Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book SynopsisThese poems come from the beauty of the glimpsed moment - a precious jewel held for a short time amid the pain and sorrow of the world, then let go into the bigger picture - The beauty is what we remember, what gives the moment its significance.

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Book SynopsisWalking Our Story is a collection of much-used and favourite poems from Joy Mead. Many of them have been selected by the author's readers and friends, who ask 'Where can I find ... ?' when they want a poem for a special occasion.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of poems can be compared to such crumbs - from many sources. Poems of strong and well-crafted connections - between communities in the West of Scotland and the West Bank Palestinian territories; between prayer and politics; between a lyrical delight in the natural world - and down-to-earth living, observed with warmth and humour.

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Book SynopsisA psalm based on the New Testament and a modern take on Epiphany are included, along with a dozen new 'Invocations'. Both witty and reflective, the poems will appeal to a wide range of readers.

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Book SynopsisThis is a book about how, on a cosmic and a personal level, darkness gives way to light. It does not sugar-coat the reality of darkness but is full of hope, reminding voyagers that light shines in the darkness', that darkness is required to perceive light and that Easter means the light has come, life triumphs, and the promised Holy Spirit will empower us for growth: eastering' These reflective, prayerful poems are a ticket and passport for a spiritual journey' and can be used in a daily discipline or with groups. For each traveller I pray journeying mercies,' Bonnie Thurston writes. And I remind pilgrims: Take heart. He will come.'Having resigned a professorship and chair in New Testament studies, Bonnie Thurston now lives quietly as a solitary near Wheeling, West Virginia, USA, working as a spiritual director and retreat leader and volunteering in a food bank. She is the author of over 20 books. You are in skilled hands here, so let yourself be carried along, ready to experience delight, or be jarred into discomfort. Above all ponder, weigh, take time. For each poem comes out of the quiet depths of a person who is a fellow pilgrim, illuminating the familiar with her own God-given insight.' Esther de Waal

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Book SynopsisA new collection of poems inspired by the landscapes of Scotland and beyond, and dedicated to Kenneth's late sister, peace activist Helen Steven: She was Scotland to me 'Kenneth Steven is best-known as a poet, although he's also very much a novelist and children's author. It's the wildscape of Scotland that has been his primary inspiration. He grew up in Highland Perthshire and was taken every summer to the west coast and the islands. At the heart of those islands was Iona, the place that from childhood has been his spiritual home. The poems are full of shining images of land and sea, and of echoes of the people who once lived in these wild and remote places; a potent reminder of the history in our geographies. Kathy GallowayKenneth is regarded as one of Scotland's finest poets and prose writers, gaining excellent reviews for his work. His admirers have included the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Ron Ferguson

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Book SynopsisA new collection of poems from Joy Mead - a book of moments, illuminated moments, those times when joy breaks through, when beauty amazes and goes some way towards healing.' Joy's poems celebrate what it is to be alive and also, perhaps, what it is to contemplate death. She hopes that each poem is:Whispering of freedom. Whispering that all that livesis known and never diescompletely. ' a poet of great sensitivity, a deeply religious poet, without being a Religious Poet. Her spirituality is grounded in the depths of ordinary' life the extraordinary life.'Ron FergusonJoy Mead is poet, a member of the Iona Community and the author of several previous books. She has been involved in development education and justice and peace work, and occasionally leads creative writing groups.

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Book SynopsisComprising two books of translations by Reynold A. Nicholson, Rumi Poet and Mystic and Tales of Mystic Meaning, this new anthology offers 170 passages from Rumi's greatest works in one volume.

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Book SynopsisA canonical Victorian writer and thinker, Barrett Browning personified the engaged intellectual. This edition provides a foundation for a complete analysis and interpretation of her works ? and of Victorian Britain. The edition presents accurate and accessible texts of all her published literary works.

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Book SynopsisBorn in Hampshire in 1918, Martin Bell was the leading member of the 'lost generation' of English poets whose careers were interrupted by the War. He was a prominent member of The Group during the fifties, and a major influence on younger poets like Peter Redgrove and Peter Porter. His poetry reached a wide audience during the sixties through Penguin Modern Poets, and in 1967 he published his Collected Poems,1937-1966, his first and last book. Bell was also a champion and brilliant translator of French Surrealist poets. He died in poverty in Leeds in 1978. Like other 'provincial' working-class contemporaries, Bell wrote fantastical, highly erudite, biting, belligerent poetry. And yet – as Philip Hobsbaum said – he also wrote 'some of the most delicate love poems of our time' as well as 'one of the major war poems in the language'. A. Alvarez called him 'an emotional tightrope walker... He writes a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else.'Trade Review'The publication of Martin Bell's Collected Poems is as important a literary event as any not merely this year but in this decade.' – Anthony Burgess. 'Martin Bell is one of the major poets writing in English in the second half of the century.' – Peter Porter

