Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisRoddy Lumsden was one of Britain's liveliest and most inventive poets of recent times. From the formal, frenetic debut Yeah Yeah Yeah, through the playful wit and cynicism of The Book of Love, to the ‘magnificent song to himself’ of Roddy Lumsden is Dead, this retrospective of his earlier work shows how his poetic journey was eventful, fuelled by his fascination with the intrigues of men and women and the short steps from real life to folklore to the surreal. Mischief Night brought together the best work from Roddy Lumsden’s three previous collections, as well as a whole new collection, The Drowning Man. It also contains poems from his pamphlet The Bubble Bride and the previously uncollected sonnet sequence Cavoli Riscaldati. It was followed by four later collections. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.Trade ReviewSharp, bright and utterly heartbreaking, this collection by one of the most intriguing voices is alternatingly roguish, curmudgeonly, insecure, and tender. The speaker woos and teases, cajoles and repels, withdrawing before beginning again. Though the poems offer no utopian promise, no deliverance, they cut to the quick with the difficult truth of longing, need, and the "salt of hopelessness". -- Monique Tschofen * New Delta Review *There are tremendous narrative poems, mysterious, lingering ones... and unforgettably realistic tales of melancholy sexual encounters... Lumsden is a brilliant vivisector and pathologist of the contemporary relationship... all we can ask for in poetry: contemplation, intelligence, stylistic beauty. Like a spreadsheet of a morality adventure, like perfectly articulated pain... a helpless celebration of Life's adventures. -- Alan Warner * Scotsman *Table of ContentsTHE DROWNING MAN 14 The Tremendous Few 15 Charcoal Sketch 16 What Love Cannot Do 17 Miss Hollington’s Notes 18 Us 19 Q 20 Rain at Night 21 The Knack 22 The Waitresses 23 Sorry 24 Life Story 25 Moments of Terror 26 Fear of Music 28 Second Prayer 29 For Jesus 30 Letter From an Admirer 31 The Bath in Milk 32 The Drowning Man 33 Between Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night 34 The Deaths of Imaginary Friends 35 Moments of Pleasure 36 Still 37 Turning into Grizzly Street 38 From the Valentine Studio 41 Cover Versions 42 On the Cusp of Virgo and Libra 43 Specific Hunger 44 Perfumes of Scotland 45 Conspiracy Sketch 46 True Believers 47 Miss America 48 One Acre Yard from THE BUBBLE BRIDE (2003) 50 Sang o’ the Kittock’s Loddie 52 A Saltire 53 Hotel Showers of the World 54 The Kitchens: A Guided Tour 55 On the Boat-slope 56 The Bubble Bride 57 Spent 58 Lateral Vertigo 59 Overhead in a Scottish Larder 60 Lumsden Hotel 61 Little Fife 62 Evidence of Owls from RODDY LUMSDEN IS DEAD (2003) Roddy Lumsden Is Dead 65 My Pain 66 My Death 66 My Funeral 67 My Post-mortem 68 My Reptilian Existence 68 My True Love 69 My Allegory 69 My Early Years 70 My Hormones 71 My Dark Side 71 My Last Supper 72 My Complex 73 My Water 73 My National Stigma 74 My Limbo 75 My Face Not Fitting 75 My Half-life 76 My Sex Life 77 My Ascent 77 My Descent 78 My Superstition 79 My Luck 79 My Reflection 80 My Sickness 80 My Performance 81 My Realm of the Senses 81 My Plea 82 My Meeting with the Goddess 84 My Prayer 84 My Future 85 My Solitude 87 My Life 88 My Pennyworth 88 My Spring But Sweet 90 The Consolation 90 Weathergirl 91 Priapus 91 Higher Still 92 The Shortcut 92 Song 93 Song 93 Escher 94 The Wish 94 The Wager 95 One Thing I Do Know 95 Intramuros 96 Simpatika 96 The Drop of a Hat from THE BOOK OF LOVE (2000) 98 Incident in a Filing Cupboard 99 Because 100 An Older Woman 101 Love’s Young Dream 102 Piquant 103 Always 104 Marmalade 105 The Twelfth Kind 106 Lithium 107 Voyeur 108 For the Birds 109 Against Naturism 111 Troilism 112 Proof 113 Tricks for the Barmaid 114 from Subject Matter 116 The Beginning of the End 117 Acid 118 Scarlet 119 An Outlying Station 120 Athena 121 Bellyful 122 Solo 123 Pagan 124 Show and Tell 125 Hobbledehoy 126 The Man I Could Have Been 128 Lullaby Cavoli Riscaldati 131 St Andrews 131 Grief 132 Easter 132 Vena Cava 133 Heatwave 133 Reading the Suddenlys 134 Making a Mistake 134 Encraty 135 What Happened Next 135 Transfiguration 136 Square One 136 Making a Comeback 137 Digitalis 137 Making a Getaway 138 Abacus 138 Halfway Across 139 Compendium 139 Harm’s Way 140 Making a Scene 140 Elsewhere Perhaps Later 141 Life Means Life 141 Manila 142 Ether 142 What We Became from YEAH YEAH YEAH (1997) 144 Then 145 Sunday Morning 2.13 a.m. 146 St Patrick’s Day 149 Manners 150 Coming 151 364 152 Yeah Yeah Yeah 153 Prayer To Be with Mercurial Women 154 Trespass 155 On a Promise 156 Noyade 157 from St James Infirmly 159 After Entomology 160 Cardinal 161 Infighting 162 Noah 163 August (and Nothing After) 164 Rogation 165 The World’s End 166 Lines to a Missionary 167 Mercy 168 Beach Ceilidh 169 ITMA 170 The Boy 171 Roisin’s Wolves 172 The Ultimate Curve 173 Vanishing 174 The Answers

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Book SynopsisLeanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983, and comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. She received an MA in English from University College, Cork in 2006. The winner – while still in her teens – of several of Ireland's poetry competitions, including the Seacat, Davoren Hanna and RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam, she has since published four collections with Bloodaxe: Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), The Mining Road (2013) and A Quarter of an Hour (2018). Waiting for My Clothes, her first collection, traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorder and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness. Leanne O’Sullivan has been writing poetry since she was 12, and began these poems not thinking they would ever form part of a book, but ‘writing down the reasons I should live for’ and then ‘becoming addicted to looking at things to find the beauty in them’.

