Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisInzuzo is a classic anthology of S.E.K. Mqhayiâs poetry from 1943 about nature, social and religious topics, as well as praise poems about historical events and people that had a significant impact on society. Mqhayi was a pioneer in combining modern versification with the diction and artistic form of izibongo (praise-poems) in his writing.

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Book SynopsisA soul’s journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices to make one story of love and loss. In And She Was Corbett combines the fictional spell-making of Haruki Murakami, with the filmic neo-noir of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), to push the boundaries of poetic genre, asking us to renegotiate the way we encounter and reconfigure ourselves through trauma, in desire, or as we seek to reassemble ourselves and our past. November, 3am, and two young lovers are about to meet on the Heathrow Express. A side street in an unknown city: Felix Morning wakes with no memory. In his pocket is a membership card for a nightclub, The Bunker. With the help of the beautiful Flick, he must recover what he has lost. Deep into a dangerous love affair, Esther and Iain believe the other can replace what they each have lost – a heart, a gift – but is Esther’s price too high for Iain to pay, and can their love survive? Who is Esther, where has she come from, and what has she got to do with the woman in the labyrinth? Does Flick belong to the past or to the future? What is memory, and what remains of us without it? And She Was demands our attention, its startling and dazzling writing asking us to be carried away as we read, but returning us by its end to a place both resolved and transformed.Trade ReviewReviews 'A romance, a thriller, a myth, Sarah Corbett's new poem will have her readers hurrying through its pages to find out what happens before returning more slowly to the pleasures of her stepped, tilting stanzas and their line-by-line transformations of her characters and their places in the world. "Step in", she writes, "and the space unfolds / one box opening into others".' John Mcauliffe‘Can memory be put in a box?’ asks one of the characters in Sarah Corbett’s mysterious, condensed and achingly beautiful narrative tale. This lyrical, unsettling, and arresting poem about passion, memory and loss possesses an hallucinatory quality. Corbett creates an extraordinary urban world where a man reaching for his past finds it ever out of reach. The erotic writing captures the complexity of sexual connection and ‘the inner silk of memory’. Corbett writes fluid and irresistible poetry, to be read, re-read and savoured.' Patricia Duncker'In this dazzling tour de force, Sarah Corbett reworks the verse-novel into a contemporary odyssey through a labyrinthine underworld where myth and the unconscious collide. With effortless formal dexterity, her poetry is by turns mysterious, disturbing, startling and intensely sensuous, and if a poetry book can be a page- turner then this is that book. At its heart this is a narrative of loss and redemption as deeply humane as it is ambitious: you will want to read it in a single sitting, then re-read to savour its impeccable craft. An exciting development in contemporary narrative poetry, and a must-read.' Tiffany AtkinsonOn Sarah Corbett's previous collection, Other Beasts (Seren, 2008): 'This new collection (Other Beasts) has all the hallmarks of a fine poet truly coming into her own, exploring her themes in a distinctive voice that is at once powerful and tender. The images rea striking – the sky unleashing ‘the long whip/of its mountains, its river’s black ribbons’; Hale-Bopp as a ‘fist of flung glitter’; a mountain village at night hanging ‘like a lantern/in some unnamed crevice of the hills’. Light and darkness – natural, artificial and metaphorical – recur. Many times I’d weighed you against other lovers, like handfuls of soil/equally dark and rough.’ Colour and sound speak together, as in ‘the clap of brown shoes ont he green lino’. The rhthms and structures are sometimes gut-wrenchingly perfect (the finest example is in ‘Fox at Midnight’,). Boundaries, borders and divisions; uniqueness and unity; intimacy and distance – whether she is contemplating our relatioships with each other, with anials and the natural world, with our ancestors, or with space and time, Corbett conveys the acheing sense of being both a part of and aprt from, perhaps most tenderly in these lines from ‘Rainbow’: whne you left me, turning to the wall for sleep,’I smoothed the skin of your small tanned back.’ The themes are deeply personal, but they are also political and universal, and the entire collection is suffused with a sense of the smallness and greatness of all things. A slim volume of short poems spoken in a soft voice. They are, quite simply, shamanic.' Suzy Ceulan HughesOn Sarah Corbett's previous collection, Other Beasts (Seren, 2008): 'By this, her third collection, it is clear that Sarah Corbett has gathered around her a compelling set of personal motifs; childhood, animals (horses, in particular), hills, moors and the night. It would be lazy to call her work Gothic, because it doesn't deliberately set out to create unease, but her poems accept the blood-and-guts surrounding life (a single eyeball, a dead hare), and often find solace in the strangeness that night brings. Corbett is adept at the well-placed, acute image; two girls caught by lightning are 'a puzzle in each others' arms' in 'Lightning', rabbits have unnerving, 'bead-berry eyes' in 'Nocturne', and she uses juxtapositions that are often startling – and startlingly beautiful. For example, a fox tosses a sheep corpse over its back 'like a crown of blossom' in 'Fox at Midnight', and the 'Mountain Pony' settles 'the bird of its fear' on a concrete floor. There's a density to the diction, caused by strong consonance. Follow the recurrence of f, t and l sounds in these two other examples of beautiful, acute imagery: Hale Bopp is 'a fist of flung glitter' in 'Comet', and in 'Rivers, Roads', '...the city just left' is '...frost on leaf, just that'. The packed repetition of consonants slows the line down, forcing the reader to enunciate clearly and giving the words a deliberated weight, which underscores the evident rhythmic control of the lines. Corbett shares that control with her presiding spirit, Elizabeth Bishop, whose work furnishes several of the poems with epigraphs. This is how I'd scan the end of 'Birthday', the first poem in the book (the italicised syllables being those with the heaviest stress): ' I bark, bark. Other beasts complain back under the weight of dark.' I'm aware there are other scansion possibilities, especially at the start of that last line, but this is how I'd read it. Notice the slip back into iambic rhythm at the end, releasing the narrator into the night through which she runs. Notice also, the dense patterning of those hard consonants, not to mention the use of rhyme. When this occurs, the poem seems a solid, precise thing, shaped by axes and chisels. This is distinctively Corbett; her music. I wonder what Corbett's imagination might do outside the confines of the modern lyric poem. I'm looking forward to the appearance of the verse novel on which she's currently working. I don't find the closed, charged chamber of the confessional poem in Other Beasts, nor a meander through the past's titbits. Instead, I find a series of beautiful, unsettling, lyric moments, and several compelling sequences that look outwards to the contemporary and wider world.' Meryl Pugh'Corbett’s book is proof that whenever there is something difficult to say, there is always another ‘and’ that can be used to force the words out of your self and onto the page.' Annie Muir, The Manchester Review'The kaleidoscopic variations in form and the narrative ambiguity, result in a work that’s both