Modern and contemporary poetry

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Book SynopsisThe First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in modern history and produced horrors undreamed of by the young men who cheerfully volunteered for a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. Whether in the patriotic enthusiasm of Rupert Brooke, the disillusionment of Charles Hamilton Sorley, or the bitter denunciations of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the war produced an astonishing outpouring of powerful poetry. Edited by author and editor Marcus Clapham, the major poets are all represented in this beautiful Macmillan Collector’s Library anthology, Poetry of the First World War, alongside many others whose voices are less well known, and their verse is accompanied by contemporary motifs.Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

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Book SynopsisA care package, left by r.h. Sin, found by you.From New York Times bestselling author, r.h. Sin, comes a care package of two new poetry and prose collections boxed together in an elegant slipcase.

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Book SynopsisA beautiful debut collection from Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair that draws on our colonial history and speaks powerfully to our present moment.Shortlisted for Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021 A Guardian most anticipated book for 2020'Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection' – ScotsmanColliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal beautifully evoke the poet's Jamaican childhood and reach beyond to explore history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke. Cannibal marks the arrival of a thrilling and essential lyrical voice.'Cannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers.' – Major JacksonTrade ReviewWith exquisite lyrical precision, Safiya Sinclair is offering us a new muscular music that is as brutal as it is beautiful. Intelligent and elemental, these poems mark the debut of a poet who is dangerously talented and desperately needed. -- Ada LimónCannibal is nothing less than an entrancing debut that reveals the teeming intellect and ravishing lucidity of a young poet in full possession of her literary powers. Here is a poetry that richly interrogates power and history while also eloquently and furtively asserting the possibilities of nature, desire, and the body as ceremonial and spiritual sources of resistance and affirmation. -- Major JacksonBook of the Month: A singingly gifted writer . . . Sinclair riffs on this notion of savagery as she evokes her childhood in Jamaica and explores race relations in the US; womanhood and otherness; post-colonialism and life in exile . . . An astonishing talent. * The Bookseller *Covers so much ground: her Jamaican background, spirituality, womanhood, America, race relations. She laces words together in a beautiful tapestry, full of history, life, death and, most of all, renewal. -- Morgan Jerkins, New York TimesFilled with beautifully rich imagery . . . Lyrical and provocative, Sinclair's poems teach the reader in rich language what it means to be 'other' * Buzzfeed Books *Much like June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Sinclair is a force to be reckoned with. Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed. * Lenny Letter *Cannibal is the dazzling debut volume of Safiya Sinclair, born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and living in the U.S. Her poems shimmer with the rich colours and sounds of her homeland, but running through is a sense of escape and of exile. * Daily Mail *Precise and provocative poems . . . Sinclair writes with a thrilling sensibility of the texture of savageness * New Statesman *Safiya Sinclair bursts onto the shelves with this richly powerful debut collection . . . Sinclair's material interweaves the personal, the historical, and the political with language of stunning originality . . . these poems are physical, enraged and sensual but also reflected and precise. * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisThe powerful new collection from award-winning poet, Emily Berry. Emily Berry's Dear Boy was described as a blazing debut', winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often painful encounter with childhood loss. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration and oceanic feeling': ''A meditation on a want that can never be answered.''

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Book SynopsisSelected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-five years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who ''began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso'' (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as ''one of the era''s true originals'', Muldoon seems determined to escape definition yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty. Among his many honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize ''for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.''

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Book SynopsisA hugely influential philosophical work of prose poetry, Kahlil Gibran''s The Prophet is an inspirational, allegorical guide to living, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Robin Waterfield.First published in the 1920''s, The Prophet is perhaps the most famous work of religious fiction of the twentieth century, and has sold millions of copies in more than twenty languages. Gibran''s Prophet speaks of many things central to daily life: love, marriage, death, beauty, passion, eating, work and play. The spiritual message he imparts, of finding divinity through love, blends eastern mysticism, religious faith and philosophy with simple advice. The Prophet became the bible of 1960s culture and was credited with founding the New Age movement, yet it still continues to inspire people around the world today. This edition is illustrated with Gibran''s famous visionary paintings.Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a poet, philosopher and artist, who stands among the most important Arabic language authors of the early twentieth century. Born in Lebanon, he spent the last twenty years of his life in the United States, where for many years he was the leader of a Lebansese writing circle in New York. He is the author of numerous volumes, including The Garden of the Prophet, The Storm, The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart, The Vision, Reflections on the Way of the Soul, and Spirit Brides. If you enjoyed The Prophet, you might like Herman Hesse''s Siddhartha, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.''His work goes on from generation to generation''Daily Mail''To read it was to transcend ordinary levels of perception, to become aware ... of a more intense level of being''Independent

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Book SynopsisSusannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry and the author of four pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018), bloodthirsty for marriage (2020) and Oh! (2022). Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, The TLS, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland Review, amongst others. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by poets under the age of thirty. Susannah is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020), and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK and Penguin Ireland.Trade ReviewA poet of tremendous imaginative range, artistic vision, and accomplishment -- Kayo Chingonyi, author of A Blood ConditionSusannah Dickey’s bloodthirsty for marriage made me think of Alice Notley in its urgency and playfulness. But Dickey is more surreal, more vivid; there are more dead gerbils. These are poems that scorch the earth with their originality and then write out of the ashes. -- Will HarrisA rare talent, and certainly one to watch. * The Sunday Times *Using the real-life case of an unidentified woman’s body found in Norway as a jumping off point, this brilliantly realised first collection by the novelist Susannah Dickey is a multilayered investigation into the ethics of the true crime genre * The Guardian *[ISDAL pushes] the boundary of how we might think about form and genre . . . Dickey brings a singular voice and a unique complexity to her investigation -- Tara Bergin * PN Review *

