Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisThese poems are luminous despatches from the charged, porous boundary between ‘animal’ and ‘human’. They pull apart and remake definitions and categorisations of wildness and civilisation, training their focus on the language we use to describe youth, social class, and the body. From iron horses to grizzly bears, from deep-water fish to scanderoons, Feral roams the limits of power, language, and love. Cinematic, playful, edgy, tender, startlingly imaginative and strange, Feral’s voices carve out a space in the borderlands. Kate Potts' Whichever Music was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first book-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Feral is her second collection and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewFeral is a storehouse of manifold enchantments: a book in which lore and personal iconography are melded to startling effect. The technical assurance displayed here alongside a strong beating heart make for a sonically and emotionally rich reading, and re-reading, experience. This collection is “a feat of balance”, as the poem “Iron Horse” has it, where each component gives shape and function to the elegant motion of the whole. -- Kayo ChingonyiIntricate, vital-tender, dazzling work — Potts’ poetry sings even as it bares its teeth. -- Eley Williams * on Feral *These are poems of a marvellously observed, bodily interiority which engage with our animal selves, at a loss in the concrete warrens of our cities, as they starve or gorge, roam or home. The resulting book is deeply personal, compelling, occasionally hilarious and frequently unsettling as the “strange fish” of our thoughts emerge from their “iron guardedness” and hitch themselves to the amazing railings of these poems. And the radio poem The Blown Definitions is a wonder, a whole island mythos to itself. Kate Potts is one of the foremost writers of our generation. Buy this monstrously brilliant book. -- Fiona Benson * on Feral *

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Book SynopsisPretend You Don’t Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling’s funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems. It introduces this popular South African poet to a UK audience. Finuala Dowling’s debut collection, I flying, published in 2002, was an instant success in her native South Africa. Its accessibility, humanity and wit, as well as its beguilingly honest stories of home, parenthood, love, loss and desperation, won many new converts to poetry. The volume went into multiple printings, and won the Ingrid Jonker prize. Dowling’s subsequent collections, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe and Notes from the Dementia Ward (winners of the SANLAM and Olive Schreiner prizes respectively), consolidated her reputation as an inventive sketcher of the domestic sublime. Her chapbook, Change is possible, sold out at the 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Pretend You Don’t Know Me contains her iconic poem ‘To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair’ as well as Dowling’s tragi-comic cycle of poems on the theme of her mother’s dementia, and the hugely popular poems ‘Butter’, ‘I am the Zebra’, ‘To adventurers, as far as I’m concerned’ and ‘The abuse of cauliflowers’. At the heart of the book are the funny and poignant connections we make with other people, and the lifelong effort to stay whole.Trade ReviewPretend You Don’t Know Me, by South African Finuala Dowling, is a witty and wise collection of new and selected poems. Her sequence about her mother’s dementia is very touching. Elsewhere, these vital works will have you crying with laughter. -- Jackie Kay * The Guardian (Books of the Year 2018) *She definitely has something which accounts for the smart, funny, then deeply sad poems. I like the brutally honest poems (not liking her own personality), the sassy ones, and the unsentimental ones about her mother’s dementia. -- Billy CollinsFinuala Dowling is a brave new voice in South African poetry, filled with vitality, wit, unexpected rhythms and fresh ideas… Always accessible, Dowling’s poetry is never shallow. -- Shirley Kossick * Mail&Guardian (South Africa) *

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Book SynopsisNick Drake’s fourth collection, Out of Range, explores the strange interconnections and confronting emergencies – the signs, wonders and alarms - of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples; portraits of those living on the margins of the city streets, and of Voyager 1 crossing the threshold of the solar system. The past echoes in poems about the ancient artists who recorded their presence in cave art, a Spanish missionary thrilled by an Aztec ball game, and a story of gay love from the Song dynasty. Here too are poems registering the shock and impact of ‘Generation Anthropocene’ on Earth’s climate and ecology. Above all, the poems seek to tune in to what is out of range; the dark matter of mystery, wonder and deep time at the edge of our senses, at the back of our heads, which poetry makes visible.Trade ReviewThis is absolutely modern poetry, at once haunting and unsettling, but in other places funny and moving. It weaves together these various strands of wonder and horror and in so doing, captures the confusion we all live with as we navigate the planet as human animals in the 21st century. * Oxford Poetry Library (Book of the Week) *These poems celebrate proximity and distance - spatial, temporal or emotional - to remark on the state we're in. Written with poignancy, formal facility and intense honesty, they take the reader on a journey through known worlds and into unknown ones. -- Nancy Campell * ClimateCultures *Nick Drake’s poetry is usually grounded in everyday contemporary experience, but his imagination also enjoys travelling, following the routes of good but accessible science. -- Carol Rumens * Poem of the Week, Guardian.com *Table of Contents9 Through the Red Light 10 Inklings 11 Chronicle of the Incandescent Lightbulb 13 Maenad 15 Still Life: Plastic Water Bottle (used) 16 Ollamaloni 18 Dance 19 The Palace of Memory 21 From the Song Dynasty 23 With Helen and John at Kelvingrove 25 Saturday Morning 26 London Fields 27 For Sandra 28 Peaches for the Solstice 30 The Flies 32 Shame 33 In Medellín 34 Night Bus 36 Driving to Achiltibue 38 Cormorants 39 Out of Range 41 Anubis 43 The Foley Artist (take 2) 45 The Dancing Satyr 47 Self-portrait as a Moose 48 Three Arctic poems 53 Grace 55 Send 56 Life on Earth 58 Fragile 59 Stranger Thing 60 Colibri 61 The Back of Your Head 63 Notes

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Book SynopsisKen Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. His politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. The pivotal work marking this shift was his long poem Fox Running (1980), brought to recent attention when an archive recording of him reading it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please in 2016. His Collected Poems brings together poetry from four decades, including all the work from two earlier retrospectives, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), together with the posthumously published You Again: last poems & other words (2004). The book is introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover. Publication coincides with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).Trade ReviewKen Smith brought an original and memorable voice to poetry in Britain. He spent his writing life not so much swimming against the tide as ignoring the stream’s existence… He was one of those by whom the language lives.’ – Sean O’Brien, Independent

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Book SynopsisSpiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself and welcome who one chooses to express hospitality towards; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it. The drive of this collection is spirit in the sense of the courage it takes to true to one’s instincts. There is a timelessness to the poems in this book and a sense of what endures. Here is oneness with existence, an appreciation of the universe, a happiness that springs from standing on the globe and the feeling of being a living, breathing soul in it.Trade ReviewSarah Wardle writes with great humanity and makes A Knowable World of the indignity, frustrations and fear of acute episodes of mental illness. That’s how she manages to get her readers to empathise with all those in the community, both in and out of hospital, who live with the stigma of madness’ – Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger.Table of Contents9 Song for World 10 The Golden Bough 11 Votive 12 Spiritlands 15 Amina’s Truth 16 Night Nurses 17 First-hand Evidence 18 In the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 19 The Spirit to Solve 20 Human Spirit 22 Pamphleteering 23 At Dove Cottage 24 Schoolgirl to Teacher 25 Mr Wales 26 Careless Whisper 27 Art Therapy 28 On Empty Street 29 City Rain 30 Mill-hands Conversing, 1919 31 Still Life 32 Umbrella 33 US 34 Modern Classics 35 Artistic Preference 36 Letter to the Third Millennium 37 At Home with the Celts 38 Cassie At Six 39 Topspin Theory 40 Lotus 41 Dreamtime 42 Abigail’s Wedding 43 Amanda 44 Blue Rosette 45 Out on the Hustings, 1974 46 Oxfords of the Mind 47 Autumn Effect at Argenteuil 48 Spirit Horse 49 Midlander 52 On Connecting 53 Howling Wolf 54 Soraya and the Spider 57 May Morning 58 May Sunday 59 Reminiscence at the Community Centre 60 Making 61 Kissing in English 62 After Astrup 63 On Woodland

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Book SynopsisNegative of a Group Photograph brings together three decades of poems by the leading Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman. Born in Mashhad in 1962 and based in Sweden since 2006, Ghahreman is the author of five highly acclaimed collections. Her poems are lyrical and intimate, addressing themes of loss, exile and female desire, as well as the changing face of her country. Negative of a Group Photograph runs the gamut of Ghahreman’s experience: from her childhood in the Khorasan region of south-eastern Iran to her exile to Sweden, from Iran's book-burning years and the war in Iraq to her unexpected encounters with love. The poems in this illuminating collection are brought to life in English by the poet Maura Dooley, working in collaboration with Elhum Shakerifar. Farsi-English dual language edition co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Trade ReviewThese poems are a wonderful mixture of the bodily, the earthy and the transcendent, the metaphysical; they have lyricism and a sense of elegy and a wonderful sense of defiance. -- Boyd Tonkin * Judge, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Costa Book of the Year for her final collection, Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore was as spellbinding storyteller in her poetry and in her prose. Her haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity, nowhere more so than in Inside the Wave, in its exploration of the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. All her poetry casts a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss. Counting Backwards is a retrospective covering ten collections written over four decades, bringing together all the poems she included in her earlier selection, Out of the Blue (2001), with all those from her three later collections, Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012) and Inside the Wave (2017), along with a number of earlier poems.Trade ReviewWe all felt this is a modern classic; a fantastic collection, life-affirming and uplifting. The poems carry powerful messages that speak to all of us. -- Wendy Holden * Chair of Judges, Costa Book of the Year 2017 *She was – first and last – a poet. Her first collection, The Apple Fall, was published when she was 30, her last, Inside the Wave, in April this year... Her last collection is her most spare and moving. Inside the Wave is smooth as a sea pebble and liminal – poised between life and death. -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian *Dunmore is a particularly lucid writer, and not simply because her poems are so often filled with the play of light. Her language is bare and clean; her forms balladic and unobtrusive… Dunmore seeks to draw attention, not to her mastery of craft, but to her subject and the intricate, original, patterns of her thought…These poems are light-boned, but strong: elegant, complex, fully-turned unions of image, thought and sound. In these times, we should be glad of this voice. -- Kate Clanchy * Guardian *Table of ContentsInside the Wave (2017) 19 Counting Backwards 20 The Underworld 21 Shutting the Gate 22 In Praise of the Piano 23 Re-opening the old mines 24 Inside the Wave 26 Odysseus to Elpenor 28 Plane tree outside Ward 78 29 The shaft 30 Leave the door open 31 My life’s stem was cut 32 The Bare Leg 34 The Place of Ordinary Souls 35 My daughter as Penelope 37 The Lamplighter 38 The Halt 39 Bluebell Hollows 40 A Loose Curl 41 Hornsea, 1952 42 Festival of stone 43 A Bit of Love 44 Winter Balcony with Dunnocks 45 Mimosa 46 Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen 48 The Duration 49 At the Spit 50 Terra Incognita 51 Four cormorants, one swan 52 Girl in the Blue Pool 53 February 12th 1994 54 What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for? 55 In Secret 55 All the breaths of your life 56 Her children look for her 57 Little papoose 58 Cliffs of Fall 59 Five Versions from Catullus 59 1 Through Babel of Nations 59 2 Undone 59 3 Sirmio 60 4 Dedication 61 5 Sparrow 62 Rim 63 On looking through the handle of a cup 64 Ten Books 66 Subtraction 67 My people 68 September Rain 70 Hold out your arms The Malarkey (2012) 75 The Malarkey 76 Come Out Now 78 The Inbox 79 Boatman 80 I Owned a Woman Once 82 Longman English Series 83 Writ in Water 88 Dis 89 Newgate 90 At Ease 91 Harbinger 91 The Hyacinths 92 The Night Workers 93 Agapanthus above Porthmeor 94 Visible and Invisible 94 The Snowfield 95 Lemon tree in November 96 Bildad 99 Skulking 99 Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street 100 Barclays Bank, St Ives 100 Playing Her Pieces 101 Pianist, 103, 102 The Torn Ship 103 Taken in Shadows 108 Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661) 108 Picture Messages 109 Lethe 110 The Queue’s Essentially 110 The Captainess of Laundry 111 The Day’s Umbrellas 112 The Deciphering 113 The Tarn 113 The Gift 114 What Will You Say 115 Cloud 115 I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly 116 The Kingdom of the Dead 117 The Last Heartbeat 117 The Old Mastery 118 The Overcoat 118 Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road 119 I Heard You Sing in the Dark 120 La Recouvrance 121 The Filament Glad of These Times (2007) 125 City lilacs 126 Crossing the field 127 Litany 128 Don’t count John among the dreams 129 The other side of the sky’s dark room 129 Convolvulus 130 The grey lilo 131 Yellow butterflies 132 Plume 132 Odysseus 133 The blue garden 134 Violets 135 The rowan 136 Barnoon 137 Getting into the car 138 Glad of these times 140 Off-script 140 ‘Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars’ 141 Tulip 142 Beautiful today the 143 Dead gull on Porthmeor 144 Narcissi 145 Dolphins whistling 147 Borrowed light 148 A winter imagination 149 Athletes 149 Pneumonia 150 Wall is the book 151 Gorse 152 Blackberries after Michaelmas 152 To my nine-year-old self 153 Fallen angel 154 Bridal 155 Still life with ironing 155 Spanish Irish 156 Cowboys 156 Below Hungerford Bridge 157 Ophelia 158 Winter bonfire 158 One a.m. 159 Lemon and stars 159 Cutting open the lemons 160 Hearing owls 161 ‘Often they go just before dawn’ 162 May voyage Out of the Blue (2001) 165 Out of the Blue 166 The man on the roof 167 Giraffes in Hull 168 Jacob’s drum 169 That old cinema of memory 170 Depot 170 A lorry-load of stuff 172 Virgin with Two Cardigans 173 Ice coming 174 Cyclamen, blood-red 175 Piers Plowman: The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell 185 Smoke 186 Bristol Docks 188 The spill 189 Without remission 190 The rain’s coming in 191 As good as it gets 192 If only 192 Mr Lear’s ring 193 Fortune-teller on Church Road 194 Sleeveless 194 The point of not returning 195 The form 196 The sentence 196 With short, harsh breaths 197 The footfall 198 The coffin-makers 199 Inside out 200 The blessing from Bestiary (1997) 203 Candle poem 204 At the Emporium 204 Next door 205 He lived next door all his life 206 Under the leaves * 207 The surgeon husband 208 Fishing beyond sunset 208 Hare in the snow 209 Need 211 Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces 212 I should like to be buried in a summer forest 213 The scattering 214 All the things you are not yet 215 Ferns on a hospital window * 216 Diving girl 217 A pretty shape 218 Viking cat in the dark 219 Baby sleep 220 Frostbite 221 Basketball player on Pentecost Monday 222 Tiger lookout 223 Tiger Moth caterpillar 224 Hungry Thames 224 The wasp 225 On growing a black tulip * 226 Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman 227 Bouncing boy 227 Ghost at noon 228 Greek beads 229 Tea at Brandt’s 230 We are men, not beasts from Recovering a Body (1994) 233 To Virgil 234 Three Ways of Recovering a Body 236 Holiday to Lonely 237 Poem in a Hotel 238 The Bike Lane 239 Drink and the Devil 240 Ahvenanmaa 241 Rubbing Down the Horse 242 You came back to life in its sweetness 243 Heimat 244 In the Desert Knowing Nothing 245 Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers 246 The Yellow Sky 247 Getting the Strap 248 Adders 249 The conception 250 Scan at 8 weeks 251 Pedalo 255 Beetroot Soup 256 The Diving Reflex 258 Bathing at Balnacarry 259 Boys on the Top Board 260 Sylvette Scrubbing 261 Babes in the Wood 262 Cajun 263 Then I think how the train * 264 Skips 264 Time by Accurist 265 The Silent Man in Waterstones 266 The Wardrobe Mistress 268 When You’ve Got 269 Afterword * from Secrets (1994) 273 Lemon sole 274 Christmas caves 275 That violet-haired lady 276 Whooper swans 277 Snow Queen 278 The cuckoo game 279 The butcher’s daughter 281 The greenfield ghost 282 Herring girl 283 Russian doll 284 Breeze of ghosts from Short Days, Long Nights (1991) 287 Those shady girls 287 The dream-life of priests 289 Sisters leaving before the dance 291 On not writing certain poems 292 Privacy of rain 293 Dancing man 295 At Cabourg II 296 Baron Hardup 297 Nearly May Day 300 Three workmen with blue pails 301 Brown coal 303 Safe period 304 Big barbershop man 305 The dry well 306 Our family, swimming again * 307 Sweet pepper * 308 Heron 309 One yellow chicken 310 Sailing to Cuba 310 Off the West Pier 312 Winter 1955 313 Rinsing 313 To Betty, swimming 314 In Berber’s Ice Cream Parlour 315 On drinking lime juice in September * 316 Not going to the forest 317 Lutherans from The Raw Garden (1988) 321 Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden 323 Seal run 325 Wild strawberries 326 A mortgage on a pear tree 337 A pæony truss on Sussex place 328 Permafrost 329 At Cabourg 331 Ploughing the roughlands 332 The land pensions 333 A dream of wool 334 New crops 335 Shadows of my mother against a wall 336 Air layering 336 The argument 337 The peach house 338 A meditation of the glasshouses 339 The haunting of Epworth 340 Preaching at Gwennap 341 On circuit from Heptonstall Chapel 342 US 1st Division Airborne Ranger at rest in Honduras 343 One more for the beautiful table 344 Lambkin 344 Dublin 1971 346 The hard-hearted husband 348 Malta 349 Candlemas 349 Pilgrims 350 An Irish miner in Staffordshire from The Sea Skater (1986) 353 The bride’s nights in a strange village 354 Lazarus * 355 Christmas roses 356 I imagine you sent back from Africa 358 The knight * 359 In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913-1945 361 The parachute packers 363 Porpoise washed up on the beach 364 In deep water 365 Lady Macduff and the primroses 367 Mary Shelley 370 The plum tree 371 The air-blue gown 373 My sad descendants 374 Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night 375 The horse landscape 376 Thetis 377 In the tents 378 Uncle Will’s telegram 379 Rapunzel 381 Bewick’s swans * 382 The sea skater 383 In the tea house 384 Florence in permafrost 386 Missile launcher passing at night from The Apple Fall (1983) 389 The marshalling yard 390 A cow here in the June meadow 391 Zelda 392 Annunciation off East Street * 393 The Polish husband 395 The damson 396 In Rodmell Garden 397 The apple fall 398 Pictures of a Chinese nursery * 399 Pharaoh’s daughter 400 Domestic poem 401 Patrick I 402 Patrick II 403 Weaning 403 Clinic day * 404 Approaches to winter 406 The night chemist 407 St Paul’s 408 Poem for December 28 409 Greenham Common 410 Poem for hidden women 412 If no revolution come 414 A safe light 415 Near Dawlish 415 The last day of the exhausted month 416 Second marriages * 417 The deserted table 418 The writer’s son 419 Ollie and Charles at St Andrew’s Park 420 Winter fairs 420 In a wood near Turku 421 Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff 422 Breakfast 423 index of titles and first lines