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Book SynopsisAfter mapping Britain’s national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The bitter social critic became poetry’s Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world’s wildlife and environment. -273.15 [absolute zero] was his first new collection after his three-volume Collected Poems. The book is a lament, a tirade, a disaster warning, and an anthropologist’s catalogue of our final expedition addressed to an earlier survivor of global catastrophe, Noah of the Flood. He published his final collection, Vendange Tardive, in 2010.Trade ReviewDespair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume. -- Robert Potts * Guardian *

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Book Synopsis"Extreme of Things" is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present "how things work" at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, "Ghosts and Other Company" (1995) and "All the Things I See" (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The "'Season Songs' from Persephone" (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts.Trade ReviewJenny Joseph writes poems full of mist and reason, poems strange in what they say but plain in the way they say it, poems rooted in an English tradition of passionate but quiet exactness...careful craftsmanship, an honest exploration of the human heart, and statement after statement that nags at the memory. -- Robert Nye * The Times *She can delineate surfaces like a sculptor - exact, precise, sharply definite - yet with a startling undertow, a pull of unease which lies just beneath the texture, as an artery beneath the skin. -- Joan Foreman * Eastern Daily Press *Rational, realist, philosophical, Jenny Joseph represents a stoical refusal to see life other than it is - a less sentimental poetry it would be hard to imagine. * British Book News *

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Book SynopsisFrom London's hospital wards to rural Italy and the Great Plains, Sally Read's first collection eulogises the emotional and physical borders we cross, whether in sexual surrender, the squeezing of a trigger, or the point at which skin is pierced by a needle. What results appeals to the thresholds at which we succumb to desire, love, or grief. Yet, ultimately, there is tenderness and acceptance as she considers what breaks us, and what binds.Trade ReviewSally Read's first collection is a marvellous book, bringing together poignant and lyrical meditations on love, mortality, art, healing and the Italian landscape in poems of fine judgement and a true poet's skill. The Point of Splitting marks the debut of an accomplished writer, not only one to watch, but one to read now, for her wit, craft, and clear vision. -- John Burnside

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Book SynopsisTony Hoagland’s zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He was American poetry’s hilarious ‘high priest of irony’, a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge. His first UK book of poems is a selection drawing on three collections, Sweet Ruin (1992), Donkey Gospel (1998) and What Narcissism Means to Me (2003). He published three later collections, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010), Application for Release from the Dream (2015) and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, published posthumously in the UK by Bloodaxe in 2019.Trade ReviewHe belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"…Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield…making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don’t…For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don’t notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties. -- Henry Shukman * Poetry London *

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Book SynopsisCarole Satyamurti's poetry explores love, attachment and the fragility of personal survival, charting the tension between connected and separate lives. With an unflinching eye, she takes on complex and often painful subject-matter - cancer for instance or raising a disabled child. Many of her poems hinge on a turning-point or a place where one life touches another, bearing witness to the way we imagine - or fail to imagine - the otherness of others. Stitching the Dark draws on four previous books and includes a whole new collection, her strongest and most formally adventurous. In these new poems, there is a deeper engagement with the universal predicament of how to live in the face of mortality - of what it means to exist, and to cease existing. The title suggests that the act of writing - the search for the right words - is an attempt to repair, illuminate, and give form to what is unknown, fearful, perplexing. But the collection is by no means solemn. There is also wit and celebration, dark humour and a fine sense of the absurd, as well as poems challenging our responses to events that do not affect us directly. She also published a later collection, Countdown (2011).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 Shuttle

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Book SynopsisPiotr Sommer is one of Poland’s leading poets. Continued extends and enlarges the achievement of his earlier Bloodaxe selection, Things to Translate, and spans his whole career to date. The translations were made with the help of leading British and American poets, including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn and D.J. Enright.Trade ReviewIt might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last twenty years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale – and find out why. -- Tomaz SalamunPiotr Sommer is the great poet of “everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps”. Like Frank O’Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls “improper names” – the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us. -- John AshberySommer’s main subject is the “quandary-ness” of “ordinary life”: an old dog, the colour and texture of a lemon, a lift in a dilapidated block of flats, the crash of toiletries on a bathroom floor. The art of the poetry – and its art is considerable, singular and memorable – is in the way it matter-of-factly transforms ordinary incident, character, landscape, object, and the assorted interactions thereof, into tiny metaphysical and epistemological essays: investigations into the subjects of language, imagination, impermanence, memory, identity. It is a poetry that engages large subjects through its attentiveness to seemingly small or minor events… There is a quality of otherness in the poetry, or the suggestion of otherness. Boundaries are continually being crossed. There are sallies and retreats. What at first may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is very much the poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and travelling incognito. -- August Kleinzahler

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Book SynopsisBefore and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. Yang Lian has written that Concentric Circles is ‘the most important piece since I came out from China’, and that it is emphatically not a political work, but instead a work focused on ‘deep reality’ and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. The book, like the sections of which it is comprised, uses a kind of collage, where many small fragments, each complete in itself, are aligned together in a series of patterns to form a grander mosaic: from line to line, poem to poem, cycle to cycle, in ever-widening concentric structures. Yang Lian regards this English version as an integral part of the work as a whole – indeed, it could be said that the work is incomplete without its English parallel, and that as he reads it he is ‘struggling free from time and incorporated into the beautiful “concentric circles” of ancient and modern poetry, in China or elsewhere’.Trade ReviewYang Lian is one of the most astonishing poets I've read for years. He has a westernist, modernist sensibility allied with an ancient Chinese, almost shamanistic one. He can both excite and frighten you – like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn! -- W.N. Herbert * The Scotsman *He continues his work bridging Chinese tradition to western modernism. The scope of his creative imagination is astounding …Yang Lian is one of the great world poets of our era. -- Klaus Rifberg * Edinburgh Review *It wouldn’t surprise me if he became a future Nobel Laureate. His style is one of extraordinary grandeur and ambition… Without question, the sequence Where the Sea Stands Still has a monumental drive, a sensuous strength and intellectual clarity; it could prove as enduring an achievement as Montale’s Xenia or Elytis’s The Axion Esti. -- David Morley * Stand *

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Book SynopsisTatiana Voltskaia is one of Russia's leading poets, as well as a distinguished journalist and essayist. She belongs to the generation who began to write poetry seriously during the last decade of the USSR, reacting to the profound and disturbing changes of that time to emerge as the poets of the new Russia. Her subjects are the perennial Russian ones of love and death, and her work continues Brodsky's preoccupation with space and time as the vectors of our lives, echoing his vision of Russia as a crumbling empire. At the centre of her lyrical poetry there is a woman trying to escape from her condition of isolation, seeking communication through dialogue, conversations, reflections, shadows, echoes, letters and sex. Many of her poems are set in her native city of St Petersburg - often described as the Venice of the North - where water meets stone, reflections meet their images, and what is real is confronted at every turn by illusion. It is an 'artificial' city, built without native or vernacular architecture or culture: everything was borrowed and imitated to create a window on to the West, and this eclectic cultural mix where East meets West finds its reflection in Voltskaia's work. Her concern with the Western tradition of literature in Russian poetry places her firmly in the St Petersburg tradition of Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky and Kushner, characterised by strict verse form, intellectual themes including those from classical literature and myth, coupled with an intimate address to the reader. The same themes appear in all her work, but while in the prose Voltskaia sets these in the context of our lives and times, examining the implications they have for our society, in her poetry she explores their personal significance for the individual. Russian-English dual language edition.