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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 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 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 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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Book SynopsisThis is not the time for adultery.Your lover will fail to be impressed,not so much by the face maskand stale musk of sanitizing gel,but your flouting of the rules.At once funny and moving, Safety in Numbers is the new collection from the nation''s favourite poet. Traversing new yet timeless terrain with his signature wit and intimacy, Roger McGough brings to life the very strangeness of our timesFrom lost tongues and violins to rising oceans, from adulterers in lockdown to ghosts in line, we may live in dark times and yet find ourselves laughing. From surprising angles and with unexpected voices, McGough, ''a trickster you can trust'', reveals the telling moments of our lives._______________PRAISE FOR ROGER MCGOUGH''A witty and ingenious chronicler of British life with a deftness and agility that is hard to beat'' Poetry Society''The patron saint of poetry'' Trade ReviewSparky, thoughtful, inventive, and fun, it's also the mix of these qualities that makes this a fantastic collection * Buzz Magazine *This slim volume is a joy, packed with wry observation, vim and wit that deftly captures the spirit of these strange times we inhabit. Journeying through topical subjects, from rising oceans and adultery in lockdown to seaside staycations and an ode to Laura Kuenssberg, poet Roger McGough has a keen eye for the magical moments within the mundanities of modern life * Herald *Probably the best-known contemporary poet in the country, Roger McGough still tours his brand of zany takes on British culture . . . Safety in Numbers runs with several themes, including the pandemic, how to write poems and even being a narrator and voice-over artist. . . . [with] a lot of characteristically clever imagery and wordplay, such as in Warning Signs, a list of aphorisms, "Time to hit the road? You stumble, hit the road". * Expert Reviews, Best Poetry Books for 2022 *McGough is a true original and more than one generation would be much the poorer without him * The Times *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, on ‘joinedupwriting’ *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 Review, on ‘joinedupwriting’ *The patron saint of poetry * Carol Ann Duffy *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Long overdue, this highly competent translation fills a major gap in our understanding of Arab literary history. No Middle East studies collection will be complete without it.” —Hussein N. Kadhim, author of The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic QaṣīdahTable of ContentsFrom Clay Throb (1947) 1. Semiramis 2. Autumn Echo 3. Whimper 4. Dreaming Silence 5. Boredom 6. Clay Throb 7. Shades 8. Closed Lips From Songs of the Dead City (1951) 9. Barrenness 10. Depths 11. Postman 12. Image 13. Three Signs 14. The Hypocritical Wound 15. At Night 16. Here You Are 17. Roads 18. Old Age 19. Dream 20. An Old Love 21. Slavery 22. O My Friend 23. Deceit 24. Lost Step 25. Loss 26. Where To From Steps in Exile (1965) 27. Secret 28. Old Image 29. Judahs’ Repentance 30. You Came with the Dawn 31. Bitter Land 32. I Want To 33. Tomorrow Here 34. And Tomorrow I Return 35. He Said Something to Us 36. Return to Hiroshima 37. In a Few Hours 38. A Talk for Next Saturday 39. The Eighth Journey 40. At Forty 41. To My Town 42. Steps in Exile From The Journey of Yellow Letters (1968) 43. To a Negro from Alabama 44. Disappointment of the Man of the Past 45. Desolation 46. Genesis 47. Dreaming of Return 48. Two Faces 49. Message of the Small Man 50. The Paling Salt 51. Age of Rubber Stamps 52. I Wish If 53. Short Laugh 54. The Waiting Sails 55. Suffocation 56. Call of a Nation 57. Dream of the Snow 58. At the Crossroads 59. A Child of the First War 60. Night, Cold and Wardens 61. Journey of the Yellow Letters From Songs of the Tired Guard 62. Sleeping Pills 63. Indicted, Though Innocent 64. A Call for Stupor 65. A Dream in Four Scenes 66. Expulsion 67. The Killed Witness 68. Apology 69. Between Two Points 70. Dialogue in the Bend 71. Confessions from 1961 72. Hey… You are Indicted 73. Dialogue in Three Dimensions 74. Procession of the Seven Sins 75. Call of the Seven Sins 76. Stolen Frontiers 77. Sindbad’s Eighth Journey 78. On the Verge of the Fallen World 79. Two Voices Late at Night 80. I’ll Stay Here

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Book SynopsisAndrew Motion's prose memoir In the Blood (2006) was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval and a hymn to familial love. Now, over a decade later and after moving to live and work in the United States, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel but this time in verse. Essex Clay rekindles, expands and gives a tragic resonance to subjects that have haunted the poet throughout his writing life. In the first part, he tells the story of his mother's riding accident, long unconsciousness and slow death; in the second, he remembers the end of his father's life; and in the third, he describes an encounter that deepens the poem's tangled themes of loss and memory and retrieval. Although the prevailing mood of the poem has a sweeping Tennysonian melancholy, its wealth of physical details and its narrative momentum make it as compelling as a fast-paced novel: a settling of accounts which admits that final resolutions are imp

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Book SynopsisAlthough Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon's thirteenth book, it has all the passion and provocation we more often associate with a first collection. Ranging as it does from poems that take as their subject matter the Native American leaders Joseph Brant and Mangas Coloradas, through the Great War, the Irish Rising, hunting with eagles, the house wren, all the way to the day-to-day assault of twenty-first-century America, Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling. It also confirms Dwight Garner's assessment of Selected Poems 1968-2014 in the New York Times: 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.

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Book SynopsisThe illuminating letters of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, including the dramatic breakup of their 21-year marriage and their extraordinary reconciliation.

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Book SynopsisPoems of the Decade 2011-2020 celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Gathering one hundred poems by writers and performers who have drawn new audiences to the artform, it highlights poetry as a space for fresh powerful language, feeling and thought. It includes poems by Raymond Antrobus, Simon Armitage, Fiona Benson, Liz Berry, Caroline Bird, Vahni Capildeo, Alice Oswald and Claudia Rankine.

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Book SynopsisWith musical language and vivid imagery, Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West attunes us to the sheer wonder of being alive. Intimate reflections on family histories, hardship, and everyday life reveal the ways art and nature can lift us from grief and serve as lodestars in an increasingly uncertain world.

