Poetry / poems by individual poets
WW Norton & Co E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962
Book SynopsisWith a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E.E. Cummings in his lifetime.
£35.99
Fourteen Publishing InHabit
Book Synopsis
£9.37
Flapjack Press Li'l Book o' small Poems: (or is it?)
Book Synopsis"You'll never live more life than wha' I'm livin' through right now..." Join Gerry Potter on a voyage into social relativism and the domestic/fantastic in a punchy 'n' pithy, yet generously discursive, collection. Contemplating both the ingrained and fleeting fears of a life enlightened through c-PTSD diagnosis, these are li'l poems addressing big issues.Trade ReviewPraise for the author: "Everything poetry should be and all too often isn't." Time Out / "Gerry is about intelligence and argument and politics and protest. So must we all be." Roger Hill / "Enormous talent." Gay Times / "Intelligent, humane and searching poetry." Dr Jo Bell / "Will amuse, move, inspire and provoke." Polari Literary Salon / "One of the most radical forces in performance poetry." Designer Magazine
£11.40
Guernica Editions,Canada Downtown Flirt
Book SynopsisIn October 2016 Peter Jickling left the Yukon to write in Toronto. His resulting poems document subjects ranging from subletting to subways ? illuminating quiet moments amidst noise. Sometimes sad, often funny, and always humane, Downtown Flirt is an outsider?s account of urban life.
£13.46
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Chan
Book SynopsisChan is a mercurial name, representing the travellers and shape-shifters of the poems in this collection. It is one of the many nicknames of Hannah Lowe's Chinese-Jamaican father, borrowed from the Polish emigre card magician Chan Canasta. It is also a name from China, where her grandfather's story begins. Alongside these figures, there's Joe Harriott, the Jamaican alto saxophonist, shaking up 1960s London; a cast of other long-lost family; and a ship full of dreamers sailing from Kingston to Liverpool in 1947 on the SS Ormonde. Hannah Lowe's second collection follows her widely acclaimed debut, Chick, which took readers on a journey round her father, a gambler who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London's old East End to support his family. Published by Bloodaxe in 2013, Chick was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and selected for the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion.Trade Review'This is an outstanding, unputdownable first collection' - John Glenday.; 'An unforgettable book. In an age where blurby superlatives compete on debut book covers, this one has an edge: it is ABOUT someone, namely the poet's late father, from whose name it takes its title... "Say", which exploits understatement to the full, is remarkable, and heartbreaking' - Helena Nelson, Magma.; 'Hannah Lowe's debut collection is wonderful... a book which deals plainly and honestly with big emotions and tender, dramatic personal scenes' - Declan Ryan, Ambit.; 'Lowe's poetry is vibrant and sensitive, devoted to the retrieval of "lost, forgotten things"... skilful, bittersweet' - Chloe Stopa-Hunt, Poetry Review.Table of Contents1. What I Play is Out de Window! Ribs Sax I Sax II Cherokee Pinewood Suite, unrecorded, 1958 Quintet at a Party, 1963 What is and isn't Jazz? Green Amoeba Mingus Sophisticated, slick Alpha Boy All The Bodies in the Foreign Ground, 5000 Miles From Home Coda 2. Out of Many Ran Awa, My Mulatto Boy Justice Out of Many High Yellow Brown Eyes Blue 'Honey' Hakka Paper Baby Lowe Geaneology Eleven O'Clock Child Borderliner Mitchell/Mingus Scott Joplin Rag Fourteen Days in May What Do I Remember of Sophia? What Charlie Said Chin 3. If I Could Write Honestly A Short Biography of My Father Oranges Gloves If I Could Write Honestly Shells For Ida Yam and Callalloo What Ida Said 4. Ormonde Ormonde What I know Distressed British Seamen White Stowaway Schoolboy Dressmaker Boxer Passieros Twist In Ship-breaking Johnny Cakes On Cannon Street Chan
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Love Minus Love
Book SynopsisWayne Holloway-Smith's second collection Love Minus Love is an internal universe, fragmented and glued back together with uncanny logic. A strange layering of time, in which multiple things happen at once, in a looping track of intrusive thoughts – shot through with dead cows, pop songs, dead dads, the white noise of televisions – rotten teeth are raining everywhere. Somewhere at the core of all this, the seemingly fixed boundaries of masculinity, family, trauma and mental health are blurred towards a new type of vinegary identity, in a pitch of emotional intensity that punches you right in the gut. Wayne Holloway-Smith's debut collection Alarum was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize as well as being a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. His poem 'the posh mums are dancing in the square' – included in Love Minus Love – won first prize in the Poetry Society's 2018 National Poetry Competition. Love Minus Love is shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize and is also a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice.Trade ReviewI rejoice in Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems, and I miss them when I'm not reading them. Love Minus Love is a gorgeous painful classic of the Dead Dad genre, and the We Are All Meat genre and the Re-Building Mum genre. It is a beautiful tapestry-album of boy agony, wit and honesty, punctuated by devastating in-parentheses-bildungsromans. It's unforgettably brilliant. -- Max PorterExciting, excoriating, gorgeous, appalling, and eye-wateringly honest. Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems are blisteringly beautiful, and probe at a siege-like nucleus of familial harm. Histories of abuse, hurt and disease are confronted and dissected in all their messy, meaty complexity, but always with love, always with hope and a sweet, sweet tenderness. One of the truest poets writing today. -- Fiona Benson
