Poetry / poems by individual poets
The Emma Press Meat Songs: Animal noises
Book SynopsisThe voices of humans and animals, living and dead, clamour for the reader’s attention in Meat Songs. Headlice roam their strange habitat, a severed pig’s head questions an undergraduate’s choices, and packaged meat products are ignoring the future.Trade ReviewIn its surrealism, its dark comedy, its pitch-perfect sense of style, and its exploration of the surprising possibilities of prose poetry, this pamphlet puts me in mind of Luke Kennard’s work, although Nicholls has a voice all his own. Despite drawing attention to contentious issues, there is no preaching here. Rather, the poems express a quizzical wonderment at the strangeness of things, which is more powerful in its potential to recalibrate our views on the subject than any ranting polemic.David Clarke, Sabotage Reviews
£999.99
The Emma Press Pisanki
Book SynopsisIn 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.Trade Review'Kuczynska narrates a bond between generations, one that has led her to depict the pear trees and “metal-sown” fields of her grandmother’s memories. Pisanki is a spellbinding tapestry of images and emotions, of displacement, loss and hope.'- PBS Bulletin"Like “Sarah Jane’s Geranium”, almost all the poems in this selection ironize the conventions of such sentiments in order to better perceive the real political effects of displacement. Kuczyńska seeks to recognize and refigure this ‘longing’ for home in the pamphlet as a whole, but this impulse is most obviously present as she writes the history of her grandmother’s deportation to Maharashtra in India, and eventual emigration to England. These poems – “Brother Staś”, “The train from Arkhangelsk to Bukhara” and “Dresses”, among others – are the pamphlet’s most obvious strength, and will be the reason many readers pick up Pisanki in the first place." -Edward Ferrari, Sabotage Reviews -- Edward Ferrari
£7.77
The Emma Press Paisley
Book SynopsisRakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.Trade Review"A striking debut collection which evokes the rich culture and history of Rizwan’s native Lahore. Themes of belonging, migration and displacement abound, as Rizwan examines the split linguistic self of the migrant: “My voice is the mirror that breaks in Urdu”. The patterns of her homeland are ever-present: “in a new country, let us dream of different paisleys”. Combining free verse and complex ghazals, this is a powerful exploration of the role of women in Pakistan and beyond." - Poetry Book Society, Winter Bulletin 2017 -- Poetry Book Society"The collection as a whole, however, is a serious instigator of thought. It will certainly appeal to a Western audience so that they can see what integration means to those that that they want to integrate and what kinds of things their ethnic minority brothers and sisters from the Sub-Continent are experiencing and thinking about." Suneel Mehmi, Contemporary Small Press * Contemporary Small Press *"...this young poet is not afraid to do her own bit of undigging. In her title poem, she uses a ghazal form in which every couplet rhymes ‘paisley’ with ‘paisley’. The word is repeated so many times that all shreds of former association disappear in a furious blizzard of repetition. There is fierce energy here, and uncompromising intensity. I see the paisley symbol for the first time in my life. " * Sphinx Reviews *The physical shape (and taste) of language, as well as its abstract resonances, takes on a new significance. This is seen perhaps most clearly in Rizwan’s assured use of the ghazal in poems such as ‘Urdu/ Hindi’ and ‘Speech Therapy’, where the form lends itself particularly well to Paisley’s overarching dialectic. -- Phoebe Walker * Sabotage Reviews *
£7.77
Five Leaves Publications Touching Distance
Book Synopsis
£7.14
Influx Press Foreign Passion: La Pasion Extrajanera: 2016
Book SynopsisIn 2011 Cristian Aliaga, journalist, academic, and one of Argentina's foremost contemporary poets, left Patagonia to take a journey through the UK and continental Europe. Aliaga travelled to places that exist and do not exist: former mining communities, destroyed in the 1980s; identikit towns with their franchise high streets; run-down suburban railway stations; and the open spaces of the Yorkshire moors. He visited sites of conflict, like the Falls Road in Belfast, places of poetic significance, including Dylan Thomas's house and the centres of "Western" culture that those from the edge of the world are told to admire. So long the object of foreign gazes or described by others, this was the chance for Patagonia to talk back to the centre. The stories that he tells inspire and devastate, reflecting our cultures back to us from a different perspective.
