Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisBroken Hierarchies collects twenty books of poems by Geoffrey Hill, written over sixty years, and presents them in their definitive form. Four of these books (Ludo, Expostulations on the Volcano, Liber Illustrium Virorum, and Al Tempo de'' Tremuoti) have never before appeared in print, and three of them (Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres, Pindarics, and Clavics) have been greatly revised and expanded.Trade ReviewVivid clarity ... intense lyric beauty. This is work of the first importance. * Paul Batchelor, Book of the Year 2014, Times Literary Supplement *The scale and consistency of this volume, meticulously edited by Kenneth Haynes, and handsomely, if rather minutely, set out, with plenty of white space around poems and a jacket bearing an image from Kokoschka, give it a monumental air ... At the vital, latter end of the book there are huge achievements and intricate exercises, experimental in their rigour. Hill's scraggy apple tree is indeed an emblem of his stupendous late-spring flowering. * John Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement *Broken Hierarchies possesses a magisterial intellectual sweep and sense of literary high ambition which is perhaps unique in contemporary English poetry. * Terry Kelly, London Magazine *Hill has for 40-odd years kept his language as close-textured, tough, knotted and lyrical as poetry can be. If he makes old Eliot seem by comparison an easy read it is not for mere show; these poems are as beautiful, hard, compressed and granular as the rocks and stones and trees from which they are made. * Fred Inglis, The Times Higher Education Supplement *If the phrase "greatest living poet in the English language" has any meaning, then we should use it to describe Hill. * Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian *He can rival the best. * Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times *Table of ContentsFOR THE UNFALLEN (1959); KING LOG (1968); MERCIAN HYMNS (1971); TENEBRAE (1978); THE MYSTERY OF THE CHARITY OF CHARLES PEGUY (1983); HYMNS TO OUR LADY OF CHARTRES (1982 2012); CANAAN (1996); THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (1998); SPEECH! SPEECH! (2000); THE ORCHARDS OF SYON (2002); SCENES FROM COMUS (2005); WITHOUT TITLE (2006); PINDARICS (2005 2012); A TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER (2007); LUDO (2011); THE DAYBOOKS (2007 2012)

Read more less

Book SynopsisPercy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems “Prometheus Unbound” and “Adonais,” an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “Mont Blanc,” and “Ode to the West Wind.” This comprehensive and informative new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary, and idealistic.Trade ReviewThis is such an important and definitive edition. It will suit both the scholar and the general reader ... One can only marvel at the amount of editorial work that has gone into this volume -- Nick Lezard * Guardian *

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis''I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday''Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac''s most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked ''choruses'', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic. ''A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature'' Allen Ginsberg''A jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas'' The New York Herald TribuneTrade ReviewA spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. -- Allen GinsbergA jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins of Dylan Thomas. -- The New York Herald Tribune

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power and yet always clean and uncluttered. It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions, and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly and so well' Chinua AchebeOnly a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty' Isabel AllendeA lion in literature's forest' Maya AngelouA dazzling selection of poems from one of the most beloved American poets, whose distinctive verse resonates around the globeFew poets in history have possessed the irrepressible humanity and abundant positivity' that characterise Sonia Sanchez's astonishing body of work. Energetic, infectious and rich with sonic exuberance, Sanchez's poems have radically transformed the direction of American poetry over the past six decades and have been an inspiration to readers around the world. Whether it's her iconic haiku, rhythmic ballads or devastating elegies, Sanchez's lyric, luminous and lovely as chandeliers', thrums with a profo

Read more less

Book SynopsisLupercal, Ted Hughes's second book, contains many of the unsettling and vivid animal poems for which Hughes is so rightly celebrated, including 'The Bull Moses', 'Hawk Roosting' and 'Pike'.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was first published, it catapulted its author into the bestseller lists and established her as one of our funniest and most eloquent of poets.Cope has an extraordinary canny sense quite rare among poets of what will engage a reader's attention.' Poetry ReviewA jet-age Tennyson.' London Review of BooksLike Larkin and Harrison, Cope has proven that a popular poetry is possible without compromising quality.' Acumen Series

Read more less

Book SynopsisA poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement - and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collection brings together all the poems published by James Joyce in his lifetime, most notably Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach. It also includes a large body of his satiric or humorous occasional verse, much of which is fugitive and little known to the general reader.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis new Selected Poems offers an ordered retrospective of the fertile career of Derek Walcott, spanning six decades and drawing on twelve collections. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Walcott has, in the words of Seamus Heaney, ''moved with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it.''