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Conversation
Book SynopsisIn The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present, and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even in grief, closeness in times of isolation and lockdown, and the longing to bridge gaps and find cures. Miracles are found in the everyday, in a child’s sleep or a lit-up house. Textiles transform into remembrancers, landscape into emotion. A contemporary Daedalus views his life from a hang-glider. A scrap of handwriting, cafe talk, an exploding car, an earthquake, the naming of fields or a line of walkers ignite conversations about place, time and the tender paradoxes of mortality. Stephanie Norgate’s first collection Hidden River (2008) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was followed by The Blue Den (2012). The Conversation is her third collection. Her poetry has been praised for the ‘depth of its lyricism’ (Jackie Wills, Warwick Review), and for being ‘energetic and generous, and displaying a ‘feeling for place, for the roots of things’ and for being ‘searching, memorable and disconcerting … She has the ear for the music of a line and the shape and strength of an image.’ (R.V. Bailey, Artemis).Trade ReviewThe poems in The Blue Den possess a brooding, magnetism which draws us into a drowned ship, a slow-worm’s narrow skull or the hand-clasp of an orang-utan. The beauty of imagery and rhythm is matched by the subtlety of the poet’s thought. -- Helen DunmoreNorgate shuns full-blown epiphany in favour of a quiet, patient unveiling of the world that invites a way of seeing, a way of thinking. These poems with their observational insistence, are charged with a phenomenological inquiry. -- Julian Stannard * Poetry Review *This is a collection packed with rewarding poetry to be read and re-read with new gems to uncover each time. -- Wendy Klein * Artemis *Table of Contents11 The House 12 Eavesdroppers 13 Word Hoards 14 Miracle 15 February Foxes 16 Sycamore 17 Dead Nettle in the Fann Street Wildlife Garden 18 Wildlife Garden in the City 29 outside some flats in Camberwell 21 Orthopaedics and Trauma, King’s College Hospital 23 Bedroom Tax 25 Evening Teaching 26 ask the heathland 27 walk in a wood after a long loneliness 28 The Machine 30 Night Walk with My Parents 31 To Wish on the Stone 32 The Bridge 34 lines prompted by an old leather travel bag 36 In Trieste 37 Jane Austen’s Visitor 38 Studio mirror: the maid speaks 39 Dalí among the cactuses 40 Time Slip 41 Sweet Woodruff 42 Comfort 43 The Night Table 44 Terrace Ghosts 45 on seeing a drift of blackthorn in April’s haze 46 Question 47 At the Stone Chamber of an Ancient Village 49 lockdown bluebells 50 above ourselves 51 To sing of soap in desperate times 53 An Hour’s Walk 55 The Sears and Roebuck sheet as Scrubs Bag 57 Through a glass darkly 58 Elegy for the Closeness of London 62 After an evening’s writing in the shed 63 The Summoner of Birds 64 The Wake 65 Your Poem 66 At St Erth 67 Walking the Path Again 69 The Conversation 70 Siskin 72 Daedalus over the Downs 74 Gate on the Downs 76 What the chair saw 77 The Clumsinesses 78 The Tile 79 Landings
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd A Change in the Air
Book SynopsisJane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world. A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke's widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019).Trade ReviewThe poems are plain-spoken and restrained: they resist easy consolation. Their austerity serves to intensify the unmediated emotion they almost don’t want to capture… a poem might be born of personal loss, but, once completed and published, it has entered a different timespan, and becomes the forge where other minds are shaped and brightened. -- Carol Rumens * The Guardian, on When the Tree Falls *Her observation of nature is...precise, her poems are…honed to the bone. Clarke knows exactly how much to withhold so that the understated artful phrases echo eloquently across the white space of the unsaid. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times *The Irish poet Jane Clarke has followed a great debut collection with an even better second book. When the Tree Falls talks about her farming father in his last years. It delivers a clean, hard-earned simplicity and a lovely sense of line. -- Anne Enright * The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2019) *A poet who blends the contemporary with a great sense of the ancient and the rural… There is no sentimentality, no ornamentation; every word is incredibly honed and carries a really deep emotional weight. -- Jessica Traynor * Arena, RTE 1, on When the Tree Falls *Table of Contents10 After 11 Butter for Queens 12 Raspberries 13 District Nurse 14 Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson’s Wedding 15 Given 16 Becoming 17 All the horses she’s ever loved 18 Eggs 19 All she needed 20 Milk 21 The Lookout 22 The Arch PIT PONIES OF GLENASAN 25 Christmas Morning 26 Pit Ponies of Glendasan 27 The Pay 28 Mullacor WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER 31 September 1914 32 In the dugout 33 The Game 34 After we’re gone 35 Bouchavesnes 36 Priam of Troy 37 Ling 38 When all this is over 39 Snow 40 Pianist YOU COULD SAY IT BEGINS 42 You could say it begins 44 Crossings 45 Flight 47 Family Bible 48 When the sun 51 The Dipper 52 Lazy Beds 53 skein 54 Passage 55 Wildfire 56 Rowan 57 Refuge 58 Recipe for a bog 59 spawn 60 At Purteen Harbour 61 Little Tern Colony, Kilcoole 63 Mater Misericordiae 64 The Key 65 Spalls 66 Her first 67 Wife 68 Ballinabarney 69 First Earlies 70 Shepherd 71 Fences 72 Thief in April 73 Stepping in 74 June 76 Notes 78 Acknowledgements
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd To Abandon Wizardry
Book SynopsisTo Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory. Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.Trade ReviewMatthew Caley’s sixth collection Trawlerman’s Turquoise is a steer through linguistic rapids – the effect is dizzying, and psychedelic. One is left with the sense that some new order has been made manifest…in Caley’s intoxicated world the urban becomes urbane, lexicon turns lyrical. -- Cheryl Moskowitz * Magma *Table of Contents11 prologue 13 The Vulnerable 14 The Archipelagos 16 Bagatelle 17 The Nit Pickers 18 Lynx Litter 19 Luxor 21 The Blunderbuss 23 The Leaf 25 Approaches to a Door 27 The Strop 29 The Spill 30 Wispy Streamers 31 Pabl Piccass 32 Aphid Says 34 Canton for the Stranded 35 The Tickle 36 I Conjured up a Horse 38 Lamantia Street 40 The Scarf 41 from Transmitter 63 Undescended Testicles 64 The Obligations 66 Double-hooped Earrings 67 The Unbalanced 68 Unicorn Street 70 The Confessional 71 from The Drifting Recidivist Says 74 Plume Travelling 76 The Bungalow 78 Horse in the Sea Mist 81 This Pure Child 82 The Height 83 Star-wheel 84 Fusillade 85 Canton for the Wastrel 86 Depot of the Aero-houses 88 The Weathervane 89 Bollo’s Brook 92 The Lynx 94 epilogue
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd May Swim
Book SynopsisBy turns lyrical and sardonic, this new collection from Katie Donovan is characteristically watery candid and uncompromising in its refusal to inhabit the safer reaches of the shore. Themes of loss, widowhood and ageing co-exist with observations of her wild garden and its inhabitants, including a mangy fox she helps to survive.
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd First Rain in Paradise
Book SynopsisFirst Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Gwyneth Lewis's highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved from the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence, but suffering doesn't preclude humour.
£10.80
Poetry Wales Press No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press The Black Place
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Battery Rocks
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Pushkin Press Change Your Life
Book SynopsisRainer Maria Rilke developed one of the most singular poetic styles of the twentieth century. Visionary yet always anchored in the real world, his poems give profound expression to fundamental questions of love and death, of the chaos of the modern world as well as the spiritual consolation of art and nature. Change Your Life draws from across Rilke's career to offer a comprehensive view of his most essential poetry, featuring major selections from the great Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus alongside less frequently anthologised work. In these dazzling new translations by acclaimed poet Martyn Crucefix, Rilke's poems beguile with fresh insight and mystery.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd The Historians
Book SynopsisWinner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020. An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020. A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century. Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her 'edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history' ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: 'Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... Their hands are full of words.' Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: 'We will not leave you behind', a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.Trade Review'Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century.' - Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review
£10.44
Salt Publishing Robbergirls
Book SynopsisWritten during a residency with The Polar Museum in Cambridge, Robbergirls reimagines The Snow Queen as a Sapphic rite of passage. Offered in seven sections that echo the fairy tale’s form, these hot, tender and generous poems search for a lost other who is by turns friend, brother, son, lover, but ultimately an aspect of a fragmented self. In her formally playful and linguistically rich third collection, Benyon suggests that the ache for contact can be tempered by nature, even with disordered seasons. In striking poems that refuse to deny environmental breakdown, the poet holds space for the indigenous people of the Arctic as she considers the devastating impacts of climate change on their landscapes and lives.
