Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisLike the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.Trade Review'The mood is both tender and desperate, with something of the uncanny in its blend of the recognisably human and apparently Other - His religious regard for the world (not the same thing as religious conviction) produces a strange translation of its ordinary terms. Its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever, yet at the same time brought into clearer focus' - Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review. 'Drawing on the sensibilities of the European poets - Goethe, Michaux, Holderlin - whose work he knows so intimately, Constantine's humane and serious volume weighs the life of the individual against the crash and tumble of the wider world and finds in favour of the subtler forces and complexities of the former' - Sarah Crown, Guardian.

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Book SynopsisVidyan Ravinthiran's much-anticipated first collection contains many poems about Sri Lanka which fuse politics, personal history and myth, yet his voice pitches itself not so much halfway between East and West as between emotional forthrightness and linguistic exuberance. Traditional forms - of culture, of verse - contend with brusquer impulses in an era of technological distortion; without taking himself too seriously, the poet asks if perhaps we don't take ourselves seriously enough. These are poems of impassioned intelligence, which refuse to separate thought and feeling and seek not only to delight and disturb but to work through difficult problems. The intricacies of the modern relationship - the smallest society, a haven of two - are reconnected with the historical world; translations, some from classical Tamil, ask how close two languages or two people can get. Indeed, Grun-tu-molani is concerned throughout with a range of human behaviours common to different societies - the need to assert oneself, save face, explain, and touch; the last of which would not be possible were it not for the distances between us.Trade Review'Gripping is not a word you usually associate with poetry, but Vidyan Ravinthiran's poems are precisely that, and they seldom let go. They are full of surprising turns (and turns of phrase), and their humour can make you squirm, as humour should, the assonance and internal rhymes and puns adding a further twist to the funny knife as it tickles the funny bone. A ferocious intelligence is at work in these poems, whose stylish armoured exterior reflects sometimes a literary scholar and sometimes a displaced person; sometimes contemporary Britain and sometimes ancient Sri Lanka. Ravinthiran is set to enrich English poetry, just as, in an earlier generation, Gamini Salgado enriched its prose' - Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 'Vidyan Ravinthiran's poems are a heady mixture of exotic language and strangely real personal experience.The poet's reflective stare takes in with ease different worlds, all cemented together by a verbal wit and a winning, amused half-mockery. They are a delight' - Bernard O'Donoghue.

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Book SynopsisThe Sparkling Jewel of Naturism brings together three seemingly unrelated poem sequences by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The poems in each spark off unexpected connections and surprises, despite their contrasting concerns: jealousy in 'Doormat' (being the object of someone else's jealousy), little girls in 'Happiness Is Just a Waste of Time', and married women in 'Blowfly'. Like all of Selima Hill's work, all three sequences in The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.Trade ReviewArguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry… Despite her thematic preoccupations, there’s nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill’s work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon…using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama…hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn… So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry – not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics. -- Fiona Sampson * Guardian *Hill, more than any other English poet, cranks out angry, impotent, abused and richly surreal Britain. And she is very very funny…fresh, fierce and convincing… A mood-swinging voice, talking to itself rather than to the reader, shows how pain and joy transform the material world. -- Claire Crowther * Poetry London *

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Book SynopsisAna Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before for the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change, and more recently co-founded the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Blandiana redefines her poetics in every new book of poetry she publishes. In My Native Land A4 she recreates a land of words, water, trees, cities with abandoned churches, fallen angels that cannot find their way back to heaven, and gods that learn to roller-skate to try to reach the young who remain oblivious of their existence. She projects visionary spaces within the confines of a page - the A4 sheet of her title - which emerge out of her imagination as anguished territories in which the lyrical 'I' is compelled to draw precise, clear boundaries out of a diffuse magma of words. The poems articulate a quest for love, beauty and truth and affirm an urgent need for existential authenticity as a requisite for the redemption of the self, chronicling the struggle between a constantly deteriorating body that is learning how to die and the spirit that strives to overcome its physical constraints. My Native Land A4 contains meditations on fundamental themes such as the fragility and vulnerability of being, the inexorable toll of time, the limitations of the human condition and the correspondence between life and death within the cosmic rhythms of the universe. The print edition of My Native Land A4 only includes the English translations. The e-book with audio is a bilingual Romanian-English edition with most of the poems read in Romanian by Ana Blandiana.Trade ReviewThe blank page... stands as a perennial reminder of how freedom emerges even within repression... I am most moved in her book by the delicacy and scope realised time after time by her profoundly analogical imagination. -- Charles Altieri * Chicago Review *The poems that deal at all with freedom do so in ways which are philosophical rather than political, putting the speaker and by extension all humanity in spaces that are enclosed, with no or illusory exits. * World Literature Today *

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Book SynopsisLouis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1970s and 80s. At that time he didn't want his poetry to be translated into English, believing it should be judged solely on his own original words and 'not critically assessed through the distorting prism of English' (Pat Cotter). But living in Australia for ten years gave him a different perspective, and he began publishing his work in bilingual editions. Since his return to Ireland in 1996, he has worked closely with poets Kevin Anderson, Biddy Jenkinson and Mary O'Donoghue on English translations of his poetry, with his co-translators fully engaging with the original poem in Irish, but never publishing bilingually 'until the poems have reached their first audience among Irish speakers'. This new bilingual selection of his poetry takes its title from Gerry Murphy's haiku 'Translation and its discontents', a reminder of the more destructive aspects of translation: Stark moonlit silence the brindled cat is chewing the nightingale's tongue. Here 'the translator appropriates material from another language to sustain the appetite of his own, devouring the original in the process. The danger of suffocation has led to some unease among Irish language poets.' Keenly aware of that ever-present danger and related anxieties, he and his trio of translators have eschewed the modern fashion for so-called "versions", producing English translations which are as close as possible to the original Irish poems without sacrificing their tone, energy, clarity and lightness of touch.Trade Review'This is an energetic, even boisterous, body of poetry, enlivened with a gift for the unexpected but compelling metaphor, ever ready to invite the reader to look afresh at the world of the everyday. These are poems that effectively combine emotion and intellect, sensuousness and insight, humour and melancholy. Louis de Paor is a poet who has inherited that peculiar strand of reasonable unreason that has marked much of best modern and contemporary poetry in Irish' - Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith.

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Book SynopsisHuman life and the passage and rhythms of time and the seasons come together in The Zebra Stood in the Night, the seventh collection by one of Ireland's leading poets. Grounded in the natural world, this is a book about about landscape, loss, belonging and transformation. As everything in nature grows and decays, so 'everyone is always inside the act of dying at the same time as being inside the act of living', Hardie writes in her essay 'Aftermath', a meditation on grief which precedes a sequence of poems on the death of her brother in India. This is Kerry Hardie's second collection since her Selected Poems (2011), following The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012), and continues the arc of the latter, 'a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality' (Claire Askew), questioning, celebrating and challenging all aspects of human experience. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. Shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award.Trade Review'Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing. Hardie's later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once - The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach' - John McAuliffe, The Irish Times on Selected Poems. 'Kerry Hardie's newest collection is a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. Death is, of course, such a common theme in poetry that it's difficult to find anything new to say about it, but Hardie succeeds, injecting into these poems her usual quiet originality - Death in Hardie's poems is a release from the process she finds truly terrifying: the slow decay of ageing - The feeling that runs throughout the collection is that of time running out: seasons changing, the familiar disappearing, death approaching ever faster - a book of poems that celebrates the wonder of our small lives as much as it laments their brevity' - Claire Askew, The Edinburgh Review, on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree. 'Kerry Hardie writes about the here and now, the everyday and the ordinary in an authentic lyric voice. She speaks of God in our secular age without unease or embarrassment. This deeply spiritual book is deceptively immediate and it yields its mystery and depth in each rereading' - Judges' citation, Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, 2005. 'The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly' - George Szirtes, The Irish Times. 'Hardie's poetry is brave, steadily confronting both the deaths of her loved ones and her own experiences with illness as an ME sufferer. Her collections contain gentle, but insistent, works of memento mori - What makes her work exceptional is how skilfully she illustrates the connection between humanity and the cycles in the natural world. Poems and lives move through the unstoppable clockwork of seasons in her collections - A unique aspect of Hardie's poetry is the hope that is present in all her collections. She guides us through tragedy, reassuring us but never romanticising the true nature of life' - Jennifer Matthews, Poetry International.

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Book SynopsisMiriam Gamble's second collection takes its title from unlicensed broadcasting. Here, the marginalia of prophecy coexist with and counter voices of authority, voices that are at once eerie and depressingly recognisable. An artist steals back paintings, leaving the money in their wake, and scores a cameo on Crimewatch; a figure from medieval memento mori art finds himself up against a consumer deaf to the language of symbolism; animal anti-heroes spit in the face of well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, human interest. Throughout, biological impulses are sparked then thwarted by entropic systems - creatures and humans alike find themselves steered rather than steering, engulfed by repeating patterns which nullify the efforts of the individual life. Pirate Music questions the narratives, including those forged by art itself, by which we shape the world to suit our own devices and steel ourselves against 'what we cannot name or see'.Trade Review'These poems - understand the relation between form and violence, understand that craft and control can be acts of brute force too - against the other, even against the self. The Squirrels Are Dead is a collection of extraordinary formal versatility and skill' - Fran Brearton, Edinburgh Review. 'Experimental and wide-ranging, her work is by turns lyrical, surreal and quirkily humorous. Her debut collection shows that she is already a writer of considerable achievement and one who looks set to promise more in the future' - David Cooke, The North. 'What separates her from the thousands of other poets with a gift for sharp description, is the complexity and tautness of her arguments - Gamble's intelligence is what makes these poems a pleasure to read' - John Clegg.