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Book SynopsisEsra Plumer completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK, on the work of Unica Zürn and her development of the technique of automatism as an artistic strategy. Dr Plumer is the leading expert on the artistic work of Zürn with an extensive background in the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatric treatment methods. She has taught at the University of Nottingham, the European University of Lefke and The Courtauld Institute of Art.Trade ReviewThe first significant and sustained English language study of the writer and artist that attempts to explicitly remove her from Bellmer's leaden shadow and show her as significant in her own right... The result of Plumer's careful and exhaustive scholarship is an image both of Zürn as an individual separate from the better known Bellmer, as well as her body of work as a distinct and unique contribution to postwar arts and literature. Plumer’s book is itself a superb and groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on Zürn and postwar Surrealism generally. In particular, Plumer provides great insight and methodological clarity into how to examine the relationship between mental illness and artistic creation without reducing one to the other, an activity that has, unfortunately, been the standard approach for so long. * Journal of Modern Literature *‘Esra Plumer’s illuminating study swiftly escapes the claws of psychobiography. Instead, she opts for an informative account of Unica Zürn’s oeuvre (both visual and textual) as an outcome of a conscious artistic strategy, at times infused by her mental illness, rather than a product of such illness per se. What emerges is a well-overdue portrait of an exceptional artist who was far more than just la femme de Bellmer, as demonstrated in Plumer’s astute analysis of the complexities of artistic and personal collaboration.’ * Kamila Kuc, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in New Media, Goldsmiths, University of London *‘Esra Plumer’s comprehensive study of the literary and artistic works of Unica Zürn is highly informative. She presents Zürn as an autonomous artist and also reviews her early period in Berlin. One particular merit is that it at last enables the English-speaking world to share an insight into the surrealistic oeuvre of an exceptional German-French artist.’ * Dagmar Schmengler and Isabel Fischer, curators of the exhibition 'Unica Zürn – Camaro – Hans Bellmer in Berlin: Early works at Camaro Haus, Berlin' (2016) *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword by Mary Ann Caws Introduction 1. Beginnings of Change 2. Exhibitions and Exposure 3. ‘Femme de Bellmer’: Critical Reception from 1984 to 2014 4. Anagrams 5. Automatism after 1945 6. Notes on Unica Zürn’s The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives Epilogue Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis anthology of Moroccan poetry by over seventy contemporary poets presents a significant contribution to the field of Moroccan literature in translation and will appeal to readers with an interest in Arabic poetry in general and the Moroccan dialect inTrade ReviewKapchan’s collection brings together a rich and varied tapestry of Morocco’s many poetry traditions, addressing themes as various as desire, political prisons, and spirituality. * Al-Fanar Media *Table of Contents Acknowledgments On Translation and Ethnography Abdelghani, Mahmoud Achaari, Mohammed Adnan, Taha Adnan, Yassin Aissa, Idriss Akhrif, Mehdi Alahyane, Ayad Arouhal, Khadija Ammach, Jamal Azaykou, Ali Sedki Azrhai, Abdelaziz Barakat, Ahmed Bassry, Aicha Benchemsi, Rajae Benjelloun, Abdelmajid Benjelloun, Abdelmajid Ben Jelloun, Tahar Benmoussa, Ouidad Bennis, Mohammed Bentalha, Mohammed Berrada, Omar Bouanani, Ahmed Boudouma, Jamal Bouhlal, Siham Boujbiri, Mohamed Boussrif, Salah Chebchoub, Fatima Chouhad, Moulay Ali El Aoufi, Boujema El Assimi, Malika El Hajjam, Allal El Khassar, Abderrahim El Khayat, Rita El Maïmouni, Mohamed Elmannani, Abdellah El Ouadie, Salah El Ouazzani, Hassan Farid, Mohamed (Zalhoud) Guennouni, Mohammed-Khammar Hamrouch, Abdeddine Hmoudane, Mohamed Houmir, Mostafa Ikbal, Touria Jouahri, Abderrafi Kadiri, Mourad Khatibi, Abdelkébir Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed Khaless, Rachid Khoudari, Najib Laâlej, Ahmed Tayeb Laâbi, Abdellatif Lahbabi, Mohammed Aziz Lamrani, Wafaa Lemsyeh, Ahmed Loakira, Mohamed Maadaoui, Mostafa Madani, Rachida Majdouline, Touria Mansouri, Zohra Mejjati, Ahmed Meliani, Driss Mesnaoui, Driss Amghar Mesnaoui, Nafiss Morchid, Fatiha Moumni, Rachid Mourad, Khireddine Moussaoui, Abdesselem Moussaoui, Jamal Najmi, Hassan Nissabouri, Mostafa Ouagrar, Mohamed Ouassat, Embarek Oussous, Mohamed Rabbaoui, Mohamed Ali Rajie, Abdellah Salhi, Mohammed Sebbagh, Mohamed Serghini, Mohamed Serhane, Abdelhak Serhani, Mounir Souag, Moha Tebbal, Abdelkrim Zrika, Abdallah

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Book SynopsisBlending the critical essay with poetry, Gate of Lilacs is a collection of verse written by Clive James in response to – and profoundly inspired by – the work of Marcel Proust.'James picks out the characters, the motifs and the moments that set his memory ablaze, just as Marcel was able to conjure such visions from a tisane-infused madeleine' – Literary ReviewOver a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than reading À la recherche du temps perdu – commonly translated as In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past. Then he spent half a century trying to get up to speed with Proust's great novel in two different languages. Gate of Lilacs is the unique product of James's love of and engagement with Proust's masterpiece. With À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust, in James's words, 'followed his creative instinct all the way until his breath gave out', and now James has done the same. In Gate of Lilacs, James, a brilliant critical essayist and poet, has blended the two forms into one.I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms . . . If I wanted to talk about Proust's poetry beyond the basic level of talking about his language – if I wanted to talk about the poetry of his thought – then the best way to do it might be to write a poem.In the end, if À la recherche du temps perdu is a book devoted almost entirely to its author's gratitude for life, for love, and for art, this much smaller book is devoted to its author's gratitude for Proust.Clive 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. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook, and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy. Praise for Clive James:'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times'Wise, witty, terrifying, unflinching and extraordinarily alive' – A.S. Byatt, critic and author of Possession: A Romance'Clive James is a true poet' – Peter Porter, London Review of BooksTrade ReviewJames writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force * The Times *A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone -- Robert McCrum * Observer *After writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured * Independent on Saturday *He is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *Part of a great burst of late fruition . . . graceful in its thought, moving in its insights, and often written with a fluidity that makes me wish he had done more of this sort of thing. I'll also put it on my students' reading list to remind them that, whatever the universities tell us, we can't understand something until we have responded to it creatively * New Statesman *James picks out the characters, the motifs and the moments that set his memory ablaze, just as Marcel was able to conjure such visions from a tisane-infused madeleine * Literary Review *