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Book SynopsisFirst known for his war-time poems written from a German labour camp – notably his sombre reworkings of the myth of the Magi – André Frénaud (1907-1993) is one of the most searching of French poets. His work is structured by a sense of quest, which gives it its labyrinthine patterns, underground tensions and fractured, inventive forms. His poetry has an epic and tragic dimension: spurred by an urge for transcendence, it refuses false paradises, arrivals and notions of reconciliation. Rome the Sorceress (1973) is Frénaud’s richest and most disturbing confrontation with the hidden life of myths and the sacred, probing the themes of time, inheritance, revolt, illusions of divinity, father-?gures, mother-?gures, and the insatiable monuments of language which pretend to grapple with this weight of experience. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.Trade ReviewFrénaud is a strong and original French poet who deserves to be much better known in this country. This book uses the city of Rome as a focus for an impassioned meditation on culture and barbarism, faiths and revolts, cruelties and aspirations. Pagan and Christian forces come alike under the burning-glass in a work of immediate impact, even if at times dark and enigmatic. -- Edwin Morgan * PBS Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisPeter Reading was one of the most original and controversial British poets of the post-war period: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. He was a prodigiously skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. Volume 1 of his Collected Poems includes an Introduction by Isabel Martin and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The collections included (in full) are: Water and Waste (1970), For the Municipality’s Elderly (1974), The Prison Cell & Barrel Mystery (1976), Nothing For Anyone (1977), Fiction (1979), Tom o' Bedlam’s Beauties (1981), Diplopic (1983), 5x5x5x5x5 (1983) and C (1984)Trade ReviewReading has spent 25 years creating a body of work which vindicates Tom Paulin’s description of him as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying England”… Now that his entire corpus, astonishing in its range and integrity, is available, it is hard to see how Reading’s role has for so long been under-recognised…Reading has completed a quarter-century masterpiece which has successfully blended the personal, the national and the global. The result is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction, employing a vast array of traditional forms and genres. -- Robert Potts * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Come to the Cabaret - on tour somewhat erratically in the North. Sample its impassioned ballads, phantasmata, and despairing satires. The cast includes a suicidal Pict from Galloway, Morayshire's unsavoury Third Corbie, and the demented Edinburgh surgeon, Scrapie Powrie. Appearing now at the House of Fear, King Shit-Click's Palace and Bede's World. In this new collection from W.N. Herbert, the verse veers from the Whitmanic to Dunbar-like flytings, and the language lurches from Scots to English through all half-way houses. The result is a big bad anxious trip through the Information Age with one of the most various of contemporary poets. W.N. Herbert is a highly versatile poet who writes both in Scots and English. Sean O'Brien has called him 'outstanding - a poet whom nothing - including what he terms "the Anchises of the Scots Style Sheet" - will intimidate'. For Douglas Dunn, his was 'the best writing in Scots - thoughtful, studied, clever - I've seen in years'. Jamie McKendrick admired his 'vibrant' poetry, his 'ear for the sensuous music of Scots' and his 'ability to effect sudden shifts of scale that bring the human and the cosmic face to face'.Trade Review'W.N. Herbert's poetic prescription is kill or cure. Herbert specialises in big, spine-burstingly various and formally eclectic books, in both Scots and English, that are always in the end unified by the energy, wit and intellectual adventurousness of their author - several books in one by a writer who should by rights count as several poets in one' - Patrick McGuinness, Poetry Review. 'This antithesis of the slim volume bubbles and seethes with wit and polysyllabic adventurousness' - Edwin Morgan, The Scotsman.

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Book SynopsisPeter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. Volume 2 of his Collected Poems includes an index for the first two volumes. The collections included (in full) are: Ukulele Music (1985), Going On (1985), Stet (1986), Final Demands (1988), Perduta Gente (1989), Shitheads (1989), Evagatory (1992) and Last Poems (1994).Trade ReviewReading has spent 25 years creating a body of work which vindicates Tom Paulin’s description of him as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying England”… Now that his entire corpus, astonishing in its range and integrity, is available, it is hard to see how Reading’s role has for so long been under-recognised…Reading has completed a quarter-century masterpiece which has successfully blended the personal, the national and the global. The result is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction, employing a vast array of traditional forms and genres. -- Robert Potts

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Book SynopsisâThere are as many nuances and inflections for kisses as there are lips to kiss,â says American poet Tess Gallagher. And so with these playful, serious and sassy poems about kisses, a whole book devoted to the kiss.

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Book SynopsisKatrina Porteous has been living and working alongside the fishermen of the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past thirty years. Half the poems in The Lost Music celebrate her love of the place and its people. Her first collection also includes some of her own drawings featuring both fishing and industry in decline as well the wildlife of North-East England. All her poems are strongly physical in character, written to be read aloud. They take as their starting-point the tensions between time and eternity, change and stillness. In language which is both passionate and controlled, they express the endless struggle to discover new forms of order. The fishing poems develop these themes within a microcosm of the wider world. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, Katrina Porteous traces the identity of the community in its common memory and working practices, finding with the passing of the old ways of life a loss of spiritual direction. The poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember.Trade ReviewKatrina Porteous returned to her native North-East, to an elected solitude on the Northumberland coast. She bears witness to the natural beauty and the industrial wreckage around her. What is rarer, she has also sought out the people there, in particular the dwindling fishing community, and out of this experience she has not only created memorable poems but performed an act of historical and linguistic retrieval. But whatever the subject, there is throughout an engagement with process - be it of natural growth and decay or of human love and mourning - that demands prolonged patience, careful observation and unwavering purpose. A rage for order informs the fashioning of these cadences which resonate in the memory. There are poems here to take to heart, and to have by heart. -- Stephen Romer

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Book SynopsisFrench-English bilingual edition. Gerard Mace's work challenges the barriers between poetry and the essay. This play between and within genres is essential to his writing - which has been called essay merveilleux - and derives from a questioning of language in its broadest sense. He is equally interested in the seductive musicality of words and in the remembered gestures which traced the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the calligraphic writing of the Far East. His fascination with dictionaries, grammars and glossaries leads him off on journeys in which the real and the imaginary are fused, but without being confused. He slips between words like a marvelling child constantly hoping that one day the world might be read like an open book. This edition brings together three series of prose poems, Le Jardin des langues (1974), Le balcon de Babel (1977) and Bois dormant (1983). Other books by Mace have as their subject literary figures such as Rimbaud, Corbiere, Nerval and Champollion, while Rome et le firmament and Lecon de chinois evoke places heavily charged with culture and history. Mace's other books include Vies anterieures (1991), which takes up the relationship between memory and writing, in the form of Lives (as in the Lives of saints or illustrious men), and La memoire aime chasser dans le noir (1993), which develops his fascination with the image - the poetic image, dream image and photographic image. Following the sudden death of translator David Kelley, work on his translation of Gerard Mace's book had to be completed by series editors Timothy Mathews and Michael Worton, helped by Jean Khalfa. Jean-Pierre Richard is one of Europe's foremost literary critics. He has written not only on French poets but also on Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust. He has a wide following throughout Europe and the USA, and is admired particularly for his approachable and sensuous accounts of French writers.

