Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewWhen I first encountered Fariha’s writing, I let out a sigh of relief. Was it refreshing? Yes. But there was something more. Her words allow us to feel visible. Fariha’s writing has the power to heal and transform. She pulls you into her stories until you’re at the edge of your seat, emphatically rooting for her subjects. -- Rupi Kaur“A moving poetry collection by a queer Muslim writer exploring all the facets of her identity.” * Domino *“[Roisin’s] writing is intensely vulnerable and through revealing her own experience she reflects so many others.” * Bustle *“…a collection of poems that aims to heal..." * Vogue online *“…heart-aching and emotional while offering a sense of hope in a world that desperately needs it.” * Little Infinite *“In these short and potent stanzas she makes it clear that while she’s been able to lay down the ghosts that have haunted her own self-worth, loving herself back to health after the mental and physical exhaustion of weathering constant aggressions is a long and continuous process.” * Teen Vogue *

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Book SynopsisLittle treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The original text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. The poetry of W.B. Yeats is among the most-loved literature of the twentieth century. At times dream-like, at others political, his verse has a rich sense of identity, infused with myth, mysticism and lyrical skill. This gift edition of selected poetry gathers some of the finest works by the Irish poet, including ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘When You Are Old’, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 'Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', ‘Easter, 1916’, 'The Second Coming' and 'A Prayer for my Daughter'. In place of the glossary are included selected notes by Yeats himself, and indexes of titles and first lines.

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Book SynopsisZonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life.Trade Review'Dynamic, interrogative and unsettling; crafted yet open-ended; fiercely smart, savage and stirring - from the get-go, Paterson's poetry has been essential reading.' - Guardian'An immensely skilled poet of craft and restraint, who speaks with a stunning lyrical voice.' - Daily Telegraph

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Book Synopsis''The Forward Prizes have turned a spotlight on contemporary poetry which is both searching and glamorous''Carol Ann Duffy100 Prized Poems brings together the best of the poems published over a quarter century in twenty-five editions of the Forward books of poetry, a series highlighting the works commended annually for the prestigious Forward Prizes.The roll-call of poets included is a Who's Who of poetry excellence and includes both familiar names Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Derek Walcott - and fresh voices Kae Tempest, Kei Miller and Emily Berry. This anthology of anthologies is a great way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.

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Book SynopsisIn 2019 poet-artist Gommie began walking the coastline of an England with nothing but a backpack, a tent and an unusually large collection of pens. His aim? Searching for hope during increasingly hard times. From losing his way on the Dover Hills to bankruptcy in Rhyl and wild camping in Scarborough, Gommie’s extraordinary journey is still ongoing, and his findings, a deeply moving mixture of texture, illustration, poetry and verbatim conversations, are a gentle homage to the often-overlooked places we inhabit and the frequently forgotten voices we hear. Follow him @gommie_poem on Instagram.

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Book SynopsisSalt is a distinctive assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in the form of brief utterances. One extends to sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes not least the word salt.' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life that refresh with the turning of each page. Like little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt

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Book SynopsisThe complete Cavafy poems including the unfinished works in a stunning new translation.From the acclaimed author of The Lost', a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering. With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy's form, Daniel Mendelsohn's translation brings to English the poet who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot among them.Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise of the modern world, Cavafy's poetry collapses the spectra of time, geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithica, famed for their revival of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy's unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel Mendelsohn's edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh, definitive edition of CavaTrade Review’The poetry of Cavafy has been my spiritual food for many years now … Cavafy is a poet who never leaves you. He gets under your skin’ Louis de Bernieres ‘Magisterial … A brilliant scholar, a discerning critic and a generous person, Mendelsohn brings Cavafy alive’ Times ‘This beautifully produced book is as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn’s scholarship is formidable. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough’ Guardian ‘No-one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work … Mendelsohn’s scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet’s love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it’s impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual’ Daily Telegraph ‘Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them’ New Yorker ‘This not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language … It is an event on the page. Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art’ New York Times Book Review

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Book Synopsis The first ever collection of poems by the acclaimed author of the Aubrey/Maturin series of Napoleonic naval adventures. Trade Review'You are in for the treat of your lives. Thank God for Patrick O’Brian: his genius illuminates the literature of the English language, and lightens the lives of those who read him' Irish Times ‘O’Brian’s narrative pace is always gripping: it shifts its speed and provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises – comic, grim, farcical and tragic.… The writing is as strong and delightfully various as the people and plots. And everything – skies and seas and ports and creatures – is vivid and sensuously present.’ A. S. Byatt, Evening Standard ‘O’Brian writes like a man to whom writing comes as easily as breathing: precisely, fluently, economically… perfect cadences’ Jane Schilling, Sunday Telegraph ‘A man of poetic sensibility with a plain-teller's instinct. At best, that resounds with authority in a late Yeatsian way’ George Szirtes