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Book SynopsisAfter starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux 'drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui.' The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. He uses humour or satire 'to help combat the darkness - to make the reader laugh - and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.' Each of Lux's multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. 'Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,' says Lux, 'a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he's goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.'Trade Review'The latest collection of dazzlers from one of the few poets writing today who fills me with envy. Lux is such an antidote to the post-confessional poetry that's all about your broken heart - He's interested in history, geology, oceanography. His poems are based on the world, though I'm sure he's writing about himself' - Billy Collins. 'Simultaneously funny, sad, ironic, compassionate, mocking and spiritual. There is such emotional and tonal range...yet a definite common-sense, serio-comic down-to-earthiness lurks throughout the collection as if implying that we humans should know better, be above all the nonsense to which we seem endlessly addicted' - Sally Molini, Cerise Press. 'Lux prizes simplicity in language, and his deceptively plainspoken style allows for powerful images - Lucid and morally urgent poems' - Elizabeth Hoover, Los Angeles Times. 'Try Lux on for size. He'll pinch in places, soothe in others, but I predict one thing: you may never fit the same way in your own skin again' - Rita Dove, Washington Post Book World. 'Over the course of forty years and twelve collections of verse, Thomas Lux has created a body of work of such consistency and excellence that I sometimes fear he is the victim of his own success - Lux's consistency arises from a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one - But by the mid-1980s Lux had extricated himself from - the neo-surrealism and caffeinated absurdism that was all the rage in the late 60s and early 70s - the daftness and imagistic pyrotechnics of neo-surrealism were replaced by a more scrupulous (but every bit as inventive) approach to the image, and irony and whimsy by something that would best be described as wit - wit in the tradition of the metaphysical and cavalier poets. The poems now became more burnished, more linguistically sly, and - most importantly - aimed to tutor and to teach as much as to entertain - uniquely and resonantly vital' - David Wojahn, On the Seawall.

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Book SynopsisThese are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness - all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes. These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey (which intensifies in the new poems). Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, When God is a Traveller was her fourth collection of poetry, and was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2014.Trade ReviewA sense of wonder and striking contrasts pervade the Indian poet’s fourth collection. The sacred meets the everyday, cerebral wordplay delivers full-blooded emotion, and ancient Hindu myths run alongside contemporary urban life. Breathtaking in scope, taking in religious faith, friendships, love affairs and existential themes. Often the work questions poetry itself – but it is always rooted in the physical and the tangible, with fresh visual imagery that really packs a punch. Bold and thought-provoking. -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady *Arundhathi Subramaniam has already won acclaim as a poet of integrity… There is a beautiful uncertainty about her poems… intimately physical, intense enough to scald and char, along with a will to withdraw, to renounce… unhibitedly sensual while still yearning for transcendence. This ambivalence, combined with a sense of wonder, of unexpectedness, of moods as well as words, is what marks her apart. -- K. Satchidanandan * Frontline [on Where God Is a Traveller] *

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Book SynopsisIntroduced by Michael Longley, Goat's Milk is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Frank Ormsby, a central figure in the poetry of Northern Ireland for the past forty years. As well as a whole collection of new poems, it includes work from his four previous collections: A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995) and Fireflies (2009). In his most recent poems Ormsby brings a new directness and simplicity to bear on the rural Fermanagh of his boyhood. A series of vignettes evokes his formative years, both his experience of division and loss (the impact of his father's death is a constant theme in his work), but also the enriching aspects of family and community and of the natural world. These poems deepen and extend themes central to the earlier work. They also reflect what The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature describes as Ormsby's gift for a 'poetry of resonant minutiae' which 'celebrates the neglected recesses of the commonplace'. Goat's Milk was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize 2018.Trade ReviewFrank Ormsby belongs to that extraordinary generation of Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure… From his earliest work Ormsby has favoured a natural shapeliness. The critic Eve Patten praises "his defiant attachment to economy of form"… A plain-speaking, down-to-earth utterance may be the norm, but it teeters on the verge of taking flight, and sometimes gives way to an exquisitely refined lyricism. -- Michael LongleyA collection of poems from a distinguished poet who has observed his surroundings with a powerful and consistent intensity over many years. -- Professor Roy Foster * Chair of Judges, Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize *Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems, by Frank Ormsby, reminds us why we missed this poet’s wry and concise voice during the 14-year gap in his writing life; and the new poems extend and ratify his unique angle of vision. -- Patricia Craig * Irish Times (Books of the Year 2015) *

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Book SynopsisThe world of Beauty/Beauty is 'built from the nose/out, like a painting', accumulating its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing. Preoccupied with demise and loss, as well as reimagination and regeneration, Rebecca Perry's debut collection has the duality and symmetry of its title at its core. Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets. Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green. Beauty/Beauty was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection.Trade ReviewIn Beauty/Beauty, she offers female perspectives with openness and vulnerability, in both her themes and experiments with form, to find new ways of writing the feminine. Non-linear images are subverted by shattered narratives, in poems written "from the nose / out, like a painting". Her gaze is not limited to personal experience. It is a triumph of imagination that she is able to empathise with other forms of oppression, such as the killing of Bigfoot and a slave on a slave ship. She captures the sadness of seas and writes a love poem to a stegosaurus, whose mouth "holds more wonder than a sky full of stars". -- Pascale Petit * chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges *

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Book SynopsisA land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. When things didn't work out as they had hoped much of the responsibility for running the farm and engineering their eventual escape fell on their teenage son, Adcock's father. This sequence of poems follows the course of their efforts and builds up a portrait of a small, isolated community.Trade Review'Adcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach' - Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian. 'Adcock's reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucent - those who see in such poems only flatness are missing the power of a voice which teases both reader and subject' - Jo Shapcott, TLS. 'Her imagination thrives on what threatens her peace of mind, and only when she is unguarded can these threats have their full creative effect - Throughout her writing life, she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of orderliness and good clear sense; but she has made an even finer one from loosening her grip on them' - Andrew Motion, TLS.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Jutland brings together two contrasting poem sequences by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson), Advice on Wearing Animal Prints, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award, and Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-pits. Like all of Selima Hill's work, both sequences chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. Jutland poses questions about forgiveness,'but the answers, / like Valentines, are never enough', as she writes in 'Wolverine': 'And can't he understand / I'm trying to love him but I don't know how? / And is it true forgiveness is forgiveness / only if the person first reprints? / That kindness isn't kindness but self-sacrifice?'Trade Review'Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry - She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon - hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn - So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry' - Fiona Sampson, Guardian. 'Hill, more than any other English poet, cranks out angry, impotent, abused and richly surreal Britain. And she is very very funny - fresh, fierce and convincing - A mood-swinging voice, talking to itself rather than to the reader, shows how pain and joy transform the material world' - Claire Crowther, Poetry London.

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Book SynopsisPeople we love die. And at the heart of the grief there's a sense of wonder: we can't believe it, where have they gone, what are they now, what does that make us? We end up wondering at life too. Death takes us to the edge of living; grief leads us to question the very limits and designs of life itself. Greta Stoddart's third collection Alive Alive O follows the human impulse to make sense of our mortality. Death is reconfigured not so much to console us but as a way of playing out different scenarios, trying for variants in metaphor and meaning, that we may better accept it. But for all their focus and attention on death these are not poems of despair. In their intensity and spirit our mortal life becomes a thing to behold, even in - or because of - the face of death.Trade Review'Honest, observant poems from a collection which is both wonderfully unsettling and deeply life-affirming' - Costa Book award judges 2008. 'These unnerving poems do not contemplate strangeness as much as embody it' - Stephen Knight, Times Literary Supplement. 'As a poet, Stoddart is not in the business of offering solutions; the closest she comes to doing so is obliquely, through the bright snap of the language in which she presents her dilemmas, the irresistible clarity of images so right they deliver an almost physical connection, joining poem and reader' - Sarah Crown, Guardian.

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Book SynopsisVirginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river's upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers and was familiar with all aspects of the Thames and its hinterland: both the natural world and the people whose lives are intimately connected with the river. In recent years, she has returned to the Thames, working for a summer as an assistant lock-keeper, and walking its length to record and respond to its landscapes, river life and river folk as a poet and photographer. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland's Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. The English River is her first book-length poetry collection, showing many new sides to this multi-talented artist: as poet, nature writer, storyteller and photographer. The foreword is by Peter Townshend. `Virginia's story is about the river and the people who work on it, especially those who man the locks. She captures a view of the upper reaches of the River Thames that is entirely fresh. There are glimpsed moments of the claustrophobic beauty of the wooded parts that contrast with the open expanses of uplifting countryside where the river meanders through woodland and farmland. Focussing on the professionals who work on the river, and who manage the locks and the flood plains around them, Virginia suggests - as she works as a lock-keeper's assistant - that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work. She herself becomes enchanted, that is certain. She makes herself vulnerable in the most romantic way, working and writing and evoking everything she sees and feels as both a storyteller and poet, and as photographer.' - Pete Townshend, musicianTrade Review`Like the bends of a river, each one of Virginia Astley's austere, cleanly-made poems offers some particular pleasure: a delicate reflection, an original piece of seeing - but the true impact of this book is felt when the sequence is read in order because this book does not just record the passage of a river but the passage of a life lived honestly and fully. The emotional forces gather steadily, and the final effect is powerful as a tide.' - Kate Clanchy; `Virginia Astley's collection in celebration of the Thames is a wonderfully attentive and full-hearted response to both the river and the landscapes it winds through. She is most obviously (in this collection at least) a nature poet, but there are love poems here and poems detailing the lives of those who live on and by the water. Each poem can stand alone, can be read in or out of sequence, but the works true force comes from what they share - the patient returning to the water, its moods, its history (the history of its uses), it onwardness, which is the flow and energy of a journey and a story. I thought of Alice Oswald's poems about the Dart and the Seven. Virginia Astley's book is doing something different - more personal, less theatrical - but in its way it is equally powerful.' - Andrew Miller, novelist; `These mysterious and musical poems feel lit by skies of the early year, but what year? Time thins, Virginia Astley finds on her return to the Thames of, "my remembered landscape,/stored in my earliest self." But she comes back to replay this "quiet exchange" with place, not as a tourist but as a lock keeper, working on the river, watching, making adjustments, embedded like an undercover journalist. In this cool and watery melancholy, there is joy and love in the flow of details and an authenticity that comes from a synthesis of memory and work, a journeying downriver to a kind of freedom in a world that has survived the ages and yet barely exists at all.' - Paul Evans, nature writer; This is a beautiful book. There are many examples of poets and photographers "illustrating" each other's work. Here, where poet and photographer are one, illustration is not attempted, and poetry wins. The photographs show me the route, take me along the poet's path, share glances from source to barrier - a field of fritillaries, a little church dressed in snow, a weeping willow over water, and so on. The pictures show the way, while the poems have their own imagery, their own music, and lines that linger in the mind. A fine collection.' - Gillian Clarke