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Book SynopsisSarah Wardle was poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur FC when many of these poems were written. Her Score! is a winning commentary on contemporary culture, shooting at the heart of consciousness, family, sport, the female voice and Darwinian science. Her second collection kicks off with her Spurs poems, tackling the common ground between goals of competition and community. Then X: A Poetry Political Broadcast presents poetry as a beacon of imagination, choice and responsibility: the still, small voice that guides us through life’s terrain. Score! is completed by Sheet Music, a medley of poems ranging from London to Stone Age man, Schrödinger's Cat to Nelson’s Column.

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Book SynopsisLook, Clare! Look! is the story of a year. When Clare Pollard set off on a six-month world trip, she wanted to write a long poem which engaged with what she saw and felt during her travels. On her return, she discovered that her father was seriously ill, and his funeral was held on New Year’s Eve. Clare Pollard’s third collection is a book about journeys and home. She looks closely at both global issues and the blossom in her yard. Beginning as a meditation on western guilt against the backdrop of SARS and the Iraq War, it ends by looking at our closest relationships, in poems that deal with a pregnancy scare and her engagement, as well as illness and loss.Trade ReviewPollard’s poems are like shards of glass, brittle, dangerous things that work their way under your skin. Her voice captures the pain, anxiety and emptiness of a generation weaned on Coke and Diamond White, reared on fast food and TV, and now entering adulthood armed with utterly ephemeral cultural reference points and a strong suit in self-destruction…Her poems compulsively re-enact the reaching out to life and the withdrawing in pain…Pollard is a poet of the 21st century, a witness of the present and a shaper of its voice. -- John Sears * PopMatters *

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Book SynopsisNick Drake's "From the Word Go" explores the different meanings and implications which are tightly packed into that small word - from departures on journeys in this world and beyond it, through expulsions from homes, places and relationships, to the possibilities of adventure and new discovery. At the heart of the book is a sequence describing the dying, death and afterlife of his father, an account of the struggles, fears, comedies, losses, and revelations of that final process of going out of this world. "From the Word Go" builds upon the considerable achievement of Nick Drake's award-winning first collection, "The Man in the White Suit".Trade Review'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' - Jackie Kay 'Nick Drake shows a talent for capturing the suffering and loneliness of people, and the instantaneousness of events...His Czech roots and friendships with AIDS victims add particularity and worldliness to his elegies and love poems' - Sarah Wardle, Poetry Review 'Culturally eclectic and socially engaged, The Man in the White Suit is exciting stuff...a highly effective wit with a serious agenda' - Peter Lawson, Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Alexander is a leading American poet whose work has been inspired by a wide range of influence, from history, literature, art and music to the 'rich infinity' of the African-American experience. Her's is a vital and vivid poetic voice on race, gender, politics and motherhood. "American Blue" is her first British publication. Many of her poems bring history alive and singing into the present in highly musical, sharply contemporary narratives, which use many different forms and voices to cover subjects ranging from slave rebellions, the Civil Rights movement, Muhammed Ali and Toni Morrison to the lives of jazz musicians and the 'Venus Hottentot', a 19th-century African woman exhibited at carnivals.Trade Review'Alexander has an instinct for turning her profound cultural vision into one that illuminates universal experience.' - Clarence Major. 'In narratives sweetened by the lyric pulse and pierced through by felicitous turns of irony, Alexander chronicles the world of "black and tan". Her poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh. Race is present in her poems in the way that sex, class, age, even weather are present in all of our lives' - Rita Dove, "Washington Post." 'Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together' - "Chicago Tribune." 'Alexander uses exquisite care and delicacy to explore turbulent times and feelings, Bravo!' - "Ntozake Shange." 'Alexander explores tensions inherent in gender and race and expresses the ambivalence of motherhood in jazz-inflected tones' - "Elle".

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Book SynopsisJean ‘Binta’ Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances were so powerful she has been called a 'one-woman festival'. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry. Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life. The Fifth Figure was her sixth book, and saw Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture. In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean 'Binta' Breeze's Third World Girl: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition, nor the later collection, The Verandah Poems (2016).Trade ReviewJean ‘Binta’ Breeze… emerged in the 1980s as the first female dub poet, fusing reggae rhythms and music with the spoken word… Through the use of a variety of women’s voices and contexts, Breeze’s work challenged the usual stances of the dub and performance poetry tradition. Whether on stage, record or page, she spoke for – and to – black female experience, encompassing a wide range of subjects, styles and tonalities. -- Lyn Innes * The Guardian *Her range included not only the polemical and the personal, but also more extended narratives and memoirs. A later, remarkable book, The Fifth Figure, is in five sections, each of which adopts the perspective of Breeze’s forbears, from Great-grandmother down to mother, until the last one is hers. In a wealth of styles, she finds echoes between the voices, before encompassing them all in the biographical conclusion. -- Obituary * The Daily Telegraph *A major, perhaps even a great voice. For stature, Jean "Binta" Breeze invites a Caribbean comparison with Maya Angelou, except that her range is broader still. Her poetry shifts effortlessly through standard English to a native Jamaican which has no equal in its emotional depth. -- Alexander Linklater * The Herald *Breeze sings of sisterhood and the private spirituality that keeps the head above water even when prejudice, and laundry, threaten to drag it down. Her work, and that of a great many other black women writers, affirms life in a way that the rest of the world might do well to emulate. -- Tania Glyde * Independent *

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Book SynopsisDan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). This book - his first to be published in Britain - brings together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005), along with more recent work. His later collection, "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon", was published by Bloodaxe in 2010. "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography in which the enigmas of an individual mind become universal puzzles. "Natural History" takes its inspiration from Pliny's encyclopaedic "Historia Naturalis", suggesting that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders - and equally in need of a compendium of everything known.Trade ReviewDan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many of his generation aim for: free-swinging, gorgeous in phrase, bold in imagination, athletic in movement…the imagination is an organ of perception, a means of feeling. -- Robert PinskyDan Chiasson is a wilfully literary poet – one who invokes (and impersonates) writers both classic and modern, meditates on the function of poetry, plays self-consciously with voice and toys shamelessly with time. Yet he can also lay down a clean, unadorned lyric line…There is something serious behind the literary shenanigans – an ambition to write larger than any one self stirs the book to life. -- Kay Ryan * New York Times Book Review *Like Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” or that of Pliny, Dan Chiasson’s gaze is curious, friendly, and unassumingly all-encompassing. Like William James (another mentor), his distinctions are smooth and profound and capable of sudden crescendos of meaning that are heartbreaking in their intensity. -- John Ashbery