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Book SynopsisAn embrace of a book' Florence WelchPoetry was my place, my little clearing in the forest, where I could quietly put everything I was holding. I'm not sure what gave me the courage to open up that space to you, but here I am, doing it.'The Magic Border is the debut book from Mercury Prize-winning musician and poet Arlo Parks, combining never-before-seen poetry, song lyrics and beautiful, intimate images from collaborator, photographer Daniyel Lowden.Featuring twenty original poems, alongside an exclusive artist's statement and the complete lyrics from her sophomore album My Soft Machine, this vital collection explores the queer experience, blackness, grief, trauma and love through the eyes of the remarkable young musician.The Magic Border allows readers rare insight into her creative process and beautifully showcases the full breadth of Arlo's singular artistry.Arlo Parks pulls beauty around her as a war tactic, and she shares the spoils with us' Katie Gavin, MUNAThere's as much music Trade Review‘The most tender and tactile collection. Arlo Parks writes poetry you can taste … An embrace of a book’ Florence Welch ‘Arlo Parks pulls beauty around her as a war tactic, and she shares the spoils with us. I am grateful and invigorated’ Katie Gavin, MUNA ‘There’s as much music in Arlo’s poetry as there is poetry in her music. How nice to find her same reassuring warmth, eloquence, and softness in another medium as she finds new ways to capture the fierce love and noticing she has for life and the people she adores’ Lucy Dacus ‘Dream-like, song-like, Arlo Parks’ sumptuous poems pierce us with their directness of emotion, keen images, and seductive rhythms. As rich and sharp as photographs, The Magic Border is sexy and startling; these songs penetrate the heart’ Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers ‘Wonderful, full of intoxicating beauty and tenderness. This is a collection to savour’ Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

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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 SynopsisEdward Thomas wrote most of his poems during active service in World War I - poems which search for the true self, and affirm the oneness of all experience.

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Book SynopsisThe response of one writer to the work of another can be doubly illuminating. In this series, a poet selects and introduces another poet whom they have particularly admired. Ted Hughes''s classic selection of Sylvia Plath''s poetry provides the perfect introduction to a major body of work in twentieth-century poetry. Hughes draws upon the collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and from Sylvia Plath''s Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Poems.

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Book SynopsisDaljit Nagra possesses one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary English poetry. British Museum is his third collection, following his electrifying version of the epic Ramayana, and marks a significant departure of style to something quieter, more contemplative and inquisitive, at times valedictory. His political edge has been honed in a series of meditations and reflections upon our heritage, our legacy, and the institutions that define them: the BBC, Hadrian's Wall, the Sikh gurdwaras of our towns, the British Museum of the title poem. With compassion and charisma, Nagra explores the impact of the first wave of mass migration to our shores, the Arab Spring, the allure of extremism along with a series of personal poems about the pressures of growing up in a traditional community. British Museum is a book that asks profound questions of our ethics and responsibilities at a time of great challenge to our sense of national identity.

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Book SynopsisI've rounded up a rowdy assemblyOf my own Consequential DogsAs counterparts to Eliot's mogs.Mine are a rough and ready bunch:You wouldn't take them out to lunch . . .But if they strike you as friendly, funny,Full of bounce and fond of a romp,Forgetful of poetic pomp,I trust you'll take them as you find themAnd, at the very least, not mind them.T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections ever. At last, in the 80th year of Old Possum's Cats, we have the companion volume that Eliot had envisaged, written by master poet and Costa-winner, Christopher Reid.This wonderfully witty and varied collection, illustrated in full-colour by the brilliant Sara Ogilvie, is perfect for younger readers to appreciate. A book that will be enjoyed by generations to come, perfect for reading together!

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Book SynopsisThis selection of correspondence presents, for the first time, the private life and reflections of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry.

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Book SynopsisFormally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity.' – Ocean VuongBread and Circus is a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse: it combines poetry, photography and spectral imaging to explore the realities of economic necessity and marginal poverty through a personal lens.Examining the experience of the US urban Black community from a variety of perspectives, it draws heavily on Airea D. Matthews's archival research on Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century Scottish economist, as well as his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.As the perspective shifts from watchful child, to teacher, mother, writer and citizen, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost.Trade Review'This book enacts, with tenderness and intelligence, an erudition that matches the capacious love of its ambitions. Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity, Matthews engages the archive as a breathing document, refusing to let history be done with itself, and thereby accomplishes what I love most about poetry— especially hers—that it lives, is living.' -- Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 'Matthews's writing is bold, innovative and complex.' * Washington Post *'Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.' * New Yorker *'Discerning and significant' * Poetry Foundation *'Unflinching. . . Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequality.' * Publishers Weekly *'Matthews has earned a place in the accomplished company of Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser.' * Booklist *'When sinking into the work of Airea Matthews within Bread and Circus, "gratitude" is the word that most eagerly leaps to mind. I am grateful to be witness to a writer dismantling the boundaries of form, shape, and language, while not sacrificing any brilliance on the page. This is a stunning collection of work, which feels both ahead of its time and also abundantly on time.' -- Hanif Abdurraqip, author of The Little Devil in America 'From page to unrelenting page in this fierce and brilliant book, Airea Matthews shows us just how high the stakes of poetry should be. If you are not writing to save your life, you are not writing in Airea Matthews’ league.' -- Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy 'Roman poet Juvenal criticized a public distracted with free wheat and mindless entertainment. Toni Morrison said the point of racism is to keep us distracted from fully living our lives. With the genius and ferocity of mother love, Airea Matthews’s Bread and Circus shreds our expectations of what poems can be and do while clearing the air of the illusions that cloud our understanding of past, present, self and other. Lift the cover and breathe in the clarity concentrated on these pages." -- Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest

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Book SynopsisCollecting poetry written in the years 2011–2014, Sentenced to Life sees Clive James look back over his extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty.After falling dangerously ill in 2010, Clive James did not expect to live to see this volume published. But live he did, and these poems see James writing with his insight and energy not only undiminished but positively charged by his situation.There is no sense of self-pity in this collection, which includes the internet sensation ‘Japanese Maple’ and which deals openly with regret, death and his own illness,. With a great breadth of subject matter – taking in Hollywood, travel, art and politics – it is his fascination with humanity that shines through. It is, above all, a celebration of life – all that is treasurable and memorable in our time here.Rich in wisdom and sharp of thought, Sentenced to Life represents a career high poiTrade ReviewMany of these poems are an appeal to the heart, and in particular to the heart of his wife. The collection’s defining quality is gallantry and it is this that makes it so moving * Observer *Clive James is courageously fighting his dark future with that most powerful of weapons: poetry. He may lose the battle but his words will linger * Daily Express *

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Book SynopsisA lyrical excavation of trauma and healing in the midst of early motherhood - the debut work of an endlessly inventive poet whose work 'fizzes with energy, physicality, and the levitating openness of song' (Rebecca Tamás) **Selected as a book of the year by the Financial Times and Telegraph** 'An essential read, poignant, powerful and provocative. I love the feeling in Amy Acre's poems' Salena Godden Amy Acre’s debut collection is an unforgettable, unflinching excavation of motherhood, what it means to be a female artist, and what it means to be a poet with a deeply integrated community. This is a timeless work the like of which we haven’t seen enough of in the past, primed to last long into the future. 'Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this' Joelle Taylor, winner of the 2021 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 'Mothers, daughters, lovers, all the thrilling complexity of love and grief that the body must bear; these are poems which set the page aglow and make my heart spin' Liz Berry, winner of the 2018 Forward Prize for PoetryTrade ReviewMothersong is an essential read, it is poignant, powerful and provocative. I love the feeling in Amy Acre's poems, this timeless vulnerability, this ripe truth, these pieces are beautiful, evocative, and everlasting -- Salena GoddenAmy Acre’s powerful collection explores contemporary parenthood and the memory of a childhood marked by grief ... These poems are graced by an exquisite diction and enlightening observation * Irish Times *Acre’s debut collection, takes readers through the frightening, wearying, ecstatic experience of becoming a mother * Daily Telegraph *Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this -- Joelle TaylorAmy Acre’s poems are electric. They crackle and spark with wild feeling, inventiveness and deep sensuality. Mothers, daughters, lovers, all the thrilling complexity of love and grief that the body must bear; these are poems which set the page aglow and make my heart spin -- Liz BerryExpansive and risk-taking * Guardian *This debut collection from the London-born poet is confident, witty and a little addictive. As the title suggests, these poems explore motherhood and mother loss, in verse that manages to be both playfully frenzied and movingly intimate. * Financial Times, Books of the Year *

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Book SynopsisFrom a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a 'rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' (New Yorker) Selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph _______________________________ Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form - from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.Trade ReviewBennett captures the beauty of what really matters in life - the memories, youth sports, family traditions and little moments that many of us take for granted ... [Owed] couldn't have been more timely * Salon *Odes to intimacy and his African-American com­munity ... Bennett has a sharp turn of phrase, too * Telegraph, Best poetry books of 2023 *Themes of praise and debt pervade this rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US ... Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic, and boldly stakes claim to ‘some living, future / English, & everyone in it / is immortal' * New Yorker *We’re lucky to have Joshua Bennett’s Owed at this hour in America. The resonances of ‘ode’ and ‘owed’ underscore his tremendous acts of invention amid ‘an ever-expanding grand Black Epilogue.’ Lyrical and political fibers are woven through narratives as clear and idiosyncratic as the plastic on your grandmother’s couch. Owed fights for the ‘ground where the children can play & come home whole.’ Bennett swings with song and exaltation; he swings with resistance and defense. I’m glad to have his amazing collection right now. I will be glad to have it tomorrow -- Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinOwed is an indictment of the state even as it is an ode to the ongoingness of Black imagination. Here, a single moment shimmers with a million resonances of attention. So the world is loved this much. And what has been taken has been taken this much. Bennett insists on repair even as he mourns what is utterly irreparable. This book is part of a breathful, bodied fight for Black life. I am emboldened and sharpened by Bennett's genius and by his love made plain across each of these shimmering pages -- Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black MariaAstonishing poems that explore the past, childhood, family relationships, identity, and memory among many other themes, all expertly rendered through a mixture of forms ... Bennett has a gift for building and setting vivid scenes and complex stories within the small frames of his stanzas * Booklist *Owed intertwines the author’s multifaceted professions as poet, performer, and professor through powerful, crisp poems that celebrate the complexity, joy, and heartbreak of the Black experience in America ... Bennett’s poems are more necessary than ever * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *

