Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisA daring new collection from one of poetry's rising stars.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Picador Poetry Prize 2010

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Book SynopsisThe definitive collection of Sean O'Brien's poetry, drawn from almost 40 years' work.

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Book SynopsisThe fabulous new collection from the prize-winning poet Gerard Woodward.

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Book SynopsisRachael Boast’s first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent – but where Sidereal’s gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast’s focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life’s intoxicants – love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence – and sees Boast’s pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things – the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there – and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.Trade ReviewThe metaphysical turn in recent poetry in the UK is emphasized in Rachael Boast's second collection, Pilgrim's Flower, which recognizes that there are certain states and perceptions that shape the weather of the spirit, which poetry seems uniquely qualified to render . . . you'll see something of the diversity and ambition that marks our younger poets. -- Poetry Books of the Year * Independent *

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Book SynopsisThe new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted poet John Glenday.

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Book SynopsisFurniture, Lorraine Mariner's debut collection, was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. Her poetry is sharp, quirky and skilful. Praise for Furniture: 'Pleasingly direct and conversational, almost aggressively anti-poetic. The poems are spoken in the voice of a young woman who inches her way through a blizzard of bewilderment at life’s unpredictable twists and turns’ Tablet

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Book SynopsisA compelling new poetry collection from the acclaimed Australian poetTrade ReviewA lovely book, from one of Australia's most celebrated poets. Kinsella has a distinctive voice and displays a height of ease with poetic forms, both narrative and personal, and more formal. * Western Australian *

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Book SynopsisThe compelling new poetry collection from the T S Eliot Prize shortlisted poet

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Book SynopsisA powerful new collection from the T S Eliot Prize shortlisted Annie Freud, featuring beautiful full-colour illustrations by the poet herself.

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Book SynopsisNew collection of astonishing variety and virtuosity from the leading English poet of his generation

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Book SynopsisAnother gorgeous collection of poetry and prose from Australian poet and social media sensation Beau Taplin. Beautiful, inspiring, and empowering, Worlds of You sweeps readers away on a journey of emotion. Filled with lyric wisdom, Taplin’s second book expands on the themes introduced in Bloom, offering insight and comfort.

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Book SynopsisThere''s little that''s been written yetConcerning teenage etiquette,So as a sort of useful guideSome gruesome cases lie insideOf teenagers who lost their wayAnd ultimately had to pay.You''ll read about the tragic fateOf Pete, who couldn''t get a date,And Jen, whose hopes and dreams were quashed, And James, who staunchly never washed.This book could be, and no mistake,The best investment that you make,So quickly - pluck it from the shelf!Or suffer some such fate yourself...Trade ReviewHilarious. Bart Simpson meets Adrian Mole at a party thrown by The Inbetweeners. Smart, smelly, spotty and so laugh-out-loud funny it might get you a detention... * Emlyn Rees and Josie Lloyd, authors of We're Going on a Bar Hunt *Delightfully funny and poetic portraits of modern teens * Buzzfeed *

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Book SynopsisFrom the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood.''2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation''s best minds'' Danez Smith, winner of the Forward Prize ''A riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read - both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest'' TIME MagazineMagical Negro is an archive of Black everydayness, a catalogue of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms and customs. These poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacemTrade ReviewParker's poetry is a sledgehammer covered in silk, exposing black women's vulnerability and power and underscoring what it means to be magical and in pain. - BuzzfeedMagical Negro is unsettlingly new: a book that incisively explores states of black womanhood with astonishing buoyancy and grief. I can't stop thinking about the songs it sings, songs that feel inevitable and yet unvoiced, complex and yet urgent; poems that are steeped in pop culture and the here-and-now of actual life while also being refracted through the darkest lens of American history. To read it is to wonder what each poem will do next, and to be reminded, over and over, of Parker's extraordinary lyric gifts.This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star.If you're anxious for your snug perspective to be rattled and ripped asunder, for the predictable landscape you stroll to become all but unrecognizable, for things you thought you knew to slap you into another consciousness - brethren, have I got the book for you. Bey's bestie continues her reign with this restless, fierce, and insanely inventive way of walking through the world. Once again, children - ignore Ms. Parker at your peril.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE WALES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021Winner of the Naim Frashëri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia Winner of the European Lyric Atlas Prize ''Fiona Sampson''s voice is something new and it''s a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read'' W. S. MerwinQuestions of humanity, of point of view, are at the heart of Fiona Sampson''s new collection, Come Down.Throughout, Sampson''s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond - some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present. Come Down ends with a long, eponymous poem, which moves fluidly and brilliantly through different forms of memTrade ReviewFiona Sampson's voice is something new and it's a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read -- W. S. MerwinA very fine poet indeed . . . This perfect equilibrium between the numinous and the touchable is typical of Sampson's achievement * Guardian *The imagination is always at work; demonstrating that curiosity is a form of passion * The Sunday Times *I am amazed at Fiona Sampson's ability to be metaphysical and visceral at once - to be savagely tender even, at times. Her image-making is entirely original, as is her diction; and she can elevate the ordinary and settle the elevated -- John KinsellaFiona Sampson's Come Down places particular responsibility on the reader as a co-creator, the added medium needed to lend shape to her art. It is a welcome burden . . . We are therefore deeply invested and immersed, as Sampson points to eras and memories, moments of creation and preludes to extinction . . . Come Down is a rich travelogue through layers of experience. * Financial Times *Sensual, sharply intelligent, searching; these poems live on their own terms, in their own appointed ground . . . deeply musical, intellectually engaged and, most importantly, in love, not only with language, but also with the world we seek day by dayThe most generous thing the poet can do is to give us vivid, piercing memories that become our experience . . . Here, dangerously and marvellously, [Fiona Sampson] comes close to revealing herself as a symbolThe passion surfaces in an elegiac, metaphysical flux . . . [Fiona Sampson] takes things apart, deconstructs them to set free the music insideNuminous musicality remains a hallmark of Fiona Sampson's poetry. Come Down traces the meeting points of our fleeting human lives and the shifting timelessness of the world that surrounds us . . . But Come Down also faces up to precise human hurt [. . .] exploring place, memory and the chasms of history -- Ben Wilkinson * Guardian *