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Book SynopsisAfter first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry following the publication of her first collection Chameleon in 2015. Her first English translation combines her debut volume with her second book Nachtroer (2017), its untranslatable title the name of all-night shop in Antwerp where she lives. Chameleon is a set of apparently naïve but knowingly ironic, playful and subversive poems which trace a girl’s search for a woman’s identity, a coming-of-age exploration of body and language drawing on memories, shapes and landscapes. In Nachtroer her poems take a nighttime journey through heartbreak, insomnia and the hectic flow of daily life, driven by a desire for disappearance, displacement and dissolution. Chameleon ends with taking to the ocean. Nachtroer’s last poem is about building a boat for such a voyage. Chameleon Nachtroer sets the two books afloat in English.Trade ReviewThis poetry parades like the chameleon in various appearances…in streaming language and unlikely, striking images. * Humo, on Chameleon *This is carefully accurate poetry, eloquent and adventurous, and truly authentic. That someone’s second book can be so audacious and dauntless is remarkable. -- VSB poëzieprijs 2018 jury, on NachtroerTable of ContentsCHAMELEON I The Red Cross on the Treasure Map 13 Bucharest 14 Sisjön 15 Örebro 16 Växjö 17 Japanese Pond 18 Hvannadalshnúkur 19 August 21 Sampling 22 Diagnosis 23 Fish Bowl 24 Gilles 25 Flamingo 26 The North Sea 27 Charlotte Cake II Discovery Channel 31 People Who Watch Wildlife Films to Better Understand Themselves 32 Grand Jeté 33 Whalespotting 34 Satellite Photo 35 Small Volcano 36 Seraphic Light 38 Tyrant 39 Chameleon [I] 40 Chameleon [II] 41 Felidae [I] 42 Felidae [II] 43 Rorschach 44 Astrology for Beginners 45 Space Peel 46 Instructions 47 Lampyridae 48 Expedition 49 Archaeological Site 50 Hunter/Gatherer 52 Triceratops III Origin 55 Specialist Poulterer 56 Bull’s Head 58 Netezon Laundrette 59 Ausflug/Auszug 60 Winter Veg 61 Council Flat 62 Turtle Reflex 63 Genealogy 64 Fernweh NACHTROER Eight, ∞ 71 [VIII–I] Nachtroer 81 Nachtroer 83 Haematoma 84 Drift 86 Aquarium 87 Blue 90 Lethe 91 Groceries Soft Drinks Spirits & Tobacco 94 The Age of Aquarius 98 —— 99 Thirst 103 Section 109 Fricative 110 Hypostasis 111 Slash and Burn 116 White 119 Topos 120 There 126 You’d Like to Build a Boat

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Book SynopsisSometimes metaphysical, sometimes apparently confessional, sometimes challenging, often hilarious, Mark Waldron's poems take you by the arm and usher you in to a dark/light, funny/sad, silly/serious world which is exactly what the actual world looks like if you creep up on it and take it by surprise. As human beings living in society we’re supposed to keep what we really think hidden, but the poems of Sweet, like Rinky-Dink want to look at the absurdity behind our posturing, because in looking at it squarely in the face we might hope to have some freedom from it. Sweet, like Rinky-Dink is Mark Waldron’s fourth collection, following Meanwhile, Trees (2016), published by Bloodaxe, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both from Salt.Trade ReviewI get nervous for Mark Waldron's readers – I can hear them begin to laugh a little, becoming too comfortable too quickly, while reading a poem of his and I want to warn them. I want to yell at them to get out of the way, tell them that what's really happening is that they are about to get their hearts broken. Poor monkeys. -- Matthew DickmanClearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something. -- Sean O’Brien * Guardian *His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language…. And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book. -- Carol Rumens * Observer, Poetry Book of the Month *Table of Contents13 I wish I loved lawnmowers 15 Brute Creation 16 Sixteen Found Dogs 17 The Take-Off 18 Las Aves Vacías 19 Sarouk Mohajeran 21 Your Face 22 Diving for Pearls 23 Sweet, like Rinky-Dink 24 The Stick 25 Light that falls 26 WW1 Marcie 28 What are things 29 The body is a kind of home, 33 Hobnobbing with Elephants 34 A Scabbarding 35 Manno 36 A Drip 37 Oh no, 38 Coming Through! 39 Endpiece 40 Supination 41 How to Get a Gibbet through the Small Hole 42 Poor light, 43 Angry with Trees 44 The Dragonfly and Berries 46 My Hopeless Marcie 47 Ice Cream for I Scream 48 As Though Begat, but Not 49 How scrubbed-up clean 50 The first time I came upon him, 52 How to Tap a Field Mushroom 53 A Closed Sandwich 54 The main event 57 No wonder 58 A Flying Visit 59 Ordinary People, We Just Don’t See Them 60 The Wild West 61 Even now that we live exclusively 63 What are you doing taking the air 64 My God, my Marcie’s got 65 My brain likes fish, 66 My brain is a fool, 67 My boneheaded brain 69 The words you sweat, 70 The Lighthouse Keeper 72 Buddies 73 Even when 74 Trees, Breeze and Rabbits 76 Childhood

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Book SynopsisTess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests – the Northwest of America, the north-west of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher’s poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write – a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet’s unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching.Trade Review'The book itself is dedicated to two great loves (the American writer Raymond Carver, and the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray) and its narratives echo through time... Beneath all the places, stories and loves, this poet finds that deep resonance of common essence. There is beauty and grief and humour here; there is a gentle wisdom; there is a quiet, incremental insight that sings us awake. I treasure these poems.' - Jane MeadTable of ContentsRecognition 1 i In the Company of Flowers 5 Almost Lost Moment 6 Ambition 7 Your Dog Playing with a Coyote 9 Ability to Hold Territory 10 Blind Dog/Seeing Girl 12 Doe Browsing Salal Berries 14 ii Little Inside Out Dream, 17 Dream Cancel 19 Stolen Dress 21 Glass Impresses 23 Hummingbird-Mind 25 One Deer at Dusk 26 iii Correction 31 Sully 33 Retroactive Father 36 Earth 38 The Seemingly Domesticated 39 Reaching 41 Right-Minded Person 44 In the Too-Bright Café 45 iv Let’s Store These Hours 51 Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras 53 The Branches of the Maple 56 Yet to Be Born Weather 57 I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America 59 While I Was Away 63 v Without 67 Deer Path Enigma 69 The Favorite Cup 70 What Does It Say 71 vi Bus to Belfast 75 Is, Is Not 76 As the Diamond 78 During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading 81 Curfew 83 Eddie’s Steps 84 Four-Footed 86 The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees 88 Blue Eyelid Lifting 91 vii Button, Button 95 Breath 99 To an Irishman Painting in the Rain 100 Encounter 102 Planet Greece 103 Cloud-Path 105 viii Oliver 109 A “Sit” with Eileen 112 Remembering Each Other While Together 115 Opening 117 Word of Mouth 118 Daylong Visitor Caress 123 March Moon Three Stars 125 Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests 127 Notes 135 Acknowledgments 139