£10.44
Salt Publishing Old Men
Book SynopsisPeter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a range of forms.
£10.44
Salt Publishing New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisNew And Selected Poems brings together a quarter of a century of exceptional writing.Julian Stannard started his career as a writer in the Italian port city of Genoa. He has written at length about Liguria and Italy in general. His work has been translated into Italian and he finds his place in a rich Anglo-Ligurian tradition. This gathering of poems from many collections infuses his love of Italy with a clear-eyed view of modern Britain.These are poems which can wrong foot and amaze. His satirical appetite draws on Rabelais, Gogol, Swift, and Lear. Stannard ultimately creates an unmistakable voice the commonplace is made strange and yet even stranger still.2010 Winner of the International Troubadour Prize 2024 Awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize
£13.38
Canongate Books The Flame
Book SynopsisTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR POETRYTHESE POEMS AND NOTEBOOKS ARE THE LAST WORD FROM THE LATE, GREAT LEONARD COHENThe Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, selected and ordered by Cohen in the final months of his life. The book contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen's lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who has plumbed the depths of our darkest questions and come up wanting, yearning for more.Trade ReviewThe last word in love and despair . . . Full of youthful spark, beauty and romance . . . Elegantly and posthumously published . . . Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end -- Kate Kellaway * * Observer, Poetry book of the month * *Cohen was a poet before he was a musician, and with this posthumous collection his career completes its circle. Encompassing poems and lyrics written in his last decade, as well as self-portraits and notebook extracts, the book is introduced by his son Adam Cohen * * Financial Times, Best Poetry Books of 2018 * *Cohen's enduring, beautiful bleakness is the draw here. His gift for understated melancholia is on each blackening page * * Daily Mail, Best Books of 2018 * *We'll be listening to Cohen - still smirking and smiling - for decades to come, with this collection as our companion * * Spectator * *For his final publication, he left almost nothing to chance . . . The Flame shows the emphasis that Cohen put on distillation . . . Included in various proportions are love, sex, death, regret, exaltation, piety and gentle fondness. The blending of the earthy with the spiritual would give John Donne and Marvin Gaye a run for their money * * Guardian * *The Flame is a gift . . . These poems and lyrics are as startling and stirring, as clever, funny and sorrowful as we came to expect from a poet/singer/songwriter . . . [A] treasure trove * * The Big Issue * *If you felt Leonard Cohen's death in 2016 as a personal assault, this book is a posthumous balm . . . All of Cohen's work has a raw, straight-to-the-heart intensity - reach for this the next time you need inspiration for a wedding toast that will leave them gutted, or any other moment you need a little sustenance for the soul * * Vogue * *Cohen's final volume shows his poetic soul. If you know the man only because of "Hallelujah" or "Suzanne," pick up The Flame and warm yourself within its pages * * Washington Post * *It's clear that Cohen remained sharp until the very end, and the book, a kind of farewell tribute by the poet-prophet, offers ample evidence of his abiding sense of humor . . . What Cohen offered his many fans and followers was the opportunity to partake of the kind of spiritual experience that makes it possible for us to feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone * * Los Angeles Review of Books * *A gorgeous collection of the late, great Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, it's an essential read for any fan * * NME * *
£18.70
Vintage Publishing Rapture's Road: From the author of All Down
Book SynopsisIn this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland'Hewitt’s words penetrate with Nerudian passion and force' GUARDIAN'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTERAs the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.Trade ReviewStunning... shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals * Observer *Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force * Guardian *Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire’s natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture’s Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction * RTÉ *An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of ShyA writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann Ní Ghríofa, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEAn extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by... beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous -- Fiona Benson, praise for TONGUES OF FIREGorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing -- Andrew McMillan, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEI fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems... A beautiful book and Seán Hewitt is an extraordinary writer -- Liz Berry, praise for TONGUES OF FIREThe best new work of non-fiction I've read in years -- Sarah Perry, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEIntensely original... Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
£11.69
Vintage Publishing Food for the Dead
Book Synopsis**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD***SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism''A beautiful, necessary book''ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic''Every poem is a masterpiece''OLIA HERCULES, author of MamushkaWith this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context.Central to this book is a timeline of hunger', a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (death by hunger' in Ukrainian) Stalin's man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / runnin
£11.70
Cinnamon Press Mine
