Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisWheel, as the title suggests, is full of revolving perspectives and throughout Michael O'Neill's beautifully modulated second collection, the poetry turns on an axis of opposites: self and others, here and there, childhood and middle-age, the present and the past. In the title-poem, an encounter with a tramp calls to mind the wheel of fortune; another poem depicts a 360° shot of a figure on a bridge; in yet another an adoption application prompts memories of circling a field. Elsewhere, a boy's phantasmal arm brushes his ear as he bowls, the dead form a band of souls, a merry-go-round melts into a hoop of light, and the rings of a tree uprooted in a gale expose its age. The poems often open out on to imagined states and virtual realities, and occasionally glimpse a dimension beyond time's whirligig. Deft in its shifts of tone and formally skilful, Wheel is a powerful and affecting collection.Table of ContentsPost-Mortem, Making a Will, Dawn, Cheverny , Leaves, God Talk, Sunday Morning, Adelphi Dreams, Angel, Halifax, Wheel , Stateless, Music in the Mirabell, Norfolk, Guilt, Aura, Camp, Images, Next DoorVersions, Idyll, Fall , Waiting, Void , Caught , Lost, Crush, Going Back, Looking On, Bengal Night, Non-Combatant, Lines, Dream Families, Adoption Hearing, Spell, Appearances, Exchange Visit, Hope, Stare, There, Corridor, Turneresque, The Half-Landing, Unspoken, The Line-Manager's Soliloquy, Moments, It, Popeye Village, Daypex, Probably Not, Gloss, Dawn, Bypass, Venetian Triptych 1. September 2. Precious Little 3. Calculus, Spinners, Infinity, Compass Needle, Blue, Toys for the Boys. Biographical note.

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Book SynopsisThis book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence."James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger."Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review"His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time."Keith Richmond, Tribune"In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit."Wayfarers "The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems."Paul StubbsJames Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.Table of ContentsRecovery, Apprentice Work, Air Terminals, Days of 1973, Sestina for R, A Private Garden, Widowed / Unwidowed, Two Phonecalls at 4 am, From the Sky Parlour, Dowry for an Aerophobic, Speed Date, Serapis from a Postcard, The Buddhas of Bamiyan, A King's Faith, Chess in Kirkuk, Nightnurse, Sanchez de Aldama, 14th April 1930, (Reverb) At the Scene of 'The Earthenware Head', Prospecting Several Instances of Active Imagination, Four Interpretations of Photographs by Claude Cahun, Five Interpretations of Overpainted Photographs by Gerhard Richter, Avoiding a Close Reading of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, Three Presumptions Whilst in the Neighbourhood of a Friend, Voice Portraits of Uncle Patrick at the Reunion House, Not the Arm Wrestle, The Angel vs. Gabriel, Inclub Satires, Doctor One-Eye, Inviting the Ghosts, Thieves' Society, To-tock-a-noo-lah, On Not Reaching a Summit, A Room in the House of Aries, Dragon Tree, Incest, Jackanoria, Entry (Cornwall 1991), A Local Marriage, The Ashes, The Minister's Daughter, What Remains of Old Addresses, Testimony. Notes, Biographical Note.

