Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisFrom early, rhyming works in Love Poems and Others (1913) to the ground-breaking exploration of free verse in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) the poems of D. H. Lawrence challenged convention and inspired later poets.This volume includes extensive selections from these and other editions, and contains some his most famous poems, such as ''Piano'', a nostalgic reflection on lost youth and love for his mother; ''Snake'', exploring human fear of the natural world; the short, cutting comment on sexual politics of ''Can''t Be Borne''; and the quiet philosophical resignation of ''Basta!''. Using the revised poems, but in the order in which they appeared in their original collections, this selection offers a fresh perspective that reveals an innovative poet who gave voice to his most intense emotions.

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Book SynopsisTaking its inspiration from Shakespeare's idea of the seven ages of a human life, this new anthology brings together the best-loved poems in English to inspire, comfort and delight readers for a lifetime. Beginning with babies, the book is divided into sections on childhood, growing up, making a living and making love, family life, getting older, and approaching death, ending with poems of mourning and commemoration.Ranging from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, via Shakespeare, Keats, and Lemn Sissay, this book offers something for each of those moments in life whether falling in love, finding your first grey hair or saying your final goodbyes when only a poem will do.

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Book SynopsisA tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan war forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - from the witch Circe who turns his men into pigs, to the twin terrors of Scylla and Charybdis.Trade Review“[Robert Fitzgerald’s translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original.” –The Nation “[Fitzgerald’s Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer’s art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.” –The Yale Review “[In] Robert Fitzgerald’s translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.” –from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney

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Book SynopsisThis first selection of Geoffrey Hill''s poetry charts the evolution of a complex, uncompromising, visionary body of work over fifty years. It includes poems from Hill''s astonishing debut, For the Unfallen, through the verset-sequence Mercian Hymns, to acclaimed recent work, including The Orchards of Syon and Without Title. Trade ReviewEngland's most important living poet * Times *Hill so entirely eclipses most of his contemporaries that it seems meaningless to rank in relation to them. Trumpets should be blown, garlands made ... loquacious, playful, wildly comic ... poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes * Daily Telegraph *Whatever the densities of Hill's expression, or the powerful impacted forces in his syntax and rhythms, this poetry achieves a strength, memorability and precision beyond the abilities of any other poet writing in English * TLS *

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Book SynopsisThe centenary of Patrick Kavanagh''s birth in 2004 provides the ideal opportunity to reappraise one of modern Ireland''s greatest poets. From a harsh, humble background that he himself described so brilliantly, Kavanagh burst through immense constraints to redefine Irish poetry - a poetry appropriate for a fully independent country, both politically and culturally. Moving beyond Irish verse''s preoccupation with history, national politics and identity, he turned to the land and scenery of his native Inniskeen, portraying the closely-observed minutiae of everyday rural and urban life in an uninhibited, groundbreaking style. Lucid, various, direct and engaging, Kavanagh''s poems have a unique place in the canon and a unique accessibility. This major new edition is the culmination of many years of work by Antoinette Quinn in creating authoritative texts for Kavanagh''s poetry - from his early works such as ''Inniskeen Road: July Evening'' to his masterpiece, the epic ''The Great Hunger'', allowing us to see the development of Kavanagh''s genius as never before.

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Book SynopsisRainer Maria Rilke’s powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet.    At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke’s letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde’s new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke’s later work The Letter from the Young Worker.  For more than 80 years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature Trade Review...I cannot think of a better book to put into the hands of any young would-be poet, as an inspirational guide to poetry and to surviving as a poet in a hostile world. -- Harry Fainlight * The Times *

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Book SynopsisKathryn Maris is originally from New York and has lived in London since 1999. Her previous collections are The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006) and God Loves You (Seren, 2013), and a selection of her poetry appeared alongside the work of Frederick Seidel and Sam Riviere in Penguin Modern Poets 5: Occasional Wild Parties (2017). Her poetry has been published widely, including in Granta, The Nation, The New Statesman, Poetry, The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber).Trade ReviewThe funniest book I've read in years. Maris flexes her wit and wisdom to create a litany of nervous characters in a style that's mordant, sarcastic, satiric yet often compassionate . . . a poet of risk, she is dark, deep and often laugh out loud -- Daljit NagraHer dry, droll, clinically deadpan manner is all her own; but her themes - obscure hurts, implacable dissatisfactions, hardwired propensity for victimhood and suffering - reflect the experience of humanity at large -- Christopher ReidIt's like being in a cage with a jaguar - both the car and the animal: one is very fast, the other very hungry. It's highly dangerous, but strangely, you don't mind. Bloody readable anyway -- Hugo Williams

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Book SynopsisI come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free. The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the peace of wild things.Trade ReviewWendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have (probably) never heard of. He is an American sage -- James RebanksOur modern-day Thoreau ... He is unlike anybody else writing today -- Andrew Marr * New Statesman *The poet laureate of America's farmland * Observer *Wendell Berry's poems have a real twinkle in their eye in the face of a dark world -- Colum McCann * Atlantic *He has returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose * Baltimore Sun *

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018A New York Times Notable Book of 2018Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love''s bladeSizing up the heart''s familiar meat?In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith''s signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors'' reports attest to the exTrade ReviewSmith's new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America's original racial sins . . . and apprehension about history's direction. . . . These historical poems have a homely, unvarnished sort of grace * The New York Times *The poems in Wade in the Water are full of memorable images nimbly put together by Smith's exquisite sense of timing and her feel for the kind of language appropriate to the poem. * The New York Times Book Review *Smith brings great intelligence and sensitivity to her poems, leading readers deeper into other people's stories and ultimately into their own humanity. * The Washington Post *Smith's poetry is an awakening itself * Vogue *In lines that are as lyrical as they are wise . . . Smith makes connections between the current state of American culture and its history * BuzzFeed *Smith is the country's poetic caretaker, calling both for collective reckoning and collective empathy * The Atlantic *On a craft level, these poems are impeccable. . . . I know brilliance when I read it and this book is brilliant -- Roxane GayFor Smith, poetry is hospitable: accommodating whatever she is moved to write. Her work witnesses, protests and raises its own roof. . . . Smith emerges as a poet in charge of her own creation myth and a recorder of destructive realities * The Observer *Her work witnesses, protests and raises its own roof.... Excellent and bracing -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *Powerful and tender * Elle *Unmissable... a collection of poems exploring what it means to be a woman and a citizen in a culture directed by wealth, men and violence * Stylist *Personal and ambitious * Porter *