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Book SynopsisClive James read, learned and recited poetry aloud for most of his life. In this, the last book he completed before his death, the much-loved poet, broadcaster and author offers a selection of his favourite poems and a personal commentary on each.In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn't just remember them, he found them impossible to forget. The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration.Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud.In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem's construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life.Whether you're familiar with a poem or not – whether you're familiar with poetry in general or not – these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James's enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved. This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight.'Clive James's joyous farewell . . . from Thomas Wyatt to Carol Ann Duffy' – Guardian, Best Poetry of 2020Clive James (1939–2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collection Sentenced to Life and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, both Sunday Times bestsellers.Trade ReviewA treasure trove of poetic pleasure * The Times *The Fire of Joy is a proper pleasure. Fun and fight-picking, wise and persuasive. James loves a layman and, by the end, the layman certainly loves James . . . “It’s a dipper,” said my husband, reading over my shoulder. If I wasn’t on review duty, that’s the way I’d read it: dipping in at random, at bedtime, a poem a night. -- Laura Freeman * The Times *The Fire of Joy is a set of personal, quintessentially Jamesian commentaries on 80 of his favourite poems. * Guardian *A must for anthology lovers . . . The late, great critic and poet doesn't so much look forward as back; these are old favourites (Byron, Wordsworth, Masefield, Owen) from a lifetime’s reading, with personal notes on each one. I found it moving as well as a joy. -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail *A wonderful anthology of 80 or so poems to memorise and read aloud, selected by the late critic and humorist Clive James. Enjoy the poems and his witty, opinionated mini-essays about his choices. * The Times Best Books of 2020 So Far… *Clive James’s joyous farewell . . . from Thomas Wyatt to Carol Ann Duffy, this valedictory volume features 80 poems he learned and loved, each accompanied by an essay to persuade us of their brilliance. -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian, Best Poetry of 2020 *Clive James was so prolific that he’s still publishing books a year after his death . . . [These] are poems to “murmur under your breath at the bus stop, declaim aloud in the bath, roar from the rooftops”. -- James Marriott * The Times, Best Literary Non-fiction Books of the Year 2020 *A book to lighten the darkness . . . What links them all [the selected poems] are Clive James’ typically witty, sometimes abrasive and always passionate comments. It’s a book to dip into and ponder in this bleak midwinter. -- Piers Plowright * Tablet *Extraordinarily cogent . . . I have read many old men’s books over the years, and even the best writers often lose their flavour . . . But this book shows no diminution whatever of James’s talents, and it’s fueled by his obvious love of the form. -- Marcus Berkmann * Spectator *[This book] is full of boisterous life . . . His farewell is funny, intellectually sharp and a faithful companion for this age of turmoil and uncertainty . . . [it] rings and rhymes with passion and learning from a big brain who found room in his soul for poetry and in his heart for the contentment it can bring in good times and the solace it carries in bad times. -- Hugh MacDonald * Herald *The context of [this book's] composition is inescapable and each choice seems more moving in light of James’ impending demise . . . The Fire of Joy is a generous and genial valediction from one of Australia’s most famous wits. -- James Antoniou * Sydney Morning Herald *A deeply affecting book that blends autobiography with literary criticism, and is filled with James’s trademark breezy erudition and wit . . . It is indeed a joy to read, and savour. -- Troy Bramston * Weekend Australian *

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Book Synopsis‘Funny but serious, accessible but rich in meaning, consistently surprising – the world looks slightly different after reading a Billy Collins poem. He’s a one-off, an American treasure’ Nick Laird These are poems of whimsy and imaginative acrobatics, but they are grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the proper way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and invites us to his own funeral. Facing both the wonders of being alive and the thrill of mortality, these new poems can only solidify Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most durable and interesting poets.Trade ReviewA new collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and 'America’s favorite poet' * The Wall Street Journal *A writer . . . fully aware of his work’s power to delight * New York Times *A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace * New Yorker *Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world * Carol Ann Duffy *Funny but serious, accessible but rich in meaning, consistently surprising – the world looks slightly different after reading a Billy Collins’ poem. He’s a one-off, an American treasure * Nick Laird *

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Book SynopsisA brilliant outing from one of the finest poets currently working in the English language. This is at once a sharply political and deeply personal book which explores just that intersection.‘Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking’ GuardianTrade ReviewIt sometimes seems that contemporary poetry divides into two sorts - those poems that did not need to be written and those written out of necessity. Denise Riley belongs to the second category - her writing is perfectly weighted, justifies its existence. It is impossible not to want to "say something back" to each of her poems in recognition of their outstanding quality. Her voice is strong and beautiful - an imperative in itself . . . remarkable * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisOne of the English language’s best-loved living poets, in Nature Carol Ann Duffy presents us with her favourites among her poems on the natural world. Drawing on work written over four decades and arranged chronologically, Duffy also adds to her selection one wholly new poem.