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Book SynopsisHarlem Shadows (1922) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem Shadows earned praise from legendary poet and political activist Max Eastman for its depictions of urban life and the technical mastery of its author. As a committed leftist, McKay—who grew up in Jamaica—captures the life of Harlem from a realist’s point of view, lamenting the poverty of its African American community while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. In “The White City,” McKay observes New York, its “poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed” and “fortressed port through which the great ships pass.” Filled him with a hatred of the inhuman scene of industry and power, forced to “muse [his] life-long hate,” he observes the transformative quality of focused anger: “My being would be a skeleton, a shell, / If this dark Passion that fills my every mood, / And makes my heaven in the white world’s hell, / Did not forever feed me vital blood.” Rather than fall into despair, he channels his hatred into a revolutionary spirit, allowing him to stand tall within “the mighty city.” In “The Tropics in New York,” he walks past a window filled with “Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,” a feast of fresh tropical fruit that brings him back, however briefly, to his island home of Jamaica. Recording his nostalgic response, McKay captures his personal experience as an immigrant in America: “My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; / A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize A New Yorker Essential Read of 2022 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 An NPR Best Book of 2022 A Literary Hub Best Reviewed Poetry Collection of 2022 _______________ ‘Witty and incisive… [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief’ New York Times _______________ The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look, a National Book Award finalist With Customs, Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures, in society, in language itself, by which these limits act on us. Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal; to navigate a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that can become a relentless challenge; a mutating shibboleth. Through the poet's adept balancing of tonal and formal elements, these poems interrogate the ‘customs’ of the nation-state, of the English language, of the paces these systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead, the propulsive force that informs each line, each white space, and punctuation mark, is a powerfully galvanizing and healing force. Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities of restlessness, of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.Trade ReviewWitty and incisive… [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief * New York Times *This collection, while shaking an elegant fist at “the wide hallways / of a great endowment”, is a useful dispatch from within such rooms * GUARDIAN, Best recent poetry *Striking * BOOKSELLER *A thought provoking and enjoyable read * PULSAR POETRY *Sharif gives us a poetry (and a person) caught at the adjunct between two possibilities, the border at which ambiguity (that most faithful repository for poets through the ages) can be weaponised. But it is the beauty of Customs that, in standing at this boundary, we can catch the light beyond * THE ARTS DESK *I really love ... Solmaz Sharif’s Customs. I love the book’s precision and truthfulness and find I continue to turn to it for something like help -- R. O. Kwan * The Cut *Sharif masterfully blends, develops, and transforms her imagery throughout Customs in such a seamless and unexpected way that the reader effortlessly follows these gorgeous, golden, and intelligent threads all the way to the brink of epiphany and beyond * New York Review of Books *Rooted in unrootedness; migration, borders and displacement are all themes in Sharif’s poems. This book asks us to consider how powerful language can be, and to use it carefully * NPR, Books We Love *As she masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief, Sharif manages, with conviction and consistency, to make the reader feel welcome * New York Times Book Review *The ostensible clarity of borders and checkpoints gives way to a terrain of fundamental uncertainty, a geography of elusive thresholds * New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 *Dazzling . . . Sharif’s language is spare and all the more sharp for what remains, for all that she has left out, as the sculptor does with a slab of marble. . . . This is poetry – this is a poet – that marvels us in manners minute and majestic -- Mandana Chaffa * Ploughshares *Sharif masterfully blends, develops, and transforms her imagery throughout Customs in such a seamless and unexpected way that the reader effortlessly follows these gorgeous, golden, and intelligent threads all the way to the brink of epiphany and beyond * New York Journal of Books *Blistering in its clear-sightedness, this collection offers a fierce, beautiful closing that dares to imagine ‘a beckoning, a way.’ A bold and uncompromising book with virtuosic emotional range; highly recommended * Library Journal, starred review *Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this complex and confident collection * Publishers Weekly, starred review *Sharif demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required to live in the West with deep roots in Iran * Booklist, starred review *Spectacular . . . In a massive feat, Customs continues the work of Look, pushing its mission forward with a new slate of sharp, memorable pieces that are set to inspire yet another generation * Cleveland Review of Books *Sharif’s ruminations on language in Customs - and how to keep it alive and potent - cement her position as one of the most thoughtful poets working today * Harvard Review *