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Book Synopsis''Beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech'' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI''m made of murderers I''m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother''sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book''s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and pTrade ReviewOut of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation -- Garth GreenwellShane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis -- Rabih AlameddineShane McCrae is a shrewd composer of American stories . . . He is a prospector for speech rhythms, collecting his material wherever he can. But American attics are full of old boxes of diaries and letters; and testimony, no matter how arresting, is not itself poetry. What makes McCrae's compositions so ingenious are their marvels of prosody and form, learned from the English Renaissance poems that he read in libraries when he was just starting out. The result is beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech -- Dan Chiasson * The New Yorker *Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands - earns - our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world -- Nick Ripatrazone * The Millions *This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump . . . In McCrae's timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims * Publishers Weekly *

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Book Synopsis''In McCrae''s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through'' Kate Kellaway, Guardian ''Confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time'' Kit Fan, GuardianWriting you I give the death I take I know I should feel wounded by your death I write to you to make a wound write back Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and recreate images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae writes into and through the wounds that we remember and ''strains toward a vision of joy'' (Will Brewbaker, the Los Angeles Review of Books). Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the

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Book SynopsisThis edition is made up of 217 poems, ordered chronologically, so that the reader can follow Mansfield's development as a poet and her experiments with different forms.

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Book SynopsisThe critical apparatus in this volume includes an extended essay on the development of the text, a Historical Note, Explanatory Notes and a full glossary of Scots, foreign and archaic words.

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Book SynopsisThese 13 newly commissioned chapters examine the impact of archival poetry collections on both literary scholarship and poetic practice.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders whatFriedrich Hlderlin's work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'.

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Book SynopsisThe definitive text of Allan Ramsay's poems, presenting his uncollected works chronologically for the first time, with comprehensive explanatory notesTrade Review"Author, antiquarian and cultural impresario, Allan Ramsay stands at the heart of Edinburgh's literary Enlightenment and the reanimation, especially, of a vibrant Scots vernacular poetic mode. In this superb edition, Rhona Brown definitively supersedes the haphazard efforts of earlier editors, and gives us this important poet with new clarity and completeness." -Thomas Keymer, University of Toronto

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Book SynopsisExplores the transformation of religious orthodoxy in the age of modernismTrade Review"A perceptive, absorbing, irreplaceable study. In showing how modernist writing was shaped by an interplay between the claims of mysticism as individual experience and the benefits of ecclesiastical frameworks, Callison illuminates a rich seam of innovation and perplexity not just in Jones, Eliot and H.D. but in the broader life of early twentieth-century Christianity." -Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University

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Book SynopsisReading Dylan Thomas attends in detail to the problems and pleasures of deciphering Thomas in the twenty-first century, teasing out his debts and effects, tracing his influence on later artists, and suggesting ways to understand his own idiosyncratic reading practices.