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Book SynopsisThis collection draws work from 5 of Gallagher's previous collections, together with a substantial body of new work. Born in Australia, Gallagher moved to Paris before settling in London. She draws on a rich inheritance from these different worlds in her poetry, which is always rooted in a passionate sense of discovery and attention to place.Table of Contentsfrom THE EYE'S CIRCLE: Shapes within a Pattern / 15 from PASSANGERS TO THE CITY: Song for an Unborn / 21, Firstborn / 22, For Julien at Six Weeks / 23, At the Playground / 24, Distances / 25, The Trapeze-Artist's First Performance / 26, Itinerants / 27, Zelda Fitzgerald Practising Ballet / 28, The Survivor / 29, Maldon, Old Mining Town / 30, Homecoming / 32, Wimmera Windscreen / 33, Leaving / 34, Getting the Electricity On / 35, Woman in a Tableau / 36, Chartres Cathedral / 37, The Long Reach Out of War / 38, Unknown Soldier / 39, Dividing-line / 40, Domestic / 41, Momentums / 42, Passengers to the City / 43, The White Boat / 44, Concerning the Fauna / 45, Night in the Suburbs / 46 Kandinsky Journey / 47, The Magic of Hands / 48, November, Bois de Vincennes / 49, Lost / 50 from FISH_RINGS ON WATER: International / 53, Firstborn / 54, A Girl's Head / 55, Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot ('Furnley Maurice') / 56, Eastville, 1939 / 58, Relic / 59, Ghosts / 59, Plane-Journey Momentums / 60, Art Class on Observatory Hill, Sydney / 61, Near Keith, South Australia / 62, Scene on the Loire / 63, To Joe: In Memoriam / 63, Homecoming / 64, Alone on a Beach / 66, First Time / 67, The Affair / 68, Lines for an Ex / 69, Poem for the Executioners / 69, Political Prisoners / 70, After Kathe Kollwitz - 'The Face of War' / 71, Girl teasing Cat with Mouse / 72, Tree Planting at Alexandra Park / 73 from TIGERS ON THE SILK ROAD: 1969 / 77, In Memoriam for my Brother / 80, Dancing / 81, Jet Lag / 82, Frost Country / 83, 1942 / 85, River Murray Reunion / 86, My Mother's Garden / 88, The Gondola at Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice / 89, Poem for a Shallot / 90, Reckoning / 91, The Ash Tree / 92, Thirteen / 93, Knebworth Park / 94, A Visit to the War Memorial, Canberra / 95, Slippage / 97, The Lines on Her Palm / 99, Hunger / 100, Poinsettias / 101 from CIRCUS-APPRENTICE: Entente / 111, Laanecoorie / 112, The Year of the Tree / 114, Hedge / 116, Summer Odyssey / 117, From the Sahel / 119, Winter Hyacinths / 120, Hybrid / 121, Thinking of My Mother on the Anniversary of Her Death / 122, Gwen John swims the Channel / 123, Circus-Apprentice / 124, Keeper / 125, GM Scientist / 126, Tanka for a Hero / 127, Priests / 129, Girl on a Bolting Horse / 130, Nomad / 130, On the Pass from Kathmandu / 131, At Delphi / 132, Love Cinquains / 133, The Lesson / 134, Dancing on the Farm / 135, The Last War / 136, Itinerant / 137, Cloud-eye / 138, After Kandinsky - Grey Forms (1922) / 139, In the Black Square (1923) / 140, Horizontal (1924) / 140, Contrasting Sounds (1924) / 141, Blue Painting (1924) / 142, Yellow, Red, Blue (1925) / 143, Balancing (1925) / 144, Tension in Red (1926) / 144, Homage to Grohmann (1926) / 145, Counterweights (1926) / 146, Points along the Arc (1927) / 147 NEW POEMS: Biodiversity / 151, Seeing the Hand / 152, Take-off / 153, Fledgling / 154, The Dance / 155, La Fleuraison / 156, South Beach / 158, Manifesto / 159, Nostalgia Sonnet / 160, The Wild Colonial Boys / 161, Au Pays de la Somme / 162, Common Grounds / 163, The View / 164, Genealogy / 165, Soundings / 166, Snow-fire / 168 Biographical Note / 169

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Book SynopsisLinda France's seventh full-length collection is concerned with the dualities of our inner and outer worlds – the seeming paradoxes of self and society, language and experiment, ideal and reality. At the heart of the book is a section look at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of the landscape gardener Capability Brown. Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian's Wall, not far from where she has lived for the past 30 years. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. Her wise and generous poems seek a place of oneness amidst inner and outer worlds, riven with dualities – the seeming paradoxes of self and society, language and experience, ideal and reality.At the heart of the book is a section looking at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of Capability Brown, who was born in Northumberland in 1716. These poems consider some pressing questions: how much control do we have over our environment? How does our state of mind reflect the world around us? What, in the end, will endure?A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured France's spine and cracked her pelvis. This injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation."There