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Book SynopsisNow is a fast and frenzied meditation on time, ageing, alienation and the pressures of living in the modern city. Each triplet in this book-length poetry sequence addresses the question: What is 'now'? With the brevity of a proverb, each three-liner offers a short, sharp perception which tries to capture or just grasp at the sliding identities of 'now', at the same time as it adds its quickfire nugget of wit or wisdom to the accumulating weight of the whole sequence. By the end of the book, Kennelly has taken us on a journey not just through time but through a dark night of the soul, through his own head and the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of people struggling to survive and find meaning in their lives. Now is published simultaneously with "When Then is Now", a trilogy of Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies which dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All three plays - Sophocles' "Antigone" and Euripides' "Medea" and "The Trojan Women" - focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes.Trade Review'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 'His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life' - sister stanislaus kennedy '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...a serious contribution to the nation's mental and spiritual well-being' - jim farrelly, Editor-in-Chief, Sunday Tribune

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Book SynopsisJack Gilbert was a major figure in American poetry, but was always a total outsider, defiantly unfashionable and publishing only four books in five decades. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with Views of Jeopardy in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands. His second collection, Monolithos, appeared twenty years later in 1982, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with two later collections, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. His final collection The Dance Most of All (2009) was followed by his Collected Poems from Knopf in 2012. Transgressions was his only UK publication, and covers his collections from Views of Jeopardy to Refusing Heaven. Jack Gilbert wrote compellingly about passion, loss and loneliness. His poems are ?lled with a sense of wonder at existence and with his surprise at ?nding happiness – despite grief, struggle and alienation – in a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings. His work is both a rebellious assertion of clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. His poems are about being alive: the nature of the self, the life he lived and the people he loved.Trade Review'He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion...Gilbert is the rarest of beings: a necessary poet' - James Dickey 'Poetry of constantly surprising beauty and directness. Jack Gilbert resides with the modernist giants of the early century because, among other reasons, he is not intimidated by them' - Frank Lentricchia 'The rigor of Gilbert's purpose is matched by the economy of his means...Serious and unflinching, Gilbert is the rare poet who manages to come at the Romantic most effectively from an unrelentingly classical base' - Allen Hoey, American Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisC.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. ‘A voice that has become utterly distinctive: restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in its quest to find and speak the truth…an intelligence both compassionate and fierce. The result is four decades of poems that delve into everything from the most joyous and private matters of the heart (he is one of our greatest love poets) to the chaos and horror of politics, warfare, and our species’ seemingly innate penchant for cruelty and self-destruction. Like Whitman’s, his world view is simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic. Williams’ rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and his syntax enacts the ways in which the mind moves through mood and memory, speculation and logic. Because the voice is both cerebral and muscular in its reflexes, the music it makes feels spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which it sings. The poems are wholly American in this regard; their simultaneous tenderness and outrage bring to mind the music of Charles Ives. Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement, but C.K. Williams is one of them. His poetry will speak to future generations, as it does to us, of what it was to be human in our time.’ – Chase TwichellTrade Review'Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement, but C.K. Williams is one of them. His poetry will speak to future generations, as it does to us, of what it was to be human in our time' - Chase Twichell 'As much scope and truthfulness as any American poetry since Lowell and Berryman' - Michael Hofmann, TLS

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Book SynopsisThese poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry - from Jamaica - was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. This late collection by Berry explores the different reasons he and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication was linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living: ‘Mi one milkin cow just die! / Gone, gone – and leave me / Like hurricane disaster!’ Windrush Songs ranges from from lyrical pictures of Caribbean country life to poems in the voices of travellers with desires, fears, anxieties, hopes and ambitions. James Berry came to Britain on the next ship after the Windrush and shared many of the experiences that prompted this migration in search of change and a better life. Many of the poems from Windrush were included in James Berry's A Story I Am In: New & Selected Poems, but renewed interest in Windrush Songs has prompted its reissue.Trade ReviewBerry came to Britain from Jamaica in 1948. In the introduction to this collection of poems, he explains why he came to Britain and left a country he loved. 'Beginning in a City, 1948' in particular gives a strong impression of what Caribbean arrivals experienced in their first hours and days. The emigrant experience is often littered with contradictions… and Berry’s poems illustrate this perfectly. -- Louise HareWhen I think of James Berry’s poetry I think of celebration… celebration with an echo of despair, but his urge to find worth and joy in both the remembered life of his rural Jamaican childhood and in his sojourn as a "bluefoot traveller" in Britain through the last forty years, is the real motive force of his work… Berry has been at the forefront of the struggle to validate and honour the language people of West Indian origin in Britain actually speak. -- Stewart BrownTable of Contents9 Introduction PART 1: HATING A PLACE YOU LOVE 14 Wind-rush 15 Learning Beauty 16 Wash of Sunlight 17 Sitting up Past Midnight 18 Desertion 19 I African They Say 20 Villagers Talk Frustrations 22 Old Slave Villages 23 Poverty Life 24 Poverty Ketch Yu an Hol Yu 25 Devouring 26 Sea-Song One PART 2: LET THE SEA BE MY ROAD Reasons for Leaving 30 Sea-Song Two 31 Reasons for Leaving Jamaica 32 Running on Empty 33 To Travel This Ship 34 A Dream of Leavin 35 Breaking Free 36 Away from me Little Ova-bodda Piece of Lan 37 Land-Cultivator-Man at Sea 38 A Woman’s Dread of Layered Snow 39 Work Control Mi Fadda like a Mule 40 Sea-Song Three Reminiscence Voices 43 Reminiscence Voice 44 The Rock 45 Thinkin of Joysie 46 Mi Woman Hol Everyting Back 47 Fish Talk 48 Sun-Hot Drink 49 Empire Day 50 Childhood Mysteries 52 Old Slave Plantation Village Owner 54 Comparing Now with Ancestors’ Travel from Africa 55 A Talk to the Machete 56 A Story I Am In 58 Mi Fight with Jack-Jack 60 Sea-Song Four When I Get to Englan 63 Mother Country 64 Wanting to Hear Big Ben 65 Sociable and Unsociable Ways of Money 66 How the Weak Manufactured Power for the Strong 67 Song of Man and Man 68 Whitehall Goin Turn We Back 69 Eatin for Two Man 70 Englan Voice 71 White Suit and White Shoes 73 A Greater Oneness 74 Sea-Song Five PART 3: NEW DAYS ARRIVING 76 New Space 77 In the Land and Sea Culture-crossed 78 Beginning in a City 1948 80 Hymn to New Day Arriving