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Book SynopsisA beautiful collection from much-loved poet Pam Ayres, compiling her best verse dedicated to animals, illustrated by Ellie Snowdon. Now a Sunday Times bestseller. 'Oh WHY must you bark at the postman? Why must you batter my ears? I know it seems rum But the postman has come Every morning for SEVENTEEN YEARS.' From her very first encounter with a friendly golden Labrador at just three years old, Pam Ayres has been enchanted by animals. Now, for the first time, in this beautiful new illustrated work, she has gathered together her life's work of poems, new and old, dedicated to her love of them. This definitive collection brings to life the charming characters and voices of all creatures great and small through Pam's poetry over the last five decades. From delightful tales of our British wildlife in 'I'm a Starling Me Darling' and the difficulties of keeping farm animals in 'Fleeced', to her hilarious observations of our pets in 'Ode to a Jack Russell' and poignant reflections on the end of their lives in 'Tippy Tappy Feet', Pam Ayres on Animals is a celebration of animals everywhere.Trade ReviewPam Ayres is essential to British humour * Mail on Sunday *

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Book SynopsisA buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it means to overcome a condition when living is a part of the condition itself, these poems observe the speaker’s world as it crowds around him, coming into sharper and specific focus, from the hard wisdom of saints on suffering and a slightly unhinged Caravaggio on the metaphysics of painting, through to the deep meaning of a hot dog and a thoroughly botched retelling of a Norm Macdonald joke. Throughout it all, Advil whirls around like an unruly tornado of a sidekick, snapping Polaroids and “searching for a cloud that resembles a plausible end-of-life scenario.” Think of this collection as a meditation on how to deal with pain and uncertainty when life itself is an uncertain, painful mess. These are poems that acknowledge the shakiness of the ground we stand on. The opening poem wonders: “If you stay with the shakiness through its conjugations? Who knows.” But don’t worry. Advil’s on the case and aims to find out."These wry poems cajole the reader into feverish attentiveness. Andrew Faulkner's Heady Bloom is that unusual collection of poems whose aim is generous and profound, but whose means are often comic and provocative, all jagged edges and elbows. Chaplinesque, perhaps, but Chaplin at an all-ages hardcore show, or having been to one and reflecting on it later, in tranquility." —Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City and Run the Red Lights"Among other issues, this book explores how the seizures, hallucinations, and excruciating pain caused by neurological conditions that are now treated clinically were once thought of as visions granted to and endured by saints. Faulkner does this in poems that are filled with seriousness but also humor, unlikely allusions, and exhilarating wordplay. A running conceit is the speaker’s ambivalent relationship—a kind of “bromance”—with Advil, modern medicine personified as his nemesis and doppelgänger, a taunting comedian but also a vital helpmate, a debased version of the saints’ archangelic protectors. Faulkner’s imagery and conceits surprise and delight. A strange and beautiful book. " —Geoffrey NutterTrade Review"These poems grapple with what it means to overcome a condition, when living is part of the condition itself." -CBC Books

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Book SynopsisA Narco-Acid Western told in a series of interlinked poems, Soto’s striking debut collection follows the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional US/Mexico border town where an ongoing drug war is raging. The surreal verse of Soto’s poems portrays a bleak political climate as it coincides with the rituals of love & loss, culture & spirituality, & the quest for a better life at all costs. Following the narrative arc of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s classic cult film, El Topo, A Grave is Given Supper builds a world saturated with a mystical aura that describes the finite tensions & complicated desires of lives taking place in the borderland.Trade ReviewAdapted into an original literary-theatric performance by Teatro Dallas directed by Claudia Acosta and starring Elena Hurst LONGLISTED for Reading the West Book Award “The landscape in A Grave is Given a Supper recalls the tones of Frank Stanford, steeped with our phantasmagoric Texan borderlands. Soto offers up each poem like a votive candle, wreath of roses, or weapon, to lay on the altar of the outlaw Jesus Malverde, announcing the arrival of a new literary voice.” —Fernando A. Flores, author of Pig Latin and Stuck on a Razor “Soto describes insects, femicide and the border wall in mystical terms.” —Jaime Dunaway, Advocate Mag “A surreal exploration of the Mexican drug war written in free verse… While many poems traverse…dreamlike terrain, they’re also sometimes grounded in reality. This is where the book is most gripping and provocative.” —Tim Diovanni, Dallas Morning News On Dallas Spleen and previous work: “Soto drives a relentless narrative from poem to poem… a narrative composed of equal parts joy and rage.” —The Literary Review “Soto eases into discomfort and renders it stunning.” —Katy Dycus, The Wild Detectives “There is a deep, inescapable sadness in many of Mike Soto’s poems but it is a sadness for the world and never himself. It’s wrong to stereotype poets, even positively, but I think Soto’s Mexican literary heritage is deep in his bone marrow. It’s a rich, earthly, mystical tradition in which to have one’s taproots. These poems of light and life are compressed, but never crushed.”—Thomas Lux "Feeling distant, far from family and the place that has given me the deepest sense of home, I resolved to write about individuals on a journey of self-actualization despite living in such a climate of violence, but I wanted to take that further—there were already enough portrayals of economic empowerment and ego empowerment—and make it a quest for a kind of enlightenment." —Mike Soto on his work in A Grave is Given SupperLit Hub's “Combines neoclassicism’s equal temperament, the incisive excesses of the metaphysical poets, and Jamie Sabines-like political sensibilities.”—Joe Milazzo, ENTROPY “It’s been wonderful workshopping with Mike and adapting his words for the stage. A lot of our team are first-or second-generation people who have experienced some of the things touched on in the show: migration, drug wars, a journey from Mexico to the U.S.”Teatro Dallas "Across the book, poems spastically display the weight of both people and landscape in heartbreak and obituary...Holding the book together is the poet’s consistency of tone; Soto’s poems never falter at being both maturely concise and emotionally staggering." — Greg Bem, Rain Taxi