is a restless energy about her work, a fascination with the paradoxes of people, the lives we lead and the society in which we live those lives, as well as a sense of the profound sadness of the passing of time, and of people.... She writes with warmth and wit of 'windows hooked with flamingo beaks'; 'the small room where all your geese are cooked' and, enamoured as she is by the work of Capability Brown, of 'landscapes erased / by tarmac and railway, time and weather.'"Keith Richmond, Tribune"One thing I liked about France's collection, and this is something one hopes to find in a poet, is that many lines and stanzas stand alone as memorable and worth rereading."Stride"France's enthusiasm for her topic shines through, her poetry bursting with flora and fauna. However, France is also able to tame that burgeoning natural world into a series of neatly trimmed poems, as she similarly controls the excesses of physical pain."The Warwick ReviewLinda France was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, and for the past 16 years has lived close to Hadrian's Wall, near Corbridge in Northumberland. She works as a poet, tutor, mentor and editor, often collaborating with visual artists, particularly in the field of Public Art. Since 1990 her poetry has won many awards and prizes as well as being carved into stone and wood, cast in metal, etched in glass, stitched onto fabric and printed on enamel. Her recurring themes are landscape and history, flora and fauna, love and identity.Table of ContentsHER - Dying in My Sleep / 11, Yes / 12, Waiting with My Yellow Dog / 13, After / 15, You Don't Know What Love Is / 16, Thundertown / 17, 38 Poems She Never Wrote / 18, What the Beam Said / 19, The Break / 20, Vertebra / 21, Frida Kahlo's Corset / 23, Knitbone / 24, The Burning House / 25, The Goose and the Bottle / 26, Moonshine / 27, Corona / 28, What Love is Like in Winter / 29, The Change / 30, Cave Painting / 31, Reconstruction / 32, The Love Potion of Polemios / 33 Burdened Children / 35, Falling / 36, Stagshaw Fair / 37, Sorrow / 38 YOU - Biography / 41, Birthplace / 42, Capability / 43, The Line of Beauty / 44, Brownification / 45, Nature Lessons / 46, Health & Plenty / 47, Cascade / 48, Psyche Leans Towards Love / 49, Three Looks at a Lake / 50, On Going to a Lecture on Capability Brown called 'Copying Nature' / 51, Last Day / 52 HERE - Joy / 55, Gulls / 56, Two Rivers / 57, Wildling / 60, Sadness as Billy's Leeks Fail to Win Posthumous Prize / 61, My Mother's Leek Pudding / 62, Weathervane / 63, Tara / 64, Borrowing a Grandmother / 65, From The Life Cycle of the Dragonfly / 66, Two Sightings / 67 You are Her / 68, No Subject / 69, Bowl / 70, New Planet / 71, Two Nudes / 72, The Somethingosphere / 73, Mrs Fooner is Spifty / 74, The French Postman / 76, The Sound of Snipe / 77, Your Hands and the House Martin / 79, The Peregrine and the Moon / 80, On Not Going to Kyoto / 81, On the Sele / 82, Heartwood / 84, Kingfisher / 85, Jizz / 86 Biographical Note / 90

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Book SynopsisKrystyna Milobedzka, one of Poland's leading and most innovative poets, was first published in 1960; her early volumes were singled out by Stanislaw Baranczak for their "dramatic ungrammaticalness", as they speak about elementary human relationships - between woman and man, mother and child - "in a language that is 'being thought'." Her prose poems, rooted in the body and earth, reveal an immediacy of expression, "seemingly uncontrolled, reporting the birth of the yet unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue." Nothing More, Milobedzka's first full-length book in English, samples her entire career. Here her kinship with the world, a unity in multitude, is reported in imperfect jottings, with "words broken in half broken to quarters". Commenting on her sparse diction, the poet explains: "I think it would be best if each writer could invent their own language to write down the very little they have to say. Only the necessary words." Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese invents her own translated language to convey Milobedzka's experimental poems into English. More 'collaborations' than translations, according to Robert Minhinnick in his introduction to this book, they are "the fruits of an exemplary literary symbiosis."Trade ReviewIn our deep and attentive reading, Milobedzka's understanding of language proves itself so thoroughly thought-out and conditioned by a larger worldview that 'correct' linguistic solutions seem, by comparison with her 'ungrammaticalness,' artificial, inauthentic, incomplete. Her apparently incohesive language amazes us with two features, cultivated with unparalleled discipline. First is elementariness. In this poetry everything is reduced to forms as primary and simple as possible, forms that reach their destination by taking a shortcut, sometimes