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Book SynopsisLawrence Sail's poetry is noted for its scrupulous combination of close observation and broader reflections. In Guises he builds on the strengths of twelve previous collections, writing 'in praise of perception', which brings its own challenges and delights, embodied in the shifts and layers of language. A sense of the precious and the precarious informs poems with widely differing subjects and settings. There is, too, a new awareness of the threat to the sumptuousness of the natural world posed by human profligacy. Sounding the provisional nature of our earth-bound experiences, Sail knows the closeness of eulogy to elegy, and his poems celebrating the immediacy of human affections and experience sit aptly alongside those remembering friends who have died. Forty-six years on from the publication of Sail's first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness.Trade ReviewThe poems can be demanding in their intricacy, inviting and rewarding rereading. They are highly reflective, thought made sensual via routes only poetry can take. * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *It is through microscopic attention to minutiae that Sail sees furthest. -- Andrew McCulloch * Times Literary Supplement *Though Sail's work is quietly lyrical and almost undemonstrative at first scan, the poems reveal more and more to the active reader prepared to work hard to mine the gold. -- Patrick Lodge * Envoi *Table of Contents11 Anagrammatic 12 Radishes 13 Falling Back to Earth 14 Cloudlands 15 Samuel Palmer’s Yellow Twilight 16 Lundy Headland 17 Ribblehead Viaduct 19 A Stroll by the River 20 Taking Keriga Nyagwoko Home 21 Vendange 22 At the Equinox 23 The Smoke-tree 24 Winter Sketch 25 Lore 27 Sarabande 28 Soay Sound 29 A Summer Dream 30 Journey 31 Two-step 32 Olympic Cyclists 33 Heartsong 34 Lullaby 35 Pas de Trois 36 Notes on a Fossil Fish 37 Clues 38 Giacometti’s Cat 39 Zigzag 40 Moths Queuing 41 Thinking of Steve Sims 42 Smoke-rings 44 Birdcall 45 Female Head, about 1525 46 Four Late van Goghs 49 A Wedding Photo from 1975 50 Triggers 51 Three Time-signatures 53 Briefing Model for D-Day 54 Woodlice and Earthworm 55 Belonging 56 Cut Flowers 58 Shine 59 Triptych 62 At a Concert 64 Masquerade 66 Seafaring 67 Kepler’s Epitaph 68 Sentences for Vivaldi’s Gloria 69 Instances 70 Sea Pictures 72 Recognition 73 Mayflower 74 Rainer Maria Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy 77 Asphodels 79 Notes

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Book SynopsisWhip-hot & Grippy is a collection of possibilities in a state of emergency. In the first part, a series of long-form and sequenced poems augment various states of being divided/plural in attempts to activate unauthorised directions. Disrupted tangents are punctuated by recurring muzak, advertising-speak, sex scenes, terrorism, broadcast media, consumption-anxiety, protest, human-animal relations and cosmic departures. Throughout, informed discontent and humour act as drivers of dissent, mining conceptual complexity and testing poetry’s combustible potential. The book culminates in ‘more flinching’, a multi-part poem first published and freely distributed in an exhibition. Merging the news of a military dog, shot in service, with the death of a pet dog, it collapses images with bodies and politics with intimacies, enacting failed attempts to navigate practical and emotional entanglements. Whip-Hot & Grippy is Heather Phillipson's second collection, following her highly praised debut, Instant-flex 718, published in 2013. As well as being an award-winning poet, she is an internally renowned artist whose sculpture, ‘The End’, was installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in 2020.Trade ReviewPhillipson’s work is often very funny as it rebounds from one untenable erotic or intellectual position to another...sounding like the love child of Frank O'Hara and Rosemary Tonks. -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *A visual artist’s debut book-length collection, in which a My Little Pony is mutilated for art’s sake and a plate of mashed potato epitomises domestic drift. Levity and a likeable, direct voice make this innovative and entertaining summer reading. -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times Summer Reading Guide *For all the playfulness in Instant-flex 718, it also addresses the weighty issues – mortality, the relationship between mind and body, the extinction of species, religion – and its lively combination of intelligence, verve and humour makes it a debut that is both unusually accomplished and unusually pleasurable to read. -- Carrie Etter * Guardian *Table of Contents9 latest technology 10 Guess what? 12 when did you start feeling like this? 14 it’s not just a conditioning shampoo it’s 15 CHEERS! 19 Take Spanking White Pants 20 some things 25 Earlye in the Morning 29 it’s getting rough for thoughts cut up by conventions we must thump through though it hurts our muscles 30 hankering incarnate & the apocryphal sputum bath-craze 33 Splashy Phasings 35 everything slapped & candied & opening 39 TRUE TO SIZE 41 TRUE TO SIZE 42 TRUE TO SIZE 44 TRUE TO SIZE 46 TRUE TO SIZE 48 TRUE TO SIZE 49 JUNK LOG 53 more flinching 125 Personal Statement

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Book SynopsisZoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewHand & Skull examines the complex relationships between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ways in which gender informs these experiences. Brigley regularly uses epistolaries to establish dialogues, often addressing or personifying women of myth, literature, and history, such as Leda, Edna Pontellier, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Gender violence and violence against animals are often central concerns, but what makes the collection particularly compelling is its refusal to let tragedy be the only note it sings; many of the poems also embrace the complicated wonders of motherhood, of devotion. Hand & Skull dazzled me with its agility and subtlety, its graceful inquiry into how gender, violence, myth, devotion and the natural world braid through our lives.’ -- Amie WhittemoreWith Conquest, her fascinating second collection, the Welsh-born poet Zoë Brigley explores women's desires, dream and loves… Brigley deepens her expressive range as she explores diverse worlds and a shifting female cast... Via historical and mythic approaches, she highlights the vastness and intensity of women's desire, as well as the delicacy... The formal variety of Conquest serves Zoë Brigley's imaginative quest well, and includes, for instance, the prose poem, the list poem, and a variation on the double sestina. Yet the collection is without ostentation, and poems such as "The Love of a Husband" ("Because he never, ever hesitated./ Because when she shuts a window, he opens a door.") and the intricate "The Blue Rose", in memory of her English grandfather, are as heartfelt as they are beautifully judged. -- Moniza Alvi * PBS Bulletin *Exploring sexuality and politics with imaginative subtlety, Conquest is a book about pursuit and capture and the things that elude us in the chase… What seems to interest Brigley most about pursuit is what is evaded in the chase. Her poems are full of references to the lost and the untouchable… This is a beautifully disconcerting collection, intelligent in its treatment of its themes. -- Helen Mort * Magma *Table of Contents9 Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe, Hands and Horse Skull 11 Blind Horse Elegy 13 Poem for Emily Doe 14 Undressing Poem 15 Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe 16 Poem on the Edge 17 Letter from a Sheep Skull 18 Dryad 19 Dressing Poem 20 Sonnet for the Hole in the Glass 21 Letter from Tess Durbeyfield 22 Forgetting Poem 25 Victoria Brookland: Horse 27 Letter to a Horse’s Head 28 Poem with a Least Favourite Dress 29 Revolver 30 Western Union 31 Poem with a Whalebone Crinoline 32 The Eye in the Wall 33 The Shave 34 Hand & Breast 35 Post Colonial 36 Beatitudes for the Women 38 Poem with Seams 39 Victoria Brookland: Vésuviennes 40 Letter to Leda on Getting Married 41 Poem with a Wedding Dress 42 Swan 43 Rare 44 Syringe 45 Round Trip 46 White Patio with a Red Door 47 Vésuviennes 48 Poem with a High Waist 49 The Amish Roofers 50 Poem with Stockings and Suspenders 51 Victoria Brookland: I too am a rare pattern 53 Letter from Edna Pontellier 54 Star / Sun / Snow 56 Eagle Poem 57 Name Poem 58 Poem with a Mourning Dress 59 Letter from Nemi 61 Beatitude for the Meek 62 He Has a John Clare Chin 63 Tree with Cut Limb 64 My Last Beatitude 65 Hand & Skull 69 Notes 70 Acknowledgements 71 Thanks

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Book SynopsisVidyan Ravinthiran’s second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and in which the pronoun 'we' aspires to stand for a larger community, including (if you like) readers themselves. Many describe life in the North East for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent. Brexit; racist and sexist abuse; class; our work-life balance, and our relationship with institutions (be it our employer, or the NHS); taboos surrounding mental health; civil war in Sri Lanka; media representation of minorities; immigrant anxieties: these poems look inward, but also outward. Worrying at the link between society and our private lives, they scorn a politics which would put us all in separate boxes. Love, and imagination, may not conquer all, but as recent shocks suggest, ‘we’ must at least try to understand people different to us. Shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the collection is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewAlso on the shortlist [for the Forward Prize for Best Collection] is another collection that approaches divisive politics with humanity and warmth: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet’s wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran’s sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today… to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community. -- Ben Wilkinson * The Guardian *The poet’s domestic introspection is no less than a conduit for contemplation of the troubles which define many lives. And in this fine collection, they include racism (Ravinthiran is British by birth and Sinhalese by family origin, his wife is white British), cultural dislocation, mental illness, politics and identity... Vidyan Ravinthiran’s collection is both bracing and complex, and it is difficult to give a comprehensive review of such a diversionary, inclusive body of work without venturing into essay territory. -- Steve Whitaker * The Yorkshire Times [on The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here] *As a very rare kind of British poet indeed - one from a Sri Lankan background readers might expect Vidyan Ravinthiran to have a lot of important things to say. He does, but, like Oscar Wilde, whom this witty and ambitious debut quotes twice, Grun-tu-molani also delights in wrong-footing expectations of earnestness. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * Sunday Times *'Grun-tu-molani' is borrowed from Bellow’s phrase meaning 'man wants to live' and Ravinthiran’s verse seems driven by a comparably urgent impulse, to perfect his craft. From translations of ancient Tamil texts to contemporary riffs on recession and technology, he combines formal range with wit as well as moral, sensual and emotional complexity. -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times, Summer books 2014 *Grun-tu-Molani brings a light touch and a sometimes damning elegance to subjects including MTV, a chair addressing Jackie Chan, the Tamil Tigers, militarism and the purpose of money – recalling the early Michael Hofmann as he does so, which is a good sign. -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *Table of Contents11 Today / Aubade 12 Sea break / Hazlitt 13 Frost / The armchairs 14 Learning / Jigsaw 15 Riposte / Fiction 16 Hail / Nothing can be sole or whole… 17 Ceylon / DH1 18 Our first house / A gift 19 You’ve been teaching me / BAME 20 Thought experiment / An email 21 In this room / Children say the funniest things 22 There are things / Sometimes 23 Who am I / No 24 Leeds / In my father’s room I discover 25 Peak District / Clouds, two (Borges feat. Kolatkar) 26 Leviathan / That said 27 She / She 28 The Indian grandfather / John Addington Symonds 29 Lingerie / Safe words 30 Don’t stop / i.m. Steve Hilton 31 Outside the Hanuman temple / I mention it 32 Parental advice / Worry 33 I’ve noticed something / Conversation 34 The fight / Afterwards 35 Larkin / The poem of happiness 36 Strictly / Titian 37 Paatti / Today 38 Brexit / Leave 39 In the mixed area / Inspiration 40 Mercy invincibility / Another side effect 41 In my family / Unlike some 42 From the window / That hand 43 We’re / And so 44 from the Tamil / Let 45 Dubrovnik / Trust 46 My body is a cage / Transition 47 Tough mudder / This is not a photograph 48 Faraj / It’s a dark 49 Whoever you are / Haircut 50 My parents and I / My Sri Lankan family 51 Swedenborg / Union 52 It’s not about you / Barrett/Browning 53 In the bubble / The hearing aid 54 New Year’s Eve / Driving 55 This book / Mother and sister 56 The X-Files / Contrarieties 57 In films / We’re moving on 58 Birmingham / Of justice 59 Trying / Artist 60 It must be / Spring

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Book SynopsisAfter Cézanne is a sequence of fifty-six poems exploring the life and work of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Reimagining his friendships with Zola and Pissarro, his impact on Matisse and Picasso, as well as his posthumous reputation, Maitreyabandhu celebrates Cézanne’s apples and card players in poems at once tender, urgent and amused. The book includes 26 colour reproductions, a preface by Christopher Lloyd (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, 1988-2005) and extensive textual notes. After Cézanne is Maitreyabandhu’s third collection.Trade ReviewAll the aspects of Cézanne’s ordeal are fused together in Maitreyabandhu’s remarkable poems in which the varied forms of composition and wide range of reference provide a refreshingly unique insight into Cézanne’s art. What is achieved here is an incomparable poetic expression of the artist’s personal idiosyncrasies and manifold achievements. -- Christopher Lloyd * (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures 1988-2005) *These remarkable poems remind us of the close kinship between painting and poetry. Maitreyabandhu shares insights into Cézanne that can, perhaps, only be grasped through poetry. The poems speak eloquently of Cézanne’s art and of the experience of trying to comprehend a great artist. -- Barnaby Wright * Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery, London *A resoundingly authentic collection with no lapses in concentration. Maitreyabandhu’s understanding of Cézanne and his motivation are endlessly persuasive without ever crossing into presumption. A rich and intense book, unashamed of its erudition and its powerfully keen sight. -- Sasha DugdaleTable of Contents9 Foreword by Christopher Lloyd 16 Cézanne and the Colour Palette 17 The Method of Loci 19 One Hundred Cloche Hats 21 The Apple’s Progress 22 The Ambiguities of Place 23 Angels in Peckham 25 The Black Clock 26 The Mannequins of Paris 27 Madame Cézanne with Anti-Representational Effects 29 Five Studies for Marie-Hortense 31 Self-portrait of the Artist Wearing a Hat 32 Rilke on the Place de la Concorde 33 Sunday Bells 35 Cézanne’s Dog 36 The House of the Hanged Man 37 The Pissarro Portrait 39 Cézanne in the Studio 41 This Painting of a Mountain 43 Man with a Pipe 45 Léontine 49 Cézanne’s Peasant 51 The Artist’s Mother 52 The Church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte 53 Einstein’s Watch 57 Human Things 58 Apple, Chairback and Dish 59 The Disfluency of Cézanne 60 Kukai in Provence 61 Il Était Plus Grand Que Nous ne le Croyions 63 Afterthought 64 The Red Teapot 65 Art Tutorial 67 Rilke Writes to His Wife from the Salon D’Automne 69 Morning in the Studio: Les Grandes Baigneuses 70 This Perpetual Dazzlement 71 Cut-outs 73 Matisse in the Studio 75 Roger Fry at Langham Place 76 For the Artist of Anahorish 77 The Quarry at Bibémus 78 Sufficient Blueness to Give the Feel of Air 79 A Worm Composing on a Straw 81 Salt 83 At the Vollard Shop 84 The Three Inseparables 85 Bathers at Rest 87 L’Œuvre 88 Burnt Lakes 89 Two Dozen Mongoose-Hair Brushes 91 The Mountain Ode 93 Under Linden Trees 95 Vallier 96 Opusculum 97 On Rough Ground 99 Two Ways of Closing 101 A Horde of Destructions 103 Notes