Book SynopsisThere is no such thing/as refuge or retreat' ends one of the poems after layering vivid image on image, leaving us changed for the experience of reading. And it happens again and againembodied, specific, clear images that deliver meaning that is integral to the experience yet surprising and new. And along the way the emotions build, not from being told or hammered home, but because we are allowed to sense them so deeply that we are able, also, to feel them: the loneliness and the tenderness, the sadness that is reflected back in the green eye of a piece of polished malachite, the loss that lurks in the corner of an office, the romance and the longing. This is a collection to savour, full of words that haunt, it pulls us back to find another layer of meaning, and another
£8.67
Carcanet Press Ltd Latch
Book SynopsisA London Review Bookshop Book of the Year. Rebecca Goss' fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.Trade Review'This collection collapses the boundaries between land and lineage, is filled with portent, vestige, longing. I don't know how it's possible for these poems to be so intimate, yet vast. They beat fiercely with bird-animal-human hearts.' - Tishani Doshi; 'Latch brings us an evocation of the past which avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality or nostalgia. Instead here is something sharp, joyful and interrogating: a bright, taut view of a rural English childhood. Her astute eye lets nothing through as the latch of memory and the blacksmith's making become a vehicle for a poised engagement with the shifting roles of motherhood across time.' - Deryn Rees-Jones
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Goddamned Selected Poems
Book SynopsisA collection of new and selected poems about life, love, and growing older.
£15.29
Carcanet Press Ltd Ambush at Still Lake
Book SynopsisCaroline Bird's new collection charts marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery: the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness, after the happy ending.
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd Heirloom
Book SynopsisThis first collection from a Caribbean-born writer examines how violence shapes four generations of women and how each generation resists the dysfunction, tyranny, and terror inherited from the previous one.
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd Guaracara
Book SynopsisThe poet traces their ancestral legacy over the centuries through the history of 'King Sugar'.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Before Violence
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£11.69
Profile Books Ltd Kit
Book Synopsis'raw as well as wrought ... a novel of spaces and gaps ... like life poured into art' - Anthony Cummins, The Observer 'In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy [...] Kit reaches places other books don't.' - Max Porter 'An extraordinary experience ... It is work and voices like Megan's we have to fight for.' - Maxine Peake Megan and Kit met in their early twenties. Their friendship was intense, wild and true. Years later, when Kit becomes desperately unwell, Megan tries to pull her old friend back from the precipice, navigating the difficulties of revisiting a relationship conceived in the great freedom of youth, whilst attempting to remain fully present in the messy beauty of her family life. Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication - and precariousness - of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end. Told in a spare, winding prose-poem, with a voice reminiscent of Max Porter, Elizabeth Smart, Kae Tempest and Rebecca Watson, Kit is a splintered, powerful work of empathy, friendship and unconditional love.Trade Review'Raw as well as wrought ... a novel of spaces and gaps ... like life poured into art.' -- Anthony Cummins * The Observer *An extraordinary experience. The richness, rhythm and power of the language pulls you in, down and along. Megan's voice is totally unique: ethereal, yet completely relatable and grounded. It's a mirror to a female existence. You feel deeply connected to the narrator's journey, but it's also a challenging piece. Completely invigorating. It is work and voices like Megan's we have to fight for. * Maxine Peake *Kit is a visceral, heartfelt paean to the wildness of friendship and unconditional love. -- Fiona Sturges * The Guardian *In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy, it searches for a loving root system and finds it working away beautifully in our everyday wreckages [...] Kit reaches places other books don't. * Max Porter *This beautiful, unflinching book asks us what it might mean to truly confront loss - its shame, its intimacies, its clarifying horrors, the ways it forces us to relearn how to live. * Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass *Megan Barker's Kit is a timeless classic, the language is compelling and succinct, there is tenderness captured in here and a fierce heart too. This book is so exquisite and so daring - I loved every page. * Salena Godden *'Kit is love and pain distilled: a book of extraordinary force. It left me reeling for days' * Tom Bullough, author of Addlands *Extraordinary [...] It is a "poultice of words" - something that brings feeling to the surface. It bears witness to death, and how the living live with it. * Pádraig Ó Tuama, editor of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World *If I put it down for a moment on almost every page it was only to steady myself, or to savour, or marvel, and occasionally (thank God) to laugh. I can't wait to read it again. * Sue Peebles, author of Snake Road *
£11.69
Troubador Publishing Life Behind the Pen
Book SynopsisWHAT IS ALL THAT RABBLE? What are they rabbiting on about? Disturbing my nap. My parents started reading to me before I was even born. I first entered a poetry competition at the age of 5, and 7 years later... My Life behind the Pen has just begun, A life that started with a wonderful dream. The sun is here, the moon is on the run. I'm 5, po'try fills my head, as it seems. Pictures become words, and words turn to rhymes, Various poems inside can be read, Anywhere, any which way; the good times! There is no right or wrong it can be said. Collection of pieces, written for you, This is my book; I really hope you like. Read and learn poetry then you can do and write, it's easy as riding a bike! The power of poetry - this is it. You may have noticed, you've read a sonnet.