£9.49
Shoestring Press Welcome to the Bike Factory
Book Synopsis
£10.42
Shoestring Press Various Returns
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£10.42
Shoestring Press The Nick of Time
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£10.42
Shoestring Press Afterwords: Occupying No Man's Land
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£11.00
Shoestring Press The Rising Flame: Remembering Sidney Keyes
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£10.00
Shoestring Press Life and Other Terms
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£10.98
Shoestring Press Boys on a Roof: Nine Abrasions
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£11.00
Shoestring Press Selected Poems
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£10.00
Shoestring Press Letter to My Rival
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£10.00
Shoestring Press Schooled for Life
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£10.42
Shoestring Press Setting Out for the Mad Islands
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£10.00
Shoestring Press The Wild Boar Speaks: The Collected Poetry of
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£12.30
Shoestring Press Electric Psalms
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£12.34
Shoestring Press The Wicked Flowers of Charles Baudelaire: A
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£9.68
Shoestring Press Chasing the Raven
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£10.00
Shoestring Press The Orthopaedic Hospital Great Escape
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£9.31
Shoestring Press Making Word Gifts
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£10.00
Shoestring Press No Avoiding it
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£10.00
Shoestring Press Thirty-Three Ostrich Cadenzas
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£8.20
Shoestring Press Bitter-Sweet
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£8.93
Shoestring Press Letters to Randall Swingler
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£10.00
Shoestring Press A Song About You
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£10.00
Shoestring Press Working the Scrapbook
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£9.50
Shoestring Press Beyond the Boundaries
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£12.00
Shoestring Press Double Dactyls
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£8.20
Arc Publications Reykjavik Requiem
Book SynopsisThis is Gerður Kristný's third collection from Arc and the third of the trilogy which already comprises the highly-acclaimed Bloodhoof and Drápa. In all three poetic sequences, the poet employs the archaic form of the saga to conjure up razor-sharp dark and bewildering images of the fates of women in a world where the boundaries between life and death and what lies beyond are unclear. In this particular sequence, Gerður Kristný gives a voice to a woman whose story was one that society was not ready to hear at the time, a woman who was abused as a child but who committed suicide before her own account of what had taken place was published. At its heart is the very notion of articulation, of how our language and culture determine what stories we can tell and what words we can use.
£999.99
Arc Publications Diary of a Divorce
Book SynopsisAn unsentimental, forensic account of the breakup of a marriage, told without rancour and with a humanitarian resolution. An exceptional first book.
£999.99
Arc Publications Smithereens
Book SynopsisEvocative, spiritual poems from a Pakistan-born poet living and working in the Scottish Highlands. Latif's work captures the moments of beauty, alienation, distance and intimacy he finds in the wilderness and remote towns of a region so often associated with emptiness, but which the poet shows us is rich with vivid life.
£999.99
Arc Publications Regarding the Next Big Occasion
Book SynopsisLarissa Miller's poems take the reader on a peculiar voyage of unforgettable, potent, and arresting images. Through an array of bewildered speakers Miller leaps from the habitual world into the absurd and places us directly in the strangeness of existence. Miller's use of language is charged with rapture, sensuality and irony.
£7.00
Arc Publications Gravity for Beginners
Book SynopsisKevin Crossley-Holland’s name will be familiar to readers of all ages for his historical novels, his re-telling of the Norse myths and his many volumes of poetry. Previously published by the late Enitharmon Press, he is a very welcome newcomer to Arc with his twelfth collection – his first for six years – inspired by the “heavenly squelch” of his own north Norfolk where “the word on the tip of your tongue may be sacramental”. As Ronald Blythe puts it: “His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint.”
£999.99
Arc Publications Approximately in the Key of C
Book Synopsis"Curtis's humour and charm, 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 brought to the fore on the page... His greatest skill is to make readers go 'yes, of course'; he reminds us of what we've known all along." Michael McKimm, The Warwick Review
£999.99
Arc Publications Lunarium
Book SynopsisJosep Lluis Aguilo's Lunarium, his fifth and latest poetry collection, takes up his recurring theme of the uncertainty of life. In 2008 this book, Llunari (Lunarium) was the winner of the Prize Jocs Florals de Barcelona and Josep Lluis Aguilo was appointed Poet Laureate of the City of Barcelona during the period 2008-2009. These poems speak in a multiplicity of voices, often from the fantastic surroundings of myths and legends - labyrinths, secret libraries, mirrors, hell and the devil, smugglers, pirates of the Caribbean, palaces with golden pillars, apocalypses... There is a sense that the poet is constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible in an attempt to explore what it means to live on the edge of his imaginary worlds, at the same time using these 'other worlds' to explore our own world and what it means to be human. Aguilo's language is rich and sensuous, and the beautiful rural and maritime landscapes of the poet's native Mallorca shine through the fabulous worlds he creates.