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Book SynopsisTua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. I walked on into the forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (2012/2015), the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty (2003), published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006. In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, her new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.Trade ReviewForsström has Finland-Swedish modernism in her bloodstream but has kept a coolly timeless tone in her poetry. Her style can with some reason be called classical… What we read slowly reveals its true poetic face – the face of the lament, the elegy… It’s most beautifully and bravely done. -- Magnus Ringgren * Aftonbladet, Sweden *Tua Forsström writes poetry that comes stealing up on you. There is something curious about her poems, a way of adhering to the world that is hard to put one’s finger on. -- Hadle Oftedal Andersen * Klassekampen, Norway *I don’t know what I am going to need on the day that I have to face major loss, but I’m already writing a reminder to myself to go to the bookshelf then and pick out all of Tua Forsström's books. -- Anna-Lina Brunell * Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland *Table of ContentsI II III IV V

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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 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 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 SynopsisLucid, lyrical and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness.Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 'For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**Trade ReviewThe absence of rest, and its physical and mental impacts, is made tangible... Burnside deftly provides some light within this gloaming. -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty. -- Cressida Connolly * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *A masterful storyteller... I'm in safe hands whenever I pick up a book by him. -- Jen Campbell * The Times, on ASHLAND & VINE *As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye... Never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, on STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE *Few writers manage distinction in even one form. John Burnside has achieved it in two [poetry and fiction]... A Burnside narrative stays in the mind like a half-broken dream; it's often hard to pin down just why it is so compelling... If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both. -- Fiona Sampson * New Statesman, on ASHLAND & VINE and STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE *

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Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021***A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world. The poems in Ransom display all the lyrical beauty and metaphysical ambition for which his work is acclaimed, but with a new urgency, a ragged edge to what the Independent described as his 'dazzling elegance'. At the heart of this new book are three powerful sequences - one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude - that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical. The idea of 'ransom' is turned and turned again, poem by poem, seen through the lenses of personal grief and loss, cinematic scenes of kidnap and release, narratives of incarnation and atonement. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.Trade ReviewWonderfully atmospheric. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation 2023. A Sunday Times Book of the Year. In Child Ballad, David Wheatley's sixth collection, he explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and by wolves. He maps a rich territory of rivers, trees and mountains. Also present are histories, some evidenced, some no longer visible and yet to be inferred. Stylistically, Child Ballad is multifaceted, drawing on influences from the Scottish ballad tradition and the Gaelic bards, on French symbolism and on the American Objectivists. Wheatley is an Irish poet living and teaching in Scotland: as a cultural corridor, his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, different traditions held in dynamic balance and fusion. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he does, Wheatley develops an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alert to questions of memory and loss, communicating the ache of the here and now. He sees through the eyes of young children and the world looks very different in its gifts and threats. Wheatley provides intimate descriptions of parenthood as well as of a Northern Scottish natural world. He deploys an ambitious range of poetic styles and forms. His poems put deep roots down into history and geology, and with translation into other languages. Themes of migration and politics are never far away. Child Ballad sings of midlife, of resettlement and marriage as well as of parenthood.

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Book SynopsisThe fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries. For centuries, poetry anthologies shaped the way that generations of British readers encountered literature. Eighteenth-century young women were introduced to the permissible bits of Shakespeare and Swift in censored collections. Working-class Victorians enrolled to be taught from The Golden Treasury at adult learning colleges. Pop-loving teenagers in the 1960s got their first taste of the counterculture from the bestselling The Mersey Sound. InThe Treasuries, Clare Bucknell reveals anthologies to be a unique window into social history. This is the story of some of the most widely read books ever published, and the cultural conversations – around politics, gender, class and nationhood – they sparked.Trade ReviewAnthologies are the sleepers of the bookshelf, loaded with the hidden ideals and prejudices of their compilers. Clare Bucknell reads expertly between their lines to reveal a remarkable alternative history of literature. -- Rosemary HillThe delight of this book is its expert toggling of scale. Bucknell dissects large issues - politics, class, taste, education - via small vignettes: Palgrave collecting his poems with scissors, war poems falling like bombs, poetry on prescription. Her panoramic history throws up unexpected parallels - the Exclusion Crisis and the Spanish Civil War, Keats and working men’s eduction, ballads and pop. Treasuries is smart and learned but unpatronising: it sparkles with appreciation for the anthologist and their always-partial act of selection. -- Emma Smith * author of Portable Magic *Impressive in its coverage of social history, teeming with anecdotes, The Treasuries arrives just as Britain is once more rearranging its literary heritage and 'retelling favourite stories about itself at a moment of national crisis'. -- Peter ConradClare Bucknell is a compelling storyteller as well as a deep and cheerful scholar. A riveting read, The Treasuries changes how a reader approaches the designing and sometimes devious anthologists and the books they sell us. -- Michael SchmidtThis book is a wonderful celebration and examination of anthologies as the cornerstone of our literary culture. -- Ian McMillan