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Book Synopsis''Two hours ago I fell in love and trembled, and tremble still, and haven''t a clue whom I should tell''From one of the truly singular and beloved poets of contemporary Italy, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city and - always, and above all - love. This volume is the first substantial gathering of the best of Patrizia Cavalli''s work from her first six collections, from 1974 to 2006, translated by a selection of renowned poets. By turns thoughtful and sly, sensual and comic, charismatic and profound, these are works perfectly attuned to the pleasures and pains of everyday life and love.''The most intensely ethical poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century'' Giorgio Agamben ''Amazingly fresh and surprising. The world does change, in the telling'' John AshberyEdited by Gini Alhadeff

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Book SynopsisThe multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world''Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects?I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt.What do you think would happen?People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.''When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care;

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Book SynopsisBlending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing''s narrative takes us from the streets of Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.Her visual art is spare, playful and poignant: a cereal-box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher''s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity and the joy and pain of growing up.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTIONChosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBCShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeLonglisted for the Jhalak Prize''Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful ... a landmark debut'' Guardian''Oh my God, he''s just stirring me. Destroying me'' Michaela Coel''A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy'' Max Porter''Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive'' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year)''It''s simply stunning. Every image is a revelation'' Terrance HayesWhat is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because ''you fit the description of a man'' - and where it is possiTrade ReviewTakes us into new literary territory ... impressive -- Bernardine Evaristo * New Statesman (Books of the Year) *It's rare for a book of poems to repeatedly leave you breathless when reading it. Such is the urgent brilliance of Caleb Femi's Poor . . . Femi's language is restlessly inventive, unerring in uncovering images that lodge in your memory. His use of concrete as a recurring motif is brutally graceful, encapsulating this startlingly beautiful book, a landmark debut for British poetry -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *I am reading a powerful book of poetry by a young man, Caleb Femi. Oh my God, he has a book called Poor and he's just stirring me. Destroying me. I look up to him as a poet -- Michaela CoelCaleb Femi is a gift to us all from the storytelling gods. He is a poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy. But above all, this is love poetry. Love of community, language, music and form. This book flows from the fabric of boyhood to the politics and architecture of agony, from the material to the spiritual, always moving, always real. Poor is the heartbeat of a living city which truly knows itself. Caleb is a mighty and positive force in UK culture and this is a vital book -- Max Porter, author of LannyIn this fabulous debut, concrete becomes a paradox of toughness and vulnerability, confinement and shelter . . . Caleb Femi's riveting photographs and compassionate yet hard-hitting lines map North Peckham's black boys and blocks . . . His depictions of young black men possess a brother's empathy . . . It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation -- Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinMesmerizing and transporting. I've never read a collection like this . . . I literally had to shake off the experience once I was finished. [This] incredible collection . . . gives voice to a London many would prefer to ignore . . . I don't think it possible for anyone to come away from this book without having developed new levels of empathy and compassion -- Derek Owusu, author of That Reminds MeImpressive . . . At the heart of the collection is the poet's deconstruction of language, fusing biblical cadence with a contemporary street vernacular. There is something reminiscent of William Blake's visionary poetic in Femi's commitment to a realistic worship for places like Aylesbury Estate and North Peckham, as well as their communities . . . [recalls] Gwendolyn Brooks's and Nate Marshall's odes to Chicago . . . [Poor is] in conversation with Roger Robinson's and Jay Bernard's poems of witness and poetic gospel, which . . . create myths, legends, and folklore that render black bodies as holy -- Malika Booker, author of Pepper SeedCaleb Femi's Poor bristles with the exhilarations and violences of boyhood and adolescence. In its interplay of image and text, of photographic image and poetic image, the book asks us to consider what is seen and unseen, spoken of and concealed; what is, in one of many numinous phrases, "proof of light". More than this, these are poems of witness, both noun and verb: poems of the self and what the self can bear -- Stephen Sexton, author of If All the World and Love Were YoungGiving a mythic resonance to communal life, the poems in Caleb Femi's Poor are vital, confronting and electric. Political, spiritual, formally inventive and energized by a music of protest and grief, this is a rare and anthemic debut -- Seán Hewitt, author of Tongues of FireAn urban romantic . . . powerful * Dazed & Confused *Caleb's talent calls for a global stage -- Virgil Abloh

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Book Synopsis''Essential reading'' Roger Robinson''Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent'' Mary Karr''Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy'' Caleb Azumah Nelson''Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent'' Washington PostNobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world.This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as ''the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles''.Trade ReviewIn this sure, wise and devastating collection, Coleman pushes against the limitations of language ... I cried many times while reading but also laughed enormously. What a joy of a book -- Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATERWanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent * Washington Post *Wanda Coleman's peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts - hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent. All honor to her name -- Mary Karr, author of THE LIARS' CLUBWanda Coleman gives literary voice to thoughts on survival, as a Black woman who suffers economic, racist and misogynistic attack. Essential reading for all -- Roger Robinson, author of A PORTABLE PARADISEOne of the greatest poets ever to come out of LA * New Yorker *Coleman is master of telling unvarnished truths - about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future * Los Angeles Times *Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did * Poetry *Her works crackle with life ... aching and meditative * Booklist *Sassy, funny, and wickedly sharp ... there are more than a dozen poems in Hayes's astute gathering that should be widely anthologized, certainly as much as any poem by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, or [Frank] O'Hara ... Wicked Enchantment should help set the record straight: Coleman is a great American poet -- John Yau * Hyperallergic *