Read more less

Book SynopsisGraham's New Collected Poems (2004) marked a crucial point in the growth of his reputation, bringing together for the first time all the poems of his seven collections as well as some of the unpublished material that had come to light since his death in 1986.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe volume's 'Intro' charts these projects and the blurred origins of ritualised language, while its 'Outro' offers contextualising notes and anecdotal insights.Never Good with Horses further demonstrates the rich range of Armitage's repertoire and celebrates his ear for the music of language, harnessed here for the page.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnne Carson’s haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years—a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.”Trade Review"The book is an extraordinary object to behold, and more extraordinary to read, but it's hardly accurate to even call it a ‘book.’ It's perhaps 10 feet of paper, folded accordion-like, displaying as near a reproduction of Carson's original collage journal as is possible. The whole thing is folded and packed into a beautiful gray box….The result is breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical." -- Publishers Weekly"Trust me: it's an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best....The book is totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word’s best sense." -- Ben Ratliff - The New York Times Book Review"Carson has . . . created an individual form and style for narrative verse. . . . Seldom has Pound’s injunction ‘Make It New’ been so spectacularly obeyed." -- The New York Review of Books"Anne Carson is a poet who likes to get under people’s skin." -- Melanie Rehak - The New York Times Magazine"Rarely has forking over thirty dollars felt like such a solemn act of memorial." -- New York Review of Books"Nox’s intelligence, sadness, and wry humor alone might be enough, but its form takes me even more. To read is sensual. You handle the folds, opening one winged pair at a time or in quick, slinky unfurlings. And this read is not linear, with pages dissolving behind you as you turn, but spatial, more like letting your eyes wander a room. With the whole book unfurled you see it entire and make links among images, like a staircase or an egg that reappear folds apart, and among words like ash, festive, blush. You prowl the book itself." -- The Millions"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote." -- Susan Sontag

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom Kate Baer, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman, comes her much anticipated second full-length traditional poetry collection, And Yet.I will love and be loved. Save and be saveda thousand times. I will let the want intomy body, bless the heat under my skin.My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life.And Yet dives even deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of Kate''s writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer and an artist working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way.In this collection, Kate offers much needed inspiration to find the joy, and the hope, in all of life''s mess and miracles.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCharles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a leading French poet known for his controversial approach. He published his most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, but many of the poems were banned for their explicit material. He died at the age of forty-six on 31 August 1867 in Paris.Born in 1879, Cyril Scott was a writer, composer and occultist who produced music as well as writings on the occult, philosophy and natural health.

Read more less

Book Synopsis''Fatimah Asghar writes my heart'' Riz Ahmed''Fatimah Asghar''s debut collection brought me to tears many times over. It is urgent, compelling and filled with fragments of history that have changed the face of the world. Its exploration of queerness, grief, Muslim identity, partition and being a woman of colour in a white supremacist world make this the most essential collection of poems you''ll read this year'' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant, author of The One Who Wrote DestinyPoet and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls captures her experience as a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, while exploring identity, violence, and healing.an aunt teaches me how to tellan edible flowerfrom a poisonous one.just in case, I hear her say, just in case.Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and Trade ReviewIn forms both traditional...and unorthodox...Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible. Most vivid and revelatory are pieces such as 'Boy,' whose perspicacious turns and irreverent idiom conjure the rich, jagged textures of a childhood shadowed by loss. - New YorkerFatimah Asghar's debut collection brought me to tears many times over. It is urgent, compelling and filled with fragments of history that have changed the face of the world. Its exploration of queerness, grief, Muslim identity, partition and being a woman of colour in a white supremacist world make this the most essential collection of poems you'll read this year - Nikesh ShuklaWhat an outstanding collection of poetry . . . [I] will be thinking about these poems for a long time to come - GoodreadsA stunning work of art that tackles place, race, sexuality and violence. These poems - both personal and historical, both celebratory and aggrieved - are unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud. - Chicago Review of BooksIn this awe-inspiring debut, Asghar, writer of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls," explores the painful, sometimes psychologically debilitating journey of establishing her identity as a queer brown woman within the confines of white America . . . Honest, personal, and intimate without being insular or myopic, Asghar's collection reveals a sense of strength and hope found in identity and cultural history. - Publishers Weekly *starred review*If They Come For Us is a beautiful book of poems that, as powerfully and deeply as any book I've read in a good while, wonders about, explores and laments our many inheritances of violence, which are also inheritances of sorrow, and the ways those inheritances reside in our bodies and imaginations. The ways those inheritances, in fact, structure our bodies and imaginations. And yet, the wonder of this book is the way that throughout the anguish and sorrow and rage, despite it, there is tenderness.