compelling and frustrating. Instinctively, we want to locate the heart of the story, but in many of the poems this heart is obscured or withheld. Yet this is the point: rather than a linear narrative, And She Was is cinematic and strange, an exploration of how memory deals - or fails to deal - with passion and hurt.New Welsh Review‘And She Was is remarkable. I have never read a book of poetry in one sitting – absolutely gripped – and then read it all over again.' Nicky Arscott, Poetry Wales'There is much to admire in this verse novel’s stylistic richness, its condensed incident and drama, and in the audacity of its experiment.'Linda West, Text JournalTable of ContentsNocturne in Three Movements (E Major) (C Major) (E Minor) The Train The Runner The Cafe Flick The Garden The Shower The Bunker The Dance The Kiss The Fit The Key Place of the Lost Things Pinkie Esther’s Bones Esther’s Eyes Esther’s Scar The Bunker A Conversation over Breakfast Nights Together Bath Strawberries Esther Alone Scars Under The Lamp Where Esther Went Iain Sleeps A Lost Thing Returns The Bond A Conversation About Loving The Vow Pinkie Locket Running Notes and Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisIn her third full-length collection 'Blood Child', Eleanor Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change – fleeting, elusive or moored in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the ‘child’ and the ‘girl’ are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees’s poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.Trade Review'These are shape-shifting poems from a shape-shifting poet, who listens to what the place has to say and always keeps her feet on the ground.' Paul KingsnorthOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Eleanor Rees’s debut collection offers up a heartfelt hymn to her native Liverpool. Her dense, textured renderings of its landscapes are eloquent, but it is her importunate, ambiguous relationship with the city that provides these poems with their drive.' Sarah Crown, The GuardianOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: '… incantatory, spell-like, trance-inducing – poetry as magical utterance to which you have to submit, make a willing suspension of disbelief …' Matt Simpson, Stride MagazineOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: '… an ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life.' Carol Ann DuffyOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Here is a poetry that relishes the chaotic and magical; trees and plants abandon gardens and start to move down the street, humans give birth to animals, houses come alive. Eleanor Rees’s language is sensuous, unpredictable. The materials of folktale and border ballad are never far away.' Charles Bainbridge, The GuardianOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Rees comes close to describing the nature of her vision when she writes ‘marrow is all my thinking // as thinking is tired and broken / has no cohesion … thinking thinks too much of itself’. As ‘marrow’ suggests, the core of experience is deep and hidden, and in the romantic-expressionist tradition it is this deep apprehension, not the processes of conscious thought, that most compel her … lusciously, swooningly female in the restless, mobile eroticism that flows throughout the book … The expressionist character of Rees’ work is bold and demanding. She offers nothing that is cheaply mimetic or demotic.' Jeffrey Wainwright, PN ReviewOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Eleanor Rees’s poetry is strikingly pleasing, its distinctive rhythms as insidious as water.' Alison Brackenbury, PN ReviewOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Rees’s work is completely deserving of its shortlist position, even more so for a voice outside the mainstream.' Ross Sutherland, MetroOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'Eleanor Rees comes from ‘over the water’, and her poems seem to issue from a lyric country where they do things differently. Instinctive, elemental and ready for anything they twist and coil marvellously between inner and outer worlds, never resting for long in either, always beguiling or unsettling the reader …' Paul FarleyOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: 'This is a strongly contemporary voice, but always on the edge of myth, dream, fairy-tale. The title sequence is remarkable: a sustained piece of dramatic-poetic writing, a tour-de-force.' Michael Symmons Roberts'There is a sensuality in Rees's poetry; sensations are beautifully and seductively illustrated. There is also a sense of movement in the work; she takes you on a narrative journey paved by her mastery of words.' Dundee University Review of the Arts'Rees asserts unarguable truths that stretch beyond the usual socio-historic contexts we like to create in order to locate ourselves as readers.' Nicky Arscott, Poetry WalesReviews 'Together, Blood Child and Riverine convey seductively cross-fading time-scapes; it is in the end this quality that makes these remarkable poems linger in the memory, unsettling and disquieting, redefining so-called realities. Dark, visceral, her use of language and image is controlled and concentrated, and through it the message is one of connection. World and human personality are intimately woven together; we are not observers of the game but part of it, belonging to the continuum. It comes down to time, the context through which we move; past and present occupy the same space within Rees’s theory of relativity, and chronology for her is measured both in every day and cosmic terms, just as local and universal, yesterday, today and tomorrow brush against one another, with us –rushing but static– in their midst.'Sean Street, Tears in the Fence‘Eleanor Rees does with language what an origami master does with paper or a contortionist their own limbs: she teases and manipulates it into wondrous, strange, and alluring shapes. It's been several years since I've read work this stimulating, the engagement with which offering such profound peace and pleasure and such resonant rewards.’Niall Griffiths'These poems are an exquisite unearthing of meaning in nature. They trace metamorphosis, find mind in everything, and suggest not so much what things look like to humans but what they feel like to themselves.' Jayne Griffiths'The messages Rees’ poems deliver are difficult to transcribe prosaically, moving as they do in a densely fairy-tale or dream-logical atmosphere. This aspect of her work is hugely effective, creating a lush dreamscape full of mud, sludge, mulch and other fecundities, populated by eerie running children, unreliable parents, poet-birds and their panoramic perspectives. [...] The poems in Blood Child show an astute, painterly eye and a flair for outlandish and surprising detail. [...] Blood Child [is an] engaging, imaginative text that demonstrates a great love and respect for its folkloric sources, and [is] a thought-provoking read.'Dave Coates, The York Review'This is a short collection of 19 poems but the author and publishers should be applauded for having a collection that does not fit the poem a page routine. [...] In this third collection we can read the substantial creativity of Eleanor Rees and her melding of history, nature and emotion and the skill in developing a ‘oneness’ from a multitude of ideas. Foremost in her writing is the use of changing forms, transmogrifying, as it were into different species whilst in full flow which offers both continuation and further development of style as well as theme. There is also the touching on the darker recesses of the unconscious mind, not a digging, more a small bore-hole into Pandora’s Box.'J. Johnson Smith, poetryparcTable of Contents A Burial of Sight Blood Child Full Tide Mainline Rail Dusk Town Arne’s Progress Crossing Over St James’s Infirmary Philharmonic Cortege Sheen Magnolia Becoming Miniature In My Ears and in My Eyes Topology Bird Men of the Far Hill Seal Skin The Cruel Mother Blue Black