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Book Synopsis The award-winning poet''s darkly riotous debut, exploring stereotypes of Black male identity and sexuality in a corrupt systemLyrical, loud and radically urgent, Jonah Mixon-Webster''s debut aims its sights at the words and images that shape us and the corrupt forces that stand in the way of our freedom. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force. It is a revision of our most sacred mythologies - and a work of documentary poetry reporting from Mixon-Webster''s hometown of Flint, Michigan, where untainted tap water is still not guaranteed and the legacies of racist policies persist. Challenging stereotypes through scenes scattered with satire, violence, and the extreme vagaries of everyday life, Mixon-Webster explores the places where space and body, race and region and sexuality and class meet and intersect. He invents visual/sonic forms, recasts poems as FAQs and transcripts, and dives into dreamscapes and modern tragedies. Interrogating language and tTrade ReviewA master of experimentation . . . This work is alive

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best CollectionA Financial Times, Irish Times and Telegraph Book of the Year history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn''tIt is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once.Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: ''Edelweiss'' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it''s practically always the Trade ReviewWith poetry for me it's an either/or. Either I can barely read the stuff - which happens most of the time - or it leaves me delirious with the thrill of possibility. Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possible: the simplest things and the most mysterious - which, of course, are one and the same. -- Geoff Dyer'While reading "Cheryl's Destinies," every so often I encountered a poem that struck me as a poem people would be reading a hundred years from now. I felt the way I felt the first time I read "Death of a Naturalist," though, of course, Heaney was already Heaney by the time I read that book. Then again, Stephen Sexton is already Stephen Sexton-these poems glow with a welcoming confidence and with a particularness that is local everywhere, and are full of surprising moments that immediately become part of how one understands the world. Cheryl's Destinies is a course of miracles. -- Shane McCraeIn Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination. -- Seán HewittStephen Sexton is a fabulous poet: gifted with a delicate ear, a humane and generous sensibility, and attentive to both the absurdities and the wonders of modern life. It's a joy to read these unexpected and thrilling poems. -- Nick LairdCheryl's Destinies illuminates with a chorus of the dead, the living and the yet to be discovered. Cheryl, who is really into the tarot, is here to foresee, but this collection also excavates. Poems 'mosey through the graveyards of the world' where the dead speak to us and with us. Séance loving Yeats collaborates with Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan (as you do), while Ciarán Carson is remembered with vibrancy as the young poet recounts Carson's influence in Belfast and beyond. Sexton is as imaginative as he is controlled, spinning an enduring and trancey tapestry. At once playful and dystopic, hilarious and original - you won't have read poetry like this. He is a rare talent. -- Elaine FeeneyHis pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title), tarot card clairvoyant, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot Sexton cannot slip... many of his phrases are so good I wanted to steal them...Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his intercessor. -- Kate Kellaway * The Observer *Brimful multiplicity... grief-fuelled odysseys, time melting forwards and backwards as Cheryl's tarot evokes Madame Sosostris * Irish Times *Stephen Sexton writes with such ease and lightness of touch that you're too charmed to check where he's leading you, until you look down and notice, Bugs Bunny-like, that you've walked off a cliff... Sexton writes like a lover of life. His "deliberate happiness" often manifests as a kind of defiant whimsy. He's not, in the end, flinching away from what he can't face, but transforming it with warmth and humour into something luminously strange... He's not whistling through the graveyard to hide his fear, but out of unfeigned joy. Long may he dabble and mosey. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph *A witty, compassionate act of time travel * Financial Times Books of the Year *Fleet-footed and irrepressibly charming * The Telegraph Books of the Year *Opens dazzling windows of wonder into multiple worlds. The patterns in Cheryl's tarot cards reflect time-bending truths about art and history * The Irish Times *The garden of Cheryl's Destinies is wild, Rousseau-lush, magic-hour lit ... Sexton's flair comes in balancing the otherworldly with the very ordinary, acutely observed detail ... joyous and often very, very funny -- Genevieve Stevens * Poetry Review *The spring-loaded poems of Cheryl's Destinies foreground questions about art and authenticity, belief and make-believe, the inescapable presence of history and the contingent self in crisis ... many of the poems in Cheryl's Destinies vibrate not only forwards but backwards as Sexton continues to unlock the possibilities of poetic form. -- Maria Johnston * The Times Literary Supplement *

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

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Book SynopsisDeals with literature's grandest evocation of life's journey, at once an ageless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. This title presents you with the author's best-loved poem, recounting Odysseus' wanderings after the Trojan War.Trade ReviewWonderfully readable... Just the right blend of roughness and sophistication. (Ted Hughes)Robert Fagles is the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English. (Garry Wills, The New Yorker)Mr. Fagles has been remarkably successful in finding a style that is of our time and yet timeless. (Richard Jenkyns, The New York Times Book Review)

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery AwardA New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice Pick Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker “Paul Tran’s debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel “This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence.” —New York Times Book Review A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen)Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran''s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates in