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Book SynopsisCBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARDhwæt, another Beowulf translation? Not exactly… Welcome to Denmark’s Heorot Hall, where King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel, Saxon’s cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a predictable and monstrous backlash, a Mediæval fracas that only the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he arrives to “quell and queltch and quatch the Grendel beast.” Beowulf, that still-recognizable hero, embodies a “blank” function, a motive-driven yet motiveless megastar. He’s the young, fit, male, self-sacrificing protagonist-interloper who will fight any monster to protect his people. Or to defend strangers. Or to gain a reputation. Or because he just really wants to… In her rendering of Beowulf, Nicole Markotić offers a rollicking cover song of fantastical text. These pages will surprise readers as they introduce new ways to embrace, challenge, or click with Anglo-Saxon heroics. Writing original poems, Markotić de-stories the story of one man, who mostly does not play well with others, who fights monsters (and defeats their mothers, too), and who practically invents the poetic tradition of entitled bravery. Upending the tale with her fresh and enchanting style, Markotić gives a nod to previous translations, winks at canonical critics, bares historical biases, all while gifting transmogrifying pages that will whet your whimsy!"Nicole Markotić takes the original English-language epic and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines, rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time. The result is the story re-understood. The phrasing and incantation is Markotić’s own (and our era’s own), deployed with deliciously textured and diverse registers of language. Blake saw infinity in the palm of his hand. Markotić puts a millennium in yours." —Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour"Beowulf, with its unfathomable monsters and monster-slaying hero, its bro world of mead, boasting, weapons, and booty, remains a stubbornly relevant template for much of our contemporary scene. Nicole Markotić’s After Beowulf handles all this with dazzling sprezzatura. It is a pleasure to follow the narrating, condensing, commenting voice as it sashays through a range of verbal registers from high Olsonic to comic book pratfall, snark to scholarship. After Beowulf provides an up-to-date reading of Beowulf through the eyes of a feminist poet. And it continually suggests what things might be like after Beowulf." —Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy"The collision of ancient and colloquial language creates bursts of humour as my dude Beowulf makes his way into the banquet hall and beyond. Linger here to experience the aesthetics of poetry in action: vibrant and intensely moving, we feel the wrenching pain of Grendel’s mother. Markotić’s language is thick with meaning and light with humour: a creation of the most projective of verses." —Jacqueline Turner, author of FlourishTrade Review"Beowulf has been translated time and time again, whether by scholars just trying to be as accurate as possible, or people thinking outside of the box, or people who literally are just here for a good time like Nicole. After Beowulf is the tale of Beowulf, but it does address why the Geats were so terrified of his death. Nicole just happens to tell it all in the funkiest, funniest way possible. It even had me reading it out loud at one point, trying to do funny voices and keep up with the flow." –Caitlyn Vanorder, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the The Southern Bookseller Review"An irreverent romp and, paradoxically, a work of scholarship." –Barb Carey, The Toronto Star"Reworking one of the earliest of epic poems through English and Danish traditions, there is a swagger to Markotić’s lyric, one propelled by both character and the language, writing a collage of sound and meaning, gymnastic in its application and collision." – rob mcclennan

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Book SynopsisIn her most intimate poetry collection yet, Lightsey Darst considers the many facets of maternal power and whether it might guide us toward healing in the wake of history’s horrors. In the nebulous space between collective and autobiographical memory lies family memory—the rituals and routines, places and plants, that bind us to the generations before. In The Heiress/Ghost Acres, Lightsey Darst examines her Southern ancestry and the legacy of white womanhood. As she navigates pandemic isolation and political upheaval, Darst reflects on how history—familial and national—shapes parenting, and interrogates that history in search of more ethical, transformative ways to mother. The Heiress/Ghost Acres points toward a tenable and connected future, one that acknowledges past evils while finding present, potent ways for love to counter violence.Trade ReviewPraise for The Heiress/Ghost Acres “‘Why was I unprepared to be so loved?’ Where parenthood is the catalyst to politics, Lightsey Darst’s conjoined book grows question after question. How might we survive in a motherland designed to purchase motherlessness? How can we—connected in both silence and radiance—be worth our children’s light? In the bloody midst of a magicless empire, ‘What magic empire might I still build from my blood?’ Dissenting what’s given, she asks and asks and asks. And every so often an answer flowers out: ‘My child is climbing my everything, / climbing the tree of my mind / so I must furiously grow / this apple she’s seeking.’ In other words, Darst is offering us the seeds we need most: restlessness, honesty, awe, and reckoning.” —Chris Martin Selected praise for Lightsey Darst “[Darst] has the unique ability to express motion with words.” —MPR “This is a vital poetry of the Deep South ripe with bones, blood and bogs . . . a harrowing stew of lust, dusk and summer.” —The New York Times “Simultaneously vulnerable and self-assured, Darst’s verse will have you clamoring for everything she’s ever written.” —Bustle “For Darst, to remember is to claim ownership of one’s pain and, by extension, one’s humanity.” —Publishers Weekly “As they carve their way through this markedly contemporary landscape, Darst’s readers will likely have trouble separating the dreams, desires, and fears the speaker expresses from their own—the text of these poems is everything you might catch yourself thinking, and everything you might hope someone else could share with you.” —The Arkansas International “[Thousands] has an intimacy about it that speaks to the tenderness inside the reader. . . . Don’t be surprised if there’s a catch in your throat when you read." —Signature Reads “Dear fear, dear darkness, dear misunderstandings, dear life, dear lost-in-myself, I am no longer afraid of you. Now I have this book. I have Lightsey Darst’s amazing and ecstatic meditation on being a person in the world, I have these poems to guide me, I have her bravery and wild mind, I have her spells and wisdom, I have these incredible poems to carry with me wherever I go.” —Matthew Dickman