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the 2016 T S Eliot Prize for Best Collection. Drawing from neuroscience on the idea of 'internal gain', an internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration, Ruby Robinson's brilliant debut introduces a poet whose work is governed by a scrupulous attention to the detail of the contemporary world. Moving and original, her poems invite us to listen carefully, and use ideas of hearing and listening to explore the legacies of trauma. The book celebrates the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships, and our capacity to harm and love.Trade ReviewReviews 'The most vital poetry is fuelled by truth, even when it may expose us to the source of pain. Ruby Robinson’s poems enact this risk with great skill, reaffirming the power of the art. Every Little Sound is an extraordinary first collection from a very gifted young poet.' Colette Bryce'Robinson is concerned with 'the gaps between – when sets are dismantled and rebuilt, or a tortoise hibernates while all human life continues around it. In poems that pulse with sensory detail – the sun pushing through iced air, a horizon 'enflaming' the shallows at the water’s edge – her poetry amplifies the quietest, habitually unheard, sounds of our lives. There is a metaphysical sensibility - at work in poems like the wonderful ‘Undress’ – a modern take on the resistant lover trope, but with a delicious twist: while Donne and Marvell stop short of a resolution, Robinson’s fictional lover is marvellously yielding. Her crisp phrasing and relentless reaching after the truth make hers a rare and powerful new voice. Ruby Robinson is one to watch.' Julia Corpus'Ruby Robinson is a real find. Her agile and poised poems play with scale, listen out and in, and crank the gain up on the world. It’s great to discover such an exciting debut.' Paul Farley'To read 'Apology' in full is to be within the experience of the speaker. In part because of the hardness of language, clinical at times, the poem, and the collection, is irreparably moving.' Angelina d'Roza, Antiphon'Several ventures into prose and long-narrative confessional poetry punctuate the collection...and are stunning precisely on account of their grace and restraint.' Theophilus Kwek, The London Magazine'These are taut, vibrant, intimate poems, structured in a such a way as to replicate the complicated manoeuvres our brains make as we try to understand human behaviour.' osephine Corcoran'Robinson retains/regains an artistic distance that augurs well for future collections...' Martyn Crucefix'From the outset, we are forewarned – there is nothing so personal that it cannot be expressed here. Robinson brings to light the unspoken connection between reader and poet, and even in the darkest of lines, empathy arises.' Frances Kelly, Dundee University Reviews of the Arts'Every Little Sound had the most profound impact on me.' Noel Williams, The North 'An intelligent and disturbing debut that explores how family affects both our sense of self and our intimate relationships. Composed of free verse and occasional prose poems, it is stylistically original in its diction and syntax as speaker and poet grapple to render experience.' Carrie Etter, The Guardian'There are too many examples of good poetry in this book for any review outside of a monograph to do it justice. Perhaps all that needs to be said is that this is a serious arrival of a poet that I would view to be among our absolute best.' The Next Review'Ruby Robinson's Every Little Sound opens with a summary of the concept of 'internal gain': 'an internal volume control which helps to amplify and focus upon quiet sounds in times of threat, danger, or intense concentration'. The result is a set of hyperreal observations, transcending the everyday and unlocking its latent Gothic menace.' John Field, Poor Rude Lines'There is a profoundly thrilling menace behind these poems and how they dismantle the body...Every Little Sound is a book you’d cheer for even if it weren’t the underdog.' The Oxonian Review'‘Past’ kind of took my breath away when I first read it...The poem seems to be directly addressing the reader, as if we are part of that confession, as if we are the one being spoken to.' Kim Moore, Poetry'Robinson's work remains outward-looking, inviting us in from the very first line. [...] In the absence of answers, the speaker instead finds a voice – and the words – through which to articulate herself. Reflecting upon her mother’s life, she recognises the ease with which we adopt or are forced into destructive roles in intimate relationships, replaying them years later. [...] These liberating lines come from having at last found a space for expression following years of oppressive silence, while maintaining a safe distance from face-to-face interaction, for now.'Lucy Winrow, The Manchester ReviewTable of ContentsReader, listener, UnlocatableLongbeforeHopeUndressListenStoryTruthLocked DoorsMy MotherApologyInterlude Tea Time Romance Boy This Night Orgasm Schism Watching TV Internal Gain Breathe Deep Hush Love Love II Flashback How to Catch a Pebble Winter Past Talisker Bay Tuning Fork To my Family Notes and Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisIn her first full-length collection, Sarah Westcott immerses the human self in the natural world, giving voice to a remarkable range of flora and fauna so often silenced or unheard. Here, the voiceless speaks, laments and sings - from the fresh voice of a spring wood to a colony of bats or a grove of ancient sequioa trees. Unafraid of using scientific language and teamed with a clear eye, Westcott’s poems are drawn directly from the natural world, questioning ideas of the porosity of boundaries between the human and non-human and teeming with detail. A series of lyrical charms inspired by Anglo-Saxon texts draw on the specificity of the botanical and its spoken heritage, suggesting a relevance that resonates today. Westcott’s poems are alive to the beautiful in the commonplace and offer up a precise honouring of the wild, while retaining a deeply-felt sense of connection with a planet in peril.Trade ReviewReviews 'I have been waiting eagerly for a full collection from Sarah Westcott. Now it is here I am dazzled. So imaginative are the poems in Slant Light it's as if she pulls her language from a fantastical place; Westcott takes us deep into the natural world, makes us understand its physical urgency, ‘the insistence of air’. She has a microscopic eye. Everything we encounter here – the bat, the mole, the hare, the flower – is so finely described, things rise up from the page. This is not just a book of poems, it is a book of rich, exquisite shapes, providing a new understanding of how ‘we sense the bright world’.' Rebecca Goss'Slant Light is a book of charms and wonders, full of birds and flowers. But Sarah Westcott is too good a poet to simply charm us, and the work here is fierce with intelligence, compassion and the sheer exuberance of attending to what Hopkins called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’. A super debut.' Jacob Polley'Slant Light confirms Sarah Westcott as a striking new voice. Her main subject is the natural world and its many forms of life. The interconnectedness of humans, animals and plants is key to Westcott’s writing. The poems are informed by her scientific background but what makes them special is the individuality she perceives in these different forms, the voices she often gives them and the imaginative way she presents information…the approach is visionary. Even when the material is factual, the often shows it as so extraordinary that it seems beyond the real. Westcott mines the English language, drawing on scientific and technological terms and the language of everyday and obsolete words. Her tone is as varied as her vocabulary and ranges from the deeply emotional to the darkly ambiguous, from the mysterious to the vulnerable. Here is a poet deeply engaged with the natural and human world and their relationship. Her poems stay in the mind and draw the reader back. Slant Light is an outstanding collection.'Myra Schneider, Artemis Poetry'Slant Light is a beautifully constructed meditation on man’s objectification of nature. The poems are full of clear, sometimes startling imagery … and generate a sense of reflection and joy.'Magma'This is memorable work, so full of biological references, charms and voices from the natural world. The surprising imagery and arresting language reveals Westcott’s keen eye and depth of scientific knowledge, setting the tone for the way she exposes the similarities between humans and other animals.