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

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

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Book SynopsisPoems that traverse and question the lines between human and animal behavior. Experimenting with time, language, and transgressing boundaries, the poems in absolute animal lean into Nabokov's notion that precision belongs to poetry and intuition to science. Rachel DeWoskin's new collection navigates the chaos of societal and mortal uncertainty. Through formal poetry, DeWoskin finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, between the ancient and the contemporary, and between languages, incorporating translations from poems dating as far back as the Tang dynasty. From sonnet sequences about heart surgeries to examinations of vole romance and climate change, absolute animal investigates and moves across boundaries and invites us to consider what holds life, what lasts, what dies, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human. Trade Review"DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there. . . . Throughout her persistent, startling collection, the poet also fuels meaning into womanhood, and everything that’s lost or gained from being female. . . . absolute animal is a graceful reminder of why links to other living things matter and why examining the human experience is one of our only respites from what we cannot change." * Chicago Review of Books *"The first poem of DeWoskin’s newest poetry collection absolute animal gets at the heart of our modern world. . . . A trio of sonnets about a father’s heart surgery, including the Newcity-published 'arrhythmia,' uses classic heartbeat iambic construction to force us to think about our own heartbeat, each our personal ever-present reminder of the thing both keeping us alive and whose malfunction promises our end. So much attention is paid to the ways we try to abstract and guard against this mortality, as in 'dressing,' in which DeWoskin’s speaker discusses the armor she chooses to wear before a meeting with an oncologist as if goth chains and locks could protect her from potentially terminal news. But the micro is macro in this collection, and the hubris in conquering our biology is as misplaced as it was in conquering our planet. The stint, staple, or wash station can forestall, but it can’t save us forever." * Newcity *"DeWoskin has helped me listen across registers. absolute animal is filled with sestinas, split sonnets, and translations of ancient Chinese poets; the variations are apt for a collection whose references span 'tick atari basement aliens' and Li Bai’s 'waving moon.' DeWoskin's gaze is one that listens. She brings each of her subjects into a 'moment of closeness' with the body, with beloveds, and with the often violent world. . . . Inside of DeWoskin’s sometimes frightening, often joyous poetic landscape, I can hear across epochs, language, and species. I am left feeling animal: vulnerable, 'crazed with light,' listening and full of song." * Arrowsmith Press *"This is no maudlin collection. The lists’ momentum serves a distinctive voice and humor, as does the order of poems: 'chemical peel' is followed by 'taxidermy'—both parenting poems of sorts. We learn that 'rodents have perfected monogamy'; the poem 'ways to love and leave you' begins, 'trick question: do prairie voles love?' . . . Yet what could be more 'animal' than our mortality, more human than our cognizance of it . . ." * Harriet Books *“An urgent, vulnerable time capsule into the future, DeWoskin is witness to the beauty here and now. She is asking, Why should we lose all the beauty we have witnessed along with ourselves? Does beauty get lost in extinguished memories? Where does beauty go to live? A response is that beauty lives in absolute animal, and DeWoskin’s gift to us is that beauty can live on in us too, if we choose.” -- Mukoma wa Ngugi, author of "Unbury Our Dead with Song"“The momentum of the poems in absolute animal sustains a fever pitch across the pages. A master of the switchback line, DeWoskin unleashes the ferocity, the poem’s heart matter, while harnessing tumult through form and rhyme. . . . These poems wrestle between what is feral and what is tame, what is unfettered and what is domestic. This is a ravishing book of poems that dazzle and shine.” -- Elise Paschen, author of The Nightlife“‘We’ve all been ancient before, aware of what we can’t know,' writes DeWoskin in absolute animal, a volume that grapples with the most critical issues of human existence and our current historical moment with a stunningly original imagination and a muscularity of language. Whether wrestling with the isolation of the pandemic, or climate change, or women’s health, or global relations, the poems speak with an elegant ferocity. The paradox of the volume’s title understands well how much animal inhabits us as humans and how much we resist that knowledge. Many of the poems reinvigorate the sonnet form in a kind of lyric scream that bears witness to and rages against both our mortality, and the ruin human presence continues to inflict upon our planet. And yet, all of the poems love fiercely, without reservation, beyond grief and the grave. DeWoskin’s brilliant collection celebrates living with tenacity, a deliberate joy that I find thrilling, consoling, and for which I am deeply grateful.” -- Robin Davidson, author of "Mrs. Schmetterling: Poems"“Tender, probing, philosophical and brilliantly wrought, DeWoskin’s poems meditate on boundaries and metamorphoses, on the gaps, real and imagined, separating us from our natural home. What does it mean to be the creature who creates the language by which we define our world? ‘While I was writing this, everything changed,’ notes DeWoskin as she explores impermanence, and the paradoxes of living in time: ‘we made time, time made us.’ Accepting the fluidity of being, however, liberates the imagination: ‘let me be not in a garden but wild, giant, omnipotent.’ Sestinas, sonnets and golden shovels are just a few of the containers DeWoskin deploys to suggest that shape-shifting and formal change may well be our only constants, and a clue to our essential nature. Haunting. Gorgeous.” -- Askold Melnyczuk, author of "The Man Who Would Not Bow: And Other Stories""In her ravishing second book of poems, absolute animal, DeWoskin collapses binaries: Mind/body, self/other, human/ animal, past/present blur and collide in lines both prescient and gripping. The opening poem, anthrosphere, aptly names the world ‘a map of small blue trouble.’ The poem demands an answer to the unanswerable, ‘ask anthro how it came to cover bio,’ The experience of reading the book ignites brain and body in the speaker’s urgent search for beauty in the midst of the horrors of the environment and the self. And the poet delivers in lines both surprising and quotidian, ‘bright broccoli in the trash, I cherished that first lie, / my baby, three: how did that get there anyway?’ Like the prairie vole, the ladybug, the turkey vulture, that appear in these pages, we’re trapped in our biology. Yet the body can connect; our minds terrify and betray us. In her poem ‘some girls’ she writes, ‘hush the tempting clatter of bone / that wants to be exposed for one slow moment let your body be home.’ The only certainty is that the ‘home’ of our flesh will vanish. Miraculously, Dewoskin eschews nihilism and relishes joy in verse of startling imagery, emotional depth, and precision.” -- Thea Goodman, author of "The Invented Mother"Table of Contentsanthrosphere attention the animal question sestina for the snake in a man-made lake ways to love and leave you social hour vole when we say they hunt unseasonable chemical peel taxidermy heathkit tv 1980 my dad’s socially distant heart surgery his meds arrhythmia feel it if these days i keep falling back estrangement poem on returning (by he zhizhang) on the eve of government exams to secretary zhang (by zhu qingyu) climbing white stork tower (by wang zhihuan) halfway (by li bai) drinking alone under the moon (by li bai) snapshots of what’s called for some girls dressing let me be vanity a surgeon sawed me open, sewed me up double body, hot lasagna taunting the turkey vultures with love tiny staples fear chance, chicago sunset/sonnet airplane landscape, 1992, true story landing dream view from above your death tenacity acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisA poetry collection that brings together word, image, and sound toreflect on fractured, fragmentary states of being. The poetry of Mandible Wishbone Solvent is situated in the space of bridges, fragmentary overlays, spectral reach, and the desire to keep reaching. Asiya Wadud's poems engage in this act, not to stake a claim or to fasten themselves, but to hold fragments together in order to offer possibilities for connection and extension. Throughout the collection lies an acknowledgment that any hold will drift, meander, and find new paths, with each separation making space for new entanglements. Drawing on a keen interest in tactility and ekphrasis, Wadud mines the repetition and extension that comes with any fractured state of existence and considers the nature of a residual and roving we. Following this selection of lyrical, ekphrastic, fragmented poems, the book concludes with two prose pieces that dwell on the concepts of isthmus and drift, respectively, which offer further Trade Review"Wadud is an astute interpreter of the world as a text. She shows us how the physical space rendered (un)available to those fleeing disaster is akin to the conceptual breadth lacking in our minds: 'If we cannot imagine a destitute journey, one born in an urgency that forces someone to voyage across borders, then it is in that moment that it is possible to empty water from jugs, again and again.' Wadud asks readers to match her connective brilliance by turning toward the world with a discerning eye, daring us to expand our minds and behold complexity. Her poems refuse to surrender to a reading that is easily impressed with her syntactic mosaic." * Harriet Books *“Wadud’s astounding new poems—many of them ekphrastic, all of them rigorously intricate, supersaturated—come across to me as both hard-edged and liminal. Enacting the dynamic relationship between figure and ground, center and edge, they frame the constant unfolding of meaning’s dimensions, its reverberations.” -- Mónica de la Torre, author of "Repetition Nineteen"“Composed of lyric poems, artwork, and prose, Mandible Wishbone Solvent distinguishes itself in both form and inquiry from much of the poetry currently published in the US. Wadud’s aesthetic, in which the lyric permutates, shifts, and merges with what flows through, is ethically aligned, as the prose makes clear, with shifting natural (rather than unyielding geopolitical) borders and with those who are ejected and must drift from place to place. Gorgeous, meditative, and spiritual, this immersive collection offers a terrain of lush language that seems precarious and vulnerable but is ultimately ungovernable, by border patrol or otherwise. ‘How can we become capacious in our rendering of the journey itself?’ Wadud asks. And this book is an example, with every gesture, of that elasticity and generosity.” -- Rosa Alcalá, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "MyOther Tongue"Table of ContentsPart 1: Other ovals all along #221 ½ poised in hover hours seven desire lines one map disclose concentric centers the herring arrive as overture all excess bloomed then felled and green waters and green be a bridge over something 1.2 Part 2: Scant excess enclosed in a film Mandible Wishbone Solvent Shorn, treaded, red a symmetrical open plane, curve In the checkpoint I was all arms / all face the disc takes shape, dear cutlass Part 3: Microplane weights / accounts of first contact cobalt mirror image 1 cobalt mirror image 2 cobalt mirror image 3 cobalt mirror image 4 cobalt mirror image 5 cobalt mirror image 6 my mind makes for me a window then a door Part 4: The shroud can encase whatever we tell it Nearly Any Two Things Can Cohere Acknowledgments Drift: Against proximal distance from the center

