the Arts; 'a linguistic feast' - Jonathan Bate (On 'Enchantment')

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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 SynopsisA Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Review 31 Book of the Year 2020. With The Barbarians Arrive Today, Evan Jones has produced the classic English Cavafy for our age. Expertly translated from Modern Greek, this edition presents Cavafy's finest poems, short creative prose and autobiographical writings, offering unique insights into his life's work. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863-1933) was a minor civil servant who self-published and distributed his poems among friends; he is now regarded as one of the most significant poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influence on writers across generations and languages. The broad, rich world of the Mediterranean and its complex history are his domain, its days and nights of desire and melancholy, ambition and failure - with art always at the centre of life.Trade Review'Do we need another Cavafy, the most translated of modern Greek poets? Surprisingly, Evan Jones shows us that the answer is a resounding 'yes.' Cavafy famously left behind a body of 154 'canonical poems,' a number corresponding conveniently with the number of Shakespeare's sonnets. But he also left us with 37 'repudiated' poems, some of which were composed in the synthetic literary 'katherevousa' register of Greek, 75 'hidden' poems, and 30 'unfinished' or 'imperfect' poems. Cavafy also wrote prose about some of the same subject matter, and that explored his ideas about poetry. Jones does not attempt to give us a complete overview of Cavafy's work, but by putting poems in thematic categories, and allowing 'hidden' poems to brush up against 'canonical' ones (one could note that the manuscript of 'The Horses of Achilles' and of the much less well known 'Priam's Night March' are written on two sides of the same piece of paper) we see them in a new, revealing light. Jones is sensitive not only to the sense, but the sound of the Greek, rhyming where the original does, and his afterword, while wearing its considerable scholarship lightly, reorients Cavafy's oeuvre for the reader. It is a great pleasure - one of the most important Cavafyian words - to have these poems and prose writings in one volume.' - A.E. Stallings; 'Evan Jones merits the rewards of modesty; not improving what needs no improvement, nor trumping the ace with jokers of his own, lean and keen he ghosts cleverly along, oddly angular Poet of the City on his arm.' - Frederic Raphael

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing 2021. A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, 'counting silently towards infinity'. Graham's essential voice guides us fluently 'as we pass here now into the next-on world', what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us 'to the last be human'.Trade ReviewA mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its continuation' - The New Yorker; 'We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight.' - Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry Bug is a book of powerful poems that will capture the imagination of primary school-aged children; it recognises humanity’s never-ending quest to understand ourselves, others and the world around us. Above all else, The Poetry Bug is playful. It recognises that people of all ages are explorers who need to navigate our world through word play, self-expression and humour if we are to understand it at all. In a world of seriousness, standardised tests and conformity, The Poetry Bug brings much-needed light relief that will brighten up even the dullest of days.

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Book SynopsisIn this collection, Peter Daniels looks at his life as an older gay man, his London neighbourhood, his furniture, other people’s gardens and London’s creatures. His distinctive voice ranges through tight rhyming to looser meditations and prose poems, always skilfully crafted as words to make some sense of the world.Trade ReviewThis is a well-produced, attractive, and well-edited book. You will not be disappointed. -- Brian Docherty * London Grip *

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Book SynopsisWhat is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The ‘meanwhile site’ is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green’s remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal – from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

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Book SynopsisThe Death Poems: Songs, Visons, Meditations explores death in a range of forms – celebratory, visionary and contemplatively, using subject matter as varied as the dust heaps of remains that accumulated in 19th century London to the environmentally toxic ship graveyards at Alang in India. Formally dazzling, Beirne’s complex and textured meditations are sobering, spiritual and, in the end, sustaining.