… I was taken down the microscope into the pleasures and playfulness of language. A biologist’s wonder realises the empathy of a poet.'Orbis'This is a collection that relates nature to humanity in a way that is new and exciting… I think it is stunning. I'd push this book into the hands of a lot of people and I don't think you have to be very familiar with poetry to enjoy it either.'Jen Campbell, Costa Poetry Prize Judge'This collection mixes detailed observation of nature with folklore and at times almost painfully tender personal experiences, real or imagined. Westcott’s poetry is a moving marriage of an eye for nature and an acute understanding of the human heart. Beautifully written, tightly composed, this first collection is full of insight and forges a welcome link between words and nature.'John Ingham, Environment Editor, Daily Express'Sarah Westcott's poem 'Downy Mildew' is an unexpectedly moving paean to a series of models of microscopic fungi made in the 1930s by the Cambridge mycologist Dillon Weston. 'People thought fungi repulsive', he once wrote, 'and I wanted to show how beautiful they can be'. Westcott captures expertly what can be revealed if one only looks closely: 'Contingent as mist/we rise up like little loaves/with dark spores/blaze our hackles, haring/across the greenest crucifers,/sinking into pulp'.'Jonathan Barnes, The Lancet'Invoking the sinister, slanted light of Emily Dickinson's poem, in her first full-length collection Sarah Westcott casts her eye on a world teeming with organisms at once organic, artificial and mystical. Rooted in the natural world, the poems are concerned with the frail membranes that partition plant from animal matter, perfectly embodied in the image of 'The Vegetable Lamb' - mythological plant believed to bear sheep as fruit. Revealing how firmly the spores of the ancient natural world are embedded in the contemporary, the collection is also a stark reminder of a world 'quietly consuming itself'.'Poetry Book SocietyTable of ContentsBatsInklingsSpring WoodFormDowny MildewMiliaFor the Love of Young LeafFlowersLilyThe Mariposa TreesFallen MonarchThe Faithful CoupleWawona Tunnel TreeThe Vegetable LambGreen GiantThe Great Pacific Garbage PatchSentinelLambskinLittle RedPox CharmCharm for Delayed BirthCharm for a Lost ChildHare Mass Messenger May Still Life Sculpting a Mole The Cannots The Green Flash And then he started singing again Charm Against a Wen Black and Blue Cannibal Eyas Oxygen Owls We are listening Afterlife cloud Notes and Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisPoems on apparent conflicts (Brexit, coronavirus and war) and the underlying unity of Nature and the universe

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Book SynopsisThis study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet’s art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the ‘poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley’s work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley’s poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet’s life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley’s artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley’s poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.Trade ReviewReviews'Callaghan reads Shelley’s letters and their biographical concerns to illuminate his poetry, tracing the shifting relationship between the poet’s poetry and life. She shows that Shelley refused and exploded the boundaries between the personal and poetic by reconfiguring life events within his poetry and drama. The boundary between the poet’s life and art is a difficult one for a critic and often less useful than close textual analysis. Callaghan makes a case for the ways in which Shelley transmutes the personal into transformative poetry with Shelley’s understanding that ‘the poet man are of two different natures’ and that the ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, where truth and eternity clash.' Tears in the Fence'Callaghan is a confident judge and writer … an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley’s often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley’s work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early poetry more seriously on artistic terms than it has been so far. Shelley’s Living Artistry will make study of his correspondence much more central to future accounts of his work. Shelley’s Living Artistry is, then, a notable contribution to contemporary study of Shelley and, in particular, provides a useful reminder of the different genres and modes in which he wrote and the often taut relations between them.' Ross Wilson, Cambridge Quarterly‘A valuable, ranging and deeply informed contribution…to any reader sympathetic to neo-formalism, and indeed any reader sympathetic to Shelley (who can be as frustrating a poet as a brilliantly incandescent one), this study will repay attention.’Christopher Stokes, The BARS Review‘In Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, Madeleine Callaghan offers a stimulating and absorbing account of the way that Shelley self-consciously stages his artistic development in his poetry and his efforts to "[transmute] the dross of the personal into the gold of art"...In short, Shelley’s Living Artistry makes a convincing case for reading Shelley’s poetry "through the lens of the letters" so as to bring into focus important aspects of his artistry and develop "a fuller consideration of Shelley’s poetic achievement".’Jonathan Quayle, English: Journal of the English Association‘Shelley’s art, in Callaghan’s monograph, is living. It is not something that has been created or recreated, but rather like the statue of Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, needs only to be touched to feel its living warmth.’ Dana Van Kooy, European Romantic Review'This is a compellingly argued book, and it represents a serious and substantial addition to Shelley scholarship. What is particularly refreshing, however, is that Callaghan is not simply an expert scholarly reader of Shelley. She quite clearly loves his poetry and is not afraid to say so, or to reach for superlatives when only superlatives will do. It is this passion for the poetry and for understanding the depths of Shelley’s artistry that drives her close reading and animates her account of individual texts. Surely a poet as attuned to the revolutionary potential of reading as was Shelley would be pleased to have found such a reader.' Daisy Hay, Keats-Shelley JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts1. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab2. ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna3. ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook4. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo5. ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci6. ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry7. ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems8. ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of LifeBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWalking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett’s fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.Trade Review'Mature, intense, necessary – in turbulent times, the poems of A Perfect Mirror haunt and hold the reader, showcasing the gifts of a poet as accomplished in evoking the natural world as she is in communicating a powerful psychic landscape. Deploying imagery at once idiosyncratic, apposite and utterly memorable, with an remarkable feel for the line, and terrific sonic effects, Corbett never fails to move and excite, prompting me to return again and again to wonder, with not a little envy: how does she do it? Here is a talent who illumines darkness with a fierce emotional and intellectual rigour. There can be no doubt: Sarah Corbett is one of the finest, most essential poets now writing.'Kathryn Gray'A Perfect Mirror flickers more secrets about the Calder Valley into view than a mirror ever could. Marvelling at moss and the moon of ice, elsewhere plying the mystery of puddles, these miraculous poems nurse the glint of sun into gold. Even the sky begins to speak, graced by the ghosts of Wordsworth, Plath, Bronte and Austen, as scaling each hill entails a hike into the imagination, “where the mind goes gliding beyond the shores of its ocean... moving towards a horizon we will never touch”.'Jade Cuttle, Poetry Book Society'Often, cautious students of poetry worry that their poems oughtn’t be about one ‘controversial’ thing or another. What Corbett has shown is that they should take the opposite approach: fill their poems with all the savages and saints which make up the human condition. Only then will the mirror of poetry be perfect.'Jake Campbell, Poetry School'Corbett’s writing on nature is both jubilant and troubled, lit by the joys of exploring the countryside of West Yorkshire, but equally alert to environmental problems caused by humans...When Corbett lets her enthusiasm for the natural world loose her writing is energizing...'Suzannah V. Evans, Times Literary Supplement'Corbett proves herself throughout these poetic depictions of nature to be a timeless and sensual writer. She is subtly sonnet-like in her portrayal of opposing concepts, pitting safety and surety against risk, the rural against the urban, the here versus the elsewhere, and the then versus the now.'Biana Pellet, The London Magazine‘Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.’David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent Reviews ‘A Perfect Mirror reflects brilliantly on the craft off its maker, on the places of its making and on the literary heroines and heroes with whom, it proves, Corbett is amply deserving to be ranked.’Mike Farren, The High Window'Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.' David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent

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Book SynopsisEmily Hasler’s debut collection moves between the local and the distant, the urban and the rural, and past and present. This is a poetry of emotional density underpinned with a lightness of touch. Hasler’s poems are structural but organic, detailed but lively, thoughtful but playful. There is a rare combination of exactitude and wonder which leads the reader in and keeps them there. Often taking their cue from the work of visual artists, these poems probe at the ways we understand and reconstruct our environment. Examining places, objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers and bridges, these poems ask how our world is made, and how it makes us.Trade Review'Emily Hasler's poems invite us to look again at the ways in which we construct - and constrain - meaning, experience, ourselves and each other. They draw on past narratives and historical forms of investment to suggest future possibilities.' Lavinia Greenlaw'These poems are finely and patiently constructed, “the thought is latticed, girded by gaps”. Alive to the intangible, their architectural motifs continually shift back and forth, sometimes vertiginously, between the literal and the metaphorical.' Jamie McKendrick'The character of The Built Environment is perhaps best expressed in its own words: "There, / it starts to feel – in its united heart – that it is strong, light, supple, hard." Emily Hasler has nerve.'Karen Solie'The poet of this brilliant, smart debut truly knows ‘how lucky we are to see ourselves in everything’ and wears that considerable wisdom lightly. We are drawn in with and by her, exposed and comported and instructed.'Will Burns, Caught by the River'This is an intriguing, deft collection, demonstrating Hasler’s spellbinding ability to make the material world leap from the page.'Poetry Book Society'Through questioning the constructed and natural things around us, as well as the flexibility of language, this book generates a restless and creative energy that not only revives its subjects, but also renews the sense of what a poem can do and be. Often, the poems left me trapped between wanting more and feeling completely satisfied, and Hasler’s unwillingness to be constrained by any dominant mode or theme affords The Built Environment a unique place in a poetic landscape dominated by heavily themed collections.'John Challis, Poetry School'The poems beautifully unite mathematics, art and emotion, giving the reader a sense of an environment that slowly shifts under all of our influence, animals and rain included, whether or not we are witting builders of that environment. The Built Environment illuminates this credibly – making it canonical thanks to its successful fusion of curiosity and clarity.'Biana Pellet, The London Magazine'Cerebral and thoughtful ... subtle, perfectly pitched.' Suzannah V. Evans, Times Literary Supplement‘Even readers sceptical about the history and geopolitics of Hasler’s English landscapes will find it hard to be unaffected by her self-reflective and imaginatively investigative portrayals of place…what makes The Built Environment a standout debut is its rare agility in combining the playful and the metaphysical in the kind of plain, humorous, and instructive style we find in Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.’ Kit Fan, The Poetry Review‘In Hasler’s poetry, language is very much another environment we have built for ourselves. We never stop building, in stone or time or thin air.’ Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London'This collection gathers and processes details. Like “the folding machine” of its opening poem (On Headed Paper), it is intricate, precise and fractal.'Chris Kerr, Magma

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Book SynopsisThis volume offers a fresh translation of a generous selection of Lorca’s suites, a body of work that Federico García Lorca left largely unpublished upon his death in 1936. Composed between 1920 to 1923, these poems are closest in spirit and technique to Lorca’s Songs (1927) and his Poem of the Deep Song (1931). In 1926 the poet suggested they could be released together to form a ‘boxed set’, yet this plan, like other earlier efforts, fell through. Lorca’s suites reveal a poet who is interested in creating a modern style founded on popular oral lyric and fragmented narrative. But they also show a poet who explores his heart and his sexual orientation, and who may have hesitated too long about publication. Lorca achieved the fullest expression of a personal yearning in his long poem In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits. Out of an impossible contradiction between self-discovery and wariness of disclosure rises the blue world of the ideal—a timeless world that all readers of Lorca will want to take into account, inasmuch as it forms a counterpoint to the rest of his work.Trade Review'Federico García Lorca, Selected Suites is a valuable contribution to the bibliography on the poet and offers both the specialist and the general reader of poetry the opportunity to access these little-known poems [...] The high quality of these translations stems from Quance's extensive knowledge about Lorca's