£6.39
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Fire in My Head
Book SynopsisA powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak. In our times of crisis The mind has its powers This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems. Some of them, like 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017', are already familiar. Published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, it was played more than 6 million times on Channel 4's Facebook page, and was retweeted by thousands on Twitter. 'Notre-Dame is Telling Us Something' was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It spoke eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world. In 'shaved head poem', Ben Okri wrote of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times. 'Breathing the Light' was his response to the events of summer 2020, when a black man died beneath the knee of a white policeman, a tragedy sparking a movement for change. These poems, and others including poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barack Obama, Amnesty and more, make this a uniquely powerful collection that blends anger and tenderness with Ben Okri's inimitable vision.Trade 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
£7.99
Wild Goose Publications This Heart
Book SynopsisPoems that arrive like gentle reminders that life is happening right now, right here and it's trying to tell you something.Martin's work bridges the spiritual and the secular with the grace of someone who's not trying to win an argument it just tells the truth beautifully and often makes you laugh along the way.
£10.44
Canongate Books Goldenrod
Book SynopsisA powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life - a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son''s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road - Maggie Smith reveals the magic of the present moment.The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.
£9.49
Out-Spoken Press Somewhere Something is Burning
Book SynopsisAn examination of solitude and absence, the poems within this collection grapple with the reality and taboo of loneliness pitted against an anxiety of connecting. Exploring human relationships, breakdown in communication, and silence – self-inflicted or otherwise – the poems give voice to the fears and experiences that shape us, and interrogate the ways in which we process and avoid. Frecknall’s leaps of surreality, extreme empathy and vivid imagery make Somewhere Something is Burning a compelling joyride of a read.
£9.50
Flapjack Press Pig's Ear, Dog's Dinner: A COVID-19 Poetry Diary
Book SynopsisWritten daily throughout the UK’s restrictions to combat coronavirus, Pig’s Ear, Dog’s Dinner picks up directly from Volume 2, Can of Worms. Covering the period from the introduction of the ‘Three-Tier System’ through to the anniversary of the first lockdown, Paul’s third volume is filled with humour and compassion, and is a reflective documentation of the nation’s wellbeing. Illustrated by Korky Paul.Trade Review“A book that future historians will want to read; it will tell them what it was like to live in turbulent times through a poet’s eye. If journalism is the first draft of history, then here is the second: life shaped, structured, described, annotated.” – Ian McMillan, poet & broadcaster; “In these strange times, every day should have a Paul Cookson moment – keep him by your bedside for emergencies.” – Simon Mayo, broadcaster & author; “A poem a day may not keep the pandemic away, but Paul’s pithy, moving, amusing and occasionally heartbreaking coronavirus verse diary is a must read memento of these challenging times. A succinct, modern take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Brilliant.” – Paul Ross, journalist & broadcaster
£9.50
Out-Spoken Press Caviar
Book SynopsisAssociative, sensuous, and unstable, Caviar explores the line between decadence and depravity. In Fletcher’s third pamphlet, investigations of power and violence are no longer limited to the domestic and romantic. She interrogates all dark spheres of influence: ‘A word. A woman hit. A nuclear bomb.’ Language is ‘consumed and mated’, a ‘divine bistro’ that shows her mastery over form. With winking intelligence and playful sleaze, this pamphlet is a circus of swans, slapped faces, and the snottiest, most expensive delicacy in the world.
£8.55
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Mortality
Book SynopsisThe sixth collection of this profound dialogue between two major poets from opposite sides of the world takes on mortality. Provoked by near fatal accidents, family crisis, rising temperatures and forest fires in Western Australia, these poems confront the reality of death, and celebrate the arts of mortality in exquitite dialogue.