Read more less

Book Synopsis''Heather Christle''s poems may well be one of the places readers turn when they want to know what it was like to be young and paying attention in the early 21st century . . . Her poems are wide awake'' Mark DotyIn The Trees The Trees, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.Trade ReviewIn this wistfully lyrical collection, Christle tends to the fragments of selfhood with an ethereal, dreamlike sensibility. Speaking out with stream-of-conscious urgency, the body is exposed as half-human, half-other and held together by holes. As though gazing up through a luscious canopy of green, each poem becomes a vivid spectacle of play and patchwork, as the form itself is flawlessly consistent in mirroring the mesmeric tapestry of trees * Poetry Book Society *Heather Christle's poems are magicalEcstatic, breathless, full of incandescent humour and wonder . . . Read and love her seemingly spontaneous utterances, spun from her rapt attention to daily life, nature, solitude, romance, to her own reeling and enchanting imaginationHeather Christle's poems may well be one of the places readers turn when they want to know what it was like to be young and paying attention in the early 21st century . . . Her poems are wide awakeAt least once per poem, you feel like the triple-bars just lined up in the slot machine window and you laugh or cry out

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis is the truth of you.Because you are all I see.Because you are all I breathe.Because when I cannot find you, I am lost.Because when I’m with you, I am found.Because you have the fire of the universe in you, and sometimes you forget.So this book is here to remind you.Dear You, I want you to know that I see you. I want you to know that even if no one else does, even if you are a ghost in this bookshop, or just the static floating across the screen of your computer, wherever you’re reading this, I see you. I see you in the dark and I see you in the grey. I see you as a story, as words I have spoken or may yet speak. Maybe only in a memory or a dream. I see your hands and your arms and your body and your legs and your face and I see what you have been and what you will be. I see you and in looking at you, I want you to know that whoever you’ve had to be to survive all this, I will not look away. I want you to know that there’s a space inside this book for you. So if you have the time and the inclination, you can sit here with me, just for a while. And perhaps between us, we can see everything that matters. -pleasefindthis