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind, finding little, as they go, that 'can be claimed self-evident'. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s 'vacated' corners – even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery. Winner of the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize.Trade ReviewGamble can be very funny as she winds up grandly rhetorical phrases for seemingly inconsequential events… The book’s best poems offset that witty, jiving, occasionally arch voice with tender, slower effects... -- John McAuliffe * Irish Times *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 *Table of Contents11 The Landing Window Is Unspeakable 12 The Oak That Was Not There 13 Time Ball 14 Odradek Returns 15 Wonderland 16 Amethyst 17 Coda 21 Feria de Málaga 22 Leòdhasach 23 The Holy Host in Spanish Art 24 Gutties 25 Alchemist 26 Betty Staff’s 28 Feldspar 30 Incident Report 31 The Wits 32 Oils of Sculptors Working 35 Crane Fly 36 Parotia Displaying in a Forest Clearing 37 Plume 38 Girl with Book and Rubber Bands 40 Bloater 41 Enkidu’s Worm 42 Mare at Large 43 Credentials 44 Siete Lagunas 45 Kitten 49 Marine Snow 50 The Canal at Fountainbridge 52 Gardyloo 54 Little Monument: Se Vende 55 In Memoriam Your Stuff 56 Urn 57 Handwriting 58 Wormhole, Westlink 61 In the Annum 63 Abandoned Asylum 64 Sometimes Nothing 66 Winter Sunday 67 Holograph 68 Person 70 In the Recliner 71 Madeleine 72 IndyRef, 2014 73 Samhain 74 Moths 79 Notes

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Book SynopsisTrawlerman’s Turquoise, Matthew Caley’s sixth collection, features various seemingly recherché elements – telepathy, Madame Blavatsky, epistolary novels, muse worship, Balzac’s coffee addiction and Thomas Merton’s accidental electrocution amongst them – not always as straightforward ‘subject matter’, but caught up in the backdraft of the poems’ acceleration. The book’s title derives from the long, central, hyper-associative poem, ‘from The Foldings’ – trawlerman’s turquoise being a phrase to describe a psychic glimpse of the ocean for perennial inner-city dwellers, who have only ever heard rumour of one. Caley’s lyrics and love poems are poised between sincerity and its inverse, and a seeming ‘parallel world’, which gradually emerges, sits at odds with, and sheds light on, the current state of our actual world – full of melting borders, random dangers, shifting identities, misread communiqués, false reports and information overload – destabilising and exhilarating in equal measure.Trade ReviewDecidedly indecorous, Caley's vocabulary pricks his readers to keep the action anachronistic and contemporary… the book is a Waste Land of sorts, punctuated with Pound-like fragments…carefully [meticulously] crafted. -- Edwina Attlee * The Poetry Review, on Rake *A series of densely written love poems in which the reader is aware of something strange and beautiful (and perhaps a little dishonest) going on behind the scenes… It is this sense of play that makes the poems so striking, as well as the tightly reigned undertones of kitsch… Rake seems to have created a brow of its own, colloquial enough to keep you reading, yet complex enough to keep you uncomfortable…the reader is aware of something strange and beautiful. -- Emma Hammond * Poetry London *Formally outrageous, culturally light-fingered, Caley’s vision and wit make for poems that turn a wondrous, great lamp on the inter-relatedness of all things. An important poet. -- John StammersTable of Contents9 The Vltava 10 Thaw 13 Stendhal Syndrome 14 In Praise of Turkish Coffee 16 5.00 a.m. 17 Epistolary Novels 19 Aloes Démaquillant 20 Summoning Spell 21 Telepathy 23 Bay Tree on Turner Street 25 from Aphid Soliloquies 27 The Crossing 28 Don’t Touch that Heater 31 Training at Altitude 33 The Pub Crawl [Slight Return] 36 The Level 37 from The Foldings 56 The Trap 58 The Glaziers 59 Line Lengths 60 The Nomads 62 Wake Up 63 Spring Fever 65 And the Horse in Each Movement 67 The Weight 68 The Waterfall 69 Basilisk 70 Meadow Saffrons 72 Slow Blow Job 75 The Truce 76 Dear Directeur 77 My Beautiful Comrade from the North 79 [Prayer for] The Frazzled

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Book SynopsisScientists and engineers are the great explorers of our age. Inspired by the work of leading research scientists, by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, space telescopes which allow us to see our Sun in wavelengths far beyond human vision, and by the Cassini mission’s astonishing photos of Saturn’s moons, poet Katrina Porteous translates to the non-scientist contemporary questions about the nature of physical reality and our understanding of it. Edge contains three poem sequences, Field, Sun and the title sequence, which extend Porteous’ previous work on nature, place and time beyond the human scale. They take the reader from the micro quantum worlds underlying the whole universe, to the macro workings of our local star, the potential for primitive life elsewhere in the solar system on moons such as Enceladus, and finally to the development of complex consciousness on our own planet. As scientific inquiry reveals the beauty and poetry of the universe, Edge celebrates the almost-miraculous local circumstances which enable us to begin to understand it. All three pieces were commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle between 2013 and 2016, with computer music by Peter Zinovieff. Sun was part of NUSTEM’s Imagining the Sun project for schools and the wider public (Northumbria University 2016). The title sequence, Edge, was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4. Edge is Katrina Porteous's third poetry book from Bloodaxe, her first to draw upon her long involvement in scientific projects, following two earlier collections, The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England.Trade ReviewThis meditation on chaos and cosmos ends with our own planet glimpsed from the Earth’s moon… The experiment is brave, original and intriguing. -- Martin Hoyle * Financial Times, on Edge *An extraordinary new poem… The verbal flow, like the effect of the moon, is tidal, with words crashing in and then gently sliding away again. -- Jane Anderson * Pick of the Week, Radio Times, on Edge *Really brings alive the nature of the Sun to new audiences in new ways. -- Professor John Woodward * Northumbria University, on Sun *Table of Contents9 Introduction I 26 Volcanoes of Io FIELD 29 Field i 30 Quiet i & ii 32 Gravity i & ii 34 Electromagnetism i & ii 36 Higgs i & ii 38 Quantum i & ii 41 Dark 42 Field ii II 44 Various Uncertainties i 45 Aurora 46 Observatory SUN 48 Real 49 Dynamo 50 Hydrostatic Equilibrium 51 Rotation Patterns 52 Sunquake 53 Sunspots 54 Many 55 Flare 56 Stolen Light 57 Corona 58 Spicules 59 Null Point 60 Magnetic Reconnection 61 The Sun makes a noise! 62 Fraunhofer Lines 63 Window 64 Frequencies III 67 Various Uncertainties ii 68 Speakable and Unspeakable EDGE 70 First Rising Tide 72 Io, first postcard i & ii 74 Io, Jupiter’s Moon 75 Enceladus, first postcard i & ii 77 Enceladus, Saturn’s Moon 78 Titan, first postcard i & ii 81 Space Telescope 82 First High Tide 83 Io, first falling tide i, II & iIi 86 First Falling Tide 87 Enceladus, first falling tide 89 Second Rising Tide 90 Io, second rising tide i & ii 93 Titan, second rising tide 95 Highest Tide 96 Moon CODA 102 Wake 103 An Education 104 Intertidal 111 Notes

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Book SynopsisFrank Ormsby's seventh collection of poems reflects not only the beauty of the Irish landscape and the sensuous and aesthetic impact of the small farms among which he grew up, but also the continuing violence of the 'Troubles'. Close to the surface of mountain and bogland lie the hidden graves of the 'Disappeared'. Ormsby continues to make vivid use of the short, resonant poems which were a striking feature of Goat's Milk and The Darkness of Snow. Here too the content is often delivered and reinforced through rich, contrasting images within or between poems: the scarlet flowers growing in a black kettle, the fuchsia that is both 'redolent of old battles' or a 'peaceful tapestry in the annals of stone'. Among the personae of the collection is the obliging father who volunteers to be buried by his children up to the neck in sand within sight of but some distance from the 'cold shadow of the mountain'. The elegiac note that echoes through the poems rarely darkens the mood. Ormsby’s wit and humour, his sly sense of the absurd and what might be called his affection for the living and the dead draw the reader into considering the conviction that it is sometimes 'possible to believe / that joy grows irresistibly at the roots of everything'.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… 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 LongleyGoat’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) *Ormsby has found his place and time in The Darkness of Snow. Ecological and political, personal and historical, these are songs of reconciliation by a poet who was always, in fact, a generous maker of his own peace processes, and exceptionally wise in the art of being human. -- Carol Rumens * PN Review *Table of Contents13 Untroubled 14 The Black Kettle 15 The Bee-keeper 16 Fuchsia 17 The Wild Dog Rose 18 Foxgloves 19 The Butterfly House 20 Roman Laurel 21 Cows: 21 1 ‘Their eyes are innocence…’ 21 2 ‘The utter ignominy…’ 22 3 ‘We never got used…’ 23 At the Elvis Convention 24 The Sound of Trains 25 Seaside 26 The Disappeared 27 Today There Has Been Information 28 Dawn Chorus, with Painting by Joan Miró 30 Towards an Elegy 32 Small Things 33 Small World (4): 33 ‘I set my cap…’ 33 ‘In your hair, scents of autumn…’ 33 ‘Belfast Lough…’ 33 ‘Summer surrenders…’ 33 ‘Old friends at the tavern…’ 33 ‘Fooled into flower…’ 34 ‘A hermit bird, the corncrake…’ 34 ‘The heron fluffs…’ 34 ‘Wind across bogland…’ 34 ‘Ochone! Ochone!…’ 35 From A Belfast Journal 37 Saying Goodbye to the Family 38 White-throated sparrows 39 Love Poem 40 Convalescence 41 The Book-mark 42 Second-hand 42 1 The Second-hand Bookshop 42 2 The Second-hand Book 43 Nits 44 Preliminaries 45 Evening on the Farm: Early Winter 46 Poem Beginning and Ending with a Drunken Poet 47 The Poets 48 The Launch 49 With Seamus Heaney in Mind: 49 1 The Poet’s Death 49 2 At the Graveside 49 3 Visiting the Grave 50 Starlings: 50 1 A Big Hand 50 2 Every Curve 50 3 Élite 51 4 Starlings at play 52 The Kingfisher 53 Autumnal 54 The Last Leaf in the Garden 55 Fums and Porringers 56 The Urban Fox 57 Scarecrow 58 The Suitcase 59 At a Railway Station, Calcutta 60 Winter Landscape with Searchers 61 He Was the Eighth to Go Missing 62 Billy Robinson’s Kawasaki 63 Abandoned Gardens 64 Some Farmyard Buckets 65 The Hatchet 66 Custodians 67 There Will Be a Knock 68 Wake in Progress 69 Sleeping and Forgetting 70 The Bomb 71 The Security Man 72 Chagall’s Goats 73 Aristotle Reaches Fermanagh 74 Rosary 75 Rains 76 Pulse 77 The Rain Barrel: 77 1 Prologue 77 2 We Acquire the Rain Barrel 78 3 Notes Towards a Portrait of the Rain Barrel 78 4 A Busy Life 79 5 The Rain Barrel in the Snow 79 6 In the Family 79 7 Two Old Warriors 80 8 Still Life 80 9 Lost Lives 81 10 Romance 81 11 Interlude, with Girls 82 12 The Rain Barrel and the Full Moon 82 13 Photograph, with Rain Barrel 83 14 The Rain Barrel and the Sparrows 83 15 Another Use for a Rain Barrel 84 16 Lightning and the Rain Barrel 84 17 Some Other Duties for a Rain Barrel 85 18 The Butt 86 When She Died, Thinking of Him 87 No Closure 88 Rain Flowers 89 Grace Before Meals 90 The Dogs 91 Beyond the Walls: 91 1 By the River 91 2 Miss Brightly 91 3 The Peacock 91 4 Souvenir 92 The Grey Squirrel 92 Sharing Beds 93 The Parents Wait 93 Parents 94 Lessons 95 Visitors, 4 a.m. 96 The Roundabout 97 All He Remembered 98 Our Woods Were Friendly 99 The Two Trees 100 Thaw 101 Running Water 102 After Fernando Pessoa 103 Notes