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Book SynopsisWith the demise of the Soviet Union, Lithuania jumped from a neo-romantic modernism straight into the postmodern wasteland of unfettered capitalism. Pensions disappeared along with jobs. Everything underwent "reform". Everything was for sale. Poetry audiences went from stadium size to coffee house size. Giddy joy was followed by disillusion, anxiety, angst. Gintaras Grajauskas's poetry cannot be understood without this backdrop, for it was here that he cut his poetic teeth and became a major Lithuanian poet. He met the jarring changes around him with a wry smile, black humour, irony - all grounded in respect for the quotidian, the small, the insignificant. Reading his poems, one can laugh and grind one's teeth at the same time. We can see the influences of Polish poetry in the irony and search for meaning in a new cultural landscape. We can see the rejection of lyrical language for the prosaic, the pithy. Paradoxical, absurd, witty and observant, Grajauskas reflects a society that has seemingly lost interest in speaking for itself, for the whole. The individual is on his/her own. Life is tough, and to be alive today is to drift in uncertainty, but it is a human life that cannot sustain itself on cynicism and irony. We question, we search, and we laugh through the tears, reading his work, knowing ourselves better.

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Book SynopsisTaking inspiration from sources including historical and medical texts, curator's notes and the Complete Kama Sutra, Shazea Quraishi's poems explore love and loss through a range of voices: an Iraqi mother holds her fragile son; under the guise of ardour, a courtesan searches a client for signs of the woman she loves; a wife is unsettled by her husband's new family - The Art of Scratching is her first book-length collection, and includes The Courtesans Reply, a sequence written in response to the Caturbhani, four plays written around 300 BC on the life of courtesans in India.Trade Review'There is an intriguing collision between the archaeological and the lyrical in Shazea Quraishi's series of poems, The Courtesans Reply - The props and rituals bestow on these poems an exotic otherness but the emotions they explore are timeless' - Stephen Knight, Ten. 'Shazea Quraishi is one of a number of younger black and Asian women poets currently gaining ground in UK poetry. In sensual, clear, perfectly measured tones, her poems meet the male gaze with a female voice' - Katie Evans-Bush, Poetry International Web. 'Shazea Quraishi, in The Courtesans Reply, sensitively reconstructs an unfamiliar and vanished culture. Working from historical and literary sources, Quraishi never allows her research to speak louder than the human voices of her characters, a community of courtesans in Ancient India. Their individual feelings and desires emerge through lines which are simultaneously spare and sensuous' - Richard O'Brien, Poetry London.

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Book SynopsisLawrence Sail's new collection encompasses a striking variety of subjects. He reflects on detail in the natural world, both in micro- and macrocosm, looking for example at flowers, birds, the sea, the earth seen from space; he explores the intricacies and balances of love and family relationships; he finds new resonances in the paintings of David Bomberg, Howard Hodgkin and Paul Klee, and affinities in his translations of Mallarme, Rilke and Trakl. His imaginative scope extends into a sequence of prose poems responding powerfully to Gabriel Faure's nine Preludes for piano. Throughout the collection, close attention to the physical world is paired with the perceptions such careful consideration provokes. Often this embodies a duality - instances of love carry the shadow of grief; a beached boat evokes the horizon; a book is both an object and an emblem of lost authority; the fragment of a Roman carving suggests wholeness restored. Above all, there is in Sail's writing a celebration of the world, its preciousness magnified by the ways in which he takes the measure of what appears in the title poem as 'all that lasts, / all that is gone', the juxtaposition of the transient and the enduring.Trade Review'There is a shimmering quality to Sail's sensibility which moves easily between sharply focused observations of the particulars of object and place, the play of light on the locally loved and known, and a constant alertness to larger climates and movements - close and subtle looking and a rich, playful use of language are the tools by which discoveries are made' - Peter Scupham, PN Review. 'Beneath the elegance and refinement of Lawrence Sail's artistry is the ever-present undertow - the current below the aesthetic surface, moving in a contrary direction to that of the surface current, and it is this that gives the poems their authority and depth of vision' - Catherine Beeston, Critical Survey.

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Book SynopsisLove Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross's 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age - inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as - especially as - it faces entropy and decay.Trade Review'Gross does appear to have come into his own, with fresh wind in his sails... Now in his sixties... he is working at quite a throttle and with a full-throated clarity that sounds, suddenly, like no one else around' - Conor O'Callaghan, Poetry London.; 'Later is a magnificent extended elegy, formally adventurous, poised between narrative and metaphysics, themes and variation' - Carol Rumens, Poetry Review.; 'This is a collection which consistently grips, involves and challenges; it confirms Philip Gross as one of our most consistently interesting and skilful poets' - Tony Brown, New Welsh Review.; 'The writing is sinewy, urgent and resourceful. This poet is a master of form, deploying his visual and aural patterns for emphasis, as if the page were a musical score. The absolute poise of the lines carve a way through the knotted difficulty of the raw material' - Michael Symmons Roberts & Moniza Alvi, PBS Bulletin, on Deep Field.Table of Contents9 Paul Klee: the late style 12 This body, 14 Thirty Feet Under 15 Mould Music 19 Coming Of Age I 20 A Briefer History of Time 23 A Love Song of Carbon 24 I Remember I Remember 26 Heartland 28 Hold 29 Limited Edition 30 I Am Those Clothes 31 Hit Man 32 In the Small Town 33 The Rag Well, Madron 35 Coming Of Age II 36 Hordes 37 Towards A General Theory of String 39 Fission 41 Heaps 43 A Pump in Africa 44 Pinches 46 Theses Written on Mud 49 Epstein's Adam 50 The Players 52 Ways To Play 53 Coprolite 54 Fire Balloon Heart 55 The Shapes They Make 56 Mattins 58 Waits 60 Coming Of Age III 62 The Way It Arrives, 63 Watermark 65 Small Songs of Carbon 67 A Walk Across A Field 69 Several Shades of Ellipsis 73 Brownian Motion 74 Whereas 75 Thirteen Ways To Fold The Darkness

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Book SynopsisChoman Hardi's Considering the Women explores the equivocal relationship between immigrants and their homeland - the constant push and pull - as well as the breakdown of an intermarriage, and the plight of women in an aggressive patriarchal society and as survivors of political violence. The book's central sequence, Anfal, draws on Choman Hardi's post-doctoral research on women survivors of genocide in Kurdistan. The stories of eleven survivors (nine women, an elderly man and a boy child) are framed by the radically shifting voice of the researcher: naive and matter-of-fact at the start; grieved, abstracted and confused by the end. Knowledge has a noxious effect in this book, destroying the poet's earlier optimistic sense of self and replacing it with a darker identity where she is ready for 'all the good people in the world to disappoint her'. Choman Hardi's second collection in English ends with a new beginning found in new love and in taking time off from the journey of traumatic discovery to enjoy the small, ordinary things of life. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade Review'Her subject is not a private, intimate one... but massive: ideological violence, the repression of an entire people, and how that impinges on the small, suffering individuals trying to make the best of what they can ...the poems bear witness' - Kathleen McDermott, The Dark Horse.; 'I have rarely read a book which so indisputably establishes the capacity of poetry to express the historical and political... Poetry makes something happen here; the book answers the poem's question "Could you show me where that is on the map?" more memorably than any map or political analysis' - Bernard O'Donoghue, Poetry London.Table of ContentsBefore You Leave Memory Bias Crossing Back The Maths Lesson A Woman Before Her Time Homeland! What Shall Do With You? A Man's Honour The Heroes One Moment For Halabja The Silent Visit The Anfal Sequence Preface: Researcher's Speech The 1984 Negotiations Gas Attack Escaping Kanitu, March 1988 Arrest At Milla Sura Dibs Camp, The Women's Prison The Child At The Pits The Elderly From Nugra Salman Camp The Gas Survivor Dispute Over A Mass Grave The No-survivor Village The Angry Survivor Researcher's Blues Her Autumn Istikhara Your Dress Bawka Unanswered The New Bedroom Adila's Apple The Housewarming Gift The Seventh Wedding Invitation My English Years Divisions The Picture Conversations Our Different Worlds My English Years Time Out Shetland, 1469 Leaves As Clouds Slide Across The Sky His Blue Sky The Couple The Husband The Wife The Three Dancers, 1925 Blackout Flights A Day For Love