Read more less

Book SynopsisSoft spoken yet powerful, Serenity perfectly captures the constant battle of fear and courage that lives within us. The seeds of Serenity were planted in F.S. Yousaf’s last collection of poetry, Sincerely. Struck by inspiration and overwhelmed by the response of dedicated fans, Yousaf wanted to continue this journey in a new collection. While tales of longing, uncertainty, and loss flow through each poem, Yousaf artfully captures the eternal question of how to face pain with courage and quiet resilience. Featuring 140 poems and accompanying illustrations, Serenity is the perfect escape from daily life, helping readers refocus energy and kindness toward themselves and their cherished relationships.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJohn Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisKim Hyesoon is one of South Korea's most important contemporary poets. She began publishing in 1979 and was one of the first few women in South Korea to be published in Munhak kwa jisong (Literature and Intellect), one of two key journals which championed the intellectual and literary movement against the US-backed military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan in the 1970s and 80s. Don Mee Choi writes: 'Kim's poetry goes beyond the expectations of established aesthetics and traditional "female poetry" (yoryusi), which is characterised by its passive, refined language. In her experimental work she explores women's multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society, a nation that is still under neo-colonial rule by the US. Kim's poetics are rooted in her attempt to resist conventional literary forms and language long defined by men in Korea. According to Kim, "women poets oppose and resist their conditions, using unconventional forms of language because their resistance has led them to a language that is unreal, surreal, and even fantastical. The language of women's poetry is internal, yet defiant and revolutionary".'Trade Review'Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!' - Aase Berg. 'Miraculous weaponry! Miraculous translations! This kind of undomesticated engagement and lawlessness and risk and defiance and somatic exorbitance posits a world and a relation to the world where everything excluded is included - the animal and the vegetal, the molten and the mineral, the gaseous and the liquid, not to mention shame, disgust, failure, terror, raunch. The final poem "Manhole Humanity" deserves its place alongside Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land or Ginsberg's Howl or Inger Christensen's It. Kim Hyesoon's new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It's here to protect us' - Christian Hawkey.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed. Dom Bury is a writer and activist who runs workshops on the emotional and human impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2016 and won the 2017 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Opened Field’. Rite of Passage is his first collection.Table of Contents9 What My Body Showed Me Kyrie 13 Hiraeth 14 Brother 16 The Opened Field 18 Black Bird, Nine Nails, One Child 19 Fois Gras 22 Spring Without Voices 23 The Chapel in the Sea 25 Under Dartington Redwoods 27 Our Species Dies irae 31 Snow Country 33 Why I Have Chosen Not to Have Children 34 Seasons — A Requiem 37 All I Can Offer You is This 38 On the Theme — Fire 40 Hunger Libera me 43 The Body’s New Weather 44 Love as a Project for Small Children with Eyelids 49 I Lie Down On the Ground to Make Peace with the Fire Jumping the Valley Towards Me 52 Completion 53 Extinction In Paradisum 57 Afterwards 58 Seeing the Whole World Begin Kindling 61 Letter from My Daughters 62 Metamorphosis 72 Passageway 73 Threshold 77 Morning

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time. The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing. Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.Trade ReviewJane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter’s eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint. -- Adam Thorpe * The Guardian, on Another Country *A major achievement… outstanding… complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation. -- Sarah Broom * Times Literary Supplement, on Another Country *These are marvellously atmospheric poems: they have something of the quality of very careful watercolours. -- Tim Liardet and Vona Groarke * PBS Bulletin, on Silent in Finisterre *Table of Contents9 Waking 10 Inscape 11 The Drowning at Porthcurno 13 Off-spring 14 The Amortals 24 Distance Lane 25 Foundling 26 Lifelines 35 Isolation 36 Grace 37 Out of the Picture 38 Negative Space 39 Snow and Privet 40 Moving the House 41 Little Silver 44 Charm 45 Tall Story 46 Homily 47 The Silence 48 From London far 49 Anchorage 50 Passage 51 Fugue 54 Life Sentence 55 Definition of Huer 56 Stet 57 Sometimes I forget you are dead because 58 Gone Fishing 60 Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead 61 Smokey Considers Hilton’s Cat 62 Cot Song 64 Ghost Rhyme 65 Abstraction 68 New Year’s Day 69 New Atlantis 70 Tailpiece

Read more less

Book SynopsisNew Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, the book builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend who died by suicide.