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Book SynopsisThe informing spirit of Garrett's second collection is music – in the cadences of the language, the forms and resolutions of the poems. For her, a memorable poem is a kind of two-part invention, an interplay of the reader's imagination and the poet's intention. As in Bach's deceptively simple studies of that name, when the two discrete melodic lines of reader's and poet's imagination run parallel, polyphony is suggested. Elizabeth Garrett's debut volume The Rule of Three was one of the 20 'New Generation Poets' titles in 1994. A Two-Part Invention was her second collection.Trade ReviewIt is a “metaphysical” poetry (John Donne is one of the few ascertainable influences), almost glacial in its composure, intangible and profoundly erotic. -- Francesco Rugnoni * L’Indice (Italy) *As near to a pure lyric poet as we’ll get in our times. -- Peter Forbes * Poetry Review *

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Book SynopsisFor nearly three hundred years Scotland and England were the Laurel and Hardy of nations. For nearly two hundred years The Prelude was a poem by Wordsworth. Something had to give. As Britain begins to resemble a cut-up by William Burroughs, and the heritage of Robert Burns is flushed down a lavvie in Leith, one verse-monger steps forward to do battle with (or possibly for) cultural chaos. Bill Herbert’s Laurelude is in three sections: The Laurelude is a blank verse myth about Ulverston’s Idiot Boy, Stan Laurel. Othermoor depicts a cubist version of the North where the Wild Boy himself, the late Bill Burroughs, rewrites the rules. And The Madmen of Elgin squashes both Lost Boys and Solitary Reapers into Middle Scots verse forms for a pre-millennial song-and-dance. Like Oliver Hardy this volume refuses to be slim: it bursts all borders, literary and political, creating a zone where the Hollywood musical meets the Jolly Beggars, where lament bumps into love lyric, where the dictionaries go to die. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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Book SynopsisClare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girl’s natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance. In The Heavy-Petting Zoo, the male of the species is shown in all his preening glory, his growling and posturing exposed but also given marks out of ten. The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insider’s in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of today’s bright young things.Trade ReviewThis is such a striking first book that at any age it would be remarkable - from a teenage writer it leaves you excited that there may be so much more to come. * Time Out *Pollard writes entirely and authentically out of the excited anxieties of female adolescence: its quixotic hopes, its merciless bitchiness and its maiming disappointments...The violent colours, the abrupt swerves of thought and the wilfully obscuring bruising of Pollard's poems distinguish them from the usual twenty-something constructions. * The Times *This is work you can’t ignore – raw, reckless and more bloody-minded than an older, so-called wiser poet would dare to be. Clare Pollard tells us what it’s like to be young, slim and pissed at the door of the 21st century. -- Selima Hill

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Book SynopsisSalah Stétié (1929-2020) was a French Lebanese poet and essayist of international renown. In his exquisite, soberly beautiful poems, Western culture merges with Oriental and Arabic traditions. His writing has a swirling metaphysical dimension while never ceasing to root itself in earthy, sensuous experience. His poems evoke a deep, half-questioning, half-serene meditation of all that is ‘hanging on the other side of being’ – ‘the great soft lion’s track in the invisible’ – while still capturing the swarming particularities of our daily presence in the world. Salah Stétié was born in Beirut. After studies in Lebanon and France, he turned his attention towards the problems of contemporary poetry, establishing exchanges and friendships with writers such as Jouve, Mandiargues, Ungaretti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet and David Gascoyne. After launching the cultural weekly L’Orient littéraire in Beirut, he developed two parallel careers, as a writer and as a distinguished diplomat, in Paris, Morocco, The Hague and elsewhere. He published over 40 books, and was awarded Le Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l'Académie Française in 1995. Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets: 10. French-English bilingual edition.

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Book SynopsisAn exiled poet in an English seaside asylum… A winter night spent in the spooky penthouse suite of Ceausescu's vanished daughter… A scientist trying to calculate the heart's square root… All these figure in The Man in the White Suit, Nick Drake's first full-length collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It portrays and celebrates a richly varied cast of characters whose secrets and histories are the central thread of the book, ranging from life studies of those caught out by exile from central Europe or caught up in the strange aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, to intimate love poems and portraits of those learning the arts and mysteries of dying.Trade ReviewNick Drake's début collection is subtle, funny and tremendously moving. He has an eye for the small detail as well as the big picture. These poems brilliantly evoke time and place… This is a collection that will resonate long after you have finished reading it. -- Jackie KayNick Drake's first collection is impressively rich in character and narrative, bringing together a haunting array of mysterious figures and stories… Never sentimental, he is especially good at loneliness, absence and exile. -- Jamie McKendrick & Maura Dooley * PBS Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisGlyn Maxwell’s precocious, proli?c talent established him as one of the brightest talents to have emerged in British poetry over the past two decades. His debut collection Tale of the Mayor’s Son (1990) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His second, Out of the Rain (1992) won him the Somerset Maugham Award. His third collection, Rest for the Wicked (1995), like his second, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has since published several books with Faber and Picador. The Boys at Twilight lines up all the star poems from his three Bloodaxe collections. This is not just early but vintage Maxwell: the lad bursting on the scene with his strange narratives and edgy syntax, then transforming himself in the course of these three books into a modern master whose formal skills and much celebrated imaginative gifts have been surpassed by very few of his contemporaries.