at the cost of a linguistic error or an oversimplification. When something has no proper name and thus requires a longer elaboration, the poet creates a neologism, even though it may strike us with its inappropriateness among 'normal' vocabulary items. ( - ) Frequently such solutions remind us of the linguistic behaviour of children who, trying to name the elements of the outside world or their own inner experiences, take the shortest route, treading on syntactic and grammatical rules. ( - ) Milobedzka's poetry crystallizes relationships between people into their primary equivalents: the erotic engagement and the bond between mother and child. This reduction is also a complication: the relationships are both most elementary and most complex, they demand utmost responsibility, they ask for the most difficult self-reflection. ( - ) The second characteristic feature is the immediacy of expression. Here each text reveals itself in statu nascendi, seemingly uncontrolled, reporting the birth of the yet unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue. It is no longer a language that is spoken, but a language that is 'being thought.' (Stanislaw Baranczak) 2. Milobedzka desires nothing as much as the world's wholeness. She is possessed by the idea of holism. She seems to be also a pilgrim - in sackcloth - on the path to the entelechy of poetry. She knows that she will never attain it, but she has succeeded in ascertaining that it is not what we seize - but what we are not in a position to seize, what is good and open - that builds us up. Milobedzka's entelechy is also a powerful force more responsible for the condition of the good than for the adequacy of material things. That's how she sees it on her way to the truth. As she goes on, she says that she doesn't expect to discover more. But she should. To gather it all in other words. She is already doing this, already unceasingly saying: to live means to go out of nothingness, always to endure dispersion, to be able at every instant to begin to exist for the first time. I can't break through any further, she spreads her words helplessly. And She-Who-Succeeded-In-Never-Lying even to the smallest part of speech - here for the first time - is lying. (Tymoteusz Karpowicz) 3. What distinguishes Milobedzka's poetry? Let's turn to anatomy for a comparison. Whereas 'rhetorical' poets are interested in human body moved by the will of the brain, and 'introvert-searching' poets are curious about internal organs: the heart and the blood circulation system, Milobedzka peers into the microscopic network of neural synapses, hidden stimuli, invisible links that connect everything with everything. What forces us to stroke a cat, and what makes us wonder in amazement about the similarity between the rustle of a birch and the rustle of blood. Describing Milobedzka as 'cosmic' may, in light of the above comparison, sound absurd. And yet. The microcosmos of her poems transforms without any difficulty into the macrocosmos, when we realize what territories it embraces. If these poems reveal similarity (kinship, the poet herself would say) between the light in the window and the rocking of the cradle, between the shape of the horse and the shape of the apple-tree, between the cage and the woods, that is, between anything and anything, even between a participle and a ribbon in the hair, then we deal not only with a vast imagination which is purely poetic (surrealists, too, knew how to associate everything with everything), but with a certain vision, or rather a spiritual and sensual perception, of the world as a cosmic unity in multitude. Milobedzka seems at times to understand other voices besides our human voice, which she herself uses whenever she speaks and writes. If I'm one with the universe, it's not only me who speaks, but also I am spoken through. I'm both a message sender and a medium through which it is sent. We may suspect that Milobedzka can hear more, that she readily serves as an interpreter between various inhabitants of the same nature. (Tadeusz Nyczek)

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Book SynopsisThis book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.There is a reaching for the unsayable throughout this collection, whether it is thinking about the future, people's inner lives or the shadows of place, O'Neill is wholeheartedly engaged with the unfathomable nature of living. To read these poems is to be part of his exuberance for the physical and visual experience of living, be that lying in a field, being with loved ones or watching the movement of light through a day. Each moment is brimming with imagery of its past and future, so these poems bring out the mutability and movement that both blurs and pinpoints events.Michael O'Neill has lectured at Durham University since 1979, where he is a Professor of English. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. His critical studies include The All-Sustaining Air (OUP, 2007), an exploration of Romantic poetry's influence on poets since 1900. His first collection The Stripped Bed, was published by Collins Harvill in 1990, Arc published his second collection, Wheel, to critical acclaim.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Tony Curtis's new collection are woven out of his fascination with the everyday, the quirky, and the downright extraordinary. These are poems wrapped up in love and death, friendship and memory, madness and music – from the blind man singing in a field, to his three Cistercian uncles singing plainchant. There are people at the heart of everything he writes. Curtis is a born storyteller, and these are poems crafted by a poet with a wonderful ability to express great depth of feeling with deceptive simplicity."Curtis lives on the borderline between our world and the world of the Spirits."The Irish Times"His humour and charm, and ability to turn a poem with the seemingly simplest of images, and that understanding of how words will play over the listener's ear, are hallmarks which are pleasingly brought to the fore on the page in this hefty new collection. His greatest skill is to make readers go "yes, of course"; he reminds us of what we've known all along though perhaps not recognised, and reading his poems is therefore an uplifting experience."The Warwick ReviewTony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied Literature at Essex University and Trinity College, Dublin. An award-winning poet, Curtis has published six warmly received collections, the most recent of which was The Well in the Rain: New & Selected Poems (Arc, 2006). In 2003 he was awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia. He is a member of Aosdána, and a recipient of the Irish National Poetry Prize.Trade ReviewThis is a true poet with an ear for phrase and form, as well as the playful ability to think (a better word is 'dance') inside a metaphor. His sense of delight is inescapable - absolutely alive - too deliciously odd for words.A" Helena Nelson, Ambit Curtis lives on the borderline between our world and the world of the Spirits.A" The Irish TimesTable of ContentsFolk / 13 I Bench / 17 When I Lay my Hand / 19 In Praise of Grass / 20 The Pilgrim / 22 Two Poems in Memory of Michael Hartnett The Garden Flat / 23 The Flock / 23 The Heartbroken Window / 26 A Writer's Room / 28 Thrift / 29 Trespass / 31 On First Looking onto the Samuel Beckett Bridge / 32 Envoi / 34 The Birch Tree / 35 The Traveller / 36 The Curious Hare / 37 Invention No. 65 / 38 from Sixty Poems for Ciaran / 39 Mulrooney / 42 Two Pages from They / 45 December / 47 Christmas Eve / 48 The View / 49 Family / 50 Hand / 51 Three Poems from the Asylum The Naming / 53 The Gate / 56 Christmas Eve in the Asylum / 57 Unspeakable / 58 Two Faces by a Window / 59 The Maiden's Collar / 60 Scissors / 62 On Being in a Poetry Band / 63 Tending the Dead / 65 Painting the Flood / 66 Sahoko / 67 Watercress / 69 Dog's Bay / 73 Errislanan / 74 Seven Watercolours / 76 Yeats, January 1939 / 78 Sea Folk / 81 New Year's Eve / 83 II Buffalo / 85 Opus in F Major / 87 Two Poems in Memory of Elizabeth Bishop Of Thee I Sing / 89 Leaving St. Elizabeth's / 90 Emigrant Tune / 93 Jazz / 94 Harmonica / 96 Cash / 99 The Scarecrow The Scarecrow's Brain / 100 The Scarecrow's Heart / 102 The Scarecrow's Eyes / 104 The Scarecrows' Gaze / 105 The Skagit Valley Beekeeper / 106 Our Fathers' Sons / 107 Cutting Logs with Samuel / 108 Like the Buffalo / 109 The Amish Woman / 110 For Poetry, This / 112 Words for Poets / 113 Walt Whitman's Grave / 119 In Camden, Where the Poet Was / 121 Company / 123 Biographical Note / 125

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Book SynopsisWhen Michael O'Neill senses 'gangs / of shadow' half-beckoning from twilit water, the moment is eerily alluring as well as scary. Fusions of feeling recur throughout a book that has something of the 'dash' and 'darkness' praised in 'Louis MacNeice', along with a strong responsiveness to the physical and visual experience of living. Formally adventurous and alert to change and movement, combining memorable phrasing with a reaching towards the unsayable, Gangs of Shadow brims with imagery of past, present and future; its poems 'seek to bear witness, and above all sing'.

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Book SynopsisThe Dutch poet, anthologist and translator Menno Wigman died in 2018 at just fifty-one, several years after being diagnosed with a rare heart condition likely caused by an allergic reaction suffered in his adolescence. This memorial pamphlet is intended as a tribute to the poet and as a companion to Window-Cleaner Sees Paintings, my selection of Wigman's poetry published by Arc in 2016.

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