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Book SynopsisEleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages. Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children. A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections.Trade ReviewEleanor Brown's breathtaking début collection… she displays the sharp wit of a Molière, with graceful, cerebral rhymes that leave a bitter aftertaste. Ever insightful and enormously funny, she juxtaposes moving descriptions with killer punchlines. * Time Out, on Maiden Speech *Rarely have I read so refreshing and engaging a first collection. On display are wit, wordplay and an exhilarating flexibility of rhyme and rhythm. Alongside a barmaid's address to "the Lads" is a succulent celebration of a wedding-cake. Jaundiced Sirens laconically slide closing couplets in, like rapiers. A subtly sustained and cunningly crafted sonnet sequence, assessing an affair, comprises the last rites it abjures. Love's assumptions are laid bare after the manner of a female Catullus or Alceste. Mistress of the telling phrase, Eleanor Brown seems as joyously drawn to her themes, and their expression, "as music draws a dancer". -- Stewart ConnTable of Contents9 Representation 10 She’s Going in an Office like her Daddy 12 This is My Own Bit of Thing 14 Appetite 15 What Would You Put Dracula Under? 16 Heroes I 17 Girls Don’t Need to be Educated, They Get Married 18 Location Location Location 19 Honeymoon 20 Nice Murders 22 Damsel-fly 23 The Dressmaker 25 A Tragedy on Every Page 27 Fast-talking Girl 28 The Empress and the Golden Swan 30 Verbatim 31 Friends 33 Sleepovers 34 The one that I came in with 35 Good Smells 36 Assistant Librarian 38 Wannabe 1938 39 Unsatisfied Requests 40 All the Little Mermaids 41 Fen Jenny 42 The Changeling 43 White Ink 44 Helpless with Laughter 45 North Staveley Songbird 46 A Broken Heart or Something Like It 48 Why Is the Skull Crying 49 A Burning 51 Good Hunting 52 Blood Sugar 53 Snatches of Old Lauds 55 Heroes II 56 A Lot of Schoolboy Stories 57 The Jig-borer 58 The Tracer 60 Blue Rain 61 War Quartet 63 Bledewort 66 Chess Queen’s Letters Home 70 Poem on the Underground 72 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisLegna Rodríguez Iglesias has quickly become one of the most celebrated Cuban poets writing today. Her intense – often confrontational – poetry refuses to conform, subverting expectations and challenging social mores. Particularly arresting is her uncomfortable focus on the human body, which she dramatises in isolation, stripping it of context, making it strange and even obscene. Alongside poems of extreme descriptive vigour, Rodríguez Iglesias irreverently skewers the hypocrisies, clichés and hierarchies of our time. This selection offers a broad survey of Rodríguez Iglesias’s work, drawing on eight previous collections in Spanish. Throughout, the poems are inflected with Cuban history and explore the tensions between the generation of the Revolution and her own. The consequences of poet’s long-term residence in Miami are forcefully brought home through poems of emigration and estrangement. The playfulness and verbal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English by Abigail Parry, an award-winning poet whose debut collection Jinx was published by Bloodaxe in 2018, working in collaboration with bridge-translator and writer Serafina Vick.Trade ReviewThe Poetry Translation Centre gives the best contemporary poems from Africa, Asia and Latin America a new life in the English language, working with diaspora communities for whom poetry is of great importance. By fostering creative collaborations between poets and translators, the PTC produces high-quality translations that extend the audience for international poetry.Table of ContentsIntroduction 5 from Fertile Truce [2012] Fertile Truce 19 Memory is a bullet train 21 Thirty heads a day 23 Spoilt 25 Special Period 27 Eat 29 Rotten cherry 31 Mad dog pack 33 The cemetery 35 Canaan 37 from Transtucted [2017] 47 41 52 43 53 45 54 47 55 51 57 53 66 55 from Miami Century Fox [2017] Maggot people 59 Ms Trolley remembers countries 61 The day my girlfriend’s molars started hurting 63 You don’t say 65 Pure Jazz 67 The head that filled with water 69 What is my name? 71 Giddy-up Johnny 73 No flowers for me 75 from The Perfect Moment [2012] The day that I 79 The head I lost 81 Music for chameleons 85 Red room 87 Orange room 89 Blue room 93 White room 95 from Gum (Now is When) [2013] ‘Calm down…’ 99 ‘I wanted to do some sort of poetic exercise…’ 101 ‘The one tying…’ 103 ‘When a 25-day-old cat dies…’ 103 ‘At the core of every being…’ 105 ‘Truly, it is a shame…’ 107 ‘When I send off my poems…’ 107 ‘I must ask you…’ 109 from Dame Spray [2016] Kenozero 113 The Great Architect 115 An accumulation of dry matter that is slow after flowering but intensifies during the lactic phase 117 My girlfriend leaves for Cancún today 119 My girlfriend’s brother 121 Graduate 123 The quantity of water initially necessary to support the substratum is determined by its nature and dimensions 125 Grandpa Brecht 129 Bucket, rope, fire extinguisher, etc. 131 I’m making friends with all the police in the city so I can rob a bank with my water pistol 133 The importance of tolerance and its development 135 Farmer’s treasure 137 from Sucking the stone [2013] The good life 141 The ways 143 I don’t know how to put this 145 The law of dynamics 147 Sucking the stone 149 Kabuki theatre 151 Sucking the stone 153 The world of the senses 155 Four by four 157 from Thread+Thread [2015] The thread 161 To get what I’m given 163 Cold beneath the moon 165 The worst part 167 Lips 169 Easy 171 How the violin sounds 173 Kilometres 175 The house 177 I do not exist 179 The thread 181 Notes 183 About the Authors 187

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Book SynopsisIreland. Night. A grotto to the Virgin Mary illuminates a deserted road. Overhead, the soundless roar of the Milky Way’s glittering traffic reminds us of a past that runs parallel to our own uncertain times. Olives ripen in a Portuguese valley. The sound of gunfire approaches a Paris café. Irish women revolutionaries march towards their future. Tigers prowl through County Leitrim's rural townlands, whose old names emerge like neon signposts from the dark: Red Marsh, Small Watery Place, Round Hill of the Boys. Róisín Kelly’s Mercy is an attempt to reconcile her Catholic background with her pagan heritage, transcending the limits of a world in which everything is connected. Both intimate and political, this powerful debut collection combines a passionate exploration of self with an awestruck confrontation of wilderness. Róisín Kelly was born in west Belfast, raised in Leitrim, and now lives in Cork. Her pamphlet Rapture (Southword, 2016) was described by Leanne O’Sullivan as ‘fierce and mysterious, beautiful and compelling’.Trade ReviewRóisín Kelly hauls the mythological up into the contemporary world in this fiercely tender collection. Love and loss are laid bare again and again under constellations new and old, in skies above Greece, Portugal, America, France, and Ireland. Kelly’s intelligence and wisdom ignite each of these poems, whether funeral pyre or beacon in the dark light. Mercy burns with ruthless beauty. -- Zsuzsi Gartner * author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives *What is striking about Kelly’s writing is that she intentionally situates herself within Ireland’s literary tradition, frequently drawing on Yeatsian images like the rose. She is unswerving, however, in her desire to draw romance and realism together, and Kelly revives the symbols of old so that they might be re-spoken in a brazen, drunken voice… Kelly’s poetry is at once tender and savage, steeped in tradition yet brave in expression — she takes readers where they don’t want to go, a feat that most writers attempt, but few achieve. -- James O’Sullivan * Los Angeles Review of Books *Unafraid of sentiment, these twenty poems meditate on lost love, longing, and the tendency of intimacy to arrive as an utter surprise, and dissolve just as swiftly. -- Grace Wilentz * Poetry Ireland Review (on Rapture) *This brief collection shows remarkable emotional range. Kelly leaves the reader afloat on a tide of colour.’ -- Alison Brackenbury * PN Review (on Rapture) *Table of Contents9 Mercy 10 Leave 11 Mars in Retrograde 12 Tom Barry 13 Chameleon 15 Penelope 16 Domínio Vale do Mondego 18 Guarda 20 A Massage Room in West Cork 21 Rapture 22 In America 23 Mary Anne MacLeod 25 Mar-a-Lago 27 La Chalupa 28 At a Photography Exhibition in New York Public Library 29 Rose 30 Glenveagh 31 Storm Warnings 32 Paris, 13 November 2015 34 Tropical Ravine House in Belfast Botanic Gardens 35 Eden 37 The Cave of Melassini 39 Ithaca 41 Oranges 43 Easter 44 Miracle at Standing Rock 46 The Unicorn Children 47 Tigers in Leitrim 48 Poem for a Friend’s Unborn Baby 50 Northern Lights 51 Cosmic Latte 52 irish coffee 53 Mercury in Retrograde 54 Ophelia 56 Amongst Women 59 Wedding Below the Perseid Meteor Shower 60 Tuam 62 Granuaile 64 Notes

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Book SynopsisThe two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross’s writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation – with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.Trade ReviewAt 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 *Table of Contents11 Edge States 14 Erasures 15 Nocturne with a View of the Pier 23 The Age of Electricity 24 Touched 25 A Wave… 28 Shag, Rampant 30 Himself 32 Firepower 34 Pyroglyphs 37 Three Fevers and a Fret 40 Equator 41 Southern Cross 43 The House of Innumerable Things 45 Canberra Rising 48 The Day of the Things 50 The Floes 51 Restoration 54 Bay Laurel 56 A Kind of Rapture 57 Sea Koan 59 How He Lay 60 Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach 62 Dear Barber 63 Of the Silence at the Heart of Pyrotechnics 64 Between the Islands 79 Towards a Line from Guillevic

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Book SynopsisMagnum Mysterium is Irish American poet Julie O’Callaghan’s first collection since Tell Me This Is Normal: New & Selected Poems (2008). Her new poems have evolved from the early monologues – written in American demotic – to poems of heartache on the death of her husband, the poet Dennis O’Driscoll. But even in these harrowing poems she never loses her ear for the absurdities of modern life – including the grieving process where she can “see” her husband alive and doing what he loves ('Cyber You'): I need to see you living and breathing. I go to YouTube and there you are being you (the tiny you) with the tie I bought you for Christmas sitting on a chair on a stage in Santa Fe asking Seamus questions. Eternally. In Magnum Mysterium Julie O’Callaghan has continued writing poems which 'seem effortless and are immediately accessible and achieve great emotional weight by the lightest of means' (Michael Hartnett Award citation).Trade ReviewThese poems are agile, heartfelt and original. They expand with repeated readings, earning the reader’s trust as they echo voices that are recognisable all around us, if not within us as well. -- Leslie Ullman * Poetry *O’Callaghan’s subtle ear for the intonations of speech, her appalled delight in the things language is made to do in our consumer-crazed era…and her shrewd handling of line-endings mark her as a true poet, someone with an almost deranged interest in the possibilities and impossibilities of words. -- Patrick Crotty * The Irish Times *Table of Contents11 Island Life 12 Sitting in a Cloud 13 Voyage 14 After Gulliver 16 Maximum Car Wash 17 Zen Christmas 18 Norman Rockwell’s Apples 19 Riddle 20 No Longer with Us 21 Horse Power 22 The Day 23 Floating World 24 Headlights 25 The Bridge-Tender I Didn’t Call Dad 26 News 27 Beside Me 28 Unfunny 29 Last 4th 30 Stay 31 Ship 32 Garden Daydream 33 Bruisers with Groceries 34 Ice Age 35 Seasonal Affective Disorder 36 Distant Memory 37 New Year’s Omens 38 Hidden 41 21st Century Pillow Book 45 Departure Drama 46 Mother in a Twister 47 Broken 48 Call 49 Early on Indian Hill 50 Teensy Tomatoes 51 Perfect World 52 Festivities 53 Purchasing Vittles 54 At Whole Foods 55 Nuclear Bombs 56 A Cabin in the Berkshires 59 United Nations 60 Peaceful Valley 61 Check the Fridge 62 Mystery 63 Babu will show you to your room After Dennis O’Driscoll 67 Magnum Mysterium 74 Alien 75 Abandoned 76 Me & Our House 77 Dreams 78 Vow 79 Dictation 80 Here 81 Pup 82 Pygmalion 83 Ultimate Skellig 84 Hidden Words 85 Faith 86 Cyber You 87 You in Mid-air 88 It’ll Be OK 89 Vinegar 90 Our Cliff 91 Aghadoe 92 After Dennis O’Driscoll

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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. The title of his eleventh collection, Belongings, signals that these are poems concerned both with our possessions and with what possesses us. Among much else in the word belongings, the poems draw on a sense of our ‘co-ordinates’ – something like the eastings and northings that give a map-reference – how you might triangulate a life. The poems ask: Where do you belong? And have in mind also the hostile: You don’t belong here. Go back where you belong. Many, possibly all, the poems in the collection touch more or less closely on such matters. Perhaps all poetry does, showing a life in its good or bad defining circumstances. In the poem ‘Red’, the defining geography is literal, drawn from an old geological map of Manchester in which Constantine finds ‘the locus itself, a railway cutting / Behind the hospital I was born in’, from which the paths of a life led outward. In other poems the particular becomes universal, a territory holding all our belongings, our memories of the people and the places we hold in our hearts. Behind these explorations another kind of belonging is challenged: our relationship with the planet to which we belong, but which does not belong to us.Trade ReviewThe 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 *Constantine’s peculiar vision is an uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday…the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable… Overwhelmingly the poems are intelligent and well-turned, setting out the tensions between innocence and experience with fine control. -- Elizabeth Lowry * TLS *Table of Contents1 11 My recent encounter with the Good Angel 15 Red 16 Lake 17 Puddles on the track… 18 Maps 19 How it saddened me… 20 Eye test 2 22 For the love of it 23 High wind, sunset, high spring tide 24 Full moon and cloud-cover 25 Abandoned bulb fields under Samson Hill 27 Strata 28 Landfall 29 The lucky and the unlucky 31 Black Dog 3 35 At the garden centre 37 The lady on the lid 38 My Tilley hat 40 Both knowing, neither saying… 41 Recall 42 My neighbour 43 He awoke and found it true 44 Dad’s Wastwater 45 As when on a usual Sunday… 47 Open Mic 4 50 Ballad of the barge from hell 51 Ballad of the slave ship in the eye of heaven 52 Song: The way things are is the way things have to be 54 Ballad of the cruise ship 5 59 I will hold you in the light 60 First thing I saw then… 61 Côté coeur 62 The horseshoe 63 Fields 64 The tidebreak 65 On the borderlands 66 Stele 6 69 Leaves 70 Ash 71 Ways of being 72 Sycamore 73 The blackthorn path 74 Plane tree 7 77 My friend’s belongings 78 Young woman with a cello on the metro 79 Old men walking the streets 80 Unborn child of Elizabeth Gaunt 81 Young woman asleep 82 Rescue dog 83 The Marazion man 84 Dancer 85 Mazey 86 English lesson 87 I watched a man… 88 The morning after 89 Carousel 8 91 Six more Hölderlin Fragments 9 98 Chorus from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 99 Chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone 101 Dolphin 103 Notes