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Book SynopsisIn this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps.In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.”With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.Trade ReviewPraise for The Kissing of Kissing“This expansive and ecstatic debut, by a nonspeaking autistic poet who calls on ‘prayer to let all of / language answer me,’ inaugurates the publisher’s ‘Multiverse’ series of books by neurodivergent authors.”—New York Times Book Review“Fierce and energetic . . . [The Kissing of Kissing] makes a remarkable statement, both visually and verbally.”—Shelf Awareness"[The Kissing of Kissing] is beautiful to behold and even more refreshing to see pleasure so central to neurodiversity because of how often mainstream literature erases this fact."—Shondaland“A testament to the idea that poetry is truly the root of human connection via language is The Kissing of Kissing, a groundbreaking collection from neurodivergent poet Hannah Emerson. The raw beauty of each individual poem — and the entire book — is stunning and absolutely confident in its structural integrity.”—Washington Independent Review of Books“The first entry in Milkweed’s Multiverse series of books focused on neurodivergent and disabled writers, Hannah Emerson’s debut is utterly beguiling, her poetry an indescribable combination of interior monologue and public address. ‘Please try/ to become the breath that gives/ helpful thoughts that are floating / towards you yes yes,’ she writes with characteristic longing and confidence. Reading this beautiful book, I felt as though Emerson’s words had always been in my head.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR, “Books We Love”“Emerson, a non-speaking, autistic writer, communicates a sublime personal cosmology in poems vibrating with an energy that derives, in part, from surprising repetitions, especially of the words kissing and yes . . . Unforgettable.”—Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet Books” blog"The Kissing of Kissing is the most original collection of poetry I've read in years . . . [Emerson's] ability to transmit the full-body experience of joy is rivaled only by Whitman. Please, please read this book. Your mind and your poetry and your life will be better for it."—Arkansas International“Inventive . . . Images repeat on a scale that shifts from the immediate, worldly, and intimate to the cosmic. ‘Please try// to imagine how big you are yes yes,’ Emerson suggests, challenging the reader to expand their perception and vision through this unusual and intriguing approach to form.”—Publishers Weekly“I have never read a book like The Kissing of Kissing . . . Hannah Emerson has exploded cultural assumptions about how we should write, how we should communicate, and what it means to be alive . . . Emerson [draws] the reader out of their trance and into the real world, which to her is grander, vaster, and freer than we all might realize.”—Luna Luna Magazine“This book feels personal and inviting at the same time–it’s very much Emerson’s story and perspective on display, and yet her work regards the reader not as a distant observer but as a partner in experiencing this big weird world we find ourselves in. The Kissing of Kissing makes the complicated feel comfortable and vice-versa, and that makes it a book worth settling down with and reading again and again.”—Anomaly“[The Kissing of Kissing] articulates nascent worlds anxiously awaiting their opening . . . Emerson, as an autistic poet, is not broken in the face of neurotypical linguistic norms, but rather an agent in the breaking and rebuilding of alternative ways to know the world.”—Barrelhouse Reviews“There is a ‘yes yes’ magic spell ‘yes yes’ in these pages, as this planet’s most extraordinary poems will cast. Yes, and more ‘yes yes,’ Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing deserves a cult following—I’M IN! You, too, will fall in love with these poems that are coming at life in angles we never knew we needed to imagine!”—CAConrad“The Kissing of Kissing is incantatory and ecstatic. Ideas and images rooted in the natural world appear and swirl; the patterns and deviations they create combine to form a lush soundscape. In the vibrant heart of this woods of Hannah Emerson’s words, we are implored to embrace gestures that are straightforward and not—to ‘try to dive / down to the / beautiful muck’ or ‘to get to the flake of / snow that indescribable thing / that we need to know if we are to melt.’ The Kissing of Kissing is spectacular in its cadences and in its call to embrace longing, desire, intimacy, and (yes yes) love.”—Michael Kleber-Diggs “Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing is one of the most accomplished poetry debuts I’ve come across in recent memory. There’s something of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy in these poems, that deep rush of deep ecstasy made full by having touched deep loss: ‘I sound / each prayer to let all of / language answer me. / Teach our water its art. / Use questions.’ You can feel echoes of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and Ross Gay in Emerson’s truly singular and unforgettable voice. This is one of those rare miraculous books that, having read, I want to immediately share with everyone I love.”—Kaveh Akbar“‘Look very hard to find / the place between / the pillow and hell,’ Hannah Emerson writes in The Kissing of Kissing. Half entreating, half commanding, with an expansive approach to syntax and the urgent repetition of a heart beating with greater and greater intensity toward self-realization through language, these poems demonstrate a poetics of deep listening and deep feeling, of care, that suggests an alternative to the cruelty and carelessness that often take center stage in our historical moment. Hell is always proximate, Emerson’s poems remind us, but through attentiveness to ‘little things,’ so is the possibility for transformation—which is the work of poetry.”—Lauren RussellTable of ContentsContents My Name Begins Again Becoming Mud Kissing Tendrill Mind Peripheral Just Happy That Lovely Children Are Dancing Keep How the World Began A Blue Sound The Path of Please I Live in the Woods of My Words Please Try to Go to the Road Giveness The Underworld Connemara Pony To Go To The Sun Another Free Blue Vortex The Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Dreaming Beast Throught Language of Leaves To Burrow Between Center of the Universe The Other World Love is Orange Irises Fill Your Arms Bring the Spring Animal Ear Pow Pow Pow Pow Into the Towards Teach Hannah Is Never Only Hannah The Edge The Reason You Became Human Come Home Lovely Burst Sugar Beat Cicadas Our Feet Become the Music Musibility Keep Yourself at the Beginning of the Beginning Sacred Grove The Listening World

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Book SynopsisIn these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.Trade Review"Out of memory’s dreamlike whoosh, Adam Kirsch fixes scenes of his Californian boyhood in flowing blank verse, holding each cameo up to the light then setting it back down with 'the reckless joy of getting rid.' Most moving are the child’s deep misgivings about a world he can only begin to know in fits and starts, the unnerving self-doubt that resolves itself into poetry. This is an artist’s coming-of-age for the ages. It took my breath away." —David Yezzi, author of Black Sea “'There is no I,' writes Adam Kirsch, 'to be born or die.' His new collection takes the stuff of selfhood—memories, longings, disappointments—and gives them 'a decent burial in words.' It is an autobiography, a farewell, and a reckoning, best illuminated by his own culminating image of a bonfire—or, perhaps, a funeral pyre—incinerating the fond vestiges of childhood and adolescence. Each act of disposal is an act of composition, and in these poems, Kirsch composes the years of his life into treasures." —Amit Majmudar, author of What He Did in Solitary"The Discarded Life is a wonderfully seaworthy and streamlined vessel that carries us capably through the treacherous straits of youth and the pensive, open seas of adulthood." —Leslie Monsour, The Los Angeles Review of Books"Kirsch writes poetry that is self-effacing but not abject, whose formal audacity is undercut by its sense of perspective. The poet’s mind, Kirsch seems to suggest, grows when it knows its limits."—Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisUsing the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisJean Sprackland is celebrated for her tactile, transformative poetry which makes the miraculous seem familiar and the domestic other-worldly. Her new collection is tuned to new and deeper frequencies. ‘Green noise’ is the mid-frequency component of white noise – what some have called the background noise of the world – and these poems listen for what is audible, and available to be known and understood, and what is not. Each poem is an attempt at location – in time, in place, in language. Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life. Others go in search of fragments of a mythic and often brutal past: the lost haunts of childhood, abandoned villages, scraps of shared history which are only ever partially remembered. A physical relic or a mark on the landscape seems briefly to offer a portal, where a sounding is taken from present to past and back again. Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.Trade ReviewSprackland likes to read the sign language of the natural world… These poems are exact and well made, their lightness of touch often given drive by a fierce vocabulary. -- Peter Scupham * Literary Review *Jean Sprackland’s Green Noise has a tangy, earthy smell about it. She is a snooper on the natural world, a conspiratorial poet who upturns things to find out what’s odd about them and, almost incidentally, explores her own lostness as she goes. -- Michael Glover * The Tablet *