£11.69
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Ground Provisions
£10.44
Birlinn General The Poems of Norman MacCaig
Book SynopsisThis collection of Norman MacCaig's poems is offered as the definitive edition of his work. It has been edited by his son, Ewen. A prolific writer, MacCaig left about 600 unpublished poems after his death; 99 have been selected for inclusion here. The aim of the selection process was to sustain the overall quality of the 1990 Collected Poems, which was compiled by the poet. Unusually, MacCaig's creativity did not decline with age, and most of the unpublished poems date from his seventies and early eighties, adding significantly to his published work from that period. Insight to the writer's life and work is provided in an appreciative introduction by author and critic Alan Taylor, focusing on MacCaig's life and times, and in a collection of MacCaig's words on his own and others' writing.Trade Review'Norman MacCaig is an indispensable poet, and his Collected Poems is a wonder-book which will give years of pleasure' -- Douglas Dunn'I have always loved the mixture of strictness and susceptibility in Norman MacCaig's work. It is an ongoing education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry . . . He means poetry to me' -- Seamus Heaney'Magisterial' * The Herald *'Deeply lyrical yet crystal clear in its language, MacCaig's poetry is a must-have' * Sunday Herald *
£22.50
Birlinn General The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman McCaig
Book SynopsisFirst published in 2010 to mark the centenary of Norman MacCaig’s birth, The Many Days aims to strike a balance between representing the much-loved poems that any reader would expect to find in a selected MacCaig, and other less familiar verses. The collection is arranged to show the range of the poet’s work in all its variety, from his love of nature and the landscape of the North West Highlands to his life in Edinburgh; from his care for animals and human friendship, to his moments of joy and grief, creative delight and occasional creative dread. Time and again MacCaig returns us to that good place we know as the world, but hardly ever seen so clearly as we do in these marvellous poems. Trade Review'He said so much in so few words… He’s perfect poetry to me' -- David Linklater * Boom Saloon *
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd A Village Life
Book SynopsisFrom a fountain where 'all the roads in the village unite', concentric circles expand into the distance: the young and old, fields, a river, a mountain - the fountain's stone counterpart, where the roads end, human time superimposed on geological time. Renowned as a lyrical poet of austere intensity, in "A Village Life Louise Gluck" evokes a Mediterranean world with luminous precision. Her focus is on moments of speculation and reflection in a dreamlike present tense.
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd La Jeune Parque
Book SynopsisPaul Valery (1871-1945) was a poet and essayist, and along with Verlaine and Mallarme is regarded as one of the most important Symbolist writers, and an influence on poets from Eliot to Ashbery. He had a quiet life by many standards, but in one respect it was exemplary, even legendary; he made an early reputation in little magazines, decided to stop writing verse when still only 20, kept his silence for 20 years, then began again; and his first book of verse, published when he was 45, was his masterpiece La Jeune Parque.'A poem should not mean, but be,' said Archibald MacLeish. La Jeune Parque ('the goddess of Fate as a young woman') certainly exists: she's beautiful and makes great gestures. And as for what she means, there's a substantial amount of argument about that, so La Jeune Parque is a poem by either definition. It's a classic, by general agreement, written to the full 17th-century recipe for alexandrine couplets, and it's modern, with every word pulling its weight in more than one direction. Alistair Elliot's translation with notes is aimed at making this rewarding but difficult long poem accessible enough for bafflement to turn into admiration. He attempts to clarify its small puzzles and also trace the overall narrative line of Paul Valery's poem: it does have a story (what should a young woman do?) and does struggle towards a resolution. He also provides an introduction which deals with the interesting circumstances of the poem's four-year composition (1913-17), which resulted in Valery's instantly becoming a famous poet at the age of 45, after having written no poetry for 20 years.Trade ReviewOne of the finest attempts at absolute poetry this translation, with an introduction and extensive notes, provides a fine introduction to this most difficult of French poets. -- Justin Quinn * The Honest Ulsterman *
£9.45
Everyman Shakespeare Poems
Book SynopsisThis collection contains more than 80% of the sonnets, including all the famous ones. In addition, there are substantial extracts from the longer narrative poems Shakespeare wrote in his youth, songs from the plays, and celebrated soliloquies from HAMLET, ROMEO AND JULIET, KING LEAR, HENRY V, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, etc. Together, these verses give a comprehensive view of shakespeare the poet by assembling all the well-known passages together with less familiar but equally powerful extracts.