£999.99
Arc Publications Reading the Flowers
Book SynopsisReading the Flowers began during Linda France's 2010-11 Leverhulme Residency at Moorbank, Newcastle University's Botanic Garden (now closed). This led to a tour of Botanic Gardens in the UK and abroad. Here nature and culture meet in poems looking at flowers cultivated and wild, trees in the garden and the rainforest, plants and creatures that live alongside them under the microscope of memory and imagination.
£999.99
Arc Publications Memorial to the Future
Book SynopsisIt is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Törne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement - Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes. His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Törne's collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Törne's powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.
£999.99
Arc Publications Subterranea
Book SynopsisSubterranea is a first collection of poetry by Jos Smith that explores the relationship of our human world to the earth that underpins it. At times delicate and curious, at times painfully unbalanced, it is a relationship of always precarious intimacy, and one that is often most vividly apprehended in the imagination. Subterranea is a collection that measures its own poetic form against the earth's resistance, knowing full well that if there is to be any relationship at all something must give in us; that perhaps there might even be an art to this giving.
£999.99
Arc Publications North Sea Poems
Book SynopsisThis chapbook presents not only a variety of moods and colours in Heine’s poems about the North Sea but also a loose narrative which takes us from the shore, to scenes aboard ship, and the return to harbour, ending with a pastoral scene in which the sea has been truly left behind. Written in free verse rather than the rhymed quatrains Heine usually used, these poems explore the intersections between myth and everyday life in vivid scenes which mirror the fluid motions and moods of the sea.
£999.99
Arc Publications Coffee: A Poem
Book SynopsisIt is hard to imagine a time when coffee drinking was not part of every-day life and yet it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that it became widespread in Europe. The visit of the Turkish Ambassador to Louis XIV’s court in 1669 helped to make coffee-drinking fashionable in France, so it is not surprising that it was a Frenchman who chose to extol its delights, not to mention its health-giving properties, in a long poem written in Latin, a popular language for verse throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. L’Abbé Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore’s masterly translation.
£999.99
Arc Publications Coffee: A Poem
Book SynopsisIt is hard to imagine a time when coffee drinking was not part of every-day life and yet it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that it became widespread in Europe. The visit of the Turkish Ambassador to Louis XIV’s court in 1669 helped to make coffee-drinking fashionable in France, so it is not surprising that it was a Frenchman who chose to extol its delights, not to mention its health-giving properties, in a long poem written in Latin, a popular language for verse throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. L’Abbé Guillaume Massieu, priest turned teacher, gives a witty yet instructive account of the origins of coffee, its real or alleged properties, and how to make the perfect cup, an account which loses none of its sparkle and humour in John T. Gilmore’s masterly translation.
£999.99
Arc Publications No Cherry Time
Book SynopsisIn its geographical sweep - from Israel / Palestine westward across Europe, then circling back to Greece - No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of alienation, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean ("sea between the lands") that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West. It brings back a "world still wide, blissfully unknown".
£999.99
Arc Publications The Bestiary: or Orpheus' Retinue
Book SynopsisThe Bestiary, 30 short poems celebrating mammals, birds, fish, insects and the mythical poet Orpheus appeared in 1911 and was Apollinaire's first published work. Although they appear slight, the poems inspired the artist Raoul Dufy to illustrate each of them with a woodcut (5 of the 30 woodcuts are reproduced in the chapbook) and the composer Francis Poulenc to set six of them to music. The poems - witty, ironical and full of surprising images - show Apollinaire's mastery of short form poetry, and Martin Sorrell's superb rhyming translation perfectly preserves the spirit of the original. Although many individual poems from The Bestiary have been published in translation, this chapbook is one of the very few complete editions to appear, and with an introduction and explanatory notes by the translator, it is a perfect introduction to Apollinaire's poetry.
£999.99
Arc Publications Twist
Book SynopsisTwist is a slant look at the connections binding us together - familial, social, political - in poems which range from the curious and disturbing to memories and evocations of the ordinary magic at work in our lives. It meditates on growing into middle age and explores how, obliquely and unseen, grief and loss transform into grace and redemption.
£999.99
Arc Publications Twist
Book SynopsisTwist is a slant look at the connections binding us together - familial, social, political - in poems which range from the curious and disturbing to memories and evocations of the ordinary magic at work in our lives. It meditates on growing into middle age and explores how, obliquely and unseen, grief and loss transform into grace and redemption.
£999.99
Arc Publications The Wound
Book SynopsisThe Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin.
£999.99