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral,Poet pilgrims competing for free picks,Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remixFrom below-the-belt base to the topnotch;I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatchwhen the tales overrun, run offensive,or run clean out of steam, they're authenticand we're keeping it real, reminisce this:Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business.In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style.Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life.Trade ReviewThe liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read - every page a virtuoso performance of language, character and story -- SIMON ARMITAGEThe language is every bit as Chaucerian as Chaucer - ripe, rollicking and humorous - and Agbabi's redesigned pilgrims are as much a mixed bag as the originals * * The Times * *Inventive, innovative and ingenious - Agbabi's take on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales zooms right into the 21st Century -- JACKIE KAYHer poems draw on rap, jive and disco rhythms as much as the formal subtleties of free verse. Agbabi is a fine poet, and her linguistic wit carries satirical fire * * Daily Telegraph * *Anyone giving a poetic echo to The Canterbury Tales needs exceptional imagination, human warmth and rhythmical energy; without them, the echo is doomed to fade. But Patience Agbabi has all these things and more: a completely appropriate sense of variety, fun, seriousness and good humour. Stirred all together, they make Telling Tales a compelling collection of story-portraits, at once contemporary and time-honoured. It's a wonderful achievement -- ANDREW MOTIONPatience Agbabi has brilliantly created a Canterbury Tales for a multicultural Britain, about the oversexed and the losers, the damned and the blest, in rap, sestina, text, sonnets and rhyme royal. Responsive to their models in endlessly inventive ways, they are a treat to read, and even better if you know the originals. Chaucer would have been proud of what he has inspired -- HELEN COOPER, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of CambridgePatience Agbabi's Telling Tales is a brilliant, virtuosic take on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as spoken by a dazzling list of contemporary characters in a variety of contemporary idioms. Her use of received and improvised form is masterly, a great entertainment in itself, her wit and sense of poise remarkable. If Telling Tales is not one of the books of the year or in line for a major prize it will be proof the world has grown very dull indeed. This is a landmark book that extends the domain of poetry. Forget the diviison between live and page. This is live on the page -- GEORGE SZIRTESTelling Tales is a carefully constructed wonder tour. Agbabi is a genius. And this is her best work yet -- LEMN SISSAYTelling Tales is a pilgrimage of punks, badasses, broken hearts, beat poets, silver-tongued fixers, town criers, beauties, sinners. A jostle of life; loud language, noise, sudden refection, quiet, pain. A busload of voices. A poem on wheels. Inventive, risky, serious and fun -- JEANETTE WINTERSONA rising star * * Observer * *Thrilling. Has a multi-dimensional richness . . . A bold, brassy work * * Independent on Sunday on Transformatrix * *An energetic compendium of familiar stories translated into the contemporary idiom of street slang and slam poetry * * Times Literary Supplement * *

Read more less

Book SynopsisSweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.Trade Review'Rory Waterman writes poems of the kind there'll always be a need for.' - Alan Jenkins

Read more less

Book Synopsis'A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness,' Guardian'In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones' lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle' Amanda GormanA mighty anthem about the saving grace of friendship, Danez Smith's highly anticipated collection Homie is rooted in their search for joy and intimacy in a time where both are scarce. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption.Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is written for friends: for Danez's friends, for yours.'This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way' New York TimesTrade ReviewI’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady. -- Parul Sehgal * New York Times *A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness. * Guardian *Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it’s here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they’ve built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, "your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us" -- Franny Choi, author of Soft ScienceThis book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly -- Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come For UsHomie is how we survive – in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt -- Tish JonesHomie is deeply moving and funny… [and] a step change from Smith’s earlier work -- Lanre Bakare * Guardian *The president of black voices in poetry. Smith uses their new collection to explore the ideas of friendship, intimacy and comfort * Stylist *I return to this collection to remind myself of what is possible on the page, the joy, the rigour, the necessity of a strut. Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be -- Raven Leilani * Week *A great collection of poetry about friendship, sex and Blackness. It's rare for me to go back to poetry but I come back to this again and again... It's beautiful -- Travis Alabanza * Dazed *A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *Homie felt like a book for this year as we learned to look after one another in new ways -- Željka Maroševic * White Review *[Homie] filled me with pure joy. It is a book as inventive, funny, sad, warm and sharp as any I've ever read -- Yaa Gyasi * Techregister, *Books of the Year* *Much of Smith's early success came through the slam poetry scene... Homie makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page -- Kevin Okoth * London Review of Books *

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisGrowing from a year-long commitment to write one haiku a day, Catstrawe ranges through family history and female relationships, the stimulation of travel and the inspiration to found in the immediate environment, politics and the world situation, but always, at its heart, the experience of living with cancer. Quickly outgrowing the limitations of seventeen syllables to explorer more extended forms, this is a book about living life to the full in the face of the inevitability of death.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSue Lewis has won previous pamphlet awards and one of the many things that delights about her work is that each new collection pushes the boundaries of language and integrity further. The writing is lucid, precise, the metaphors are precise and fresh, but the effect is to take us withinto interior landscapes where there is not certainty but the constant liminality of life in process, the questions and doubts we contend with, the moments of compassion alongside the bittersweet ache for the lives that might have been, while tending to the life that is. There is not a false word in this exquisite collection as it makes its risky/tender pilgrimage.'