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Book SynopsisPoetry that explores the beauty of themes often considered undesirable - pain, disability, and the aging body.Trade Review"Dominik Parisien's Side Effects May Include Strangers shines light onto and into the lives of medicalized, queered, and disabled bodies. In their venous fireworks, these poems are astonishing flares that illuminate a seized body 'bursting with strangers,' or diagnostic tools that operate 'the way a blade' makes 'a body easy to interpret.' These are provocative, linguistically dexterous poems that invite you to reimagine the shape and possibilities of living with illness and pleasure." Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic"If 'words are artificial / constructs we impose / on natural phenomena,' then communicating the elemental human experience of love and pain requires a new lexicon. Fortunately, Dominik Parisien gifts us a new vocabulary for the inexpressible in this luminous collection of poems. The impossibility of language as a mirror for pain is explored in gorgeously lucid terms. Parisien carves intimate portraits of daily life; the rich spectrum of disability in its radiant texture is detailed with exquisitely clear precision. By poetic alchemy, hurt is transmuted from medicalized language to mythical expression. A rethinking, reframing, recontextualizing, and radical reimagining of the trial by fire that is chronic pain, Side Effects May Include Strangers answers the question: 'Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain?' Grounded in authenticity, crafted with careful grace and attention, these poems enable the heart to sing." Roxanna Bennett, author of Unmeaningable"I have to admit I was not prepared for how exquisite the first poem is in [...] Side Effects May Include Strangers. It is the kind of poem that, for a poet when you read it, it gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction, and also tendrils of envy which for me marks the quality of an excellent poem. It is the kind of poem that for a young poet with a first book says I have arrived." The Miramichi Reader"Parisien's poems are paeans of fiercely tender queer love that write with -- not through -- disability, depression, and illness, without false narratives of progress. Side Effects May Include Strangers is a necessary and life-affirming book of poems." Hamilton Review of Books