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Book SynopsisStephanie Norgate’s compelling poems celebrate our sensuous contact with each other and with nature. With subjects ranging from a child’s first enjoyment of speech to a lover’s lost dialect, they make invisible experiences tangible through vivid and intense imagery. Lovers in a mud bath are transformed into a new vision of creation. The private rituals of birth, love and loss imprint themselves on the landscape, with ‘a strong magical sense of rawness and eroticism’ (Gerry Stewart), in poems ‘all about skin – that thin, protective coating, the point of contact between inner and outer worlds’ (Jenny Swann). Hidden River is Stephanie Norgate’s first book-length collection, and follows a prize-winning pamphlet, Fireclay, praised by John Walsh in the Independent as the work of ‘a marvellous new poet’. Her poems share a passionate concern for survival, for the authentic life of the body, and for all the elements but especially water – its touch and surface, its buoyancy and nourishment, the flowing rhythms that enter us. They ‘begin to explore nothing less than human invention’ (Jo Shapcott) as they chart strong currents between the dispossessed and the natural world. Hidden River was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

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Book SynopsisDeborah Garrison's "The Second Child" is a book of poems about family in a world both more exciting and more frightening than ever before. It explores many facets of motherhood - ambivalence, trepidation and joy - coming to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She confronts her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily into New York City, continuing to seek passion in her marriage and wrestling with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness. Her critically acclaimed first collection, "A Working Girl Can't Win" chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young career woman. This new book shows her moving into another stage of adulthood, starting a family and saying goodbye to a more carefree self. Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, "The Second Child" is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday - nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Deborah Garrison examines a life fully lived.Trade Review'With their short lines, sneaky rhymes, and casual leaps of metaphor, Garrison's poems have a Dickinsonian intensity' - John Updike'It takes agility and imagination to write well about the ordinary...Garrison's first book won readers...with directness, modesty and unshowy wit. Those qualities also mark her new collection, The Second Child. This time the material includes parenthood and the attacks of September 11, 2001, with their aftermath...Garrison keeps her blessed and quotidian balance, in a remarkable way' - Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World 'Touching...the new poems are wonderful and different... This book...gives us equally weighted joys and sorrows' - Courtney Birst, Bookslut

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Book SynopsisMoniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In her early work, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are 'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal - this poet's third country' (Maura Dooley). Her less autobiographical later books are concerned not only with divisions between East and West but also with the interplay between inner and outer worlds, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual. "Split World" was published at the same time as Moniza Alvi's collection "Europa", and includes poems from five previous collections: "The Country at My Shoulder" (1993), "A Bowl of Warm Air" (1996), "Carrying My Wife" (2000), "Souls" (2002) and "How the Stone Found Its Voice" (2005).Trade Review'Alvi is a bold surrealist, whose poems open the world up in new, imaginatively absurd ways' - Ruth Padel, Independent. 'Much of Alvi's work engages with a surreal or fantastical world of fractured and partially recovered identity, working through sequences in her most recent poetry' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets. 'Moniza Alvi's world is a place of wild energy...Alvi's voice has achieved a relaxed naturalness, a fluidity which allows her to present these delicious, extraordinary poems as though it were easy' - Kathleen Jamie & Hugo Williams, PBS Bulletin. 'She is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday, so that we accept the miraculous as something we need...the overriding impression is of a deft, restrained language carrying ideas with metaphysical wit and seriousness' - Leonie Rushforth, London Magazine. 'One of the few British poets whose work could currently be described as essential reading, not least as we try to grasp what fractures of cultural difference might have contributed to the 7 July bombings.' - Tim Robertson, Magma.

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Book SynopsisSelima Hill's "The Hat" is a disturbing portrayal of a woman's struggle to regain her identity. Her story emerges through a series of short poems, often related to animals: how she is preyed upon and betrayed, misunderstood, compromised and not allowed to be herself. Like all of Selima Hill's books, "The Hat" charts extreme experience with a dazzling excess', with dark humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. "The Hat" was published at the same time Selima Hill's "Gloria: Selected Poems", which draws on ten previous collections.Trade Review'Wayward, funny, terrifying. Her writing scintillates with hatred, love and absurd insights' - Gillian Beer, Financial Times'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine...Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets'Every page reveals her unique ability to invert the world and shake it, until it reveals its truth' - Kathleen Jamie & Maurice Riordan, PBS Bulletin'Brilliant mischief' - Independent'She is truly gifted. She invests mundane things with visionary, delirious brilliance' - Graham Swift, Sunday Times'Hill is a unique voice in British poetry, handling central subjects with wit, great metaphorical beauty, and deep clarity. Her two most characteristic features, the off-the-wall images and no-holds-barred straight talk, work flawlessly together' - Ruth Padel & Sean O'Brien, PBS Bulletin

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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 latest book, "The Upshot", includes a new collection, "The Divided", which constructs a modern metaphysic out of love and the daily, set against the latent (sometimes tragic) divisions in contemporary society. The selection from three critically acclaimed earlier collections ranges from the lyrical exuberance of "Sunset Grill" to the vivid nocturnal surrealism of "The School of Night".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 *…this powerful collection…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 *Rouse writes…with such convinced skewing of the expected angles, and with such precise anger and sympathy, that one is inclined to believe her as well as to admire the poems. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisGeorge Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It is published on his 60th birthday at the same time as the first critical study of his work, "Reading George Szirtes" by John Sears. Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; and, humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter", "Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel", all included here.Trade Review'A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting' - Douglas Dunn, on Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. 'A major contribution to post-war literature...Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity' - Anne Stevenson, Poetry Review 'Szirtes is increasingly revealed as a major English poet - one of those in whom insight and technique combine to focus more and more productively as the years go by'- Hugh Macpherson, Poetry Review

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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 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". These new poems take in the physical landscape, family and friendship, as well as the transience of both folklore and politics. In part, an attempt to speak of what is submerged, they welcome that 'splash of cold water to the face' that tells us we're alive.Trade ReviewSound Barrier...demonstrates beautifully the strength of this deceptively delicate, often very tender poet: how she marries spare lyrical cadences with political scepticism, packing a whole gamut of wit and sharp observation into very little space. -- Ruth Padel * Financial Times *Kissing a Bone, her second collection, adds a shrewd historicising sense to the lyric tenderness which glowed in her first book. It takes us across borders - literal, emotional and figurative - into states of mind which are entirely her own, yet instantly recognisable by all us us. -- Andrew Motion

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Book Synopsis"A Knowable World" follows Sarah Wardle's detainment in a Central London psychiatric hospital for over a year for manic episodes of bipolar disorder. The poems chart the stresses of thirty-something city life through police arrests and hospitalisation under section orders to achieve a way out; then the threat and frustration involved in the fight for liberty and the patience needed to achieve recovery. Through commanding and apt expression, Sarah Wardle conveys bleak experience. These cathartic poems are themselves testimony to her ability to overcome the sense of futility, helplessness and panic involved in bipolar disorder. Form and technique have provided a framework for her to re-establish a sense of order and concentration out of chaos. "A Knowable World" bravely enlightens our understanding of mental illness.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 NeubergerSarah Wardle's previous collection, Score!, took readers on an exuberant tour of Tottenham Hotspur FC, where she spent time as writer-in-residence. The change of tenor in A Knowable World, which charts the reel and plunge of the year she spent in a psychiatric facility receiving treatment for bipolar disorder, could hardly be more pronounced. These are, necessarily, poems of deep introspection, in which manic episodes, escape attempts and the baffling helplessness of incarceration are examined with agonised honesty... these are convincing poems, delivered with a tight formality that echoes the strictures under which Wardle found herself, while at the same time providing her with a means of control over a terrifyingly ungovernable situation. -- Sarah Crown * Guardian *