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Book SynopsisIn her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of her third poetry collection. Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, she revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place: 'These small movements towards the bracken are to be reckoned with.'Trade ReviewThrough poems of meticulous clarity and precision, Williamson charts the lives and landscapes of a tragedy and its aftermath. These are poems which honestly and respectfully explore the two worlds of humanity: the world we inhabit, its towns, fields and rivers; and, equally importantly, the emotional and spiritual context - the world which inhabits us. What binds the two together? In this powerful and moving collection, it is surely love. -- John Glenday * [on Return by Minor Road] *Heidi Williamson’s Return by Minor Road is a wonder. Almost unbearably moving at times, these poems evoke the elemental nature of memory, our animal striving for survival, and the horror that human beings so often inflict upon each other. In three sections, the haunting of trauma, the returning in memory, and the return in actuality to honour the dead, Williamson reminds us that our most sacred responsibility is to remember. -- Dan O'BrienA subtle, moving collection that embraces and explores the landscape cut into the heart. With profound moments and a cumulative power, the collection encapsulates how place and the past are a continuing emotional reality. -- Esther Morgan * [on Return by Minor Road] *It is these moments of stillness in Williamson’s writing, of stasis and contemplation, of sadness and such beauty, that make her poems unforgettable. They make you return to them, to find what made you stop in that silence.... A sense of extreme loss pervades her writing, but it is counterbalanced with a lightness of touch, a fluidity and a simplicity that keeps you reading. -- Tilly Nevin * The Oxford Culture Review [on The Print Museum] *At their heart is human tenderness and a sense of human friability... The poems display an incisive mind, a powerful imagination and an equally impressive purchase on language. -- Moniza Alvi & Paul Farley * PBS Bulletin [on Electric Shadow] *Table of ContentsI What the river leaves behind 12 The wall 13 In a schoolroom, the woodcutter 14 Thrawn 16 Cormorant 17 Weir 18 Loch Occasional 20 What the river leaves behind 21 It’s twenty-two years ago and it’s today 22 Bracklinn Falls 23 Watching the past in the waters of Loch Earn 24 The rain in the night 25 Fugitive dust 26 Lepus timidus 27 Tharn 28 Hare II Cold spring 30 From 31 Scottish spring 32 Monochrome 33 Cold spring I 37 Calls 38 After 39 Describe 40 Flowers 41 And 42 Dumyat 43 Balquhidder 44 Aubade 45 Sheriffmuir 46 Cold spring II 49 Elegy 50 Snowdrop III The wild rain 52 When we were stone 53 Culvert 54 With a rootless lily held in front of him 56 Tonight my heart is open so hard it could shatter 57 Every day 58 Allan Water bridge 60 Facing north 61 Disappearance at six o’clock 62 Return by minor road 63 Dunblane 64 The weight of news 66 Historical markers 67 Wet morning in the cathedral square 68 A language learned abroad 69 The trees of the Trossachs 70 Self 72 Smoke 73 Dust, at intervals 74 The wild rain 75 Winter river 76 Place 79 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisA giant crane appears at the back windows of a residential street, its beam swinging freely, its red ‘eye’ seeming to overlook the lives on the other side of the glass. In her eighth collection of poems, Susan Wicks writes searchingly about our ordinary existence, its serendipities and unreliable sense-impressions, its delight in a new generation, its brief escapes – but this earthbound perspective is also part of an implicit dialogue. Under the crane new buildings spring up, seasons shift, perspective varies, until, its work completed, the giant machine is ready to be driven away. By the time it leaves, the landscape we knew will have changed and we too will have moved on.Trade ReviewWicks can be both a fearless and arrestingly tender kind of writer, unafraid of taking a thought into uncomfortable, raw or unexpected places. -- Paul Farley * PBS Bulletin [on House of Tongues] *Wicks’s poems have a magnificently physical presence… She presents a world which is grounded in reality…but still distinctly susceptible to metamorphosis…not confined to the narrowness of one lifetime, but attentive to the ebb and flow of all life, to all the things that must come round again. -- Chloe Stopa-Hunt * The Poetry Review [on The Months] *Table of Contents9 Dear Crane 10 High Wind 11 For the Blind 12 Tamar 13 The Romance of Steam 14 Crane 15 Dear Crane 16 Feeding the Ducks 17 Driving to Dorking 18 Separation Anxiety 19 Free Slew 20 Dear Crane 22 Look 23 Emergency 24 Parable 25 Two Tractors 26 Perhaps 27 Dear Crane 31 Paint 32 Over the Old Station 33 Two Trains 34 Halfway 35 Explaining Snow 36 Dear Crane 40 Stacked Planes, 5.30 a.m. 42 Dicky Ticker 44 Midwich Cuckoo 45 M25 46 The Old Cemetery, Cove 47 Dear Crane 50 Clubbercise 51 Elderly Bathing Solutions 52 Rhubarb 53 Maine, End of Summer 54 After the Lobster Feast 55 Dear Crane 57 Sirinas 58 Reading Scott Fitzgerald at the Gorgona 60 Olive tree with Clothes-pegs 61 Leaving Alikí 62 Credo 63 Sunset at Karnagio 64 Marble Beach, with Crane 65 Dear Crane 69 After a Daughter’s Miscarriage 71 The Road to Bardigues 72 On the Day of the Royal Wedding 73 Lopped Trees 74 Windmill above Golfech 75 Dear Crane 78 The Sunday Hunters 79 Robert Singing 80 Notes

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Book SynopsisHow might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection includes the prize-winning sequence ‘Dolorimeter’, which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewA fresh, moving and brilliantly inventive book... some of the most striking, and touching, moments in the book come from its dry sense of humour... Atkinson sees the absurdity in everyday scenarios, but also their poetic potential. -- Sarah Howe * Poetry Wales, on So Many Moving Parts *The unexpected imagery always packs a punch... Visceral, and at times unsettling, this darkly iridescent verse is hardly comfort poetry – but that's the point. -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady, on So Many Moving Parts *This is poetry of acute aliveness... These new poems have the dynamic quality of robust, heightened speech... With these revelatory, refreshing poems, Atkinson conveys a many-faceted self, and frees up possibilities for the voice in poetry. -- Deryn Rees-Jones & Moniza Alvi * Poetry Book Society Bulletin, on So Many Moving Parts *Table of ContentsI Dolorimeter: 19 readings 11 /ˌdɒləˈrɪmɪtə/ 12 Table 8.1: What makes patients anxious about gastroscopy 14 Heroin works 15 Found poem I 17 Accident & Emergency 19 Song of a pain 20 McGill Pain Questionnaire (annotated) please tick 21 Mr Broad’s morphine 23 Neuropathy 25 SOCRATES 27 Found poem II 28 A Biblical pain & an aside on bedside manner 30 Pranidhana 31 A line from the doctor (annotated) 32 Clean windows 34 A bad cold 35 Signs of the body: longitudinal sample at tea break 36 Last 38 The smokers outside Bronglais hospital II 41 You can’t go there 50 The heart it’s true looks jaunty 51 Walking with Virginia 52 In this class 53 Mantras 54 The department of small arts 55 Consent 56 Dear Sam 57 It is a very gracious hotel 58 Workshop 59 Panels 60 There is no sexual relation 61 Hymn 62 Dog speaks 63 Categories of experience c. 2016 64 The poem Kolkata 65 Wire-seller, Lal-Bazar 66 Kalighat 67 Yoga 68 Parable 69 Postscript 70 21 points for a feminist essay on film 72 Burgeon 73 Neighbour 74 Experiment 76 Eggshell 79 Notes

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Book SynopsisDeborah Landau’s fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets, draws a bull’s-eye on humanity’s vulnerable flesh and corrupted world. In this ambitious lyric sequence, fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an endangered planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets”. Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places – subways, cafés, street corners – into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind. ‘O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon / enough what’s the rush,’ Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st-century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the US recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany. Deborah Landau is director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She has published three previous collections in the US, most recently The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011) with Copper Canyon Press. CNN commissioned an opinion piece from her, ‘We are all soft targets’, in the light of US inaction on gun control following the latest shootings in August 2019.Trade ReviewAn essential meditation for our era. * Nylon *Through the cadence of these poems, which sometimes resemble lullabies in their dreaminess and gorgeous lyricism, Landau captures the ways humans persist, despite our collective anxiety, in our longing for 'something tender, something that might bloom'. -- Boxed/starred review * Publishers Weekly *Deborah Landau has developed a style of writing poetry that reminds me of Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson, these long poems that feel dreamy because they are so lyrical. This is also her most political book. -- Major Jackson * The Boston Globe *Table of Contents3 when it comes to this fleshed neck 7 there were real officers in the streets 21 those nazis, they knew what to do with a soft 31 America wants it soft 41 into the sheets we slipped, a crisis 53 the silence will be sudden then last 59 the snow goes to the gallows of a warm grass and what survives 67 don’t blame the wisteria 71 Notes

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Book SynopsisA collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem – part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining – the poems are united by a desire to pay absolute attention to both the material and inner world. The worlds within this collection appear to be teeming with life – crabs push through sand, wasps swarm on meat; and forms change – bones are replaced with metal, a human head transfigures into that of a muntjac – but there is nothing frantic in this shifting. The care taken in the poems to properly look, to focus on stillness and acts of interrogation, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame. If this book could be said to have a central demand of the reader, it is to consider whether they will allow themselves to attend to the pain and joy of giving due reflection to what is happening in the world around us, in their lives and the lives of others. And what the cost of that is. Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry’s second collection, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize, and was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.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. 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 *We were impressed by the book's refreshing ambition and sophistication, its liveliness and bounce, and how rewarding the poems were as we read and re-read them. -- Judges Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Professor Karen Leeder and John McAuliffe * 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize *Richly self-reliant, these are poems for the girl-power generation. In a world where all is relative, subjective and ironic, their breakages and weaknesses and contradictions get as close to something like sincerity as most young poets dare. -- Kate Bingham * Poetry Review *Table of Contents11 beaches (1) 12 beaches (2) 13 beaches (3) 14 beaches (4) 17 beaches (5) 18 beaches (6) 19 beaches (7) 20 beaches (8) 22 beaches (9) 24 beaches (10) 26 beaches (11) 27 beaches (12) 29 beaches (13) 30 beaches (14) 33 The execution was conducted in the open air 35 Lilac crest 38 No rabbit 40 Apples are ¼ air 43 On trampolining

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Book SynopsisFleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.Trade ReviewInformality and immediacy are vivid ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut. -- Fiona Sampson * Guardian *Fleur Adcock’s poetry is lauded for its composure and ease of delivery. Yet that sense of control…belies a more complicated history. -- Julian Stannard * Times Literary Supplement *Fleur Adcock is as clear-eyed as always in a collection that ranges widely over lost worlds, family histories …but always maintains the art of seemingly artless observation. -- Adam Newey * 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 * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsThe Mermaid’s Purse Island Bay The Teacher’s Wife The Islands A Bunch of Names The Fur Line A Feline Forage in Auckland House Peter’s Hat A Small Correction In the Cupboard Giza Siena Realms In the Cloud Hollyhocks Berries Amazing Grace Divining Welsh This Fountain Magnolia Seed Pods Bats Novice Flyer Wood Mice Sparrowhawk Election 1945 The Little Theatre Club The Other Christmas Poem Anadyomene Victoria Road To Stephenie at 11 PM Lightning Conductor The Annual Party Letting Them Know Blackberries Tatters The Old Road Poems for Roy: Dead Poets’ Society Jade Plant Double Haiku Elm Four Poems and a Funeral Maundy Thursday 2017 An April Bat Porridge Annual Tribute Winter Solstice Snowman Mayonnaise