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Book SynopsisThroughout Rake, Matthew Caley's fifth collection, it can appear as if we are glimpsing into the oblique diary of an immortal time-travelling rake, one who is seeking his 'one true beloved' through an heroic tally of amorous encounters, desperately trying to get beyond appetite - or possibly an entire pack [proper collective noun] of immortal time-travelling rakes. Or maybe someone imagining themselves to be such a rake, having drunk too many espressos. Be that as it may, what results is a series of beautifully skewed, left-field, back-handed love poems. Throughout, the forms used are equally promiscuous - tanka, sonnets, refrains, poems sifted from or alluding to Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Barthes' Lover's Discourse, versions of Baudelaire, Bonnefoy and Corbiere, an 'echo sonnet', sonnet-strings, mono-rhymers, a 'tonnet' - hybrid of sonnet and tanka - and most frequently, tanka used as a run-on stanza-unit. Throughout the boudoirs of La Belle Epoch, 80s Cold War Russia, ancient Egypt and the Wild West to London 1910 or LA in the 90s, but more often than not from these locations to the 24 hour neon of the contemporary city and back again in a micro-second - desire feeds lack [and vice-versa] yet yearns for escape.Trade Review'Gleeful cultural cannibalism. Hauntingly lovely, immaculately constructed. Apparently is one of those collections which makes you see the world as suddenly more complex, strange and fascinating' - Imogen Robertson, Poetry Book Society Online.; 'Satirically playful, self-parodic, yes, but unable to conceal an emotional intelligence that lends depth and vulnerability to Caley's voice even at moments of humour' - Jane Holland, Poetry Review.; 'The most inventive user of the sonnet form currently writing - Laurie Smith, Magma.Table of ContentsUs The Confluence of The Elbe and the Upa Skinny-dipper Man-hole My Hypothetical Lovers Foregone Conclusions Bling The Giantess Hither Green Thursday And Bladerunner From The Rental My Mistress Doesn't Like It When I Make Love With My Wife The Kiss Hat Chamber Piece Misery Memoir Written Immediately On Waking Eridanus Her Sleepy Egypt Archaeology Acute Hot Knee No Buffalo Skinners Absolute Gospel The Sleeper Los Angeles Octopussy, 1983 Low Expectation Threshold Quaaludes Dry Land If For You It's Tuesday, For Me It's Thursday Immortality Gursky The Funicular The Boulevardiers Ice Buds Walnuts Cloud-catcher Plane Tree Outside The Ritzy Laundrettes At Night notes for The Plateaux And The Horse In Each Movement Equanimity Arboretum The Young Hegelians The Salamander Afterglow Alacrity The Hammock

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Book SynopsisAmali Gunasekera’s first collection was published under her former name of Amali Rodrigo. This is a book marked by a sense of being on a threshold between worlds. In South and East Asian religious symbolism, the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world. The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac. Whether the occasion of these poems are relationships, customs and superstition, war and its aftermath, the fabular or simply a piece of driftwood, they question scale, geographical and emotional distances, and our habitual gaze. At the heart of the collection are her multi-voiced Aftersongs exploring the nature of the male gaze, religious didacticism and artistic inspiration. This epigrammatic sequence is based on the ekphrastic graffiti-poems inscribed between the 8th and 10th centuries at a royal pleasure palace and fortress in Sri Lanka, addressing the frescoes of the beautiful 'cloud maidens'.Trade ReviewWhat makes Rodrigo a truly remarkable poet? In part, it's the breadth and intelligence of her vision (and broad and intelligent it certainly is, taking us to Japan, Kenya, the North Pole; from Kintsugi and Ikebana to whirling dervishes and meteor showers); in part, the deftness with which she can work that vision into a world we can marvel at, but also recognise. This is a world of paradoxes - exotic and familiar, a deeply spiritual world which delights in passion; that celebrates love, but does not hesitate to focus on unsettling histories of gender violence. Lotus Gatherers is an astonishingly sensual book, in the literal sense - these are poems we can feel; poems we can hear resonating on the page, aromatic poems, laced with breathtaking imagery; poems we can hold up to our lips and taste. -- John GlendayThe first full collection from Amali Rodrigo – a poet who has lived between Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Kenya and India – is both formally sophisticated and impressively diverse, reflecting the breadth of cultures and traditions informing its contents. -- Daisy Lafarge * The Poetry Review *

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Book SynopsisThe Months is a book of poems about time - not only the attritions of time, its ageings, conflicts and illnesses, but also, and more importantly, the kind of time the French philosopher Bergson called 'duration', a human time that speeds up or slows, expands and contracts, measured by perceptual rather than scientific laws. At the centre of the collection, the long title-poem interweaves material from two pregnancies spanning two generations: these months open themselves up to insecurities and dreams, culture, myths, everyday realities and moments of fear or delight. The two births that end this compelling narrative take the book in a new direction, to a time and place where it is possible to stand still and watch a saucepan drying on a draining-board or cycle round a mountainous island at age sixty, laugh at oneself, or even begin again.Trade Review'Wicks can be both a fearless and arrestingly tender kind of writer, unafraid of taking a thought into uncomfortable, raw or unexpected places... confessions and punishments, banishments and betrayals, all are rendered in the mouths of the past or looked at from the aftermath of the present. Seeming to rise darkly in pitch at the end of the collection, they adjust our sense of the easier poems, and further deepen the focus of this mysterious and powerful book.' - Paul Farley, PBS Bulletin, on House of Tongues; 'A poet of deceptive power, who can transmute everyday objects and events into poems with an understated numinous edge.' - Kathleen Jamie, PBS Bulletin; 'A fine poet, with an eye for detail and a gift for conveying the earthiness of everyday experience.' - Jo Shapcott, Independent on Sunday

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Book SynopsisThese poems may sometimes pretend they're joking but they never really are. And what is it they're not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don't actually know who we are, and the fact that we don't truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter. Sometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It's no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there's a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we're lost. Meanwhile, Trees is Mark Waldron's third collection, following The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both published by Salt.Trade Review'Mark Waldron is the most striking and unusual new voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time. His offbeat observations and surreal imaginings are set off by a precise management of tone and mordant sense of humour. There is much black comedy in these poems but at the same time it becomes evident that a deeply humane sensibility is at work. His great gift is to face two ways at once: to our received culture, traditional and popular, and towards odd new ways of imagining ourselves. He brings to bear a sharp ear for the absurd coupled with a sure footed clarity and grace of speech. This enables him to write unforeseeable wordplays and images. In this way, his work captures exactly the uncertain mix of what it is to be a person living today - I really cannot recommend it highly enough.' - John Stammers: 'Every so often you forget just how good Mark Waldron is. Then you read a random poem and end up hissing "damn" like a thwarted villain.' - Kirsten Irving; 'One poet ...who, above all others, cries out to reach an American audience... Waldron has been busy forging a new language of deadpan, twenty-first century surreal, as receptive to John Berryman's influence as anything written in the wake of The Dream Songs, as sceptical of the lyric self as anything in John Ashbery, and usually a lot funnier.' - Dai George, The Boston Review; 'The post-Beckettian self-inquisition offered up by Mark Waldron (a poet, incidentally, writing consistently better than virtually any other at the moment).' - Ahren Warner, Best British Poetry 2013

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Book SynopsisThe Magnitude of My Sublime Existence is the account of a young woman's stay in the psychiatric ward of a large hospital. The only time she feels safe is when swimming; the only place, the sea, preferably underwater. Selima Hill's 17th book of poetry - her 14th from Bloodaxe - takes her back to the territory of her third book, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1983), but this revisiting is quite different in style and mood. Over thirty years later, 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson) is more able to chart and illuminate 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. Shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize.Trade Review'Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry...Despite her thematic preoccupations, there's nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill's work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon...using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama...hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn... So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry - not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics' - Fiona Sampson, Guardian; 'Hill, more than any other English poet, cranks out angry, impotent, abused and richly surreal Britain. And she is very very funny...fresh, fierce and convincing... A mood-swinging voice, talking to itself rather than to the reader, shows how pain and joy transform the material world.' - Claire Crowther, Poetry London; 'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine... Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets

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Book SynopsisJack Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by Malawi's dictator Hastings Banda for nearly four years, chronicling his prison experiences with dogged wit in his previous books. In Greetings from Grandpa - his sixth collection - Mapanje is still effervescent, with his wry humour defiantly intact. Some treacherous African tyrants may have been deposed or died horrific deaths, leaving their snoops in exile washing cars to survive - but these are mere metaphors of another life. The narratives in Greetings from Grandpa are mellow and cheerful testimonies of the sojourn of the human spirit as it survives freedom under implausible circumstances, whether at home or in exile. Grandchildren are born, calming the nerves of exile; dear friends back home die of AIDS, unsettling gentle memories; China and Asia arrive in Africa and nobody raises a finger; greedy bureaucrats syphon billions from accountant general's coffers; but Africa marches on regardless, stubbornly celebrating life, sometimes in traditional symbols; sometimes by inventing delightful beef festivals.The collection also includes Mapanje's version of Kalikalanje, a well-known legend among the Yao speaking African peoples of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, whose trickster hero comes into the world endowed with knowledge of past, present, future times and events. Kalikalanje is a lover of life, freedom, peace, truth, justice, and above all, fun. His enemies try to kill him only to bring destruction on themselves instead. This age-old tale has universal appeal - and is popular with children - but its symbolic, social-cultural-political nuance makes it especially relevant in today's world of persistent liars and impostors. Jack Mapanje's previous collection, Beasts of Nalunga, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. His earlier work - including the prison poems - is available in The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004).Trade ReviewGiven the regime, Mapanje's satire can seem strangely generous, impressively blending the memory of terror with a sense almost of farce when he considers his captors. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisThis powerful new collection combines Katie Donovan's unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gift. The years of her husband's throat cancer are charted in poems by turns tender, harsh and darkly humorous. Donovan gives voice to the carer's duty of being the one who watches, and contains, what is both a searing tragedy and a chainlink of domestic chores. Meanwhile the sulky electrician and the garrulous taxi driver are part of a cast of unlikely extras who provide a contextual chorus from the everyday world that inevitably carries on. Donovan grasps talismans of survival: birds foraging in the snow; her daughter's singing - which lights up the hospice in midwinter - and her son's success at soccer. The title-poem resists the classic definition of the grieving widow, instead capturing one of Donovan's enduring motifs - the moment when the mask slips and the true human response is released.Trade Review'The voice of these poems is unpretentious, funny, earthy, honest and bursting with energy... It's her craft, however, that creates the illusion of high-spirited spontaneity and buoyancy... In this new book Donovan's remarkable fertility with imagery serves a profound exploration of the first and last mysteries of the flesh.' - Peggy O'Brien, The Irish Times; 'These are subjects at the core of human experience, made poignantly luminous by Donovan's assured touch and uncluttered poetic language.' - Dr Charlotte Beyer, Iota; 'Donovan has an exceptional descriptive gift...a highly idiosyncratic, individualistic writer who probes experiences for hidden meanings...her seeming introversion is expressed through a poetry of great solidity and tactility... She covers a remarkable range...extending from the powerful elegies and international death-rituals of the opening poems to smart human parables.' - Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish Times

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Book SynopsisThe dog of memory, an animal more often unbiddable and capricious than it is comforting and predictable, roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Helen Farish’s native Cumberland and further afield – mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens – and people, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days. Farish’s doggèd and deeply moving meditation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose ‘poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke.’ The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by ‘liquefying high-sky heat.’ Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring. Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017 Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017Trade Review‘This book is Farish’s third – her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection – and it is a confident performance. Farish’s poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much)…. The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet… working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement ‘Her locations are as varied as you’d expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours… A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish’s poems.’ – Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory] ‘Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand is an original extremely intelligent working through of a complex relationship between two artists and their work. I loved the poems. The sequence works so well as a story and is so nuanced I felt completely absorbed in it. And full of admiration for Farish’s great skill.’ – Melvyn Bragg

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Book SynopsisThe Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it. Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other's eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other's and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself. At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet's father. The room constricts and glows.The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive - if it survives at all - on its broken patterns. Poetry Book Society Choice.Trade Review'A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting.' - Douglas Dunn, on Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; 'A major contribution to post-war literature...Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity.' - Anne Stevenson, Poetry Review; 'Any new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre. This volume has typically strong-voiced sequences...But its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis' pyres... Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history.' - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, on The Burning of the Books and other poems.

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Book SynopsisSlakki is Old Norse for a shallow depression among hills: 'Not much of a valley. A Slack,' writes Roy Fisher, with typical self effacement. But appearances are deceptive where this Slakki is concerned. Opening with new poems written during his 80s - since his Costa-shortlisted collection Standard Midland (2010) - the book's second section is a gathering of uncollected poems mainly written during the 1960s, though occasionally foreshadowed later in the previous decade, while the third part contains poems, similarly uncollected, written in the 1950s. 'I describe the poems in sections two and three of this book as neglected,' Roy Fisher writes in an afterword. 'I must emphasise that these poems have not been passed over or slighted by publishers, editors or reviewers: indeed my work always seems to me to have had as much attention as it deserved or was likely to get. The neglect has been entirely mine.' Fisher's Collected Poems 1968 from Fulcrum was a carefully constructed volume whose cut down selection was carried over into later retrospectives: 'The cut material was left to lie more or less unexamined again until now.That turn of events furnishes the majority of the neglected items in the present volume. There's an element of what could better be called habitual negligence that also has a bearing.' Peter Robinson produced and ordered the texts of Slakki in response to instructions and advice from Roy Fisher. Derek Slade contributed substantially to composing the notes on sources and earlier appearances of the works gathered here.Trade Review'Standard Midland is an honest appraisal of what it is possible to say, and what remains to be said, by an artist in old age. It finds Fisher at his most approachable and makes an excellent introduction to this important poet's work.' - Paul Batchelor, Guardian; 'Witty, profound and moving meditations on loss and ageing; a wonderfully varied testament to a very English blend of imagination and reserve.' - Costa Poetry Award judges' comment; 'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more.' - August Kleinzahler.

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Book SynopsisThe Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless is a book in nine parts constructed to play the Butcher - the Duke of Cumberland - in a Gaelic interpretation of the ghost gamble. Given the command on the back of a nine of diamonds - the Curse of Scotland - that the Highlanders should all be slaughtered, the persecution of Jacobite sympathisers after the Battle of Culloden under the Butcher was one of the worst atrocities carried out on British soil. Using a kaleidoscope, a deck of tarot cards and an 1895 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Nine of Diamonds is influenced by French surrealism and opens with the Gaelic visionary practice of inducing visions behind a waterfall. Treating the Highlands as a Gaelic garden, the rebels on the run as herds of deer, and the preservation of Gaelic culture as a type of sugar-cured mummification, The Nine of Diamonds is set in a phantasmagoric landscape described in the Scots of Henryson and Dunbar but evoking Scots Gaelic concepts and motifs to mix Highland and Lowland experience with magical and occult terminology. With the deer as a central image, MacGillivray's poems draw from Nijinsky as gravity-defying faun, from Mallarme, Duchamp and Breton.Written in the run up to the 2014 Scottish referendum, The Nine of Diamonds operates as a powerful wish-text. In this strange vision populated by badly-wired and furious neon unicorns, escorticati preparing their own bodies, Second World War MacLeod fighter pilots with talismanic photographs of the clan's Fairy Flag in their uniform pockets, pole-dancing fauns, stained glass knights and rusty kaleidoscopes, the underlying message is clear: in playing the Butcher back, MacGillivray is still here.Trade Review'Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush.' - Iain Sinclair. 'Luscious, generous and always terrifyingly wise, MacGillivray's unique poetic intelligence has crafted a work we have all been secretly waiting for. Its voice and the crystal breath between the words awakens histories and futures that are vividly permeable to our memory and longing. A twilight cartomancy born between open heath and midnight cave; sublime in rage, quick in beauty and hopelessly decade to love.' - B. Catling. 'There are not many books of poetry that can be classified as genuinely original and large in scope; even among the disputed ground of "innovative writing" there is little that is truly groundbreaking. Reading The Last Wolf of Scotland, however, I feel that I may have found just that sort of book.' - Steven Waling, Magma.

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Book SynopsisThe lively 'bears' in this playful and poignant collection will surprise you on every page. They are poems of love and death, life, loss and grief. The ephemera of popular culture is used to confront mortality, and you'll be transported from the British Library to the Alps to the International Space Station, along with a vibrant cast of Vikings, videogames and Angela Lansbury. From the ludicrous to the domestic, these profound, wry and very real bears affirm that hope may be found even in our darkest moments. Chrissy Williams has published several pamphlets, one of which was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Bear is her first book-length collection.Trade Review'Chrissy Williams is my new favourite poet. These poems are as close and intimate as a bear breathing down your neck, about to take you in its arms or tear you limb from limb; as strange and unexpected as a bear playing the piano and as beautiful and inexplicable as love.' - Luke Kennard; 'In spite of its almost absurdist character and apparent playfulness, Chrissy Williams's Bear is a collection of poems that deal with all that is most serious in human life. From start to finish, these wonderfully various, entertaining and original poems speak the language of compassion, intimacy and faith.' - Annie Freud; 'A pleasure in pluralism.' - Richard O'Brien Poetry LondonTable of Contents11 Bear of the Artist 12 LOVE 13 Gone 18 Robot Unicorn Attack 19 JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION in the Spring 20 The Lost 21 Green Lake 22 Bliss 25 On Getting Boney M's Cover of 'Mary's Boy Child' by Harry Belafonte Stuck in my Head 26 Sheep 27 Groundhog Day 31 Poem in Which I Respond to Notes in the Margins of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Selections 33 Bedroom Filled With Foam 34 Over Dave's Trousers 35 Jam Trap 36 Where Have You Put The Wine? 37 Four Hours Away 38 Digital Ghost Towns 40 Reading Your Comics in Eype 41 The Burning of the Houses 42 Menagerie Speeches 44 Monstrous Ham 47 There is an Epigraph 48 Moorhens 50 Art Imitates Life, but Life Imitates TV 51 Murder, She Wrote 53 Manifesto Based on Notes from Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions 54 Tigers