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Book SynopsisAddressing the loss of the poet’s mother – as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death, and the natural world – Scenes from Life on Earth explores how we grieve and remember those we love. Simmonds continues to write through the prism of her faith, offering insights and wisdom on the circuit of life, of life’s endings, and the promise of reconciliation.Trade ReviewSome of her phrases are visceral. Others as delicate as silk. But they stick in our minds. Simmonds finds humour where we least expect it, beauty when we are looking into shadows. She observes life and death for us, as her imagination flies about her world - a world that becomes ours. Life could be so complicated as could death, but Simmonds simplifies it and welcomes us with open arms. Witty and charming. Her good grace, her good humour overcomes sadness. The humour draws us in and wraps its arms about us. -- Jon Wilkins * Everyone’s Reviewing *

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Book SynopsisWhere Richard Skinner’s previous pamphlets, Invisible Sun and Dream into Play, were primarily concerned with the play of light and playfulness respectively, White Noise Machine is mainly concerned with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, which in many cases sounds like a rushing waterfall or wind blowing through trees, and other serene or nature-like sounds and Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems.

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Book SynopsisJulian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is international in scope and tirelessly ludic. The poems engage with the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and personal loss. Stannard’s poems sing and weep in equal measure: a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre, mindful of lacerating loss and the redemptive power of strangeness, a special type of humour. They supply a feast of stories.

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Book Synopsis**Winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award**Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed. Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice. A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism - both political and personal, witness and documentary - Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.'The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful' Sebastian Faulks, Spectator, Books of the Year 2020 *Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry**Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award; T.S. Eliot Prize; Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dylan Thomas Prize; RSL Ondaatje Prize; John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize**Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2020*Trade ReviewHaunting, historical, archival and imaginative... a stunning debut -- Bernardine Evaristo * New Statesman, Books of the Year *Surge is a radical hybrid, painfully beautiful multigenerational ghost story, a social document, and a work of political archaeology. It is an indictment of this country's systemic hostility to its black, Asian and ethnic minority population, and the scandalous lack of accountability when this system claims lives. It is a heartbreaking and brilliant book about an ongoing tragedy -- Max Porter * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *Politically and lyrically compelling -- Raymond Antrobus * Observer, *Books of the Year* *Sensitive but devastating verse * Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2019* *A searing combination of artistic invention and meticulous research into the 1981 New Cross Fire -- Pascale Petit, *RSL Ondaatje Prize*This affecting poetic exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981 (dubbed “The New Cross Massacre”) is incantatory, lyrical and documentary. It makes a deep impact both on account of its own narrative and in the wake of Grenfell -- Elizabeth-Jane Burnett * The Sunday Times *A sad and angry consolation, alert to the past... Surge is a mature work, with lyricism both poetic and pop... [One] of British poetry’s most distinctive new voices -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Daily Telegraph *Although the fire, the subsequent protests and the founding of the Black People’s Day of Action were documented by poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah among others, Bernard’s work uniquely addresses a new generation encountering this past almost afresh, as it is echoed painfully inthe present... The collection’s major achievement is its unfailing attentiveness to the framing of history through the stories of individuals and collectives that the poet holds, urgently, ethically and so skilfully, in their hands -- Sandeep Parmar * Guardian *If there were ever to be a twenty-first century Auden, with all the invention and cultural understanding, understanding of tradition and sense of the speed and the human outcome of foul politics, Jay Bernard is it -- Ali SmithJay Bernard’s poems sing with outrage and indignation, with fury and passion. They tell the story of two terrible fires of our times, and shockingly show how the past holds up an uncomfortable mirror to the present. They have brio, they have brilliance, they are breathtakingly brave. An astonishingly accomplished debut -- Jackie KayBernard brings alive the archive, evoking ghosts and giving voice to the dead and the aggrieved from moments in recent history all too painful... At each turn, these are poems that make you sit up and take notice * Diva *The poems here seethe with unspoken rage and acerbity; they read like thinned-out paraffin, something on the cusp of explosion... A brutal indictment of Britain’s racist history and hypocrisy in the face of the facts... Bernard’s persistent question drills down, line by line, into Britain’s dark subconscious -- Marek Sullivan * Frieze magazine *Rarely has the idea of the objectified, violated black body been framed so starkly... Bernard’s knack for showing rather than telling [...] ensures that their sustained engagement with tiered identity never feels overdone... Surge is valuable as much for its imaginative acumen as for its unflinching politics -- Camille Ralphs * Times Literary Supplement *Brilliant and unbearably moving… a kind of crowd-poem of different voices, connection the New Cross fire to the Grenfell Tower and all the victims of racism and racist violence in London -- Andy Croft * Morning Star *A range of poetic forms bring energy to this reappraisal of race, nation and embodiment -- Sandeep Parmar * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *Imagined with both tenderness and frankness... Its strong sense of place, patois, demand for justice, curiosity...are reminders that four decade on, the tragedy remains an open wound -- Kehinde Andrews * Observer *Jay Bernard's furious and heartbreaking poetry collection is their response to this outrageous tragedy [of the New Cross fire]. Read and feel rage * Guardian *'The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful' * Sebastian Faulks, Spectator Books of the Year *The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful -- Sebastian Faulks * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *

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Book SynopsisInspired by a true story, a beautiful novel-in-verse about a child far from home. From award-winning poet Liz Berry.*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' PRIZE FOR POETRY 2024*'A profound act of witness to a long injustice, and a beautifully crafted conjuring of a life lived as truly as possible' Guardian 'Book of the Day''Ground-breaking' Benjamin Zephaniah'Exquisite' Hannah Lowe, author of The Kids'Home's not a place, you must believe this,but one who names you and means beloved.'In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants.In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has - until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything.Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this spellbinding novel in verse is an exquisite portrait of a girl far from home.'Vivid, compassionate and makes Eliza Showell's voice heard at last' Financial Times *Best Poetry Books of summer 2023*'A haunting, deeply compelling narrative' Andrew McMillan, author of physical'Only Liz Berry could write such raw and staggeringly beautiful poems' Fiona Benson, author of Vertigo & GhostTrade ReviewOne of the outstanding books of this year... Although this is a historical tale its resonance is timeless * Sunday Times *A story that is not only heartbreaking but also, essentially, true ... [The Home Child] is a profound act of witness to a long injustice, and a beautifully crafted conjuring of a life lived as truly as possible * Guardian, Book of the Day *Berry's novel in verse is based on an aunt she never met... It's vivid, compassionate and, a century after her forced migration, makes little Eliza Showell's voice heard at last * Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2023* *Liz Berry has given the world another ground-breaking collection of poems. These verses are sensitive and tender, yet the language is real and unflinching. * Benjamin Zephaniah *An extraordinary work of imagination . . . Poetic virtuosity is combined with novelistic story-telling as we follow the unfolding fate of Eliza Showell . . . An exquisite book. * Hannah Lowe *Only Liz Berry could write such raw and staggeringly beautiful poems * Fiona Benson *'Magnificent . . . She takes us on a heartbreaking journey, and she persuades us to examine our own past, whoever we are.' * Ian McMillan *One of the most anticipated second collections of the decade... Enchanting... Berry combines the historical and the personal, the local and international, weaving them into a story that has its own accumulating emotional force * Irish Times *A triumph. A novel in verse, an elegy, a profound act of witness . . . Eliza is brought to such tangible and complex life I feel as though I've met her * Luke Kennard *'One of my favourite books of all time. Every collection by Liz Berry is a treasure, but this one struck even deeper. It has universal reach to the ongoing exploitation of earth's poor. * Pascale Petit *A haunting, deeply compelling narrative, that holds the reader tight to the animal anchor of the natural world, and speaks in the unique idiolect of its own genealogy * Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL *The Home Child is so beautiful . . . [Liz] honours Home Children & with a eerie magic ventriloquises her ancestor Eliza Showell * Amy Key *'A remarkable collection . . . A thought-provoking weave of fact and imagination . . . It describes in her own words how her life is transformed, and in doing so, transforms ours' * John Glenday *Deeply moving. A graceful, delicate book, stunning in its emotional depth... I know I'll return to it many times in the future * Megan Hunter, author of THE END WE START FROM *There is something of Hardy's heartbreak note to these poems . . . The Home Child is both blues and rhapsody; Liz Berry's musicality and gift for the telling image matched by her sensitivity to and love for her subject. * Declan Ryan *Deeply moving, unforgettable. * Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat *'Liz Berry's poetry is spell-work . . . Her voice carves creatures out of words, and sets them dancing.' * Jen Campbell *Liz Berry ... sings of love, loss, grief, work, wonder, hope. To say I love this, the quiet power of it, would understate * Jackie Morris, author of The Unwinding *'Liz Berry's poems are captivating and charged with her characteristically rich and sensuous Black Country language. The Home Child brings to light the devastating history of forced child migration in the service of Empire and is a deeply moving tribute to the author's great aunt. This is a book that should be on the curriculum' * Naush Sabah *Liz Berry achieves a fusion of poetry and fiction as gripping as any thriller... Inspired by the true story of her great aunt...this compelling novel in verse is a moving portrait of a girl who will never see her family again * Daily Mail *