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Book SynopsisGalway Kinnell was one of America's major modern poets. This new selection – drawing on eight collections from What a Kingdom It Was (1960) to Imperfect Thirst (1994) – updated his 1982 Selected Poems, which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His poetry was always marked by precise, furious intelligence, by rich aural music, by devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and by transformations of every understanding into singing, universal art. These constants appear in a dazzling range of poems: from odes of kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to extended, complex meditations. This selection shows how the traditional Christian sensibility of his early work gave way to the sacramental, transfiguring dimension of the later poetry, which 'burrows fiercely into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or even conventional notions of personality' (Richard Gray). As Kinnell once said: 'If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not be a person...you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could speak, poetry would be its words.' Through the poem, Kinnell throws off the 'sticky infusion' of speech and - like the hunter in his celebrated poem The Bear - becomes one with the natural world, sharing in the primal experiences of birth and death.Trade ReviewThere are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence. His language tantalises us with a foretaste of meaning, an underlying emotional logic that recalls Whitman's 'I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.' Like all good poetry, his finest poems attract and mesmerise us before we really understand them. -- Morris Dickstein * New York Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisIn a frantic world, the momentary glimpse can spark a sudden flash of insight. This resonating glimpse-caught on the move-ripples through the mind, illuminating past and present, fast-forwarding in a split second to reveal future possibilities. But in an instant it is gone, lost in the bustle of everyday life. In Glimpses, Brendan Kennelly opens his eyes-and ours-to the world and times we rush through without looking. With their quick fire wit and timeless wisdom, his glimpse-poems are in the tradition of riddles, epigrams, and proverbs. Sublime or profane, joyous or crazily raucous, Kennelly's vivid glimpses have a life of their own, leaping beyond the words used to summon them up on the page. When lightning flashes, the graveyard dances.

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Book SynopsisFrom its opening page – a refugee’s first sight of England – Changes of Address presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of ‘home’. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this book of poems is as rich and multi-layered as a novel. It brings together for the first time the whole range of Philip Gross’s poetry from the 1980s and 90s – a generous selection from his Bloodaxe, Faber and Peterloo collections along with uncollected poems and work from limited editions and collaborations. Changes of Address shows his development from the prize-winning Ice Factory to the Whitbread-shortlisted Wasting Game, but takes the reader also into previously unknown reaches of Philip Gross territory. It does not cover his later work. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation The Bridge is Marin Sorescu’s farewell to life: a book of wryly quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks as he waited for death to take him, his testament not just to human mortality and pain but to resistance and creative transformation. The Bridge is unlike any other poetry book: like a medieval dance of death but sombre in movement, a procession of breathlessly spoken, painfully comic poems. Marin Sorescu was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later – like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas – the peasant-born people’s poet was made Minister of Culture.

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Book SynopsisMaura Dooley’s poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her ‘sharp and forceful’ intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability ‘to enact and ?nd images for complex feelings… Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness…she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ’ (Literary Review). Sound Barrier presents a selection from earlier collections of work written over a twenty-year period.

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Book SynopsisThe Book of Judas, Brendan Kennelly’s 400-page epic poem in twelve parts, was the number one bestselling book in Ireland. The Little Book of Judas is a distillation of that literary monster, purged to its traitorous essence. But Judas never goes away. He continued to worm his way into Kennelly’s imagination long after the original book was “finished”, and The Little Book of Judas includes some damning new revelations from the eternal scapegoat and outcast. Not merely lost but irredeemable, Kennelly’s bitterly articulate Judas speaks, dreams and murmurs – of past and present, history and myth, good and evil, of men, women and children, and of course money – until we realise that the unspeakable perpetrator of the apparently unthinkable, in penetrating the icy reaches of his own world, becomes a sly, many-voiced critic of ours.Trade ReviewThe Book of Judas is an epic achievement and as over the top as the subject deserves. This is poetry as base as heavy metal, as high as the Holy Spirit flies, comic and tragic, from litany to rant, roaring at times, soaring at other times. Like David in the Psalms, like Robert Johnson in the blues, the poet scratches out Screwtape letters to a God who may or may not have abandoned him, and of course to anyone else who is listening. -- Bono * Sunday Independent *This is our most ambitious work of literature since Beckett’s prose trilogy… It is a labyrinthine confessional, clamorous with sin, guilt and malice, with no hint of absolution. The gesture of betrayal reshapes itself in a thousand promiscuous writhings – sexual, political, social economic; the hells of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch rendered in steel-glass corridor, pedestrian arcade, academic cloister, with devils and damned in cashmere, denim, corduroy, polyester... It is the work of moral terrorism, a modern sensibility struggling with medieval demons. You would have to fare far to encounter in literature or life such naked fear – and its attendant self-loathing – so bravely confronted. The Book of Judas is magisterial, a work of supreme technical maturity. -- Augustine Martin * Irish Independent. *

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Book SynopsisClare Pollard wrote her first book The Heavy-Petting Zoo while still at school. Its sequel is Bedtime: a setting for intimacy and tenderness as well as cruelty and pretence, where reality and fantasy are blurred. These are cutting poems from the edge, confronting evil in all its manifestations, especially the bondage of sex and cruelty. They address highly contemporary issues, from confessionalism and reality TV to masculinity in crisis, racial politics and atheism.Trade ReviewClare Pollard has so much youthful talent that it’s alarming. The poems in Bedtime have all the virtues of youth. They are raw and sexy, exotic and compelling, their insights at once intimate and universal. There’s a cruel precision of observation too, coupled with a real opulence, about these pieces – and the wonderful, reckless revelling in the language. I loved the headlong rush of it all. -- Catherine Czerkawska * Mslexia *This is work you can’t ignore – raw, reckless and more bloody-minded than an older, so-called wiser poet would dare to be. Clare Pollard tells us what it’s like to be young, slim and pissed at the door of the 21st century. -- Selima Hill