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Book SynopsisA classic poem with a timeless message, presented in a small and beautiful gift book. Rose Milligan never intended to publicly share her poem 'Dust If You Must', but a series of events led her to publish it in The Lady magazine in 1998. Her charming message about what we value in life resonated with audiences, and it has since been read on BBC radio, posted on Instagram, printed on tea towels, read at funerals and put to music. Now appearing as a book for the first time, beautifully illustrated throughout by illustrator Hayley Wells, Dust If You Must is a timeless reminder to focus on the things we can enjoy in the world, rather than the things we think we need to do.Trade ReviewDust if you must/But wouldn't it be better/To paint a picture, write a letter/Bake a cake or plant a seed ?/Ponder the difference between 'want' and 'need' -- Excerpt from Dust If You Must by Rose Milligan

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Book Synopsis'Moving and hopeful ... will stay with me for a long time' Daisy Buchanan'A fearless, young new voice' Carol Ann Duffy'One of the most exciting debuts I've read in ages' Kaveh Akbar'One of the most startling and original poets of her generation' Joy HarjoThe voice of Tayi Tibble is one of most exciting in poetry today. In Poukahangatus (pronounced 'Pocahontas'), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies - Greek, Maori, feminist, kiwi - peeling them apart and respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies and Twilight to exquisite renderings of precise emotions and the natural world alike. Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics chart the overflowing beauty, irony and ruination of her surroundings.Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history without merely telling it, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation. These are warm, provocative and profoundly original poems, written from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work and gender are intimately and insidiously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and asks how she as a Maori woman fits into trends, stereotypes and popular culture. With language that is at once colourful, passionate and laugh-out-loud funny, Poukahangatus announces the presence of a surpassingly daring new poet.Trade ReviewA fearless, young new voice with a huge range, from history to pop culture, with that sense of joy in its own word-music which immediately heralds the start of a poetic and political journey. Along with Hera Lindsay Bird, Tayi Tibble adds excitement to the new poetry coming from New Zealand -- Carol Ann DuffyStartlingly evocative, lush, moving and hopeful - this is a powerful and thrilling new voice that will stay with me for a long time -- Daisy BuchananHurls us into a lush biome of sensual density ... one feels in the presence of a singular, searching mind rigorously excavating its own psychospiritual station. Poukahangatus is one of the most exciting debuts I've read in ages -- Kaveh AkbarTayi Tibble is one of the most startling and original poets of her generation. Her poetry makes doorways of insight into turbulent history. At the end, there we are, all standing together, listening -- Joy HarjoTayi Tibble's Poukahangatus was an incredibly rhythmic and refreshing read! Ripe with dazzling imagery, culture and history, this collection offers readers a tale of identity, cross-generational references and so much more. Tibble's rich language breathes new life into poetry and tethers readers to the history of the Maori people and the lasting impact of colonization. The writing screams, 'I was here before & I'll be back again!' I'd suggest this book to every twenty-something trying to find their way! -- Roya MarshI love your collection [Rangikura], it's so good, I'm so impressed ... You totally encapsulate the heady vibe of being a young woman in New Zealand -- Lorde * Metro NZ *Tibble's luscious, widely praised debut poetry collection [channels] her Maori heritage and the zeitgeist of her childhood ... Tibble transforms tales of mundanity into spellbinding, melodiousencounters. Boys embroiled in a rugby scrum become gritty and vicious ... A game of Cowboys and Indians is incidentally wounding but also depicted as a sharp indictment of the White Savior Complex ... Tibble's running prose poems bubble over with lush imagery and serve as canny time capsules ... Like the stylistic lovechild of Rupi Kaur and Teresia Teaiwa, Tibble is a poet of effervescent verve and great promise -- Diego Báez * Booklist *This chatty, winsome debut by a young New Zealand poet mines family history, Maori myth and the residue of pop culture to fashion a striking sensibility * New York Times Book Review *Tibble's affinity for poetry was literally written in the stars ... Tibble blends past and present, peppering her poems with pop culture references -- Serena Smith * Dazed *

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Book SynopsisA highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time. Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body. Table of ContentsI Do Not Know the Way to AleppoThe Road to the LakesSpeak Stranger, SpeakWhen We Lost the WarGoing To Listen to My Father’s MiraclesDo Not Call to Me with Your Wide Eyes

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Book SynopsisJames Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait. Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature. An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.

