Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisIThis new selection of the poetry of the acclaimed Cornish poet Jack Clemo includes work from all of his major volumes, from The Clay Verge in 1951 to 1995's The Cured Arno. Awkward, radical, nature-baiting landscape poems full of pain and anguish give way to monologues, biographical sketches, broader themes and looser forms. The settings of white tips, flooded pits and the grinding works of the industrial-rural clayscape are replaced by the rivers and bridges of Florence and Venice and the coastal ease of Dorset. However, as Rowan Williams states in his introduction, 'mellow is not the word' for this transformation. Clemo remained till the end a rare rebellious voice, representing a unique poetic perspective and personal experience.Trade Review'a remarkable and original writer... [whose] charged, evangelical language has a strenuous urgency, a mixture of austere beauty and an often remorseless emphasis on the 'striving flesh', the 'storm-flash of grace.' --------The Independent------ 'Jack Clemo is one of Cornwall's most important literary figures.' ------The Cornish Guardian------

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Book SynopsisHere scattered light falls across landscapes and memories. These new poems are among Jeremy Hooker's finest, extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the 'sacred', and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. This new collection contains a variety of short, 'light' poems, longer poems, and sequences such as 'Saltgrass Lane' and 'Hurst Castle' dig deeper into his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline.Trade Review'a deceptively readable poetry that leaves phrases and images in the mind as the best poems should.' - GILLIAN CLARKE

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Book SynopsisBerowne's Book was written by U. A. Fanthorpe before she began to write the poetry that was to make her reputation as one of England's most popular contemporary poets. 'In 1974, having found that the way to get a job was to conceal my qualifications,' she wrote, 'I contrived to be taken on as a clerk/receptionist in a small hospital.' As a patient at the Radcliffe when she was a student at Oxford, she'd formed a cheerful view of life in a hospital, but a neuro-psychiatric hospital provided very different experiences. It was the shock of discovering this that tipped her over into poetry. 'Poetry' she said, 'struck during my first month behind the desk'. With Berowne's Book she had already written a witty commentary on what she saw around her as she typed. Her observations are accompanied here by some of her very earliest poems. Hilarious, tender, profound and deeply humane, this series of snapshots of hospital life in the 1970s shocks partly because so much is immediately familiar today.Trade Review'The peerless U. A. Fanthorpe roots herself in the very earth of English poetry, connecting herself to Hughes and Browning, but also and more pertinently to the real experience of English living... so clear-eyed and so, well, completely poetic.' STEPHEN FRY; 'at once consoling and surprising, and heart-warmingly generous in her sympathy with the human condition.' ANDREW MOTION

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Book Synopsis"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters in Everybody's Weekly, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn't at school."For Duffy, pictures were and still are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence 'Burdsong'. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind's eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship's hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.Trade Review'Maureen Duffy deserves serious acclaim as a poet, as much as a novelist' Sunday Times; 'she presses on like a medieval troubadour across barriers of genre, gender, space and time.' TLS

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Book Synopsis'In the Orchard' is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from 'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like 'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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