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Book SynopsisCarol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.Trade Review"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies

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Book SynopsisUnbecoming, Neil Surkan's sophomore collection, clings to hope while the world deteriorates, transforms, and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships.Trade Review""What is the minimum required?" Reading Neil Surkan, minimum maximizes the elegant, sparing truth in a poetics where each line is drawn to incise, open, lay things bare. "He wonders" the driving force of Surkan's sophomore effort, "Poetry is such a wounded smell. At best, we feel exhilarated by our rootedness," deepened as questions, good questions, 'stream in floods of words that, / like fish scales on furniture, / cling for awhile and shine / the dull way dried tears shine." Here, the promise of Surkan's debut bursts forth. Wonder becomes wondrous, "The still symmetry continues," and baby the infinities shine bright. "Why are you so invested in keeping us alive?" This collection insists we're still breathing, there's a beat. Unbecoming is nothing less than brilliant." Kirby, author of This Is Where I Get Off and Poetry Is Queer"A celery-green river unlocking, fossils chiselled out of rock ledges, third-generation firs – the natural world shifts, is altered, revises itself. In Unbecoming, love is change. Neil Surkan refutes gender scripts, makes visible the tenderness between men. 'I've a new, / unfurling sense,' he writes. Clear-eyed, rich with dazzling imagery, his poems blaze with the elemental: water, sky, land, and love." Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems"Unbecoming is calm, but never still – every detail buzzes. Inquisitive and playful, these poems wander between generations, between 'days without injury,' between what we hold on to and what we throw away. And yet, 'all we vanished / persists where blue dozed / on old maps: a nurdled / vortex, a snaggled / garbage patch, expands.' To visit the places and meet the people of Surkan's poetry is to be reminded 'how much it means / we get to change,' and perhaps how much we need to change." T. Liem, author of Obits

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Book SynopsisConfronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, this collection explores the combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters – a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch – tracing the unsettling shadows that border joy.Trade Review“These poems look with ardour and humour at what’s beloved and what’s hard to love, reminding us that sometimes those are the same things. The nostalgia-laden, trade-marked, pre-packaged baked goods that make us salivate may also make us cringe; the past self whose actions seem shamefully misguided deserves respect and tenderness. Power can do irony as well as any writer of her generation, but she can also do sincerity, goofiness, even reverence. And she does it all memorably and musically – her speakers and characters might mock notions of eloquence and aplomb but Power speaks through a sonnet or a villanelle as vibrantly and gracefully as through an open, expansive lyric. Heartbreaking and hilarious, this is an impressively accomplished first book, wise beyond its years.” Stephanie Bolster, author of A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth“Melanie Power is a poet of the immediate. Like the feral cats that navigate the alleys and sidewalks of the late capitalist east-coast universe she evokes here – her speaker prowls the crumbling infrastructures of the built world, scratching at the seams of language and landscape. What she is surrounded by – rocks, Fun Dip, roadways, roadkill, frozen cakes – ‘all things viscous’ (and ‘vicious’) and ‘sweet’ is what she interrogates. At hand are the fundamentals of a poetry in the lineage of squirrelers of image and rhyme such as Paul Muldoon, and closer to home, Ken Babstock, and Mary Dalton. There is something unerringly honest about these poems that doesn’t so much make one want to cling to the thing being observed, as revel in the briefest glimpses of these treasures caught and rendered with impeccable care – and just as quickly –released into air.” Sina Queyras, author of My Ariel“… [There] is an incantatory power in many of these poems … her lines sing, regardless of their subject. … I’ll remember [this book] for Melanie Power’s endearing candour, wise-self-effacement, and for the subtle music.” – David B. Hickey, The Antigonish Review“Full Moon of Afraid and Craving is like a dreamy, atmospheric stroll through time and memory, reflecting on the different pieces which make up a life, from the snacks you are, the clothes you wore, the desires you had, and the places you lived. Power’s poems are beautiful little slices of the past, finding core memories in an array of corners, from the memorable to the mundane. A strong debut.” The Miramichi Reader"Melanie Power’s debut collection of poems, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, has layers. Like a decadent cake that makes you laugh, salivate, then sing in awe at the passage of time. Like Aubrey Plaza’s acting – you’ll never know if she really means what she says. But that’s half the fun. The other half is exquisite craft. From odes to processed food to a birthday party attended by past selves, it’s OK to let the easy reading fool you – in no time you’ll be craving more, buying a six-pack of Vachon’s ½ Moon just because of poetry." Carlos A. Pittella

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when someone we loves dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss. In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoe Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement and explores the fragmentation of loss.Trade Review“How is it that language can encompass a loss so large it leaves us speechless? Zoë Landale’s elegies, using the rhythms and rhetoric of Rilke’s Duino Elegies as a springboard, find a way to say the unsayable. For those recovering from such a loss, or witnessing one, Orchid Heart Elegies offers sustenance and solace.” Rhea Tregebov, author of Rue des Rosiers“[Landale] composes her querying losses with such dignity and grace that one doesn’t want to avoid this experience of mourning but celebrate the way that, through the pain, we persist, more fully alive.” Catherine Owen“… these elegies, which carefully balance laments with reflections, are also imbued with a strong sense of place … on our islands: by the sea, in the forest, on the trail. [They] will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, and equally with anyone who loves the pithiness of poetry.” Aqua Magazine“In a collection of astonishing poems, after Rilke's beautiful Duino Elegies, ten poems for survival of his annihilated soul, Landale advises us to invite emptiness. Her lifeline is the phenomenal world and the elegies that mark the stations of grief are angel commentaries that make her soul walk tolerable. Elephants may weep, but humans may translate the wisdom of Angels into plainsong so that we can comfort one another with the greatest gift from our ancestors.” British Columbia Review