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Book SynopsisHope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.Trade ReviewTwo of the most fortifying books of our times, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned ... were finally written in the late Sixties. In these books, we have a devastating indictment of most of what happened in post-revolutionary Russia -- Seamus Heaney * London Review of Books *A bursting compendium of glances at people, framed in essays of scorn for the inquisitors and compassion for the victims... If she is vinegarish, she is also powerful and enhancing -- V.S. PritchettDescribes the whole range of her life with Mandelstam, their travels, vicissitudes and friendships, above all the friendship with Akhmatova... a vivid triple portrait * New Society *Max Hayward's translation reads easily and seems to me to convey exactly the style and tone in which this great book is written * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisA remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.' - Rebecca TamasTrade Review'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.'- Rebecca Tamas; '[Burnett's] stunning new collection explores the sea - its creatures, sounds, language. Many pieces are meant to be sung, or clicked (like a beetle) and it cumulates into an epic maritime lyric.' -Sinéad Gleeson

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Book SynopsisIn Joie de vivre, Bailey continues to celebrate the living and the dead with 'measured sorrow and delight'. The poems both mourn and laugh, giving age and illness more than a good runfor their money.

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Book SynopsisWritten during the three years Matt Broomfield spent living and working in the autonomous, Kurdish-led region of Syria known as Rojava, these poems paint a unique picture of the revolution there, from the inside out. From Broomfield's own place in the revolution as an 'internationalist' volunteer, to the future of the region in the face of war, this collection raises serious questions and seeks to capture of the energy of Rojava, so often overlooked by the primary-coloured propaganda and grey criticism of our media. "The revolution is living, ugly, beautiful, writhing, self-contradictory, hopelessly compromised, and utterly worth fighting for."

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Book SynopsisThe Last Woman Born on the Island is an exploration of the past and the present, and a celebration of the landscapes, both physical and emotional, that make up our lives. What are the colours of the language or languages we speak, and how do they infl uence the ways we live? Much of this collection is set in the author’s homeland of Scotland. Some poems contemplate the history and traditions of the Highlands and Islands – from the HMS Iolaire disaster off Lewis in 1919 to the knitting of Eriskay ganseys, from the legend of the White Cow at Callanish stone circle to herring girls at the start of the twentieth century. Others consider Scottish languages and parlances, the country’s wildest and most beautiful landscapes, and the effects of tourism on the culture of the Hebrides. Is there is a diff erence between something lost and something merely forgotten? How do we fi nd what we don’t know we ever had? And what is belonging to a place, let alone to two places? In one long poem, the author stands between her home country and her adopted country of France, letting her feet talk us through the places they have been. Who is the last woman and where is the island?Table of ContentsThe last woman born on the island 5 After a Reading by Jackie Kay 7 Chickens 9 Eggs 10 Made the Small Way 11 Tracks 13 Room Six 15 Passing It On 16 Lucky Penny 17 Spoon 18 Lismore 19 Heatwave 20 The Lean Years 21 Night Walk, Baile Mòr 23 Fault Lines 24 West Highland 25 Instead of gulls 26 Peace 27 Sheela-na-gig 28 Fly 29 Cod Fishing, Firth of Clyde 30 Ear 31 Landbound 32 Corvids 33 The Dream 34 Angling 36 Collins Gem 37 Bystander 38 Prototype 39 Middle C 40 Hollows 42 Monochrome 44 Tobar na h-Aois 46 Things That Can Be Thrown 47 Forbidden 48 The White Cow 49 Hebridean 50 Gardener 51 Every time I step inside 52 Post Op 53 Eriskay Wives 54 Plea to Boy on a Train 56 First Keys 57 Celia’s Shoes 58 Thirty-Seventh View of Mount Fuji 59 Death Trumpets 60 Twelve 61 Recipes 62 Upper Cut 64 Fourteen 65 Seventeen 67 Urination For Girls 68 Cusp 70 Feet 72 Trefoil 78 Love 79 I would have liked 80 Her Hair 82 A Seat at Cailleach Farm 83 Revisiting the Island 85 Letter Home, 1920 86 Light’s Tricks 88 Notes 91 Acknowledgements 93 Prizes 94

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Book SynopsisA Girl and Boy in a relationship that is both intoxicating and toxic, exhilarating but ultimately at a cost to each. Edgy and compelling, Nkere tells it all through the parallel narratives of the Girl and Boy drawing on a kaleidoscope of influences that include poetic prose and contemporary spoken word. Experimental in form, this startling debut collection breaks with convention, bringing seemingly polarised forces into combat: religion versus primal desire and love versus desolation.

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Book SynopsisCardiff Writers’ Circle was formed in 1947 and is joined here by other local writinggroups, all lending their imaginations to a wide variety of styles, genres, and formats. You may laugh. You may cry. You may gasp at the sheer beauty contained within these pages. But above all, you will be holding a snapshot of the fantastic talent that exists today in Cardiff, city of the dragon.

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Book SynopsisThe fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.Trade Review“The Fastening posits time as an oil, a sap, a skin, a river (of course), as blood—whatever sustains or poisons, muffles or protects, fossilizes or commodifies us. A barb that pierces through to the raw nerve, or a balm that sheaths it. Its poems still the past, present, and future in Doxsee’s crystal ball, her amber deposits, which we must then chuck from the sea cliff. That's a life. Moments released bleed together in the sea, and we go through all this before the rest of the world wakes up. I'm obsessed with this book of days. Oh, baby. These days are golden in their perversity, outwardly blowing wide and returning.”—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite

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