poems, and the personal, literary, and cultural context in which they were written.' W. Michael Mudrovic, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC)Table of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS1) Blue River/Río azul2) Night/Noche3) Mirror Suite/Suite de los espejos4) Garden of the Dark-Haired Girls/Jardín de las morenas5) Capriccios/Capriccios6) Moments of Song/Momentos de canción7) Palimpsests8) Songs Beneath the Moon/Canciones bajo la luna9) Pictures of the Sea/Estampas del mar10) Three Prints of the Heavens/Tres estampas del cielo11) Fairs/Ferias12) Shadow/Sombra13) Four Yellow Ballads/Cuatro baladas amarillentas14) Pools in the Stream/Remansos15) Summer Hours/Horas de verano16) The Return/El regreso17) Secrets/Secretos18) White Album/Album blanco19) The Forest of Clocks/La selva de los relojes20) Cross/Cruz21) Water Suite/Suite del agua22) Three Twilights/Tres crepúsculos23) Countries/Países24) Little Stories of the Wind/Historietas del viento25) Riverside Reveries/Ensueños del río26) Madrigals/Madrigales27) Castle of Fireworks/Castillo de fuegos artificiales28) Water Jets/Surtidores29) Herbals/Herbarios30) Snail/Caracol31) In the Wood of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el bosque de las toronjas de luna32) In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el jardín de las toronjas de lunaAPPENDIXNOTESSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Book SynopsisThis volume offers a fresh translation of a generous selection of Lorca’s suites, a body of work that Federico García Lorca left largely unpublished upon his death in 1936. Composed between 1920 to 1923, these poems are closest in spirit and technique to Lorca’s Songs (1927) and his Poem of the Deep Song (1931). In 1926 the poet suggested they could be released together to form a ‘boxed set’, yet this plan, like other earlier efforts, fell through. Lorca’s suites reveal a poet who is interested in creating a modern style founded on popular oral lyric and fragmented narrative. But they also show a poet who explores his heart and his sexual orientation, and who may have hesitated too long about publication. Lorca achieved the fullest expression of a personal yearning in his long poem In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits. Out of an impossible contradiction between self-discovery and wariness of disclosure rises the blue world of the ideal—a timeless world that all readers of Lorca will want to take into account, inasmuch as it forms a counterpoint to the rest of his work.Trade Review'Federico García Lorca, Selected Suites is a valuable contribution to the bibliography on the poet and offers both the specialist and the general reader of poetry the opportunity to access these little-known poems [...] The high quality of these translations stems from Quance's extensive knowledge about Lorca's poems, and the personal, literary, and cultural context in which they were written.' W. Michael Mudrovic, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC)Table of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS1) Blue River/Río azul2) Night/Noche3) Mirror Suite/Suite de los espejos4) Garden of the Dark-Haired Girls/Jardín de las morenas5) Capriccios/Capriccios6) Moments of Song/Momentos de canción7) Palimpsests8) Songs Beneath the Moon/Canciones bajo la luna9) Pictures of the Sea/Estampas del mar10) Three Prints of the Heavens/Tres estampas del cielo11) Fairs/Ferias12) Shadow/Sombra13) Four Yellow Ballads/Cuatro baladas amarillentas14) Pools in the Stream/Remansos15) Summer Hours/Horas de verano16) The Return/El regreso17) Secrets/Secretos18) White Album/Album blanco19) The Forest of Clocks/La selva de los relojes20) Cross/Cruz21) Water Suite/Suite del agua22) Three Twilights/Tres crepúsculos23) Countries/Países24) Little Stories of the Wind/Historietas del viento25) Riverside Reveries/Ensueños del río26) Madrigals/Madrigales27) Castle of Fireworks/Castillo de fuegos artificiales28) Water Jets/Surtidores29) Herbals/Herbarios30) Snail/Caracol31) In the Wood of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el bosque de las toronjas de luna32) In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el jardín de las toronjas de lunaAPPENDIXNOTESSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Book SynopsisIn late December 1817, when attempting to name “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” which he glossed as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the “poetical Character” Keats notes that “it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.Trade Review‘That this book ranges so richly, so variously, and so widely will be welcome to all readers, not least because it embodies the Shakespearean aspects of negative capability.’ Nicholas Roe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews‘Keats's Negative Capability will ... prompt [its readers] to think again and anew and unceasingly on what negative capability was, is, and can become.’ Jonathan Mulrooney, Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross‘[A] wonderfully diverse collection that equally tells the story of Keats while profitably poking and probing the discursive, diffusive, and cultural powers of the term [negative capability]… in the spirit of an intelligently designed Keatsian smorgasbord, the collection has something for everyone.’ G. Kim Blank, The Wordsworth Circle'This book significantly and provocatively reconfigures our understanding of Keats's poetry and letters, his authorial intentions, his aesthetic philosophy, and his global legacy.'Rebecca Nesvet, Review 19'[A] thought-provoking collection of commentary and innovative thinking... The work here will not provide statements of ‘fact and reason’, but instead will stimulate future scholarship on Keats and Romantic legacy for many years to come.'Anna Mercer, The Hazlitt Review'[The essays'] disagreements about what negative capability can and can’t mean give the volume a conversational dynamism; even their anxiety resembles the urgency of a spirited argument between friends... As Jonathan Mulrooney’s afterward notes, the collection’s dissonance is “its most Keatsian” feature.'Brittany Pladek, European Romantic Review'The collection will be essential to students and scholars of Keats as Rejack's analysis of John Jeffrey's role in transcribing 'Negative Capability' refreshes our understating of the concept. Contributors to this collection have risen to Rejack's editorial challenge and, produced prominent and diverse readings, which extend in variety across a range of critical approaches, including feminism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Keats's 'Negative Capability' remains a vital concept, which continues to provoke readers and writers alike to reflect on its myriad values and virtues in the present and will continue to do so in the future.'Amina Brik, The BARS ReviewTable of ContentsPreface - Nicholas RoeIntroduction. Disquisitions: Reading Negative Capability, 1817–2017 - Brian Rejack and Michael TheunePart I. ‘swelling into reality’: New Contexts for Negative Capability Keats’s Negative Capability: On Pantomime and ‘Irritable Reaching’ - Brian Bates John Keats’s Jeffrey’s ‘Negative Capability’; or, Accidentally Undermining Keats - Brian Rejack Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’ and Hazlitt’s ‘Natural Capacity’ - Michael Theune ‘that strong excepted soul’: Nineteenth-Century Women Read Keats - Carmen Faye MathesPart II. ‘examplified throughout’: Forms of Negatively Capable Reading’ Negatively Capable Reading - Cassandra Falke Knowledge’s ‘gordian shape’: Keats and the Disciplines - Kurtis Hessel ‘Irritable Reaching’ and the Conditions of Romantic Mediation - Jeanne Britton ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’: Pluralities and the Historical Present in Keats and Hazlitt - Emily RohrbachPart III. ‘pursued through Volumes’, Volume I: Negative Capability in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry Beyond the Great Divide: Negative Capability and Postwar American Poetics - Robert Archambeau Versions of Negative Capability in Modern American Poetry and Criticism - Eric Eisner ‘giddily off into the unknown’: Negative Capability and Naturalism in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics - Arsevi Seyran ‘Darkling I listen’: Jorie Graham and Negative Capability - Thomas GardnerPart IV. ‘pursued through Volumes’, Volume II: Adaptations, Appropriations, Mutations Negative Capability in the Twenty-First Century and Romantic Self Annihilation in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials - Suzanne L. Barnett Negative Capability in Psychoanalysis: Keats and Retroactive Judgment in Bion, Freud, Lacan, and Milner - David Sigler Zen and the Art of Negative Capability - Anne C. McCarthy Negative Capability in Dialogic Context - Walter L. ReedAfterword: Reading Keats’s Negative Capability - Jonathan MulrooneyIndex