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Book SynopsisFrom a balcony overlooking an urban back lane, a poet watches those walking below – their identities unknown and yet grasped through details of habit that reflect the strangers’ inner selves. In watching for life David Zieroth ponders questions about how to live and how to continue.Trade Review“This book is an unassuming masterpiece. Unassuming in that its speaker is a solitary apartment dweller who spends his time looking entirely away from himself into his back lane surroundings. A masterpiece in that its speaker reveals how he is nothing except what he sees outside himself in human, creaturely, and even mineral disguise. And yet this is not what he is; he is the watcher looking through him, haunting him, sending out his gaze within which is boundless, selfless awareness ‘watching for life.’” Russell Thornton, author of Answer to Blue“David Zieroth pries open the deepest philosophical and psychological workings of humanity in the most ordinary moments. At turns humorous, thoughtful, and surreal, Zieroth’s poems are wise and full of sharp observations, sussing out profound meaning in someone’s gait as they walk the lane below or in the way a gull floats with ‘his immaculate white, airy curves.’ You'll be quick to agree with Zieroth when he writes: ‘all I can say / it’s better to take notice.’” Al Rempel, author of Undiscovered Country“This stunning collection, the work of a poet at the height of his maturity, creates a paradigm for the human condition with its inherent loneliness. Here the speaker ‘watches for life’ from an urban balcony and evokes the characters and moods of those who pass below, capturing something of their souls and reflecting his essential empathy for fellow humans. Aware of a godlike visual advantage in his ‘eyrie’ or ‘control room,’ and at one point invoking ‘a clown in his mad pulpit,’ David Zieroth delights us with playful humour and refreshing self-irony, all the while realizing a vision of life full of bird imagery in which ordinary crows sometimes shine in sunlight.” Gillian Harding-Russell, author of Uninterrupted and In Another Air“This traveller’s point of view extends into … watching for life … the world Zieroth views outside his third-floor apartment, the comings and goings in the laneway below him. If such a notion seems restrictive, think again. The poet has discovered a richly varied vista beneath him.” The BC Review

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Book SynopsisFirmly rooted in frostbitten, fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness.Trade Review“Radiant in its ache and teeming with beauty, the swailing absorbs the haunted geographies of home, forest, field, fire, and snow while delivering a stunning introspection through poems steeped in the winter of their own grief. So many of the last lines blew me away, and I found myself continually returning to savour their longing.” Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland and Yellow Rain“The swailing is a powerful, unstintingly honest exploration of memory, loss, the subtle play of presence and absence, and the risks to selfhood that longing poses, explored in poems shot through with dark humour, urgency, and exemplary precision.” John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone“Among the many virtues of Patrick Errington’s impeccably constructed debut is its nearly forensic attention to the minutest particulars: ‘Last night’s rain is pearling the spruce, the timothy.’ What is most astonishing about this exactitude is that rather than dispelling the mystery of being in the world, it fills the reader with renewed marvelling and reverence.” Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many“Patrick Errington's poems are conceived in attention, crafted in grace, and finished in wisdom. ‘They told me as a child to be exact with pain,’ Errington writes, and his poems are true to his credo, leaping wildly through the mysteries of mourning while extending to us the compassionate hand of form. Here is a poet who knows that form and freedom can be one, that sorrow can have an ecstasy within it, that hope might just be ‘loss finding what form it can keep.’ Here, in poem after poem, is truth.” Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of Lunetto“Gorgeous poems which seem to shimmer on that constantly shifting border between the body and the landscape.” Andrew McMillan, author of pandemonium“From the beginning of the book to the end, the poet sets the reader’s mind on fire with the luminous language, lyric intensity, and emotional heat of these poems. Patrick Errington’s gorgeous, superbly crafted gems each shimmer under the poet’s fierce gaze, and taken together achieve something grand and powerful.” Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House “The slow burn of these poems culminates in evocative and expansive lyricism.” Poetry Foundation

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Book SynopsisIn a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing.Trade Review“In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place.” CBC Books

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Book SynopsisMaria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.Trade Review2021 is the year of Stepanova. * The Guardian *Stepanova's voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language. No translator who reads Stepanova's work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle and this miracle happened—to the English language above all. -- Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and ResurrectedA volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait. The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposiumMaria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Stepanova's] work is defined by fluent phrases expressing complex thoughts, the fusing of different styles, a carefree command of all possible metrical feet, and a great sense of empathy. * Poetry International *Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. * Poetry Magazine *Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years. * Harper's Magazine *Each book [The Voice Over, In Memory of Memory, and War of the Beasts and the Animals] casts light on the others, revealing overlapping themes. Their simultaneous appearance gives English-speaking readers a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker. * Times Literary Supplement *This ambitious collection provides English-language readers with a systematic introduction to the work of one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets . . . [The] explicit discussion of translation strategies within the volume will give readers a great deal to think about and highlights current trends and points of debate in literary translation. The translations included in this volume are of very high quality and might together make a wonderful primer for a course in literary translation. * World Literature Today *An exceptional introduction to [Stepanova's] work, the product of intensive collaboration, creative endeavour, and serious scholarship . . . essential reading for anybody interested in poetry today and in contemporary Russian culture. * Translation and Literature *Table of ContentsPrefaceBibliographic NoteIntroduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation, by Irina ShevelenkoPart I: The Here-WorldA Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a RusskiThe North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradleAhoy! Beyond the azure’s tempestAdieu, until one branched floor higherFor you, but the voice of the straitened MuseThe BrideThe PilotThe morning sun arises in the morningAs Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamberIt is certainly time to stopEven bluer than the toilet tiles(a birthday on the train)(half an hour on foot)July 3rd, 2004The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”Sarah on the BarricadesThe Desire to Be a RibBus Stop: Israelitischer FriedhofZoo, Woman, MonkeyPart II: Displaced PersonAnd a vo-vo-voice aroseIn the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurledSaturday and Sunday burn like starsIn every little park, in every little squareMom-pop didn’t know himMama, what janitorA train rides down entire RussiaOrdnance was weeping in the openThe A went past, Tram-TraumWell I don’t sing Kupitye papirosnThe light swells and pulses at the garden gateIn the village, in the field, in the forestA deer, a deer stood in that placeThe last songs are assemblingMy dear, my little LibertyThere he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his headDon’t wait for us, my darlingDon’t strain your sightFour OperasIn Unheard-of SimplicityDisplaced PersonPart III: SpoliaSpoliaWar of the Beasts and the AnimalsToday Before Yesterday (excerpt)After the Dead WaterIntending to LiveAt the Door of a Notnew AgePart IV: Over Venerable GravesThe Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)From That Side: Notes on SebaldOver Venerable GravesNotes