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the Laurel Prize 2023. A Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The Irish Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year. To 2040 begins with question masquerading as fact: 'Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.' These visionary new poems reveal Graham as historian, cartographer, prophet, plotting an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant, 'the American experiment will end in 2030'. Graham exposes a potentially inevitable future, sirens sounding among industrial ruins. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, we pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a burrowing worm. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham invites the reader to sit silent, to hear soil breathe. To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality - in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first 'claw full of hair' placed gently on a green shower ledge. 2040 as both future and event-horizon: the reader leaves the book warned, wiser, attentively on edge. 'Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me'. The title poem asks, 'what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?'Trade Review'A mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its continuation' - The New Yorker

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn a fast-paced world, The Wild Verses invites you to slow down, reflect and to seek solace through poetry and nature.From consoling words of hope and healing to meditations on love and friendship, this beautiful collection has a poem for every feeling. Accompanied by emotive illustrations of animals in the wild, this is a poetry collection to be returned to again and again.The perfect gift book for fans of Donna Ashworth and Charlie Mackesy.Trade ReviewThe Wild Verses... is a wonderful collection of nature poems, with magnificent illustrations by Sarah Maycock. These poems focus on the things which matter most - love, friendship, hope for the future and healing. Children and adults alike will love the images and messages written in rich, beautiful language. -- Emma Dunn and Clare Fulton * The Scotsman *

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen it feels like your ears are beginning to flop and all of the bounce has gone out of your hop, when everything''s driving you right round the bend, you know what you need? What you need is a friend. Join Little Bunny as he discovers how important friends can be, how they can help you tackle some of the more complex emotions, as well as how to be a good friend to others.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisPublished to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJacob Sam-La Rose has been described as 'a one-man literary industry'. This was Patrick Neate's comment on the BBC Poetry Season website: 'Passionate about poetry and its power to change people's lives, he's a lesson to us all. He's also a damn fine writer.' Already well-known on the UK performance circuit, Sam-La Rose has also spent many years working with young people in schools and communities, especially around London. So it will come as a surprise to many that Breaking Silence is his first book-length collection of poetry. It is a collection that sits on the threshold between the personal and the profound, with eyes on race and dual heritage; masculinity and manhood; definitions and senses of self. Above all, it's a collection that's invested in the power of the voice, in the work of giving a voice to issues and entities that would otherwise remain silent. It speaks on divides, from the spaces in between. Jacob Sam-La Rose's work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and that it's possible to combine the immediacy of poetry in performance with formal rigour and innovation on the page. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Aldeburgh First Collection PrizeTrade ReviewPoetry that is - fresh, vivid and masterly in its evocation of contemporary Britain. -- Choman Hardi & Martyn Crucefix * PBS Bulletin *

Read more less

Book SynopsisA facsimile capturing the essence of Sussex as it was one hundred years ago, Eleanor Farjeons' creative ramble across the South Downs celebrated in 26 poems; an inspirational landscape now embraced as the South Downs National Park, a lasting testament to Sussex.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisCherry Pie is 2015 collection from Ted Hughes Award and Arts Foundation Award winner Hollie McNish, inspired by her grandparents' advice on newspapers, war, sex and tinned cherries. The poems collected in Cherry Pie hold personal meaning for Hollie and are also those which have been frequently requested by audiences in theatres, pubs, festival tents, schools and youth clubs up and down the UK. The book is illustrated by some of Hollie's favourite artists and illustrators.Cherry Pie includes Hollie's poem Mathematics (1.9 million hits on YouTube) as well as Bungalows and Biscuits which was shortlisted for Best Factual New Media Content About Older People's Issues in the Older People in Media Awards. Her poetry has received over 3.5 million YouTube views; more than most political speeches, less than a cat dancing to 80's pop music.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDilawar Karadaghi is one of the most important contemporary Kurdish poets and his work is marked by the long years of persecution, marginalization and struggle that are part of the Kurdish experience. The poems in this short selection are full of longing, sadness, loss and, in the final poem, anger, as the poet remembers the devastating chemical attack on Halabja in 1988 in which his 'country's hair turned white'.

Read more less