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Book SynopsisA number of years back, our author went to seek out a book by some ancient Greek thinker - the name starting with an L, or perhaps a C - called On Delight of the Nature of Things, or maybe In Delight at the Nature of Things. Either way, it turned out the book didn't exist. Our author found lots of stuff on measuring the circumference and mass of the planet Earth, and lots of pages about salt, dirt and water, but not the book that she was looking for. So, in the end, she decided to write the book herself. And here it is, or at least a start on it: eighty-five everyday objects, concerns and states scrutinised, given a voice really, and which together make up On Delight of the Nature of Things, or In Delight at the Nature of Things, or, more simply, Santiago.Trade Review'Idiosyncratic, bright as new paint, at times enigmatic, at times as clear as water, Cheryl Follon's Santiago is a collection - are they prose poems? are they vignettes? - unexpected and colourful as contemporary life, vivid with dailiness, packed with unusual but strangely accessible ways of looking. It is a world in which a museum sapphire, considering, or a well's surface reflecting the faces of onlookers, have things to say to us, and in which subjects various as blood, Hanoi, a grasshopper, and an exquisitely bored Sultan mingle in enlivening juxtaposition. In a poetry culture frequently hamstrung by political correctness and a sense of the worthy it is also, that increasingly rare thing, an entertaining book.' - Gerry CambridgeTable of ContentsInsomnia 9 Blood 10 Brogues 11 New York 12 Negativity 13 Fate 14 Lightbulb 15 Couch 16 Digital Clock Display 17 Sugar 18 Sultan 19 Contrariness 20 Moth 21 Manners 22 Air Con 23 Novels 24 Canoeing 25 Croissant 26 Boredom 27 Russian Doll 28 Grimm Tales 29 Magnesium 30 Amulet 31 Comma 32 Pineapple 33 Time Difference 34 Dutch Cuisine 35 Airline Food 36 Ear Canal 37 Sea Anemone 38 Netball 39 Socks 40 Hanoi 41 Tree 42 Snow 43 Paper Flowers 44 Creme Caramel 45 Python 46 Shyness 47 Patience 48 Fame 49 Geneva 50 Memories 51 Pretzel 52 Loneliness 53 Making Do 54 Sculpture 55 Ripples 56 Brain 57 Octopus 58 Light 59 Rain 60 Fire 61 Istanbul 62 Anxiety 63 Luck 64 TV 65 Sapphire 66 Hormones 67 Iceland 68 Cartoonist 69 Water 70 Shadows 71 Homesickness 72 Grasshopper 73 Knife 74 Dust Motes 75 Jealousy 76 Heartbreak 77 Fly 78 Sand 79 Lion 80 Surgery 81 Radio Waves 82 Butter 83 Oxygen 84 Addiction 85 Forgetfulness 86 Sleep 87 Bluebeard 88 Minneapolis 89 Wedding 90 Fashion 91 Tattoo 92 Santiago 93

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Book SynopsisPauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking...her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection Sleeping under the Juniper Tree are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world.Trade ReviewOver the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls "the divining shiver", a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess... Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work. -- Frances Leviston * Guardian *Her territory is predominantly that of legend: its symbols and its creatures - the unicorn, the falcon, the serpent - but she often draws them into a contemporary setting where they neither shed power nor lose meaning. Her purpose is not so much to import the ancient world into the modern as to demonstrate that those worlds are of a piece: that old rituals still obtain, that old beliefs still govern instinct. -- David Harsent * PBS Bulletin *Pauline Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-first century. Her poetry preserves a surety of vision, insisting that belief can only increase with knowledge, and that wisdom and faith are still provinces of careful, crystalline language. She is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy, and an impressive familiarity with chemistry and optics. -- Anne StevensonTable of ContentsElijah sleeping under the juniper tree Bach after dark Alchemist in search of a voice Nativity with beehives The marvellous blemish Percussion Hindsight At the mind's edge Pompeii Burial The control room Shaman's mirror Water-mirror The library of water Closure The glass cloud Spirit-level Lone surfer The stilling John Donne arriving in heaven Fantasia upon one note Lute-maker in a north light Frankenstein on Orkney The jade quarry Japanese acrobats at the Crystal Palace A step to the Japanese garden The bamboo theatre May The nine of hares The Copse The brazen foxes White doe Spring snow Inner garden A place between places The anxiety of sunlight Borderland The Rosary Quay The invisible year The convention Snowfall in Babylon Forest with mistletoe Resource Rewilding Avoriaz Aftermath After Gerhard Richter The shape of forgetting The Mondaytown bat Accidentals The leavening Afterlife Prophecy

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Book SynopsisDual language Chinese-English edition translated by Brian Holton. Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. Narrative Poem, Yang Lian's most personal work to date, is built around a series of family photographs, the first of which was taken on the day when he was born, on 22 February 1955, and the last of which dates from the time he spent undergoing 're-education through labour' - and digging graves - during the mid-1970s. The poetry ranges backward and forward in time, covering his childhood and youth, his first period of exile in New Zealand, and his subsequent adventures and travels in and around Europe and elsewhere. In 'this unseen structure written by a ghost' Yang Lian weaves together lived experience with meditations on time, consciousness, history, language, memory and desire, in a search for new/old ways of speaking, thinking and living. Narrative Poem, or (Xushishi), was published in China in 2011, and this bilingual edition presents the Chinese text alongside Brian Holton's masterly translation of a technically complex work of great beauty, The book also includes Family Tradition, Yang Lian's first ever preface to his own work, and Ghost Composer/Ghost Translator, a translator's afterword by Brian Holton. 'Trees that desire silence but cannot be silent will murmur at their lack of Samadhibala, the meditator's gentle strength of will. At the same time, the winds of Family Tradition will not cease blowing. I believe they never will.' - Yang Lian (in Family Tradition). Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.Trade ReviewYang Lian is one of the most astonishing poets I've read for years. He has a westernist, modernist sensibility allied with an ancient Chinese, almost shamanistic one. He can both excite and frighten you - like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn! -- W.N. Herbert * The Scotsman *Yang Lian distinguishes himself in representing the pain of life caught in between historic eras...a new version of an old issue for world literature as well as Chinese literature is proposed: how to continue writing, relying on individual rather than enforced communal inspiration. -- Allen Ginsberg

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Book SynopsisC.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a shape-shifting poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. Over the past half-century, he took upon himself the poet's task: to record with candour and ardour 'the burden of being alive'. In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brought this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind's encounter with the brute fact of the body's decay, the spirit's erasure. Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly 'the dreadful edge of a precipice' where a futureless future stares back at them. Urgent, unpunctuated, headlong, vertiginous, they race against time to trace the sinuous, startling twists and turns of consciousness. All is coming apart, taken away, except the brilliant art to describe it all as the end is coming. All along is the reassurance of love's close presence. Here are no easy resolutions, false consolations. Like unanswered prayers, they are poems of deep interrogation - a dialogue between the agonised 'I' in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive 'you' of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach. C. K. William's Falling Ill will take its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.Trade Review'One feels in the textures of Williams's writing a pure conviction and a commitment to seeing a higher dimension to poetry. When Williams writes of educating the soul and of the spiritually transforming power of beauty, he is convincing.' - Ian Tromp, Poetry; 'Beautifully intricate, contentious, strikingly ardent poems by one of our great contemporary poets.' - Joyce Carol Oates, The Millions; 'As an artifact of [Williams's] life, the book is timely and essential, passionately elaborating on all the major themes of Williams's oeuvre: sex, death and dying; the loneliness of living on the earth without a present God; the disjunction between psyche and society. Williams was known for his insistently ethical approach to writing poems... and what is most powerful about these later poems is his willingness to follow through. There are poems of great beauty here.' - Katy Lederer, The New York Times, on Selected Later PoemsTable of Contents11 Flame 12 Diagnosis 13 Box 14 Heading Home 15 Pops 16 My Body 17 Telling 18 Next 19 Face 20 First Dying 21 Names 22 You 23 Tasks 24 Really 25 Eyes 26 Bone 27 Old 28 Symptoms 29 Secrets 30 Labor 31 Rays 32 Better 33 Rage 34 Impatience 35 My Double 36 What 37 Worse 38 How Many 39 Friends 40 Fine 41 The Past 42 Everyone 43 Here 44 Coward 45 Wounded Earth 46 Embrace 47 Bad Day 48 The Heart 49 Lonely 50 Begun Again 51 Can It Be Lost? 52 Trees 53 Crying 54 Others 55 Air 56 Depression 57 Day Off 58 Against Me 59 Lord Death 60 Life 61 Whenever 62 Farewell

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Book SynopsisThe houses and landscapes of childhood exert a strong presence in Silent in Finisterre. Recalled by name, in incantation, or described in ways that recapture their irreducible reality to a child for whom they are the totality of the world, they become a kind of memory theatre: for Jane Griffiths physical things are remembered both for their own sake and to explore how they continue to shape the self. Style impresses as much as content in her resonantly evocative poems, with sentences played against line breaks to create constant small disruptions of the expected sense, while predictable phrases and forms of words are summoned only to be rewritten. Here language is not a transparent means of conveying a message but a medium that - no less than charcoal or oil paint - materially affects what is expressed through it. Form and subject are as inextricably entwined as 'the echo of port in the night's starboard, / the terra firma that is silent in Finisterre'. Jane Griffiths' Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2008, and followed by Terrestrial Variations in 2012. Silent in Finisterre shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade Review'Jane 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, Guardian; 'For Griffiths, meaning is not so much to be teased out of the universe as it is to be seen. Her underlying conviction seems to be that, if we can eliminate our own warring needs, distractions and expectations, we can read the language of the world.' - Rose Solari, Poet Lore; 'A major achievement... outstanding...complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation' - Sarah Broom, Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsLessons from My First Giraffe In the Beginning Perspective Exe Geography for Beginners Song of Childhood Night Drive Black Swans The Museum of Childhood Anecdote Ferryman Child at a Museum Juxtaposition Night-Watch Tremolo There's a road Like Truth Translations My Grandmother's Mirrors Troy Gone to Ground The Weather in St Just Thesaurus Anonymous What the poet is trying to say is Riddle Lifelines Five Finger Exercise Still Here Treehouse The Pond Sneyd Park Sketchbook Still Life Snapshot of a Marriage An Unwritten Novel Instead of a Mirror Domestic Science Spital Square Object Lesson Initialisation The Question of Things Not Happening