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Book SynopsisMaria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.Trade Review2021 is the year of Stepanova. * The Guardian *Stepanova's voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language. No translator who reads Stepanova's work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle and this miracle happened—to the English language above all. -- Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and ResurrectedA volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait. The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposiumMaria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Stepanova's] work is defined by fluent phrases expressing complex thoughts, the fusing of different styles, a carefree command of all possible metrical feet, and a great sense of empathy. * Poetry International *Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. * Poetry Magazine *Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years. * Harper's Magazine *Each book [The Voice Over, In Memory of Memory, and War of the Beasts and the Animals] casts light on the others, revealing overlapping themes. Their simultaneous appearance gives English-speaking readers a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker. * Times Literary Supplement *This ambitious collection provides English-language readers with a systematic introduction to the work of one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets . . . [The] explicit discussion of translation strategies within the volume will give readers a great deal to think about and highlights current trends and points of debate in literary translation. The translations included in this volume are of very high quality and might together make a wonderful primer for a course in literary translation. * World Literature Today *An exceptional introduction to [Stepanova's] work, the product of intensive collaboration, creative endeavour, and serious scholarship . . . essential reading for anybody interested in poetry today and in contemporary Russian culture. * Translation and Literature *Table of ContentsPrefaceBibliographic NoteIntroduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation, by Irina ShevelenkoPart I: The Here-WorldA Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a RusskiThe North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradleAhoy! Beyond the azure’s tempestAdieu, until one branched floor higherFor you, but the voice of the straitened MuseThe BrideThe PilotThe morning sun arises in the morningAs Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamberIt is certainly time to stopEven bluer than the toilet tiles(a birthday on the train)(half an hour on foot)July 3rd, 2004The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”Sarah on the BarricadesThe Desire to Be a RibBus Stop: Israelitischer FriedhofZoo, Woman, MonkeyPart II: Displaced PersonAnd a vo-vo-voice aroseIn the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurledSaturday and Sunday burn like starsIn every little park, in every little squareMom-pop didn’t know himMama, what janitorA train rides down entire RussiaOrdnance was weeping in the openThe A went past, Tram-TraumWell I don’t sing Kupitye papirosnThe light swells and pulses at the garden gateIn the village, in the field, in the forestA deer, a deer stood in that placeThe last songs are assemblingMy dear, my little LibertyThere he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his headDon’t wait for us, my darlingDon’t strain your sightFour OperasIn Unheard-of SimplicityDisplaced PersonPart III: SpoliaSpoliaWar of the Beasts and the AnimalsToday Before Yesterday (excerpt)After the Dead WaterIntending to LiveAt the Door of a Notnew AgePart IV: Over Venerable GravesThe Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)From That Side: Notes on SebaldOver Venerable GravesNotes

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIf you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you -- Susie Goldsbrough * The Times *Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the task of grieving for the threatened loss of an entire world -- Rowan Williams * New Statesman *A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail *The giants of the genre are well presented … there are discoveries aplenty … so monumental is this anthology that one can imagine it pillowing a knight’s head on an elaborately carved marble tomb -- Anthony Gardner * Tablet *Funny, angry and provocative … the anthology is a success ... the editors’ introduction is excellent – clear, informative and thought-provoking -- Sean O’Brien * Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisThe Tower was W. B. Yeats''s first major collection of poetry as Nobel Laureate after the receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923. It is considered to be one of his most influential collections. The title refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917 and later restored. The Tower includes some of his greatest and most innovative poems including ''Sailing to Byzantium'', a lyrical meditation on man''s disillusionment with the physical world; ''Leda and the Swan'', a violent and graphic take on the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus and ''Among School Children'', a poetic contemplation of life, love and the creative process.

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Book Synopsis''But no, she''s abstract, is a birdOf sound in the air of air soaring,And her soul sings unencumberedBecause the song''s what makes her sing.''Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct personae, these poems by one of Portugal''s greatest poets trace a mind shaken by intense suffering and a tireless search for meaning.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York''s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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Book Synopsis''The patron saint of poetry'' Carol Ann Duffy''McGough is a true original and more than one generation would be much the poorer without him'' The Times_______________For fifty years, Roger McGough has delighted readers with poetry that is at once playful and poignant, intimate and universal. In his latest collection, he explores the whole gamut of the human experience, from forgotten friendships and family life, to the trauma of war and contemporary politics, wittily showing us who we are in all our shades of light and dark. _______________''McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings'' Time out ''Memorable and enduring and fresh. Age has not withered [his lines] nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that?'' Sunday Herald ''McGough''s trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away'' Poetry ReviewTrade ReviewHe is a true original and more than one generation would be much the poorer without him—The TimesMemorable and enduring and fresh. Age has not withered [his lines] nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that?—Sunday HeraldMcGough's trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away—Poetry Review

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