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Book Synopsis"Where I Live" combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two Indian collections of poetry, "On Cleaning Bookshelves" and "Where I Live", with a selection of new work. Her poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. They probe contradictory impulses: the desire for adventure and anchorage; expansion and containment; vulnerability and strength; freedom and belonging; withdrawal and engagement; and, an approach to language as exciting resource and desperate refuge. Her new poems are a meditation on desire - in which the sensual and sacred mingle inextricably. There is a fascination with the skins that separate self from other, self from self, thing from no-thing. These are poems of dark need, of urgency, of desire as derailment, and derailment as possibility.Trade ReviewThis is writing that creeps up on the reader quietly, sometimes with just the whisper of a sari, or the taste of a lullaby, and yet spins suddenly on the edge of stark recognition. Arundhathi Subramaniam's is a strong new voice. * Imtiaz Dharker *A marvellous collection, wonderfully varied and rich. * John Burnside *Subramaniam's poetry is one of illumination. She flashes a pencil-torchlight on a subject, and suddenly you feel you are the richer for it... Even more than precision, what defines her verse is its subtlety and the angle of vision from which she sees life. -- Keki Daruwalla

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Book Synopsis"Third Wish Wasted" is a book concerned with our wishes and desires. Belonging to a world between real and imagined folklore, the poems are by turns celebratory, humorous and beguiling, and there are bittersweet contemplations of youth, beauty and fame. Roddy Lumsden is one of the liveliest and most inventive poets writing in Britain today. His fifth collection sees him extending the range of his poetry, straying into denser and more musical territory, as well as sticking with the form and wit which typifies his earlier work. In "Third Wish Wasted" he invents and tries out various unusual and inventive forms such as charismatics, overlays and relegated narratives. There are poems composed on a top fashion shoot, inspired by travels in the USA and, as ever, he picks apart the problems between men and women.Trade ReviewEven in his earliest work, it isn't easy to make out the seam between talent and technique, and in the newer poems the idiom is crisp, quiet, and thoroughly annealed - There is a level of talent that will ransom any project in any school. On the one hand, it will be interesting to see where Lumsden goes next; on the other, he's so good that it hardly matters. -- D.H. Tracy * Verse *Although the verse is hopping with linguistic antics, the foci of the language are music and rhetoric and, whip-smart as these poems are, they tend to resist chin-stroking analysis. Throughout Mischief Night the rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsden’s poems off the page and into the living context they describe. -- Matthew Smith * Verse *

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Book SynopsisTwo Countries is a book of poems about place: about landscape, community, and the shifting, provisional relations between them. Born in Scotland, Katrina Porteous grew up in North-East England. These poems explore the ambiguities of borderlands, from the Roman Wall to the present-day Anglo-Scottish Border, and the 'debatable lands' between tradition and modernity, real and ideal, country and town, 'nature' and 'culture'. Katrina Porteous's poetry reaches far beyond the local. Two Countries is organised around a selection of her radio work, poems of many voices, drawing on Border Ballad and Northumbrian story-telling and song, and often rooted in direct oral testimony. Among the most remarkable are the dialect voices of Northumbrian fishermen, and the words of hill farmers caught up in the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic. The poems of Two Countries are meant to be heard out loud. An ebook with audio is published simultaneously with the print edition. Since her first collection, The Lost Music (1996), Katrina Porteous has collaborated widely with artists and musicians. Much of her work has been for BBC radio, notably with producer Julian May, who describes her as 'extending the boundaries of the genre'.Trade Review'A writer chronicling the life of the land through the stories of its marginalised people' - Alan Franks, The Times. 'Porteous is a highly sophisticated writer, which is what carries her work beyond folkloric nostalgia. To be as alert to tradition as she is requires her to be, paradoxically, utterly modern; which in turn, given her talents (in particular, very few poets can match her ear), makes her an important poet not just regionally but as an advocate of her adopted language to a larger literary readership' - Sean O'Brien, Northern Review. 'History as lifeblood - not as ghosts, but as part of the earth and of us' - Julia Copus. 'Katrina Porteous - celebrates what springs up, unbeautiful, between the cracks left by the post-industrial landscapes of the Northeast, celebrates the endurance of rocks and plant life...and implicitly, too, the survival of human beings as cultures and traditions struggle with change' - Pippa Little, Writing Women. 'She writes a kind of poetry that is regrettably becoming rare, a poetry with accurately observed natural furnishings, a freshness and clarity of language, each poem with its own tune' - Vernon Scannell, Daily Telegraph.

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Book SynopsisPia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets, the winner of the Nordic Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for her collection Queen’s Gate, published in English by Bloodaxe in 2001. This new translation of her work combines two more recent collections, The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, which comprise the first and second parts of a quartet written over ten years: the third and fourth parts are The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun (published in English by Bloodaxe in 2015 as Salamander Sun and other poems). The poems of The Whales in Paris span the moment of conception to eternity. Life is seen as a confrontation with what is bigger than oneself: love, desire and death, primordial forces that are present even in our very modern civilisation. Those great forces of existence form the territory of The Whales in Paris: above all, desire and death, illuminated with motifs from childhood, the relation to parents, family, mythical figures from the Bible. Time, dreams and meditation also play their part. Pia Tafdrup writes: 'Tarkovsky’s Horses is about loss in a double sense. The themes of the poems are my father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then my loss of a father. The book is a poetic portrayal of the course of an illness for which science has few words – my father begins to suffer from dementia, and then he has to go into a nursing home, where he dies. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that makes use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems about a father who forgets more and more are set in a border landscape which is also not without its comical aspects. The poems narrate the drama of what it is to be a human being.'

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Book SynopsisSamuel Menashe’s poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For over 50 years he practised his art of ‘compression and crystallisation’ (in Derek Mahon’s phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe ‘compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds’. Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe’s work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. Expanded from its original Library of America compilation, this edition covers the full range of his work, from the early collections to very recent work, and includes a DVD of Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. This features a visit to Menashe in the tiny apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village where he lived from the 1950s until 2009. Even in his 80s, Menashe still knew all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, recites numerous examples with engaging humour, warmth and zest.Trade Review'Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious awareness' - Dana Gioia.