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Book SynopsisMiriam Nash spent her early years on the Isle of Erraid, West Scotland, where Robert Louis Stevenson's family once worked as lighthouse engineers. Voices of the island echo through her first collection, All the Prayers in the House, which holds at its heart, the rupture and re-imagining of a family. Shifting and non-linear, the collection travels far from its coastal opening, moving south, crossing the Atlantic, visiting a women's prison and a 17th century ladies dictionary. Here are poems of ritual and transgression, safety and danger, tussles with the meaning of companionship and marriage. Bold, honest, imaginative and playful, they take the form of postcards, fragments, letters, underwater phonecalls and formal verse - many kinds of prayer, perhaps, for many kinds of storm. All the Prayers in the House won a Somerset Maugham Award 2018 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2018.Trade Review'Miriam Nash's work is thematically satisfying, energetic and dynamic. These anarchic poems are the product of an original and febrile mind. A blast.' - Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2016; 'Miriam Nash's poems provide pleasure through the variety and veracity of their subject matter, her insight and freshness of approach, and the warmth she breathes into them. Through subtle shifts of key and perspective they remain touchingly accessible, whether recapturing girlhood fears and vulnerabilities or creating semi-dream worlds, as when corresponding with RLS. Equally at ease with a broken line and traditional ballad form, her often quirky ways of seeing are enhanced by the lightsomeness of a songstress.' - Stewart Conn, Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2016; 'An already mature voice exploring with great precision our painstaking routines.' - Daljit NagraTable of ContentsGuide 3 The Single Mother 4 IKEA Marriage 5 Prayer for my Father as a Child 6 The Black and Blue Boy 7 Road Move on the A38 8 Song of the Mainland 9 On my First Idea of Marriage 10 Shoplifte 11 To the Metro North Conductor 12 Nail Polish for Valhalla 13 The Wedding Vow 14 A Lightkeeper Must Be a Man of Parts 15 Letter to R. L. S. 16 The Walking Father Blues 17 Arsenal 18 Stepmother 19 At my Parents' Wedding 20 Photo of my Father, Erraid, c. 1984 21 The Mother Praises Head Lice 22 Vesper 23 It's Not Your Fault, They Said to the Girl 24 Of His Bones 25 Postcards for R. L. S. 26 The Mother's Silly Clock 27 A Plumper 28 The Arrangement 29 On my Ninth Idea of Marriage at the 2014 Scottish Referendum 30 Fair 31 Letter from R. L. S. 33 The Mother Tells her Daughter of a Storm...35 The Sink 36 The Story of the Bones 37 The Father's Caesarian 39 Michaelmas Beast 40 Last Fish 41 Good Friday 42 We Can Still Dance 43 Dad Calling on the Wooden Spoon Phone 44 Dear Mother Father God 45 Higher Maths 46 Love Song for my Parents, 20 Years Divorced 47 Song of my Harp 48 The Lights 49 Love Song for a Keeper 50 Notes 51

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Book SynopsisThe Darkness of Snow is Frank Ormsby's most varied and versatile collection to date. It includes three substantial sets of poems whose themes are refreshingly and sometimes painfully new. One is a suite of poems - sombre, good-humoured, flippant - about the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. Ormsby was diagnosed as having the disease in 2011. Another was prompted by the work of Irish painters in Normandy, Brittany and Belgium at the end of the 19th century. There are also further explorations of his boyhood years in Fermanagh, while poems set in Belfast reflect the aftermath of the Troubles and celebrate the city's current phase of recovery and restoration. The book ends with a narrative poem about the trial of an unnamed tyrant in which we learn about the Accused (as he is called), about the villagers who have travelled to bear witness to the atrocities carried out in the village, and about one of the interpreters, who understands the slipperiness of Truth. The Darkness of Snow covers work written since Frank Ormsby's retrospective, Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (2015). His broad range and eye for the particular combine to make this an exceptional collection. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award.Trade Review'Frank Ormsby belongs to that extraordinary generation of Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure... From his earliest work Ormsby has favoured a natural shapeliness... A plain-speaking, down-to-earth utterance may be the norm, but it teeters on the verge of taking flight, and sometimes gives way to an exquisitely refined lyricism.' - Michael Longley; `Reading these new poems and returning to those read decades ago has been a delight because Ormsby is a poet of enviable gifts. He has a fine ear and a sharp eye and, above all, his poems are memorable.' - David Cooke, The Manchester Review; `Goat's Milk: New and Selected Poems, by Frank Ormsby, reminds us why we missed this poet's wry and concise voice during the 14-year gap in his writing life; and the new poems extend and ratify his unique angle of vision.' - Patricia Craig, The Irish Times (Books of the Year)Table of ContentsI 13 Altar Boy 14 Altar Boy Economics 15 1959-1960 16 The Cash Railway 17 The National Anthem 18 The Fields 19 Neddy 20 Snow on the Way 21 The Fox 22 Owls 23 Do You Renounce? 24 Inoculation 25 The Gang 26 Diversion 27 Omagh 28 Rhododendrons 29 Ruts 30 Unapproved Roads 31 Storms 33 Loss of Sound 34 The Woodpile 35 Snowdrop 36 Landscape with Endangered Species 37 Unfinished Music 38 Towards a Sketch of My Mother 39 After a Storm 40 A Zen Dream of Fermanagh 41 My Father Again 42 The Farmyard Haiku II 44 The Fisherman 45 The Black Duckling 46 The Waterworks Park 47 Crows Again 48 At the Graveside 49 My Last Words 50 Purgatory 51 Gunslingers 52 For Ciaran Carson 53 Lunch in The Crown with Michael Longley 54 An Evening in The John Hewitt with Conor Macauley 55 Visiting the Grave 56 Grandfather's Week 57 Small World (3) 58 The Snail 59 The Soul 60 The Cult 61 Outside The Walls 62 After Edward Hopper: Sun in an Empty Room 63 No Telling 64 Belfast Needs Fountains III TWENTY-SIX IRISH PAINTINGS 66 1 Aloysius O'Kelly: The Christening Party 67 2 John Lavery: Under the Cherry Tree 69 3 Walter Osborne: Apple Gathering, Quimperle 70 4 Stanley Royle: The Goose Girl 71 5 Norman Garstin: Among the Pots 72 6 Norman Garstin: Madonna Lilies 73 7 Joseph Malachy Kavanagh: Pursuing His Gentle Calling 74 8 Richard Thomas Moynan: Girls Reading a Newspaper 75 9 Walter Osborne: Breton Girl by a River 76 10 Roderic O'Conor: Portrait of a Young Woman Smiling 77 11 May Guinness: Pump at Pont-l'Abbe 78 12 Nathaniel Hone: Feeding Pigeons, Barbizon 79 13 Stanhope Forbes: Miss Ormsby, Later Mrs Homan 80 14 Frank O'Meara: Towards Night and Winter 81 15 William John Leech: Convent Garden, Brittany 82 16 Mary Swanzy: The Clown by Candlelight 83 17 Frank O'Meara: On the Quays, Etaples 84 18 Henry Jones Thaddeus: The Wounded Poacher 85 19 Frank O'Meara: The Widow 86 20 Augustus Nicholas Burke: Farmyard in Brittany 87 21 William John Leech: Interior of a Barber's Shop 88 22 Stanhope Forbes: Street in Brittany 89 23 Norman Garstin: Estaminet in Belgium 90 24 Richard Thomas Moynan: The Laundress 91 25 Nathaniel Hone: Old Woman Gathering Sticks 92 26 Nathaniel Hone: Leafy Lane IV THE PARKINSON'S POEMS 95 Agitans 96 Tremors 97 Side Effects (1) 98 Notes in Small Handwriting 99 The Insulin Pen 100 Hallucinations (1) 101 Hallucinations (2) 102 Hallucinations (3) 103 Friends 104 Side Effects (2) 105 Side Effects (3) 106 Once a Day 107 The Later Stages (1) 108 The Later Stages (2) V THE WILLOW FOREST 111 The Accused (1) 112 The Interpreter (1) 113 Witness A 115 Witness B 116 The Accused (2) 117 The Interpreter (2) 118 Witness G 119 The Interpreter (3) 120 Witness J 121 The Interpreter (4) 122 The Undertaker's Wife 124 The Accused (3) 125 The Interpreter (5) 126 The Willow Forest 128 Notes

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Book SynopsisIn these restlessly exploratory poems and sequences, the space between things is never empty, but alive with messages. Utterly physical even when it is at its most enquiring, Philip Gross's latest collection contemplates space and sound. Even silence reveals itself as multiple and individual. With each book in his ambitious series since The Water Table, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Gross has taken a new step in mapping where we live, in between language and the world. A Bright Acoustic looks at and way beyond the human, to a generously environmental view of the self in its relationships, at the same time playful and profound.Trade Review'At the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence - what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing... Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses.' - John Burnside & Jane Draycott, PBS Bulletin; 'Love Songs of Carbon... combines a kind of ecological serenity with the poet's continuing close-up fascination with physical matter. In it, geological time, the phases of tides, human and non-human life spans, the breakdown and recycling of ships and fruit and memory are all dimensions of the same, present moment. These poems don't challenge us to shift perspective, but to hold all perspectives in mind at once.' - Kate Bingham, Poetry Review; 'Love Songs of Carbon is remarkable for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for its simplicity. The poems are written as if something has shaken loose, come clear at last to the narrator, and this clarity lends a sharp insightfulness to poems that span the distance between the very personal and the quite literally universal.' - Ashley Owen, New Welsh ReviewTable of Contents9 Windfarm at Sea 10 Mew 12 Time in the Dingle 31 Back 32 Ten Takes on the Garden 34 Twenty Questions about Green 36 A Cult of Bees 37 Ear Candle 39 Danceuse Cambodgienne 40 A Cadence 41 Stylus 42 The Breath of Things 44 Tir na nOg 45 On Poetic Form: a short essay 46 The Same River: thirteen variations 59 The Margin 63 Railway Weeds 64 Wetland, Thinking 66 Broadleaf Torch Song 68 Descaffolding 70 Specific Instances of Silence 80 Habitation 81 Fratres: Permutations 83 Applause, Applause 85 Blackbird, Descending 88 Written on Light