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Book SynopsisArguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST******AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen'OBSERVER'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it.Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'Trade ReviewIn Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation. * Telegraph *Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write. * New York Times *Sharon Olds is a force of nature. It seems phenomenal that, at 81, she produced this collection about sex, love and the landscape of the body that seems to have been written with the fearlessness of youth. * Observer, *Books of the Year* *A brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black WaterAlways fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience, Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing. * Sunday Times *Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson, author of EphemeronDrawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy. * Guardian *Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America. * Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022* *

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Book SynopsisCharting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm Muller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on Muller's poems. The poems here become an "assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe..." and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.

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Book SynopsisIn Rhondda Burning paintings and poems mirror one another, reflecting on life in the eponymous valley or in the area around Cardigan Bay, with its wide horizons. Havard looks at his native environments with the eyes of both one who belongs and a wanderer whose long association with Spain impressed on him the kinship between the sister arts and the benefits that come when poets and painters breathe the same air. Growing up in a steep-sided valley set Havard’s visual DNA. Ten miles daily to school and ten back, upstairs in a double-decker bus with outcrops of rock and slag flashing by, left its mark. Watching his father at a window, craning his neck to scour the mountain for a break in the spillaging mist… These images were processed slowly and this depth of observation shines through both image and text. Elegant, deft and vital, this collection is an embodiment of people, places and communities that invite us to listen and see.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022. Awarded the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022. Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A Guardian Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Dublin) Book of the Year 2021. A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it. Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.'

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Book SynopsisPoems of living and loving from Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri. Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world. In this powerful collection, the celebrated novelist, essayist, dramatist and poet, Ben Okri, explores the beauty contained in each one of us – the freedom of our spirit, the child within. He recalls the death of his father, the sacrifices of his mother, the hidden river of Edinburgh, falling in love. He writes about Virgil and Mozambique, about ringing the bell for freedom, the dreams of Calliope and the full moon. He enters the fifth circle, sings of the roses of spring, and aligns the pyramids to the magic stars. This is a rich, joyful, exciting collection for everyone who loves Ben Okri's vibrant style, and a perfect introduction to new readers of his poetry. 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali Smith 'A work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' Marlon James on The Freedom ArtistTrade ReviewPRAISE FOR BEN OKRI: 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali Smith. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' -- Marlon James on The Freedom Artist

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Book Synopsis'McLane is a Romantic poet out of time' Ange Mlinko'Passionate, erudite, sensuous . . . McLane probes the minutest currents of human feeling' Sarah Howe'My favourite living poet . . . [her work] bristles with life, feeling, argument' Parul SeghalThe witty, searching new collection by National Book Award finalist Maureen N. McLane, musing on the sea, ageing, love and the climate crisisIn her first book of poems since What I'm Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017, Maureen N. McLane offers a bravura collection of perceptive poetic meditations. What You Want is a book of landscapes, mindscapes, and shifting moods. Here are poems filled with gulls and harbours, blinking red lights and empty lobster traps, beach roses and rumoured sharks, eels and crows, wind turbines and superhighways. Sensitive, lyrical, alert to seasons and pressures on our shared life, McLane registers and gives form to an ambient unease. From Sappho to Constable, from constellations to microplastics, What You Want is a collection as alive to the cosmos as it is to our moment. This is McLane's cloudy-sky book: a voyage through lambent autumns and shining winters, in which an eye looks out on what it longs for, what it loves, and asks: will it survive the coming heat?

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Book SynopsisSince his first recordings in 1955, Johnny Cash has been an icon in the music world. In his newly discovered poems and song lyrics, we see the world through his eyes. The poetry reveals his depth of understanding, both of the world around him and within - his frailties and his strengths alike. He pens verses in his hallmark voice, reflecting upon love, pain, freedom, fame and mortality. Illustrated with facsimile reproductions of Cash's own handwritten pages, Forever Words is a remarkable addition to the canon of one of America's heroes. His music is a part of our collective history, and here he demonstrates the depth of his talent as a writer. Edited and introduced by Paul Muldoon, with a foreword by John Carter Cash, this is a book sure to delight and surprise fans the world over.Trade ReviewThe greatest of the greats then and now . . . If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black -- BOB DYLANUnmistakably personal . . . Strikingly evocative * * New York Times * *A rich collection . . . Fresh and genuine * * Rolling Stone * *His influence spread over many generations. I loved him as a singer and writer -- MICK JAGGERI lost my innocence with Johnny Cash -- NICK CAVEHe's always there, the tallest figure in the circle of integrity, the deepest voice when night comes down, and the bravest take on sanity in the midst of wild confusion -- LEONARD COHEN

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Book SynopsisThe blues has left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes and "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden, to "Blues on Yellow" by Marilyn Chin and "Reservation Blues" by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues--inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics-poems in their own right-from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters.The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