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Book SynopsisClaire Askew’s electrifying second collection is an investigation of power: the power of oppressive systems and their hold over those within them; the power of resilience; the power of the human heart. It licks flame across the imagination, and rewrites narratives of human desire. It is a collection for anyone who has ever run through their life ‘backwards/ in the dark,/ with no map’ – these bright poems illuminate the way. How to burn a woman throngs with witches, outsiders, and women who do not fit the ordinary moulds of the world. It is a collection which traces historic atrocities, and celebrates the lives of those accused of witchcraft with empathy, tenderness and rage. It lifts a mirror up to contemporary systems of oppression and, in language that is both vivid and accessible, asks hard questions of our current world. These poems also delve deep into love in all its forms: from infatuations to the bitter ending of relationships. They ask what it is we want, how we might go about getting it, and what its cost might be. How to burn a woman sweeps the world up in its arms and presents it: a rough bonfire of London buses, Salem streets, Edinburgh closes. Askew’s astute, incisive language lifts from every page, throwing sparks.Trade ReviewIn this book of spells, Askew stirs together smart, modern poems about whisky, heartbreak and male-female relationships with a darker sequence about our “foremothers” who were persecuted as witches. How to burn a woman is full of hard-won wisdom and beauty. The vibe is Kim Addonizio joins a coven. -- Clare PollardClaire Askew doesn’t mince words: she revels in them, pretty or dirty, and hammers them into strange and kenspeckle amulets, talismans against loss, death, isolation…. Looking into the future with ‘no innocence’, haunted by the past, the allusive, mysterious work at the core of this collection will take Claire Askew far. -- Pippa Little * The Lake *This changes things is, admirably, a feminist collection - deeply concerned with women's lives, in all their strength and vulnerability. But Askew has a capacious eye; in the slow-burning second half of the book... some strong poems documenting travel... suggest a poet whose next steps are attractively difficult to predict... Askew is the real thing, and everyone should buy this debut. -- Kathryn Gray * Magma *Table of Contents9 Domonic 13 Nessie to the unaccompanied minor 14 Playing it cool 15 The flirt 16 Hand of Glory 18 Christopher’s rules for skimming stones, which are also rules for living 20 The women who’ve loved you 22 A Field Journal of Witches 24 Travel poem 27 Devils 29 The affair 31 Giles Corey 32 Thornfield 33 Knife 35 May 37 A spell for the departed 38 Sarah Good 41 A spell to honour your foremothers 43 You can’t always get what you want 44 Rodney 45 Motorcycle jacket 47 The neighbours of Ursula Kemp 49 Hot rod 50 Dean 52 Coming second 54 Merga Bien 55 A spell for the rejected 56 Mothers of sons 58 Show me again 60 Eunice Cole 62 Men 64 A spell for preparing to sleep alone in an unfamiliar house 66 Things men want to hear you say 68 Whisky 69 Watching the red kite trying to fly 70 Phone sex 72 Anne Askew 74 Men of the rack 76 Fletcher Mathers 78 Listening to Rainymood in Waverley Station 79 A spell for obedience 80 Janet Horne 81 Big hands 82 Library 83 A spell for the unbelieved 85 How to burn a woman 89 Foreplay 93 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisBlending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures. These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’ and Carl Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’: through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight. Amali Gunasekera was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She works in the field of Archetypal Psychology. After living in Mozambique, Kenya and India, she is now based in Cumbria. Her first collection, Lotus Gatherers, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 (under her former name of Amali Rodrigo).Trade ReviewAmali Gunasekera's second collection is a beautiful examination of the separateness and union of "I" and "You", rooted in an English pastoral tradition reminiscent of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Myth, the natural world, the ephemeral beauty of music or the filter of light on a wintry morning, unite to articulate love for the "Beloved". These are masterful poems of intimacy and joy leading to places of stillness and wisdom. -- Shash Trevett * PBS Bulletin *What makes [Gunasekera] 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 Glenday * on Lotus Gatherers *The first full collection from [Amali Gunasekera] – 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 *A native of Sri Lanka, [Gunasekera] writes complex iridescent poems that sidestep any routine post-colonial interpretation...This is beautiful work, unlike anything out there, wonderfully alive and so deserving of wider attention. -- Conor O'Callaghan * Poetry, The Reading List *Table of ContentsKasturi Mrugam 11 I Reading James Merrill at Curwen Woods 14 Worry Doll 20 Beloved 28 Variation on the Fact of Spring: One for Sorrow Two for Joy 35 II from Nine [Miscarried] Methods 48 III Spiegel im Spiegel 56 Bend in the River 63 Variations on the Fact of Spring 69 The Great Pause 80 Bonsai 89 Notes 93

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Book SynopsisAnne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. Her perspective in Ox-Eye – the term for a small cloud presaging a storm – is one of apprehension in poems relating to personal and social change. Ranging from her native east coast of America to her adopted home on the south coast of England, these incisive but often amused poems question how we view past and present, dismantling obsolete nostalgia, and casting a critical eye on what we wish for and what may happen instead. Ox-Eye is her fifth collection from Bloodaxe, appearing 14 years after her previous book, The Upshot: New & Selected Poems, which included the new poems of The Divided (2008), along with selections from her first three critically acclaimed earlier collections, Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing (1997) – both Poetry Book Society Recommendations – and The School of Night (2004).Trade ReviewAnne Rouse’s poems are watchful and amused, sardonic and appalled. They are also in the best sense political: the big picture of our whole society informs her miniatures of city life where dossers and shopping jostle for attention alongside love and death. -- Ruth Padel & Sean O’Brien * PBS Bulletin *Rouse has honed her craft further to produce some lovely focused lyrics with a wonderful development in her tone. The sureness of Rouse’s touch is a pleasure to read throughout and The School of Night is her most moving volume yet. -- Andrew Neilson * Magma *The reader is surprised and pleased and informed by the conclusions the poet leads us to, by her often poignant humour and shocks of transcendence that are rooted in a natural and unforced realism. -- Penelope Shuttle * Poetry London *Table of Contents7 Polaroid 8 Moonrise 2021 9 Landfill 10 Feeny’s Yard 11 Finish Line 12 Seyton 13 Night of the Monkey Puzzle Tree 14 The Town 15 To the Night Market 16 Ballad of a She 17 Haymaking 18 Late Swim 19 Greetings from Hastings Pier 20 Change 21 Request to a Neighbour 22 The Builder’s Mates 23 Inconsequence 24 Fling 25 Cyclops in Cythera 26 The Waves, and a Bang 27 It Greens Again 28 Uncertain Ode 29 A Thank You Note 30 The Morvoren 31 Morvoren (Variation) 32 Ode to a Puritan 33 From the Dark Tower Came 34 Man Ironing 35 Monterey 36 The Scholars’ Hostel 37 Before I Left on Friday 38 High Wall 39 Graffiti 40 Heel 41 Again 42 Notes from a Moon Station 43 Oil 45 Speech Act 46 Ildeth in Bela 47 Warriors 48 A Calenture 49 A Lothario 50 Obits 51 Domestic Animal 52 Report on Local Damage 53 Clematis 54 Found Poem for Beryl Markham 55 Louse 56 Suburban Pastoral 57 The Beat 58 At Chincoteague 59 Return to Sender 60 The Maying 62 Grotto 64 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisIn Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through pit villages and the haunt of The Miners’ Strike, to the subliminal of the everyday – including poems about typists, pencil sharpeners and learning to drive in a Ford Capri. This highly accomplished debut collection explores what it means to belong, what it means to be on the margins. This is poetry written in praise of family and community and those qualities which make us human: love, language and, most of all, resilience. Sarah Wimbush is a Leeds poet who hails from Doncaster. She has published two pamphlets, Bloodlines (2020), winner of the Mslexia/PBS Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019, which was also shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards, and The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith Doorstop, 2021), a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2020. Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands is her first book-length collection.Trade ReviewThere is a Romany saying, We are all one: all who are with us are ourselves: Sarah Wimbush’s collection draws us into the world of Travellers with linguistic panache and delight. -- David Morley * on Bloodlines *A vivid love poem to the changing landscape of South Yorkshire and its residents. The poet suggests the teeming life of the place which langugage which rolls along on its own lively music and images that sing. -- Imtiaz Dharker * on The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster *The writing felt local and universal like much good writing does, saying new things about old subjects like The Miner’s Strike and growing up, and there was a powerful anger in the poems that didn’t overwhelm them but fuelled the ordinary. -- Ian McMillan * on The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster *A thrilling debut that kept me outdoors in the grassy world of communal lives. I love the formal dazzle and linguistic dare that spoke of defiance, survival and utter joy. -- Daljit Nagra * on Bloodlines *Table of ContentsI 11 House 12 White Cottage 13 Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands 14 Mother Tongue 16 Dukkering 17 Carroty Kate 18 Gran Violet Applies a Poultice 19 Gal 20 The Hedgehog’s Tale 21 John Thomas 22 Pitched early mornin’ at encampment o’ Gypsy king Esau Smith 23 Scrapping at Marshall’s Engineering, Gainsborough 24 I can see Sandbeck Hall 25 Them Dunstan Kids 26 Our Jud 27 Threshin’ 28 Straw Ticks 29 Bedsheet 30 Meat Puddin’ 31 Laneham Ferry 32 The Bittern 33 The Calling Basket 34 A Sund’y in Worksop 35 Late Afternoon by a Hedge 36 Census 1911 37 Earring 38 The Ring 39 Walking Girl 40 The Astronaut Who Came to Tea 42 In the Library 43 Gifts 44 Bloodlines II 46 Pilgrim Queens 47 Things My Mother Taught Me 48 Inside Lingerie 49 2:15 at Doncaster 50 The Pencil Sharpener 51 Giant Leaping 52 I learned to drive in a metallic blue Ford Capri 53 Visiting My Aunt on Her Birthday, 1st September 1979 54 Uncle Reg 55 Between Mary Berry’s Baking Bible and My Class Enjoys Cooking 56 Rebel 57 A Spring Morning 58 Vixen 59 Pompocali 60 Trip to the National Portrait Gallery, with the wife 61 The Powder-monkey’s Apprentice 62 Peasholm Park 63 Blood Sugar 64 William Shaw is lowered down the shaft 65 Hillards 66 STOP! 67 Rosso Youthy 1984 68 Near Extinction 70 Markham Main 71 The York, Edlington 72 The Lost 74 Our Language 77 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisSpanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999’s Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the malevolent powers-that-be to task, as in her seminal poem ‘I’m Over the Moon’: ‘I don't like what the moon is supposed to do./ Confuse me, ovulate me,// spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient / date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,// I'm angry. I'll take back the night.’ Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Her poems dance wildly to the sizzling music of the English language, awake to every syllable: ‘Artless// is my heart. A stranger/ berry there never was,/ tartless.// Gone sour in the sun,/ in the sunroom or moonroof,/ roofless.’ These poems are also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny – ‘like having a bad boyfriend in a good band’ – though there is always wisdom beyond the punchline. Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, Liquid Flesh collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.Trade ReviewThe resonance of Shaughnessy’s poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain. -- Richard Howard * Boston Review *Shaughnessy can write the kind of line that is confusing in its beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, [lines] that can be read and reread without exhausting their potential meaning. -- Elisa Gabbert * The New York Times Book Review, on The Octopus Room *Love is the fierce engine of this beautiful and necessary book of poems. Love is the high stakes, the whip of its power and grief and possibility for repair. Brenda Shaughnessy has brought her full self to bear in Our Andromeda, and the result is a book that should be read now because it is a collection whose song will endure -- Victoria Redel * New York Times Book Review *Table of Contentsfrom INTERIOR WITH SUDDEN JOY (1999) 13 Still Life, with Gloxinia 14 Lure, Lapse 15 Jouissance 16 What’s Uncanny 17 Swell 18 Dear Gonglya, 19 Rise 20 Glossary 22 Your One Good Dress 23 Lacquer 24 Epithalament 25 Cinema Poisoning 26 Postfeminism 27 Project for a Fainting 28 You Love, You Wonder 29 Ever 30 Interior with Sudden Joy from HUMAN DARK WITH SUGAR (2008) 35 I’m Over the Moon 37 Why is the Color of Snow? 39 One Love Story, Eight Takes 43 I’m Perfect at Feelings 45 Drift 46 Me in Paradise 48 Embarrassment 52 A Poet’s Poem 53 First Date and Still Very Very Lonely 55 Dancing in my Room Alone 57 A Brown Age from OUR ANDROMEDA (2012) 61 Artless 63 Head Handed 64 Nemesis 68 The World’s Arm 70 Streetlamps 72 Liquid Flesh 77 Visitor 79 Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel 81 Products of Perception 82 Miracles 83 Big Game 85 I Wish I Had More Sisters 87 Magi 89 At the Book Shrink 91 Headlong 92 The New People 94 Nachtraglichkeit 96 Our Andromeda from SO MUCH SYNTH (2016) 119 I Have a Time Machine 121 McQueen is Dead, Long Live McQueen 128 Artisanal 130 Wound 132 Dress Form 134 But I’m the Only One 137 A Mix Tape: ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ 141 A Mix Tape: The Hit Singularities 147 ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ 173 Simone, Age 3, Late Summer 175 Never Ever from THE OCTOPUS MUSEUM (2019) 179 Identity and Community 180 No Traveler Returns 183 Gift Planet 185 There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles) 190 Bakamonotako 192 G-Bread 194 Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer 196 Thinking Lessons 197 Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence 199 Blueberries for Cal 200 Are Women People? 208 Our Zero Waiver 210 Our Family on the Run NEW POEMS 215 Moving Far Away 216 The Impossible Lesbian Love Object(s) 219 Tell Our Mothers We Tell Ourselves the Story We Believe Is Ours 226 Who Sings Whose Songs? 230 On ‘Loss of Feathers’ by Ursula von Rydingsvard 232 The Artist Jessica Rankin 235 The Poets Are Dying 236 What Have I Done?