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Book SynopsisSo Glad I'm Me was Roddy Lumsden's tenth collection, and sadly turned out to be the last book he published. In these haunting poems he returned to familiar themes in his work: the trials of oneness versus twoness, the seduction of small calamities, and vice versa. And the everyday mysteries, of running water, salt and sugar, roller-skates and back-up flats. So Glad I'm Me also contains many 'conflation poems' where he has knocked the square peg of one subject through the round hole of another, often music-related. There are poems here about many songs and musicians, ranging from cult artists like Alex Chilton and Robin Holcomb to big names like Elvis and Morrissey. As ever, he relishes unusual words (nestlecock, twofer, farnesol) and interesting, taut forms, alongside a new strand of mid-length, discursive pieces in the spirit of Chicagoan poets Albert Goldbarth and Marianne Boruch. So Glad I'm Me was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2017 and the Saltire Society Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2018.Trade ReviewThis is poetry as an extreme sport, a whole world of shifting ideas with people – dead and alive – dropping in, whispering in your ear, or just walking right through, bold as brass. With such courage, beauty and complexity, it’s no surprise that this, Lumsden’s tenth collection, was shortlisted title for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. -- Alison Craig * The Bottle Imp *Soul-bearing, heartfelt work that demands serious attention... -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Daily Telegraph [on So Glad I'm Me] *

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Book SynopsisHello. Your promise has been extracted is Ahren Warner's third collection of poems, a book in which the lyric runs in parallel with a series of photographs made by the author across Europe. From Paris, Berlin and Budapest, to Athens during the height of the Greek debt crisis and Kiev in the wake of the Maidan Revolution, the poems and images of this book form what Immanuel Kant might have called a cosmopolitan dialogue: a conversation between two speakers in two utterly different languages. Though the poems here often begin in conversation with writers and thinkers - from Celan and Plato to David Foster Wallace and Emmanuel Levinas - they are also profoundly and emotionally engaged with the realities of the contemporary world. Hello. Your promise has been extracted is not a polemic. It is neither witness nor reportage. Rather, it is a book that offers an insistent performance of poetic dialogue with the visual, philosophical and human experience it confronts. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade Review'This ground-breaking book develops a startling, sometimes fierce, always compassionate engagement with the deeply troubled times in which we live. The schema is pitch-perfect in its lyric adaptations and wholly original in the way it incorporates a narrative of images to its purpose. This is work that demands our attention, yes, but more - our involvement.' - David Harsent; 'Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous... Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy.' - John Burnside, Poetry Book Society Bulletin; 'Witty and wide-ranging... Ahren Warner has a claim to be the "poet's poet" of his generation. Even in apparently domestic and personal guise, he's a writer whose work conveys voluptuous but intelligent delight in language and technique.' - Carol Rumens, Guardian

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Book SynopsisBondo is Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English. Her title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing solidarity with a nation's wound. Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer. Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. Like her previous Bloodaxe titles, Bondo is a bilingual Welsh-English edition. Again, the facing English translations are by leading Welsh poets, in this case Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. It is her first new book since Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 and the later collection Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.Trade Review'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as undestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes.' - Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill; 'Elfyn is a poet of healing...both compassionate and celebratory. Like a soul doctor she questions and probes, like St Teresa she endures the darkness, but in the end she sings a song which affirms that flawed humanity is indeed perfectible.' - Katie Gramich, Planet; 'Liberation and enclosure are powerful themes in Menna Elfyn's work. She is a political poet, writing with passion of the Welsh language and identity for which she campaigns. But she makes her claims with realism...a restless, intensely responsive imagination.' - Helen Dunmore, Observer

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Book SynopsisAlthough Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf has lived in exile in the UK for 20 years, she is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali poets, as well as a powerful woman poet in a literary tradition still largely dominated by men. She is a master of the major Somali poetic forms, including the prestigious gabay, by which she presents compelling arguments with astonishing feats of alliteration. The key to her international popularity is in her spirit and message: her poems are classical in construction but they are unmistakeably contemporary, and they engage passionately with the themes of war and displacement which have touched the lives of an entire generation of Somalis. The mesmerising poems in this landmark collection are brought to life in English by award-winning Bloodaxe poet Clare Pollard. Somali-English dual language edition co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Trade ReviewSometimes a book reminds us of poetry’s real electric force in the world. Yusuf is a brilliant young Somali poet living in exile in London, who takes ‘history’s point/to ink a beautiful literature.’… Translated into lapel-grabbing alliterative verse by Clare Pollard, these piercingly direct poems throw open a window onto a war-torn country and its wretchedly displaced people. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * choosing The Sea-Migrations as his Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisThe Wound Register, or Casualty Book - which gives this book its title - is an official record of the casualty and sickness details for more than fifteen thousand soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment during the First World War. Written during the conflict's centenary, the poems in Esther Morgan's fourth collection apply the concept to her own family history in the aftermath of her great grandfather's death at the Somme. An unflinching sequence written to her grandmother explores the trauma of losing a father in combat, while other poems address the missing soldier directly as he hovers on the brink of living memory. Morgan's experience of coming late to motherhood brings the book into the present, giving her alertness to loss a fresh urgency as she traces the legacy of three generations. Written with the lyrical precision of her earlier work but with a new intimacy, The Wound Register grapples movingly with the question of whether it's possible to live and love while doing no harm.Trade Review'Grace, Esther Morgan's third collection, is an extraordinary, radiant book. Its poetry makes quietly insistent demands uppon the reader: "In the stillness, everything becomes itself."... The afterglow of Esther Morgan's luminous work is not certainty, but questions. Can imagination transform, or simply recognise, what is there? Do these poems come by grace of Muse or angel?' - Alison Brackenbury, Poetry London; 'We speak of "the poet's voice", a phrase which comes to mind when considering what's special about Grace: the consistency and perfect pitch of the 'voice'. Open any page, pick any poem, and the reader hears poetry that sings without use of a single poetic device of sound or form. That's not easy to get right. It's a book of rooms, interiors, sensed presences and absences, noted detail, the graceful and the slovenly - white plates on a kitchen table, a slipware bowl, the year-old jar of nails and flies. It's a quiet book, full of grace, like a painting by Vermeer, and, like the work of Vermeer, each work of art inhabits the same house. This collection doesn't strike a single false note.' - Gillian Clarke, T.S. Eliot Prize judge's comment on Grace; 'The visionary gleam is picked up and amplified by poem after poem in Esther Morgan's superb new collection... Morgan's passion for light is also a yearning for space and air, for an uncluttered and ethereal existence.' - Jem Poster, Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisMatthew Sweeney's palette in My Life as a Painter - his twelfth collection - features a wild mix of birds and animals: lizards, snakes, rats, camels, donkeys, feral cats, dogs and owls. One dog transmits telepathic requests for the food he wants, and there's a parrot who speaks as ambassador for the bird world. Sweeney's canvas here is the transhuman: where boundaries between human and non-human can't be fixed, dreams turn into torments, secrets stay hidden, strange communiques remain unclear, and the natural weirdness of his native Donegal verges on the surreal. There are poems ostensibly about art, artists and filmmaking which are as much portraits of the poet and the difficulties of writing poetry. Other poems offer oblique perspectives on religion, warfare, migration and displacement; or go off at a tangent to explore the imaginative possibilities of everything from Michigan's Mullett Lake and the geysers of Iceland to rope-ladders, tin-mines, a giant blue cabbage and an old thrown-out Christmas tree.Trade Review'...one of the most adventurous, life-enhancing and distinctive poets of his gifted generation.' – Bill Swainson paying tribute to the late Matthew Sweeney in The Guardian 'Matthew had the courage of his own idiosyncratic sensibility; nobody now writing has Matthew’s gift for employing language and images of fable to such a dark and unsettling effect, ringing the changes from tenderness to dark comedy with such power and verve.' – Theo Dorgan, paying tribute to Matthew Sweeney in The Irish Times ‘… his was a poetry of great possibility, a poetry of hope – for all its apparent darkness – a poetry of an imagined, alternative reality.’ – Keith Payne, Dublin Review of Books [on Matthew Sweeney’s 12th collection My Life as a Painter] ‘In Sweeney’s universe everything has multiple and perplexing meanings – his ‘alternative realism’ permits the everyday to co-exist with the fantastic in equally poignant and hilarious ways.’ – Pippa Little, Magma [on My Life as a Painter] ‘There’s an exuberance about the fantastical imagery of Cork-based Matthew Sweeney that gives his work the kind of popular accessibility you don’t often find in a poet so accomplished and experienced. Despite the fact that My Life as Painter is his 12th collection, he remains not only committed to taking his art to its highest form, but to ensuring his words still touch his readers.’ – Cork Evening Echo

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