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Book SynopsisRoger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as `one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.’ This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon’s extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Muldoon is always innovative and `electric’, but the focus in this selection is on linguistic `departures’ in his own practice. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of `New World’–`Old World’ (false) verbal dynamics. We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in terms of those elements of his work that are possibly less appreciated and discussed by those who cast him as a lyrical purist who 'plays' with language. Muldoon’s is a poetry that is compelled, propelled and is 'political' in complex arrays, and isn't about `gameplay’ per se, but a politics of language. Muldoon has a driving purpose in all he writes, and the reader and listener may begin to get a sense of the possibilities of this purpose through engaging with this book.Trade Review'These writings think of our relation to place as not just as a function of "where we are but [also] where we have been and where we can perceive ourselves as having been, or imagine ourselves being"... For Kinsella, it is Muldoon's verse vagabondage through the thorny linguistic, historical, and mythological borderlands of his two homes that best captures this "multi-layered and cumulative picture of place". Not just "the prince of the quotidian", Kinsella's Muldoon is the laureate of polysituatedness.' James Jiang, Australian Book Review

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Book SynopsisFrom the author of Acts of Kindness from your Armchair and the uplifting Healing Words blog, comes this new offering for those seeking deeper meaning to life. Soul Murmurs is a must-have collection of poetry and prose imbued with spiritual wisdom from east and west. Each page, resonating with peace and calm, offers comfort and moments of reflection in a fast-moving world. In this compilation you will discover: meditative verses which speak to the heart and soul; silent cries of longing for meaning; joyful searching for the Divine within and in the wider world; autobiographical vignettes offering insight on aspects of human life that we all experience. Gathered under seasonal headings to echo the eternal cycle of life, each page reverberates with inspiration, spiritual encouragement and suggested action points to uplift the reader throughout the year.

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Book SynopsisIn Fools’ Paradise, a mock-heroic poem on Brexit which complements his masque King Charles the Wise, Nicholas Hagger presents the most important British event since the Second World War: the Brexiteers’ struggle to wrest control of the UK’s laws, borders, money and trade from the EU and turn the UK into a more prosperous paradise. In 16 cantos and an epilogue of heroic couplets with an epic tone he narrates the 2018 Chequers compromise and its aftermath: the EU’s opposition, lack of internal support, looming ‘no deal’ and requests for extensions that keep the UK in the EU. He shows the UK Ship of State as manned by a squabbling crew sailing for an illusory paradise and too riven by division to reach agreement. The dream all were promised seems undeliverable. In the tradition of the social satire of Dryden and Pope, the elevated style is undermined by a recurring image of the Ship of Fools in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Swiss poem Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff), which makes a chaotic voyage from Europe to an illusory paradise across the waves. It becomes apparent that all on the UK Ship of State are to some extent living in a fools’ paradise. Focusing on the historic decision to leave Europe that if carried through would have immense repercussions for coming generations, Nicholas Hagger presents the warring factions on the UK Ship of State and in true Universalist manner foresees a resolution of the conflict in the reconciliation of a coming united world. This is an astonishing poem that approaches the most important national event of our time in the spirit of Tennyson and gets to the heart of the UK’s national predicament.

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Book SynopsisA hundred poems drawn from 50 poetic volumes show the author's Baroque roots and how his Baroque vision grew into Universalism.

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Book SynopsisIn Fools’ Paradise Nicholas Hagger presented the UK’s attempt to leave the EU under Prime Minister Theresa May in terms of the voyage of Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Ship of Fools heading with a mutinous crew for the illusory, nonexistent paradise of Narragonia. His mock-heroic satirical poem on the political chaos surrounding the most important UK decision since the Second World War is in rhymed heroic couplets, in the tradition of Dryden and Pope. In this sequel, Fools’ Gold, Hagger focuses on the beginning of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the promises that won him the 2019 General Election with an 80-seat majority, and his removal of the UK from the EU, only to be engulfed by the deadly Covid pandemic which has devastated the UK economy. Hagger describes the catastrophic national events in heroic blank verse, which befits the darkening mood. The UK public has been promised a new Golden Age, an age of plenty, and it remains to be seen whether there will be prosperity for all - gold - now that the UK is facing colossal debt outside the EU, or whether the promises will turn out to be worthless iron pyrites: fools’ gold.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021Linda Anderson's much anticipated first collection travels across time and space, employing a range of voices, including historical ones. At the heart of the collection, though, is always the moment of encounter, the moment when things appear strange, before they settle into a pattern or become known. This is as true of the explorer Charles Kingsley, awed by the Caribbean landscape, as it is of the poet herself, confronted with moments of vision or almost vision, either in her own travels, or in the ordinariness of a domestic life. Nothing is quite secure in this collection: memory destabilizes with its resurrections; seeing has many angles and cannot be taken for granted; borders fluctuate and crossings abound. And although not afraid to draw on ideas from many sources, these poems often explore how thinking masks a fragility, the knowledge of our mortal selves. What are the fragments that make a poem, the book asks? How are they held within a form? And how do we negotiate the multiple memories, ideas, sights, meetings, and losses which constitute us and our complex selves.Trade Review'This marvellous first book is a journey into the wisdom of years - it knows 