£10.44
Everyman Poe Poems and Prose
Book SynopsisProbably the most important single figure in nineteenth century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exerted an enormous influence over later writers, especially French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire and Mallarme, and through them he affected the entire field of modern literature from THE WASTE LAND to LOLITA. Probably best known for his macabre short stories, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Poe's influence was spread primarily through his poems and essays which are here reprinted. The current volume includes all his extant poems and extensive selections from his essays on poetry.
£10.80
Penned in the Margins After the Formalities
Book SynopsisA knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family. Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the only person keeping you alive.' Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize A Poetry Society Recommendation A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year One of The Telegraphs Best Poetry Books of 2019Trade ReviewEndorsementsA burning rage with a delicate taste, Anthony’s words are a puzzle for the mind, a wrench for the heart and a massage for the soul. After the Formalities sees a poet at the peak of his powers, playing with form and style, tone and content, while maintaining a unique voice through a characteristic mix of historical scholarship, and caustic wit.- AkalaAfter the Formalities is a supreme collection. Anaxagorou’s lyrics, mapped over expansive interior and historical landscapes, feels to me as wise and weathered, and it feels to be bringing something totally new to my ear. Solid. The Self and The West catch the hardest blows, but Anaxagorou’ s throws hands critical, bloodied, and tender all so skilfully in this collection you can’t help but come out feeling rocked too. The ghosts that haunt this collection have bless it and we are blessed for it.- Danez Smith There’s a fresh type of originality in After The Formalities; a book funded by a quiet, yet fierce knowing, that weighs its startling imagery and intuitive language with a depth of risk and vulnerability. Anaxagorou's vocabulary is one which pushes back, moving between socio-symbolic spaces and evolving an empathy and generosity that wasn’t there before, and for this I love him.- Wayne Holloway-SmithAfter the Formalities doesn’t just radically redefine what it means to write about the self in poetry, it forges a space for a brand-new kind of poetics on the subject. Anaxagorou’s philosophic utilization of multiple poetic modes gifts the poems their mastery, and his view on the world and ideas – unsettled, nebulous, nuanced and ambivalent – means these masterful poems can then critique the very form within which they sit, both co-opting and critiquing structures in poetry and the world that subjugate. Formal, experimental, dextrous, aural, democratic, radical; what Anaxagorou does in this collection breaches paraphrase. Mining personal and public history, the importance of this book – for poetry and for how we talk about and know society – cannot be overstated. These poems work as poems should: enacting deep thought towards philosophies, and they make me hopeful.- Rachael AllenThere’s a fresh type of originality in After the Formalities; a book funded by a quiet, yet fierce knowing, that weighs its startling imagery and intuitive language with a depth of risk and vulnerability.Wayne Holloway-SmithAnthony Anaxagorou's After the Formalities is a novel response to anxieties surrounding the growth of the immigrant-descended population, informed by his British and Cypriot heritage. [...] The poet speaks out "against darkness" to a divided nation and seeks the solace of home, whether assigned or adopted.Jade Cuttle, The Guardian -- Jade Cuttle * The Guardian *A manifesto for a complete, multifaceted masculinity ... makes After the Formalities essential reading for our times.Katie Mennis, The London Magazine * The London Magazine *Anaxagorou's] crystalline language, brevity, use of space, gaps and silence all commit themselves to accounting for loss, or the "violence in forgetting".Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian * The Guardian *Anaxagorou probes the themes of masculinity, fatherhood and ethnicity, confronting them head-on ... There are also subtle and tender moments between the poet and his son, where curiosity and vulnerability are celebrated.Zakia Carpenter-Hall, Poetry London * Poetry London *At once personally redemptive and historically acute [...] Anaxagorou's poems are at their most powerful when they slip into this kind of rapid rattle, the verbs fronted and the clauses lopped of their subjects. The narrative, rather than losing pace with the lanugage, is turned, chewed, stung.Will Harris, The Poetry Review * The Poetry Review *
£9.49
Hawkwood Books Inside Pale Eyes
Book SynopsisFlash Fiction : a dream noir, a fractured narrative of grey twilight where half-glimpsed figures flicker through a deserted city-scape. Connection is everything, but nobody connects.
£5.99
Burning Eye Books The Fire Eater's Lover
Book SynopsisSophia Blackwell's new collection, The Fire-Eater's Lover, is about performance of all kinds. Whether it's the rituals of seduction, the trials and triumphs of squeezing into a red vintage dress or the adrenalin of putting a microphone to your lips, these poems are filled with the joy of performing. The Fire-Eater's Lover conjures together scraps of everything from classic blues songs to job rejection letters, marriage proposals and medical questionnaires, and whips them into a circus of illicit sex, love lost and found, bittersweet goodbyes and moments of illumination.
£9.49