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL________The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen MortLet me kneelbefore the sky and let me be humble, untidy,let me be decorated.Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLANTrade ReviewMort's language is visceral, holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved... Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *The Illustrated Woman celebrates the female body... Her deft poetry mesmerises as it troubles -- Daljit Nagra * New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022 *The title sequence is a complex, cohesive and at times dazzling analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book Synopsis'It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open' Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic'They are sailors from another century, stalwart / captured on daguerrotype, casually masculine, tender of heart.'In the middle of the last century, the SS General Pueyrredón from Buenos Aires deposits Leo Boix's paternal grandfather on English soil for the first time. In the two years he spends there, he acquires a taste for his new homeland: from taking his tea white - muy blanco - to plunging into unfamiliar sensual worlds.So begins the poet's own journey, arriving in the United Kingdom as a young queer man. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant tells of the life he makes there: a dazzling collection of what it means to live, love and write between two cultures and traditions. Effortlessly moving between the English imagination and Spanish language, it is a boundless exploration of otherness and home, and the personal transformation that follows between 'loss / and a life / that starts anew.'*A Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice*Trade ReviewIn Ballad of a Happy Immigrant Leo Boix demonstrates the power of a poem to move not just the mind but the body. These are supple, evocative, sensuous poems that ripple with life from a poet who can do in two languages what many of us struggle to do in one -- Kayo ChingonyiHere, dear readers, you will find charms and bees, crows and legends, much silence and even more truth-seeking. You will find immigrant's songs, and love whispers to the planet, all set to music that is as inimitable as it's lush. It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open -- Ilya KaminskyAs well as having a subtle mastery of forms, Boix is playfully inventive -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *Boix... has attempted something that few poets dare and even fewer achieve - to write in an adopted language... [he] handles words like a beachcomber, relishing them and experimenting with combinations and visual arrangements -- Angus Reid * Morning Star *

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

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Book Synopsis'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction.When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.Trade ReviewOthers have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted or such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers. * Guardian, 1920 *For me, he is the greatest of all the war poets.... it is Owen's intense respect for the soldier that makes his poetry so powerful. Those who did not return have their meticulously maintained stone memorials on the fields of Flanders. But their memorial in our minds is largely built by Wilfred Owen -- Jeremy Paxman * Spectator *The greatest of all the War Poets… This edition…is a must for every poetry lover -- Emma Lee-Potter * Independent *

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Book SynopsisA timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China's most acclaimed poets-now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai WeiweiOne of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to Western readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People's Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as "Little Siberia" with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei. In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing in change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers. Selected Poems of Ai Qing is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.

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