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Book Synopsis'She came in like a shadow. She slid and bore herself into my eye, between my eyelids which blinked against the dust.' She is Maud Gonne, the muse of writer William Butler Yeats. Yeats here returns as a ghost, after having been buried in France in 1939 in the cemetery of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, to be returned to Ireland a decade later. He emerges from his grave to recount his thwarted love with Maud, a story that merges with that of the independence movement of Ireland, of which they were both emblematic actors. Yeats' ghost has suddenly arisen because diplomatic documents long kept secret have resurfaced, casting doubt on the contents of the coffin brought back into Ireland for a state funeral. Where did the poet's body go? Does he still hover, as he wrote, 'somewhere above the clouds'? What remains of our loves and our deaths, if not their poetry? Besserie's exciting new novel follows on from Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (Le Tiers Temps), translated by Cliona Ni Riordain. In Maylis Besserie's second novel, she turns her attention from Samuel Beckett to another iconic Irish writer, W. B. Yeats. The connection between France in Ireland is once again explored in the context of art, culture and the days at the end of life.Trade Review'Scattered Love is a haunting and immersive read, written with the kind of lyricality and depth of tone appropriate for a novel infused with the presence of Yeats. Besserie is almost painterly in the way she employs words, drawing her readers deep into the story she's telling. This is a poem of a novel; the perfect vehicle for capturing Yeats in all his rich complexity.' JAN CARSON 'Maylis Besserie's beautiful novel casts a brilliant light on life and love and death and what remains of us ... The elegant prose and fluid translation have a balming, soothing quality. It is strange and fascinating to read Yeats's sublimely ventriloquised voice, and Madeleine's quest is absorbing, comedic, touching and true. The magic of Yeats has new life here.' DONAL RYAN 'A truly beautiful literary novel from a wonderful storyteller.' JOSEPH O'CONNOR

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Book Synopsis'My poor old heart, I've left its drawbridge down' Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father's skeleton clocks. Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the 'tidy hem' of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something 'beyond our squeaky comprehension'. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up. 'Luke Wright is one of the greats. A poetic pugilist. Beguiling, hypnotic and master of the emotional sucker-punch. The Feel-Good Movie of the Year is his best yet.' - Carl BaratTrade Review'Luke Wright is one of the greats. A poetic pugilist. Beguiling, hypnotic and master of the emotional sucker-punch. The Feel-Good Movie of the Year is his best yet.'- Carl Barat; "In Luke Wright's long awaited third collection of deeply personal, elegiac but optimistic poems, he writes with such wit, wisdom and detailed observation about contemporary life online and on the road; in his head and in his Suffolk home. Wright's images are unforgettable, his wry insights are original and his expertly crafted lines sing, gallop and throb with feeling" - James McDermott; ‘This is a terrific new book: subtle, nuanced and movingly personal ... A hurt man, taking stock in fresh words.’- Ian Duhig

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* *A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation* Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A 'pie-faced' St George upstaged by the horse. The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus. This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed. Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.Trade Review'When I read a poem by Holly Hopkins, I feel as if I'm eavesdropping on the secrets of life itself - The English Summer shimmers with exquisite revelations. Whatever she writes about, whether it's global warming, a country church, or the death of a fridge, however down-to-earth the subject, there's a pin-sharp clarity, matched with a sleight of hand in the machinery of each poem, that gives us an original look at the world.' Pascale Petit; 'Unlike the holiday downpours wryly presaged by its title, nothing disappoints in this nimble, humane, and brilliantly inventive debut. The English Summer has the instincts of an archaeologist, the eye of a sell-out comic, and the soul of an itinerant philosopher. Whether leading us down history's forgotten byways, or skewering the quirks of contemporary life, Hopkins is an enchanting guide: a poet of rare talents, who will make you chuckle, stop in your tracks, then question everything you know.' Sarah Howe; 'From Lady Godiva to the Green Man, Holly Hopkins takes on the stories England tells about itself. I love Hopkins' tragicomic vision: vicious snobbery coexists with great tenderness, in an England tense with 'thunderclouds of gorse'. A lacerating and truly lovely debut.' Clare Pollard; 'Much alive poetry is written from the margins. Holly Hopkins does write feminist poems: about, for instance, domestic labour done by women. But as a whole, this scrupulously precision-built collection (the lines shine, but in a way that pulls you up short and makes you think) doesn't speak from the margin but the missing centre -- of Englishness itself. These poems are particular and humane. They show it is possible to be contemporaneous without being presentist; to be simultaneously, singingly, topical and historical; and they reconnect to a real, abiding world emotional highs and lows that have become politically untethered.' Vidyan Ravinthiran; 'A poem by Holly Hopkins always reminds me of some sort implement, which looks to be quite practical, but - well now, just look at that, you've cut yourself. Tsk. Whatever this implement is, she uses it to worry the joins between all manner of polite hypocrisies: between what we say and what we mean; between the spaces we inhabit and the way they're sold to us; between an ornamental wall and a property boundary. Yet somehow - I'm not sure how she's pulled this off - this is a collection about hope.' Abigail Parry

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Book SynopsisThe late 1980s witnessed two devastating chemical attacks by the Saddam régime on Iraqi Kurdistan. The first of these, in 1988, known as the Anfal campaign, saw the destruction of 3000 Kurdish villages, over 40 chemical attacks launched, and 100,000 civilians buried in mass graces, with hundreds more dying of exposure to chemical weapons. The second attack was on the town of Halabja where over 5000 people died instantly. Thousands of people who had survived the attacks in both Anfal and Halabja but had been mildly affected by the gas later died from cancer and other diseases. Butterfly Valley is Sherko Bekes’ response to these atrocities. Stunned by the world’s silence in the face of this genocide, Bekes – in exile in Sweden at the time – longs to go home and mourn the victims. He laments the repetitive cycles of continuous oppression and suppressed revolutions in Kurdish history, and in his despair speaks to other exiled Kurdish poets (Nali, Hani and Mawlawi among them) from the sixteenth century to the present day. This long poem unfolds in beautifully-drawn images of the poet’s homeland – mountains and forests, rivers and villages, meadows and flowers – which are juxtaposed with scenes of death, destruction and suffering. This is an immensely powerful poem, at once lyrical and heart-rending, and Choman Hardi’s fine translation at last gives the English-speaking reader the most extensive example yet of his outstanding writing.

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Book SynopsisWe all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, 'nipples stiffening on powdered ribs'. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend - the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, 'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away - yet forever haunted by hunger.

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Book Synopsis

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