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Book SynopsisThe title-poem of George Szirtes' "The Burning of the Books and Other Poems" is the core of this collection of narrative sequences by a writer who came to Britain as a child refugee after the Hungarian Uprising. Book burning is associated with the Nazis' burning of what they considered to be subversive books in 1933, but the practice has a long history, right down to our own day. In this particular case the burning refers to the library of Kien, the scholar, in Elias Canetti's novel "Auto Da Fé". The poems follow and expand from the events of Canetti's book in a variety of forms not previously used by Szirtes. Two further sequences are concerned with history and documentary, one about the discovery of small snippets of film recording the liberation of Penig concentration camp where Szirtes' mother was imprisoned, and another of songs concerning war and documentary photography. There are also prose poems, monologues, a series of canzoni, a group of poems exploring the origins of love in childhood, and another based on the mythical travels of Sir John Mandeville about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The book, as a whole, constitutes an exploration of the range and flexibility of a voice attuned to the patterns of history and the way such patterns transform our sense of the present. Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.Trade ReviewAny new collection from George Szirtes will treat its readers to a unique poetic combination: immense versatility and virtuosity when it comes to form, but also a tireless sympathy that dwells clear-sightedly on shocks, traumas and hard-won renewals from a century of migration and massacre. This volume has typically strong-voiced sequences… But its title sequence truly takes the breath away: a meditation on the love and hatred of knowledge, and why fury against literature did not start or end on Nazis’ pyres… Read Szirtes to feel the exquisite, excruciating paper cuts of history. -- Boyd Tonkin * The Independent, on The Burning of the Books *

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Book SynopsisIntimate and truthful, the poems in Sally Read's second collection move from the very earliest and most delicate stages of life, to the many adjustments of adulthood. Always startlingly honest, the pains of closeness and separation, love and mortality are dealt with in unflinching and transforming ways. "Broken Sleep" is a cycle of poems from a mother to her baby, moving from the uncertainty and awe at the discovery of a pregnancy, through the ecstasy of early motherhood. It charts, with tenderness, the child's development from fetus in the dark, to walking, talking toddler in a bewildering and exciting world. The poems comprise a hymn and an elegy to the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. The second part of the book, "The Glass Eye", moves swiftly into a world where loss, whether of a loved one, a breast, or simply innocence, is countered by extraordinary kinds of redemption. Whether conjuring angels, music, or lies these pieces offer a sometimes disturbing but always marvellous alternative to the unavoidable blackness behind the glass eye.Trade ReviewSally Read's first collection is a marvellous book, bringing together poignant and lyrical meditations on love, mortality, art, healing and the Italian landscape in poems of fine judgement and a true poet's skill. The Point of Splitting marks the debut of an accomplished writer, not only one to watch, but one to read now, for her wit, craft, and clear vision. -- John Burnside * on The Point of Splitting *

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Book Synopsis"Fruitcake" brings together four poem sequences about motherhood by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). "Bougainvillae" explores love and having a mother. "Nylon" is about happiness, and not having or being a mother. Then "Bunker Sacks" brings grace but also the shock of being a young mother. Finally, "Grunter" shows the impact of Asperger's syndrome on both mother and child. Like all of Selima Hill's books, "Fruitcake" charts 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.Trade Review'Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry - Despite her thematic preoccupations, there's nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill's work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon - using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama - hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn - So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry - not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics' - FIONA SAMPSON, Guardian. 'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine - Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess' - DERYN REES-JONES, Modern Women Poets

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Book SynopsisIn "Dirty Looks", Cheryl Follon serves up a fiery gumbo of playful poems drawing on the shadowy side of love. The book presents a wild Rabelaisian carnival of poetry, stories and boisterous monologues flavoured by Deep South folk and foibles, by Scottish ballads and bawdy tales, and by the jaded love chroniclers of ancient Greece and Rome. While some poems touch on more tender times, their main concern is with the thoughtlessness, jealousy, spite, deception and self-delusion that can go hand in glove with love. But for all their darkness, the poems are spiced with saucy humour and a lively, often wicked wit, and set against a sultry backdrop of Louisiana in summertime.Trade Review'These 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' - Bernard O'Donoghue. 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 - both wild and formal, with poems that are beautifully shaped and deeply, genuinely dramatic - grippingly so' - Brendan Kennelly.

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Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Recommendation. Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). His latest collection, "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon", takes its title from an improvised children's game. It is a book about staged loss and staged recovery and how, in our games as in our poems, made-up losses depict real ones. At the book's centre is the title-poem, a long exploration of being a father in light of having lost one. His previous book from Bloodaxe, "Natural History and Other Poems" (2006), brought together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005).Trade ReviewDan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many of his generation aim for: free-swinging, gorgeous in phrase, bold in imagination, athletic in movement. What makes The Afterlife of Objects distinctive and distinguished is that in these poems imagination is more than the mere monitor of a language-show. Here, the imagination is an organ of perception, a means of feeling. -- Robert PinskyChiasson drank up all of Horace, and himself became one of the more unruly, more exciting, versions of Horation - essayistic, balanced, amicable, and yet dense, even coy, style in contemporary letters. -- Stephen Burt * TLS *

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Book SynopsisA Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: Dr Who meets Paradise Lost. The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill? Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014.Trade ReviewGwyneth Lewis's remarkable long poem, an epic for our time, tracks...a pilgrim's progress, as Maris, her heroine and surrogate, takes on both disease and the National Health Service in her fight to save her cancer-stricken husband, Hardy. The result is a kind of surreal modern morality tale....overall, this is a performance that more than confirms Gwyneth Lewis's reputation as one of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation. -- M. Wynn Thomas * Guardian *'True stars in poetry like Gwyneth Lewis always match brilliance with warmth. She is the one to bet on' - Les Murray 'Felicitous, urbane, heartbreaking, the poems of Gwyneth Lewis form a universe whose planets use language for oxygen and thus are inhabitable' - Joseph Brodsky 'Gwyneth Lewis has so many of the gifts required for good poetry: command of form, with improvisation enlivening tradition; supple rhythm; originality of subject-matter and the right eye to pin down detail; humour, both sardonic and direct; and, above all, commitment to human feeling' - Peter Porter 'Her descriptive eye and innate formal intelligence merge in places to create truly magical poems, full of metaphysical mystery and spirit' - Aingeal Clare

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Book SynopsisRuth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966. Her poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. Images of the moon, however interpreted - whether as stern and stony presence or protective maternal symbol - recur throughout her work. Peter Porter described one of her collections as having 'the steadiness and clarity of the moon itself'. This substantial New & Collected Poems covers work written over 50 years, drawing on over a dozen books as well as a whole new collection. It also includes her translations of Sophia de Mello Breyner, Sophocles and Victor Manuel Mendiola.Trade Review'Ruth Fainlight has always been a painterly poet, sensuous and observant, who has paid particular attention to myth as it shapes destiny or gives meaning - the reader is aware of images being thought and felt through, the mind winding itself into narratives, prompted now by pain, now loss, now keen pleasure' - George Szirtes, Times Literary Supplement. 'If there is a suggestion of feminist defiance here, so much the better; at least Fainlight isn't strident. With so much talent and confidence, she doesn't need to be' - Derek Mahon, London Review of Books.