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Book SynopsisBefore and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets from China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of his poetry, written between 2019 and 2022. The different sections – short poems, sequences, and one long poem – form a single comprehensive statement of Yang’s recent explorations. It is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as his father’s death. The creativity of the writing faces – is even excited by – the depth of the challenges of reality. The long title-poem in seven parts is a spiritual journey travelling back in time, completed back in the now, building up into 'a reincarnation within one', as endless time is transformed into multilayered poetical space, in Ai Weiwei’s words: 'This intellectual tower… [turns] the unsurpassable puzzles intermingled with life and death into an in-depth exploration of human emotion.' Ai Weiwei's innovative cover image featuring CCTV cameras and chains made of gold stretches around the whole book, across French flaps and then continues inside the front and back covers of the book, becoming an extraordinary metaphor for the book’s content.Trade ReviewThose lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang’s original blues brothers, but he’s as much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarmé or Rimbaud […] Yang Lian’s work is rooted not in geography but in his own imagination […] to exist in Yang’s lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure. -- Tim Kindseth * Time Magazine *Repressive regimes tend to have little problem acknowledging poets’ power to shape our opinions and our world. Some of those they exile settle in Britain. Yang Lian, a leading member of China’s Tiananmen generation, has just published his autobiographical masterpiece Narrative Poem in translation… A kind of wild lyricism marks the work… a sense of the explosive urgency of writing itself. -- Fiona Sampson * The i Paper *Yang Lian is one of the most ambitious poets writing in Chinese today – indeed, one of the most ambitious poets writing in any language… Narrative Poem represents a stunning achievement of both poet and translator, bringing the two together almost as one. -- Lucas Klein * Translation and Literature *Table of Contents9 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction by Ai Weiwei 一，短诗 SHORT POEMS 根 17 Root 致身边消失的陌生人——给武汉 19 To the Vanished Stranger Beside Us: Written for Wuhan 死海 20 Dead Sea 青草祭 22 Green Grass Offering 虚构·2020 24 Fiction 2020 魇·2020 25 Nightmares 2020 瘟疫实验室 （一——三） 28 Plague Laboratory （1-3） 一只名叫“希望”的瓮 31 An Urn Called ‘Hope’ 奥威尔的新年 32 Orwellian New Year 奥维德的泉水 34 Ovid’s Spring Water 落：肖像 35 Falling: A Portrait 2019年12月19月: 冬至和诗 37 19th December 2019: A Response Poem of the Winter Solstice 柏林安哈尔特火车站大门 39 Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof Main Gate 树林中的铁轨 41 Railway Tracks in the Woods 音乐会上的狐狸幽灵 43 Phantom Foxes at a Concert 羽毛·石头 45 Feather – Stone 石头·羽毛 46 Stone – Feather “金沙，请听二十秒钟雨声” 47 ‘Jinsha, Please Listen to 20 Seconds of Rain’ 在上博撫摸一只西周编钟 49 Touching a Set of Western Zhou Dynasty Bells in Shanghai Museum 听溥雪斋弹《梅花三弄》 50 Listening to Pu Xuezhai Playing Three Plum Blossom Airs 溆浦美人夜歌 52 Xupu Beauty Nocturne 星期一，以西湖为背景 54 Monday, with West Lake for a Backdrop 邋遢大士九十歌 56 Messmaster 90 Song 海上家书 58 Letter Home from at Sea 病毒隔离中的生日华尔兹（一——五） 60 Birthday Waltz in Virus Isolation (1-5) 名字的诞生 63 Birth of a Name 汕大，封存的家书 65 Shantou University: A Sealed Letter Home 绚丽的不可解封之诗 66 Magnificent Nonblockable Poem 听茶 （一） 68 Hear Tea (1) 听茶 （二） 69 Hear Tea (2) 念湖 70 Lake Longing 白千层 72 A Thousand White Layers 御花园·零与夜 73 Imperial Garden. Zero and Night 御花园·孔雀 74 Imperial Garden. Peacock 御花园·牡蛎 75 Imperial Garden. Oyster 御花园·铜舟 76 Imperial Garden. Bronze Boat 御花园·墨乐 77 Imperial Garden. Music of Ink 御花园·来德之风 78 Imperial Garden. Laide’s Wind 御花园·玉圭 79 Imperial Garden. Jade Tablet 御花园·石器时代 80 Imperial Garden. Stone Age 御花园·最后的 81 Imperial Garden. Final 罪恶研究 82 Researching Evil 反安魂曲 86 Anti-requiem 二，组诗 SEQUENCES 轮回·灵骨塔（98行） 91 Reincarnation – Stupa (98 Lines) 倒退的历史诗 95 Poems on Turning Back History 韩退之中元节，或从四面八方坍塌到我们头上的时光 98 Han (Retreater) Yu’s Hungry Ghost Day Or, Time That Collapses onto Our Heads from All Sides 高福里中元节，上海背影之歌 102 Hungry Ghost Day at South Gate Or, A Song of the Back View of Shanghai 鹤乡 107 Crane Land 大夫，我是你身边一滴水 111 Master, I’m a Drop of Water by Your Side 三，长诗 LONG POEMS 一座向下修建的塔 119 A Tower Built Downwards 迷宫 137 Labyrinth 奥威尔的新年（诗剧版本） 151 Orwell’s New Year – A Verse Drama

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Book SynopsisBurning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick’s mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season. Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature’s vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city. Yvonne Reddick’s first book-length collection builds on the achievement of her pamphlets Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.Trade Review'To have an ecological education, wrote Aldo Leopold, is to live alone in a world of wounds. Yvonne Reddick writes of the natural world in all its wonder, variety, and woundedness. Her poems are precise, beautiful, and clear-eyed acts of witness. They are also calls to action.' -- David MorleyElegiac, original and memorable, these poems uncover the private maps and ghost-bearings that guide us in the mountains, creating their own vivid geology. -- Helen Mort * on Translating Mountains *Reddick sets a sombre music behind the rawness of loss, like a glimpse of her mountains in the distance. * PN Review, on Translating Mountains *It’s impossible to read this collection without being moved. * New Welsh Review, on Translating Mountains *Table of Contents11 Muirburn 12 The Flower that Breaks Rocks 13 In Oils 16 He set off… 17 Esther in the Asylum Garden 18 The Gift 19 November 20 Fire-seed 22 The Frontier of Water 24 Madness Lake 25 Fired Earth 26 Superb Lyrebird 27 December 28 At the Corrie of the Birds 29 On the Alaskan Peak We Never Climbed 30 Loyal, Munro, Schiehallion… 31 Storm Petrel 36 January 37 Coal Measures 41 I watch the city through oil… 42 Frankincense 43 Cristaux de Roche 45 Translating Mountains from the Gaelic 46 Shadowtime 48 Of the Flesh 49 Spikenard 50 Firesetter 51 Kindling 52 February 53 Fossil Record 56 Ptarmigan 57 Rime 58 Hare at Haslingfield 59 March 60 Imagines 62 Burning Season 64 Waterland

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Book SynopsisThe Hopeful Hat is Carole Satyamurti's last collection. She was preparing these poems for publication at the time of her death, and left the manuscript in an advanced state of readiness. The sequencing of the poems, and the sections they are grouped in, had already been decided by her. These late poems are informed by Satyamurti's keen eye for social injustice and, equally, by the breadth of her compassion. Poignantly, they are also her nuanced poetic response to having her voice box removed following a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer. The poems' formal accomplishment is carried lightly; characteristically, it is this light touch that enables Satyamurti to move so deeply. Clear-eyed in the face of her own mortality, she produced a series of courageous poems that are, as Carol Ann Duffy said of her work, 'laced with the hard stuff'. They are also graced with Satyamurti's unique and subtle wit. The preface by the poet's daughter, Emma Satyamurti, places this collection in the larger context of four decades of published work, and provides an illuminating insight into the poems gathered together here. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewNo matter how compelling her themes, with their demands of compassion and political conscience, Satyamurti never loses hold of her main topic: the capacity of language. -- Bernard O’Donoghue * Poetry London *Carole Satyamurti’s poems look to be stations on a road map of psychological discoveries, sometimes personal, sometimes objective and scientific. Her best poems are not so much confessions as meditations. -- Anne Stevenson * London Magazine *Her unobtrusive approach is deceptive – these poems have unexpected stings in their tails. -- Penelope ShuttleTable of Contents7 Foreword by Emma Satyamurti 10 Acknowledgements I 13 The Hopeful Hat 14 Cans 15 How to Wash Dishes on the Eightfold Path 16 You Could Say 17 Obituary 19 Inheritance 20 Wednesday Again 21 New York 22 Easter 23 All that Is Solid Melts into Air II 27 Voicing the Void 28 New Year on T14 29 Glossal 30 Sea Change 31 Necklace of Wasps 32 Mother Tongue 33 Overtones III 37 Requiem for a Death Foretold 38 Small Change 39 Paper Boat 40 Vyasa’s Gift 41 Hold On 42 The Climate Game 43 War Rhyme 44 Grand IV 47 Debrief 48 Ought 49 Sight Reading 50 Succulent 52 Solitude 53 Shoreline 54 Le moment juste 55 It Turns Out 56 Happening 57 Less than Beautiful 58 April 59 Memento Mori 60 Endurance 61 Logically 62 Solid

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Book SynopsisIn Peter Bennet’s poetry nothing is what it seems to be. Modern spaces are haunted by the past and the unreal. We cannot tell the encroacher from the encroached. Discontinuities in time and space and playful short-circuitings produce exhilarating shivers. Bennet is an astute observer of people, places, and things, however, and we find ourselves surprisingly at home on this border between plausible narrative and the wilder territories of the imagination. This comprehensive selection reflects Bennet’s full range for the first time, and begins with poems from the early 1980s, when he arrived in Jon Silkin’s Stand at the no longer young age of forty. It draws on seven collections published since then and includes his major sequences: The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood, Bobby Bendick’s Ride, Landscape with Psyche and Ladderedge and Cotislea. New work introduced here centres on another major and powerfully imagined sequence, a colloquy which bridges three centuries to evoke the voice of the Quaker James Nayler, who was abominably punished for ‘horrid blasphemy’. The book concludes with a substantial group of recent poems. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.Trade ReviewPeter Bennet considers the moments of interaction between past and present, fairytale and fact, using folklore’s staples to cast light on contemporary concerns. His watchful, thicketed landscapes, the stateliness of his language, all fit themselves perfectly to winter. This is fireside poetry. -- Sarah Crown * The Guardian *Bennet often tips his hat to his literary heroes, wielding the instructive tone of Norman MacCaig, the direct address of W.S. Graham, and Robert Browning’s sophisticated handling of the dramatic monologue and acoustic texturing, but it is to the imagining of a poetic place that Bennet gives his all. -- Soumyaroop Majumdar * READ *Bennet really does know, very precisely, how to contrive the entry of the powers of place and history into his poems without depriving them of idiosyncrasy, surprise, or their darker natures. -- Sean O’Brien * Sunday Times *Table of Contents13 Light on the Wanney Crags 14 Crazy Dog 15 The Silence 16 Lottie Little and the Trees 17 Souvenir of Malling 18 Síle na Gig or Playmate of the Month 19 Barmaid 20 Funny Man 21 Looking Through a Parched Sea Holly Bush 22 Fête Day at Bellingham 24 Not at Home 25 Hareshaw Linn 26 Winter Hills 27 Duddo Stones 28 Face Painting at Threpwood Hill 29 First Calf 30 At the Queen’s Hall 31 The Old Moor House 32 Cancer Patient 33 Extraction 34 Logan Street 35 The Murrough Lady 38 Berenson at the Borghese 39 The Exhibition of the Esquimaux 41 Le Plan des Pennes 43 THE LONG PACK 63 Ha-Ha 64 Spalpeen 65 Tithonus at Kielder 66 Fairytale 67 The Fossil 68 The Damp Harmonium 69 The Pigeon Loft 70 Squiffy 71 Breathe Carefully 72 The Imp 73 The Sally Garden 74 The Angel 75 JIGGER NODS 97 The Silver of the Mirror 99 The Squirrel 100 The Redesdale Rowan 101 The Tourist 102 Après-midi 103 St George’s Day 104 Black Country Browning 105 FOLLY WOOD 116 The Brass Band 118 The Acorn 119 The Green Corn 120 The Bather 121 Unity in the Englischer Garten 122 Penny Dreadful 123 BOBBY BENDICK'S RIDE 132 Epithalamium 133 Sentinels 134 The Owl Herb 135 Augenlicht 136 Mademoiselle de Silhouette 137 The Mistress 138 The Place I Am 139 The Riddle 140 Auberge 141 The Unsafe Landing 142 The Comfort Service 143 The Laboratory 144 A Helpmeet for Protestant Mystics 145 The Better Place 146 Gantries 147 The Magic Castle 149 LANDSCAPE WITH PSYCHE 156 Proxy 157 Next Time 158 After Pevsner 159 Pastoral 160 Virgil 161 French Windows 162 Sanquar 163 LADDEREDGE AND COTISLEA 174 The Gypsy Fiddle 175 The Vapour Trail 176 Death and the Spinster 177 My Mother at Erbistock 178 A Piano in Hobart 181 NAYLER 219 Vade Mecum 220 Graduands 221 The Scare 222 À Côté de la Sorgues 223 Iron Railings 224 MCMLVI 225 The Promenade 226 The Lucky Ones 227 Taliesin 228 The Floor Above 229 Night Wanderers 230 Ex Sublimis 231 Icarus 232 The Doorstop 233 Vale Royal 234 Klutvang 235 Gestalt 236 Neck Verse 237 The Kite 238 The Refugee 239 Hemistich 240 An Invitation 241 The Goodbye Note 242 Shadowed Water 243 My Mephistopheles 245 Notes

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Book SynopsisIn this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father?s birth, T S Eliot Prizewinner Philip Gross continues to develop the subtle conversation between words and silence that is at the core of his poetry.At this collection?s heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of this book''s central sequence, Evi And The Devil, weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.

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Book SynopsisChristopher Meredith''s new poetry collection, Air Histories, is his fourth from Seren. One of the best writers of his generation in the UK, the rich textures of his work mirror the landscapes and complex histories of places he knows including the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons national park.

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Book SynopsisThe Claims Office is the startlingly good debut poetry collection from Dai George, a fresh, new voice who is willing to tackle such matters as political vision, faith and loyalty with wit and satire.

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Book SynopsisKatherine Stansfield''s first collection from Seren, 0Playing House introduces us to a vibrant new voice in British Poetry. A concise wit, a distinct voice and a unsettling view of the domestic, characterize these poems who''s subjects are the ordinary as viewed through the author''s satirical yet sympathetic eye.

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