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Book SynopsisFirst scholarly edition of Philip James Bailey's epic masterpiece in a readable, modern volume.Trade Review"Scholars of nineteenth-century culture will want to thank Mischa Willett for this beautifully curated critical edition of Philip James Bailey's Festus. Seldom read today, Festus was devoured by Victorian readers from all walks of life and was reverenced in literary circles. Willett's thoughtful introduction unfolds for us the magnificent strangeness, as well as the abiding interest of this remarkable work.? " -Charles LaPorte, University of Washington

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Book SynopsisA pioneering study of women poets exploring the four laureate roles of the United Kingdom and Ireland.Trade Review"At once tracing the poets' careers and their self-inscription into exclusionary poetic traditions, Varty's timely book examines?their advances for literary and cultural democracies. It deftly?details?how, individually and collectively, these women reconfigure national identities while destabilising nationalisms, and how they infiltrate school curricula when sceptical of educational policies." -Dr Jane Dowson, De Montfort University, author of Carol Ann Duffy: Poet for Our Times

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Book SynopsisVoid Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Études néantes was to consist of poems written as musical études; these would not convey any direct message - but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This 'impossible project' has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music - but despite their esoteric nature are by no means 'difficult' in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book - one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame.

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Book SynopsisSpanning fifty years of work, Collected Poems sees Clive James make his own rich selection from across his exceptional career in poetry.From his debut collection in 1986 to his dazzling achievements in the 2010s, Clive James steadily built his reputation as one of the nation's best-loved and most highly-acclaimed poets. In this selection, made by the author himself, the very best of his talents are on show.From his early satires to heart-stopping valedictory poems, Clive James proves himself to be as well suited to the intense demands of the tight lyric as he is to the longer mock-epic. Included is perhaps amongst his finest works, 'Japanese Maple', a poem which became a global sensation upon its publication in the New Yorker.Collected Poems displays James's fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope, his lightly worn erudition and his emotional power; it undoubtedly cements his reputation as one of our most versatile and accomplished writers.'He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time' – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesClive James (1939–2019) was a broadcaster, critic, poet, memoirist and novelist. His acclaimed poetry includes the collections Sentenced To Life and Injury Time and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, a Sunday Times bestseller. His passion for and knowledge of poetry are distilled in his book of criticism on the subject, Poetry Notebook, and, written in the last year of his life, his personal annotated anthology of favourite poems, The Fire Of Joy. Trade ReviewJames writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force * The Times *A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone -- Robert McCrum * Observer *After writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured * Independent on Saturday *He is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *A verse highlight of my year -- Keith Bruce * Herald *

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Book SynopsisEuropa, Sean O’Brien’s ninth collection of poems, is a timely and necessary book. Europe is not a place we can choose to leave: it is also a shared heritage and an age-old state of being, a place where our common dreams, visions and nightmares recur and mutate. In placing our present crises in the context of an imaginative past, O’Brien show how our futures will be determined by what we choose to understand of our own European identity – as well as what we remember and forget of our shared history. Europa is a magisterial, grave and lyric work from one of the finest poets of the age: it shows not just a Europe haunted by disaster and the threat of apocalypse, but an England where the shadows lengthen and multiply even in its most familiar and domestic corners. Europa, the poet reminds us, shapes the fate of everyone in these islands – even those of us who insist that they live elsewhere.Trade ReviewThe collection's title places its concerns within the political climate of our time . . . Among his exploration of European identity are reflections on a shared history, but also on his own ambiguous sense of place as a vagrant writer . . . O'Brien writes lyrics that are both personal and strangely elliptical . . . Other poems are more anecdotal and grounded in humour. * Literary Review *In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, O’Brien is WH Auden’s true inheritor. It is reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written. * The Irish Times *Europa is an imaginative reorientation that reveals a truer picture of ourselves as Europeans, whether we like the fact or not. * The Herald *A sense of disorientation pervades Sean O’ Brien’s latest collection, in which the Hull-based poet scrutinises the Britain he knows and its coexistence with Europe – past, present and imaginary. His verse weaves with the familiar loss, madness and melancholy, to particularly powerful effect when he writes in the second person. -- Nilanjana Roy * Financial Times *

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Book SynopsisThe Other Country was Carol Ann Duffy’s third collection, and as with her later books, takes its readers on journeys that seem initially similar – but soon prove anything but. This book leads our imagination to places our minds could not have suspected were there, or would not have dared to go alone. Some of its voices are disarmingly direct, while others blur the lines between fantasy and reality, confession and self-delusion, forcing us to re-examine everything we thought we knew about some of our most basic human drives and emotions. Deeply intelligent, unflinchingly honest, with a deftness of touch and tone, and openness all the more moving for its lack of sentimentality, The Other Country is as remarkable a collection today as it was on its first publication.Trade ReviewUrgent, and packed with future classics, The Other Country is a book that proclaims that poetry is alive. Be in there early -- Peter Forbes * Guardian *You can’t classify Carol Ann Duffy as a love poet or a comic poet or a political poet because she is all these things but so much more . . . She gets straight to the emotions -- Daisy Goodwin * Sunday Times *

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