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Book SynopsisKapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian émigré poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. In Someone else’s life, her first poetry collection to be published in the UK, she explores the emotional and spiritual territory of the traveller and the dispossessed, the spaces between memory and being, exploration and doubt, desire and loss.Trade ReviewIn the suitcase that she has mentally lived out of since she was a little girl, Kapka Kassabova has brought the turbulent memories of 20th century European history with her to New Zealand, where she recollects bad dreams in comparative tranquillity, and always with the phrasing of a born musician. If her finely pitched lyricism is the first thing that strikes you, the second is the richness of sympathy that lies behind it. As if she owed her gifts and blessings to them, she speaks for the generations before her whose lives were ruined. The result is a truly international picture of what it means to be young and sensitive in the modern world. In a short life, she has already established a unique literary identity. -- Clive JamesSomeone else’s life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th century and the first of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this book – skeptical, riveting, passionate – suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us. -- Mark StrandThis much-travelled volume is always, even in several striking love poems, a record of alienation from the “valley strewn with garbage and roses” of her homeland. This doubled sensibility is at once new and accomplished, direct and complex. -- Fiona Sampson * Poetry Review *

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Book SynopsisPoetry has always been bound up with ideas of endurance, redemption, consolation, and survival, and it is one of the best antidotes to depression. We Have Come Through brings together 100 poems celebrating individual courage in resisting the ravages of psychological trauma, induced by both external events and mental breakdown. The book moves through sections covering intimations of alienation, the causes of madness, the individual’s experience at the nadir, through to healing and redemption. The final section has poems that can function as a charm against adversity and as part of our emotional repair kit. Especially powerful are those poems charting the emergence of hope after despair. Poems like George Herbert’s ‘The Flower’ convince the reader that both the despair and the alleviation were real for the writer and they hold out the promise that relief does come. Peter Forbes has chosen poems that range in time and scope from Shakespeare, Clare and Blake, through Hardy, Auden, MacNeice and Stevie Smith, to John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and many contemporary poets.

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Book SynopsisMartial is alive and kicking in Brendan Kennelly's latter-day Dublin versions of the Spanish Roman poet. He is a satirist trying to define generosity, happiness and love, with scurrilous candour and piercing clarity, in brief punchy poems. But no matter how savage his attacks, he is always playful and compassionate. He is a sharp, visionary writer who knows the world about him and is in touch with the world within himself, at once bewildered, attentive and bitingly articulate. Martial Art is a book that packs a punch.Trade Review"If Martial had been a boxer, he'd have developed a new kind of knockout punch, smiling at his victim as he walked back to his corner. His themes are many and varied. He writes of money, food, wine, furniture, style, power, sex, corruption, love, hatred.... That's Rome two thousand years ago. That's Dublin today.... Is one translating Martial? Or is Martial, smiling and mischievous as ever, translating the translator?"

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Book SynopsisPeter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. The collections included (in full) in Volume 3 of his Collected Poems are: Work in Regress (1997), Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), Civil (2002) and d (2003).Trade ReviewReading has spent 25 years creating a body of work which vindicates Tom Paulin’s description of him as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying England”… Now that his entire corpus, astonishing in its range and integrity, is available, it is hard to see how Reading’s role has for so long been under-recognised…Reading has completed a quarter-century masterpiece which has successfully blended the personal, the national and the global. The result is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction, employing a vast array of traditional forms and genres.

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Book SynopsisPauline Stainer is a poet ‘working at the margins of the sacred’, conveying sensations ‘with an economy of means that is breathtaking… her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own’ (John Burnside). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer’s five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her ‘visceral Muse’. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewOver the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls “the divining shiver”, a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess… Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work. -- Frances Leviston * Guardian *Her territory is predominantly that of legend: its symbols and its creatures – the unicorn, the falcon, the serpent – but she often draws them into a contemporary setting where they neither shed power nor lose meaning. Her purpose is not so much to import the ancient world into the modern as to demonstrate that those worlds are of a piece: that old rituals still obtain, that old beliefs still govern instinct. -- David Harsent * PBS Bulletin *Pauline Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-first century. Her poetry preserves a surety of vision, insisting that belief can only increase with knowledge, and that wisdom and faith are still provinces of careful, crystalline language. She is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy, and an impressive familiarity with chemistry and optics. -- Anne Stevenson

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Book SynopsisAnn Sansom’s poetry overturns the reader’s expectations. Her poems often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions – what Stanley Cook called ‘an authentic Northern mix of realism and imagination’. In Praise of Men and other people was her first new book for nearly a decade, a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection Romance won her many admirers.Trade ReviewAnn Sansom’s naturally accomplished and instinctively organised poems come as a breath of fresh air in an age when technical contrivance often passes for literary credibility. There is a maturity to her work, a sureness of hand normally associated with only the most established poets, but there is a freshness too, and a bareknuckle confidence that seems to sing of the author’s realisation of poetry as a first language and a mother tongue. -- Simon Armitage

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Book SynopsisSir Gawain & the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure and romance. This splendid new translation – by one of the world’s leading poets – has already been acclaimed in America. The original poem and W.S. Merwin’s modern version are comparable in stature and imaginative power to another medieval epic, Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney’s rendering. All Camelot is merry with Christmas revelry when an enormous green-skinned knight with brilliant green clothes rides into King Arthur’s court. This giant throws down a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever delivers the fatal blade must promise to take the same in a year and a day. When the young Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight grabs hold of his severed head and makes off on horseback. The poem follows Gawain’s adventures thereafter – shockingly brutal hunts, an almost impossible seduction, and terrifyingly powerful adversaries – as he gallantly struggles to honour his promise. Capturing the pace, impact and richly alliterative language of the original Middle English text – presented on facing pages – Merwin brings a new immediacy to a spellbinding, timeless narrative written many centuries ago by a master poet whose identity has been lost to time. Modern and Middle English parallel text edition.Trade ReviewGawain remains, centuries after it was written, a poem of uncanny power. It has the tapestried richness of legend, but also an astonishing psychological complexity. Its lines are elegantly wrought, but they propel us through an adventure filled with erotic entanglements, dire challenges, and mysterious landscapes. Here is that rare poem with both the epic dimension of ageless myth and the eerie intimacy of last night’s dream. The clarity, ingenuity, and force of W.S. Merwin’s translation will enable a new generation of readers to discover a remarkable masterpiece, -- J.D. McClatchy