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Book Synopsis"Catulla et al" summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus - his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy - by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment. The Catulla poems in her second book show a shift away from the loosely confessional or straightforwardly narrative poems of her first collection, "Kink and Particle", towards a more explicit playfulness with stories. Other poems try to keep one foot in a recognisable real worldA" while still bending it out of shape with strange plot twists, elements of folk tale or myth, and philosophical musings. Catulla et al was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).Trade Review'Certainly, like many of her generation, she is commendably various in her concerns, adept at recording the experiences of childhood, family, ageing, love and, of course, the ubiquitous detritus of twenty-first century life. But what sets her apart from the crowd is her unstinting and penetrating gaze, a take-no-prisoners scepticism that somehow never loses its quite particular purpose, and a warm accessibility married with a cool intelligence. Whether writing about difficulties in love or liberty, Tiffany Atkinson is smart, sexy and often very, very funny' - Kathryn Gray, Poetry International Web 'Atkinson's work is cleverly edgy and intimate, balancing the casual and the complex. The closeness and eroticism of love is explored and the quotidian imbued with layers of possible, plausible folklore. Its particular styles derive their effect from seeming familiar but winding round the reader their nagging difference' - Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade 'Atkinson achieves sophistication without brittleness, and illustrates that much of the most intelligent and accessible poetry of the last five years - is being written by young women' - W.N. Herbert, Poetry London

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Book SynopsisKerry Hardie is one of Ireland's leading poets. Her Selected Poems covers work written over two decades and draws on five collections. Her poetry questions, celebrates and challenges all aspects of life and experience, but ultimately is concerned with the quiet realisation that 'there is nothing to do in the world except live in it'. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart.Trade Review"The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly" - George Szirtes, Irish Times. "Kerry Hardie writes about the here and now, the everyday and the ordinary in an authentic lyric voice. She speaks of God in our secular age without unease or embarrassment. This deeply spiritual book is deceptively immediate and it yields its mystery and depth in each rereading" - Judges' citation, Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, 2005. "Hardie's poetry is brave, steadily confronting both the deaths of her loved ones and her own experiences with illness as an ME sufferer. Her collections contain gentle, but insistent, works of memento mori - What makes her work exceptional is how skilfully she illustrates the connection between humanity and the cycles in the natural world. Poems and lives move through the unstoppable clockwork of seasons in her collections - A unique aspect of Hardie's poetry is the hope that is present in all her collections. She guides us through tragedy, reassuring us but never romanticising the true nature of life" - Jennifer Matthews, Poetry International.

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Book SynopsisBernard Spencer (1909-63) was a distinctive voice in 20th-century English poetry, and a central figure in the Personal Landscape group of wartime Cairo writers. He spent much of his life working for the British Council, in Greece, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Austria, the settings for many of his poems. He was among the first translators of George Seferis into English, and his expatriate colleagues included Lawrence Durrell and Olivia Manning. A recurrent theme in his poetry is a particular sense of gregarious loneliness, of being someone apart. Living for many years in non-English-speaking communities, he became, quite consciously, 'a stranger here', a poet whose subtly inventive techniques and 'respect for the Object', as Durrell put it, served to fix and define modes of personal, cultural and political unease. He was to publish just two full collections, 'Aegean Islands and Other Poems' (1946) and 'With Luck Lasting' (1963), during his lifetime. Based on Roger Bowen's pioneering 'Collected Poems' (OUP, 1981), this new edition of Spencer's works is the first to include all his poetry, his translations from George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis and Eugenio Montale (made alone, or in collaboration with Lawrence Durrell and Nanos Valaoritis), and selections of his prose - including critical and travel writings, memoirs, interviews, occasional comments on poetry, and his obituary for Keith Douglas. Wherever possible the texts are derived either from manuscript and typescript holdings in the poet's principal archive at the University of Reading and others dispersed elsewhere, or checked against those various sources. The book has an introduction by poet, translator, and literary critic Peter Robinson as well as extensive notes on the published texts and a complete bibliography of Spencer's writings.Trade Review" - reminds me of Edward Thomas, and his best poems will certainly live as long as the best of Thomas" - Lawrence Durrell

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Book SynopsisJoan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain’s major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but for the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and was Spain’s most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. Now in the more recent work translated in Strangely Happy, he builds an architecture of the human spirit out of the unpromising materials of self-doubt, despair and death. In writing stripped of all inessentials, and in the company of his dead, Joan Margarit confronts old age and his own death in poems that go on moving us with their harsh, poignant music. His poetry confronts the worst that life can throw at us, yet what lingers in the mind is its warmth and humanity.Trade Review"I highly recommend the luminous, subtle "Tugs in the Fog" by the Catalan poet Joan Margarit, translated by Anna Crowe. The Spanish Civil War and its after effects, and the death of his handicapped daughter haunt poems which are nevertheless full of life" - Moniza Alvi, Poetry News. "Wow! - Erotic closeness, distance, passion, jealousy, indifference, night, death, imagination, apocalypse, and more all in a few lines and a few simple words - His themes [are] delivered with such fire and candour they inspirit" - Herbert Lomas, Ambit

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Book SynopsisTracey Herd’s long awaited new collection was inspired by the late actress Elizabeth Hartman’s lifelong struggle with mental illness and by her own experience of living with clinical depression. The book examines the eternal bonds of love and friendship and the joys, grief and losses which imbue the human experience. These deeply personal yet vibrant poems also use the mediums of film, music and memory to create a collection which reverberates with pain and yet still finds small moments of happiness to savour. Not in This World, Tracey Herd’s third collection from Bloodaxe, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her debut, No Hiding Place (1996) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and her second collection, Dead Redhead (2001), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewThe poems in Tracey Herd's Not in this World are harrowing, as if sculpted with an ice-pick in the glaciers of depression. Yet the ice is fiery, survival is at stake in an unsentimental world, where the diction is as rigorous as the gaze. There are Hollywood starlets, Ruffian the racehorse, and self-portraits where Herd confronts her own demons. Heart-breaking lines… conjure a world pared to the bone. It is rare to come across lines as stripped and taut as hers. -- Pascale Petit * chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges *What’s interesting about Herd’s poems is her use of everyday speech in settings that are themselves highly wrought… she offers a wintry bareness that offsets the bookish and filmic cast of her imagination, often with a sense of finality… -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *Tracey Herd's Not in this World would be a worthy winner of the TS Eliot Prize, for which it is shortlisted. "Happy Birthday" must contain this year's saddest lines. The carefully modulated rage, grief and self-recriminations for an aborted foetus bears comparison with Sylvia Plath at her most coolly savage… But there is more to Herd than closely observed misery. She writes with sensitivity about classic movie stars… It is remarkable how much comedy, however black, Herd finds in the gloom. -- James Kidd * The Independent *

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