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Book SynopsisMaram al-Massri is an Arab love poet for the modern age. She writes short, seductive lyrics of astonishing clarity and piercing candour, stringing them together like pearls in a story chain. This first English translation of her work draws together poems from two sequences. Her red cherry is like red lips, a fruit or drop of blood offered for the reader to taste in the poems, but abandoned to the coldness of the white-tiled floor, the white paper of the page. Her lines are anguished but tightly reined, breaking completely with traditional Arab love poetry to draw on everyday language as well as images and metaphors remembered and reinvented from childhood and the Koran.Trade Review"'Maram al-Massri relates the most subtle events of her life - a life completely rooted in the unassuaged anxiety of love, a love from which neither desire nor fear nor tenderness are absent; she tells of her joy in being the object of somebody's advances, or her disappointment when she is not. She tells of the violence of a moment of passionate intensity or the bittersweet duration of a memory...It's only love that's worth living for, says Maram, and love is always about to leave...All that remains is the awful, muffled beating of this heart or, still lighter and distinct, the sound of footsteps in the garden, footprints barely visible in the sand, as if the soul had bare feet, and was walking' - Salah Stetie; 'Maram al-Massri needs only certain mots justes, certain utterances, to evoke the intimacles of love, the simplest as well as those most charged with secrecy and meaning. Both precise and dreamy, Maram al-Massri's intimate poetry gives a voice to the soft light which illuminates the wonder of being in love' - Lionel Ray"

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Book SynopsisTatiana Shcherbina has been described as ‘one of the most significant figures in contemporary Russian poetry’ (Kommersant’). In her recent work the elegant and ironic narrator meditates on love, disappointment and loss against the backdrop of Russia’s social collapse. Sometimes her poems take the form of overtly political statements (‘Dictatorship, democracy’), sometimes new capitalist Russia is reflected merely in the emotional plane – in a poem on lost love she claims she has paid the highest rate: cash. Whilst her themes are timeless, Shcherbina’s settings are distinctly contemporary. She writes about sitting at a computer gazing into the Microsoft Windows; her poems are full of supermarkets, printing cartridges, TV, the environment; she considers applying make-up, drinking alone, falling asleep to the sounds of films in the next room. Tatiana Shcherbina is one of a generation of Russians who have been to travel frequently in Europe. She has lived in France – and sometimes writes in French – and her Russian poetry is filled with an awareness of other ‘European’ culture. She has even been criticised for a supposedly anti-Russian stance, yet she understands absolutely what is happening in Russia and is in no way an outsider. Hers is also the stance of a woman challenging Russia’s patriarchal and chauvinist society. However, Tatiana Shcherbina’s poetry is not primarily political, but literary, and she shows great versatility in different forms and genres. Her playfully meditative essays form the perfect counterpoint to her sophisticated and self-aware poetry. Russian-English dual language edition.

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Book SynopsisJosephine Balmer's 'Chasing Catullus' ventures into border territory, the no-man's-land between poetry and translation, juxtaposing new poems with fresh versions of ancient texts, brazenly reimagining classical literature, wittily subverting epic works, overwriting the past like a palimpsest. But there is a more personal journey here too. 'Chasing Catullus' presents a dark odyssey of the soul, descending in and out of the underworls as Balmer responds to the death of her young niece from cancer, exploring difficult times and dangerous emotions with compassion and humour. The poems push back the boundaries, blurring differences between ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar, giving voice to contemporary loss and grief.

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Book SynopsisTua Forsstrom is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland's most celebrated contemporary poet. Her breakthrough came when she was still only 30 with her sixth collection, "Snow Leopard", which brought her international recognition, with its English translation by David McDuff winning a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. "I Studied Once At A Wonderful Faculty" is a trilogy comprising "Snow Leopard" (1987), "The Parks" (1992), and "After Spending a Night Among Horses" (1997), coupled with a new cycle of poems, "Minerals." Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. As Sweden's August Prize jury commented, this is poetry 'both melancholy and impassioned', expressing a 'struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction - against death in life'.Trade ReviewTua Forsström's poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure...a survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others... She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Hölderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. * Claes Andersson *Forsström has a superb ability to use the everyday and the practical to get closer to the most complicated elements of life. Her language constantly goes through changes allowing the usual meanings of the words to be replaced by new insights which are a kind of magic ritual. Just like a Native American shaman, she can surely bring forth rain with her poetry if she wishes. -- Gustaf Widen * Hofvustadsbladet *Icy intensity...aphoristic as well as mystical...a fragility that is wholly particular... Forsström's visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness...the tenderness of snow. -- Adam Thorpe * Observer *

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Book SynopsisCheryl Follon is a feisty new Scottish writer who presents a wild carnival of bawdy tale-telling, songs and boisterous monologues - all in a rowdy spirit of earthy celebration. The poems of All Your Talk - her first collection - are lucid and lusty, direct and daring, spiced with down-to-earth humour and a lively, often wicked wit. Rooted in ballad and storytelling traditions, she describes her poetry as 'like boiling an old turnip and straining off a contemporary soup'.Trade ReviewThis is a feast of a book, with sensuality, earthiness and physicality served like dishes never known before, but Cheryl Follon is also bringing old traditions dramatically to life in these scrumptious poems. The loving, cursing, blessing, threatening, mocking and lusty gossiping in All Your Talk, as well as beautiful fluent streams of ancient pagan freedoms, make this a stunningly robust debut collection. All Your Talk is both wild and formal, with poems that are beautifully shaped and deeply, genuinely dramatic - grippingly so. This creates a really attractive, at times spellbinding, mix of formal restraint and surging ecstasy or abandon or wildness or Dionysiac fling. It's as though a riot observed a ritual. -- Brendan KennellyThese marvellous poems are a sustained achievement. They all have a kind of Regency air to them, founded in the context of Burns which they acknowledge, but with deeper roots and associations: Dunbar, the Ballads and ultimately Ovid (and, for the Irish reader, Merriman). What is distinguished here is the confidence to stick largely to a single form, even if it is one that the writer is so good at: local stories, translated with immense linguistic brio into the voice of a modern woman-Ovid. -- Bernard O'Donoghue

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Book SynopsisEva Salzman is a thoroughly modern, urban poet who writes with equal wit and precision about the natural - and unnatural world. In her sceptical, restless poems, irreverent muses and relentless twins take on sharply contemporary subjects: society, the unreliability of memory and - especially - identity, gender and love, sexual or otherwise. Born in New York, Eva Salzman moved to Britain in 1985, and four books later has firmly established herself as one of our most irrepressible and necessary poets. Double Crossing includes many new poems as well as selections from collections including The English Earthquake, Bargain with the Watchman and One Two. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.Trade ReviewEva Salzman is no slouch. She has a satirist’s eye and ear alert to the emotional and verbal cliché, the easy lie, and she can be gracefully ruthless. She can shift register from the formal and elegiac to an astringent New York sarcasm. She can shuffle the vocabularies of love and landscape, turn the grotesque poignant, the funny terrifying – a facility rare on either side of the Atlantic. -- Michael DonaghyEva Salzman is one of the most accomplished poets working in Britain today… her wit, directness and fresh approach to language, whether fierce or lyrical, may be seen as American qualities… From the first moment I encountered her poetry, I knew that Eva Salzman was the real thing, devoted to a demanding but sparking art. She is at the height of her powers at the moment. -- Peter Porter

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Book SynopsisFamiliar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.Trade Review'Newspapers celebrate greatness, heroism, achievement and genius in our midst, but sometimes don't pay sufficient attention to the real heroes who matter to us; the people who make a serious contribution to a nation's mental and spiritual well-being. A giant in this area is Brendan Kennelly. He is the people's poet. He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently. He also asks impossible questions and suggests unthinkable answers about the things that really matter. And he refuses to be precious or out of touch with the rest of us' - Jim Farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune; 'With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer... always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty... There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion' - Aidan Murphy; 'He lets us watch as he stands bowlegged at a crossroads in time and culture, playing stretch with knives of fear and faith, irony and soul, the fist of vision, the hard-nose of reality' - Bono; 'Kennelly's capacity to strip himself and fight in naked combat with the giants that plague us, make him Ireland's most endearing and reckless poet' - Mark Patrick Hederman; 'A very singular voice which owes nothing really to anybody, except to Kennelly's spiritual and geographical origins and, of course, to his own people' - John B. Keane; 'His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life' - Sister Stanislaus KennedyTable of Contents1 LIFTING THE MOON 23 A Giving 24 Yes 25 The year 25 The True Thing 26 Measures 27 Let It Go 28 Conference 31 A Host of Ghosts 31 Whatever 32 A Language 32 Someone, Somewhere 33 Proof 33 Leaving 34 The Prodigal Son 2 QUESTIONING ANSWERS 37 To Learn 37 The Stick 38 ozzie 38 prades 39 flushed 39 skool 40 Small Black Stars 40 Catechism 41 My Mind of Questions 44 After School 44 A Return 45 The Brightest of All 46 The Smell 47 Thorn 48 Horsechestnuts 48 Lost 49 The Horse’s Head 51 The Hill of Fire 52 The Fall 52 The Stones 54 Nails 54 Innocent 55 The Visitor 57 Tasty 57 The Big Words 59 Poem from a Three Year Old 60 Nineteen forty-two 60 Children’s Hospital 61 The Learning of Pity 61 Girl on a Tightrope 64 Rebuke 64 Play 65 The Kiss 66 A Leather Apron 66 Ten Bob 67 The Stammer 69 The Learning 70 John Keane’s Field 71 God’s Eye 3 BODIES OF SPIRITS 75 Ella Cantillon 75 Litter 76 A Mad Woman 76 Union 77 A Kerry Christmas 77 A Cry for Art O’Leary 83 I Met a Woman 83 Acteon 84 The Hope of Wings 85 Girl in a Rope 85 At the Party 86 A Great Day 87 Moloney Discovers the Winter 90 The Dose 91 Fragments 91 Steps 92 It Was Indeed Love 92 Santorini 93 The Exhibition 94 Love Cry 95 Lightness 95 Love-child 96 Sister 96 Miss Anne 97 Smell 97 Eyes 98 A Girl 108 Eily Kilbride 108 Rebecca Hill 109 Feed the Children 109 Citizens of the Night 110 Baby 111 A Drowned Girl 112 Clean 112 The Gift Returned 114 There Are Women (after Mandelstam) 114 We Are Living 115 Muses 116 May the Silence Break 117 A Kind of Trust 118 A Passionate and Gentle Voice 119 Separation 120 Willow 122 Too Near 123 A Viable Odyssey 124 bridge 124 To You 125 Tonight You Cry 127 The Furies 127 Warning 128 The Moment of Letlive 129 Beyond Knowledge 131 Mary Magdalene (after Pasternak) 133 She 133 Wish 134 Knives 134 Assassin 135 Phone Call 136 Her Spirit 136 Keep in Touch 137 Birth 138 The Burning of Her Hair 140 A Holy War 140 Sacrifice 141 The Fire Is Crying 142 A Half-finished Garden 142 Her Face 143 The Hag of Beare 145 She Sees Her Own Distance 145 A Restoration 146 More Dust 146 Wings 146 The Habit of Redemption 148 Gestures 148 Westland Row 149 The Celtic Twilight 149 The Girl Next Door 150 Maggie Hannifin’s way for women 150 Irish proverb 150 Woman in a Doorway 151 Padraig Ó Conaire’s Daughter Visits Galway on Her Honeymoon 151 The Scarf 152 Speculations 152 Portrait 153 Nora O’Donnell 153 The Work Was Coming Out Right 154 Last Kicks 155 Her Laugh 155 The Good 156 Thérèse 157 Saint Brigid’s Prayer 157 To Marina Tsvetaeva (after Mandelstam) 158 Is It Possible I Shall See You?(after Mandelstam) 5 THE MAN MADE OF RAIN 159 The Man Made of Rain 6 GUFF AND MUSCLE 228 No Image Fits 229 The Third Force 230 Correspondence 230 Consequences 231 A Teeny Bit 231 Saint Augustine on God 233 The Sin 236 Adam 236 I Saw a Beautiful Man 237 Saint Augustine’s Toe 237 A Man of Faith 238 Who Killed the Man 239 Baile Bocht 240 Shy 240 Needles 242 The Grip 242 Cock 242 The Pig-killer 243 The Pig 246 Time for the Knife 247 The Tippler 247 Work 248 Man Making Fire 249 The King 249 The Thatcher 250 The Swimmer 251 A Man Undeceived 251 The Runner 252 All the time in the world 253 That Look 253 A Man in Smoke Remembered 254 A Man, But Rarely Mentioned 255 Night Drive 257 Oliver to His Brother 257 I Wonder Now What Distance 258 Always 259 The Love of God 261 Missing 261 A Glimpse of Starlings 262 Blood 263 A Winter Rose 264 The Names of the Dead Are Lightning 264 I See You Dancing, Father 265 Oliver to His Son 266 Where Women Pray and Judge 266 Oliver to His Daughter 266 Blood 270 James Joyce’s Death-mask 271 The Dinner 273 The Blind Man 274 I See 275 Moloney Sees Through a Blind Eye 277 Kind Eyes 278 An OK Guy 278 According to The Moderate Intelligencer 279 The House I Built 279 Courage 281 The Loud Men 282 Time for Breaking 283 The Second Tree 284 A Black and Tan 286 The Grudge 288 What Use? 288 Old Soldier 289 Service 289 Ask the Children 290 Tail-end Charlie 291 The Story 292 The cries repeat themselves 292 Roger Boyle 294 But it did (a drama) 294 A Bottle 295 Columkille the Writer 295 What Else? 296 Sebastian 296 Light Dying 298 Oliver to a Friend 298 A Man I Knew 299 Raglan Lane 300 A Real Presence 301 Late Yeats 302 Penny 303 Not a word 303 Death of a Strong Man 303 A Tale for Tourists 305 Mastery 306 The Wake 308 Between Sky and Stone 308 A Peering Boy 309 If You Were Bold Enough 309 To Rembrandt (after Mandelstam) 310 Milk 313 Prodigal (after Mandelstam) 313 Treasure 314 The Hurt 315 Immediate Man 316 Six of One 319 A Short Story 319 Heigh Ho 320 The Ovens 321 The Kill 321 John Bradburne 322 Failure 323 Islandman 344 He Left Us 344 The Bell 345 Fool 346 Killing the Winter 346 Spring 347 Heat 347 Loss 348 Design 6 SAVAGE CIVILITIES 351 Moments When the Light 352 Pram 352 The Hole 354 Our Place 355 Johnny Gobless 355 The Fool’s Rod 358 A Parable of Pimlico 358 In Dublin 359 Crossing the bridge 359 Bewley’s coarse brown bread (unsliced) 361 Hunchback 362 Eating a star 362 Ambulance 363 A Visit 364 Dream of a Black Fox 365 The Black Fox, Again 366 Clearing a Space 368 Herself and himself 369 Lost place 370 Good Souls, to Survive 7 HISTORY 373 The Lislaughtin Cross 374 Lislaughtin Abbey 375 A Friend of the People 376 My Dark Fathers 377 The Limerick Train 380 A Small Light 388 Shelley in Dublin 394 The Saddest News 395 The Big House 396 Wall 397 Beatings 398 The Curse 398 Local History 399 Three Tides 399 Freedom Fighter 400 My Indifference 400 The Prisoner 402 Traffic Lights, Merrion Road, Dublin 4 405 Killybegs 407 A Running Battle 408 De Valéra at Ninety-two 410 Oliver Speaks to His Countrymen 414 Points of View 414 Calling the Shots 415 The House That Jack Didn’t Build 417 Statement of the Former Occupant 419 The Joke 422 The Ship of Flame 8 VOICES 425 Connection 425 Shell 426 Sea 427 The Island 428 The Sandwoman 429 Bread 430 Lightning 431 Book 432 House 432 Crow 433 The Singing Tree 434 The Tree’s Voice 434 The Cherry Trees 437 The Speech of Trees 437 Latin 439 Word 440 Loneliness 442 Tide 442 Bullet 442 Peace 443 Skin 445 Scar 445 Bomb 447 Freckle 448 Time 449 Worm 450 Money 450 Rumour 452 Silence 453 Raindrop 453 Key 455 Heart 456 Poetry 457 Game 9 THAT MUSIC MAY SURVIVE 461 The Gift 461 Blackbird 462 God’s Laughter 463 Living Ghosts 463 The Singers 465 Published at Last! 466 The Singing Girl Is Easy in Her Skill 467 Sing and Be Damned to It 467 The Wren-boy 468 Sounds 469 The Voice-of-Us-All 469 Star 470 The Whiteness 471 Entering 472 I can’t find you anywhere 473 Mud 474 Prayer to Venus (after Lucretius) 475 A Soft Amen 476 At home 476 The Adventure of Learning 477 There Will Be Dreams 477 Like the Swallow 478 Begin 481 Index of titles & first lines

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