'arrival is a myth', that we live in a constantly unfolding mystery, fluttering in our memories, hovering over the present, pollinating the page with our presence. And as the poems roam from post-war Scotland to tropical lushness the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into an astonishing attention to the 'uncontrollably multiple' world around us, and the parallel world within.' Mary Ruefle'Linda Anderson’s The Station Before is a wondrous lyric meditation on liminal space— temporal and sensory thresholds, fissures, glimpses of world flickering in consciousness, and most especially the moment of taking pen to paper. The poet untethers herself from all certainties to set the mind aloft, accompanied throughout by winged beings: among them fulmars, kittiwakes, ravens and lapwings in a virtual aviary of tutelary spirits. Great distances are crossed within and without, and if a secret is revealed it is this: Always write in the moment. There is a truth/ that cannot afterwards be transcribed. Anderson’s poems are luminous with this truth.' Carolyn Forché'Linda Anderson’s is a poetry of acute perception and close scrutiny, where ideas and feelings are fused in patient enquiry about what and who and how we know. A subtle music invites and receives the reader’s trust in the work of Anderson’s imagination.' Sean O'Brien'“Tilted between past and present”, a childhood in post-war Scotland and the death of a Father, Anderson surveys the tender remnants of life… In these lyrical and liminal poems “arrival is a myth” and we can only ever reach The Station Before.' Poetry Book Society'When a life-long academic distills a lifetime of images into a such a tight collection, the result is as strong as aged single-malt whiskey. This is the good stuff hidden on the top shelf, only uncorked at weddings and funerals... Anderson’s writing is precise, meticulous, and bursting with acuity.'DM O’Connor, RHINO Poetry'In The Station Before, Linda Anderson demonstrates a clear eye, a depth of thought, and a probing, restless intelligence. Whether watching a fulmar fly or giving voice to Virginia Woolf in her study, Anderson's attentiveness and her discreet, convincing music are entrancing and deeply impressive. After reading her some trace of the poems remains, some 'intimacy left over' like 'a dusting of pollen'.' Nick Laird, Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize Judge'Whether Linda Anderson’s collection, The Station Before is looking to her past, present, dreams or the lives of others, its preoccupation is the same: to privilege seeing; to rapturously observe our lives so that we might uncover new meaning. [...] Anderson’s voice, positioned at this frightening fault line of seeing/unseeing, memory/imagination, past/present arrives on the page quietly, with patience, sorrow and consideration. [...] These are not poems that manically dash about or shout for attention; their voice is poised and their shape largely contained in regular couplets, quatrains and sonnets. Anderson’s language likewise does not push for idiom or explicit playfulness but quietly asserts itself through precision – a rapturous contemplation so focused on its subject it clears the page of ego.'Genevieve Stevens, PN Review

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Book SynopsisWhat is the purpose of travel in an age when millions are displaced against their will or have no home to speak of in the first place? How can we travel without being tourists, without erasing the stories of those who live where we visit? These are some of the questions addressed in Cristian Aliaga’s compelling collection of prose poems, Music for Unknown Journeys.This collection contains Aliaga’s “travelling sketches,” in the tradition of Matsuo Bashō, John Berger, or W.G. Sebald. Each prose poem is geographically situated in his travels across Patagonia or his more recent journeys around the edge-lands of Europe. His work is politically acute, exploring struggles over territory, resources, and culture, in the places he visits. There is an intense emotional charge as he records the stories of those who globalization and contemporary capitalism have used and left behind. This volume brings together a generous selection of Aliaga’s prose poems, the majority previously unseen in English, as well as a substantial introduction to the author’s work and its context, both literary and political, by the editor and translator.Cristian Aliaga (b. 1962, Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires) is one of Argentina’s foremost contemporary poets. His work has been highly praised in the TLS and elsewhere.Trade Review‘Music for Unknown Journeys by Christian Aliaga is the Argentinian poet’s first collection to be translated into English. [The poems] are highly evocative and full of wonderful, sometimes meticulous, details... Ben Bollig has done an effective job of capturing Aliaga’s voice in English. Bollig has also written an illuminating introduction.’ Leo Boix, Resistance and Defiance‘In his observations of ordinary people pursuing their daily bread, [Aliaga] cannot shake off a sense of timeless and universal human trauma... this volume will also be of interest to researchers engaged in work on contemporary poetic forms—and indeed short prose forms—and how they integrate with the tradition of the travelogue.’ Iona Macintyre, Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionThanks and AcknowledgmentsPart One. Unknown Music for Journeys: North and South American TravelsPoemsPart Two. The Foreign Passion (Revised and Expanded): European and African TravelsPoemsTranslator’s NotesIndex of Place Names

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Book SynopsisWhat is the purpose of travel in an age when millions are displaced against their will or have no home to speak of in the first place? How can we travel without being tourists, without erasing the stories of those who live where we visit? These are some of the questions addressed in Cristian Aliaga’s compelling collection of prose poems, Music for Unknown Journeys.This collection contains Aliaga’s “travelling sketches,” in the tradition of Matsuo Bashō, John Berger, or W.G. Sebald. Each prose poem is geographically situated in his travels across Patagonia or his more recent journeys around the edge-lands of Europe. His work is politically acute, exploring struggles over territory, resources, and culture, in the places he visits. There is an intense emotional charge as he records the stories of those who globalization and contemporary capitalism have used and left behind. This volume brings together a generous selection of Aliaga’s prose poems, the majority previously unseen in English, as well as a substantial introduction to the author’s work and its context, both literary and political, by the editor and translator.Cristian Aliaga (b. 1962, Tres Cuervos, Province of Buenos Aires) is one of Argentina’s foremost contemporary poets. His work has been highly praised in the TLS and elsewhere.Trade Review‘Music for Unknown Journeys by Christian Aliaga is the Argentinian poet’s first collection to be translated into English. [The poems] are highly evocative and full of wonderful, sometimes meticulous, details... Ben Bollig has done an effective job of capturing Aliaga’s voice in English. Bollig has also written an illuminating introduction.’ Leo Boix, Resistance and Defiance‘In his observations of ordinary people pursuing their daily bread, [Aliaga] cannot shake off a sense of timeless and universal human trauma... this volume will also be of interest to researchers engaged in work on contemporary poetic forms—and indeed short prose forms—and how they integrate with the tradition of the travelogue.’ Iona Macintyre, Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionThanks and AcknowledgmentsPart One. Unknown Music for Journeys: North and South American TravelsPoemsPart Two. The Foreign Passion (Revised and Expanded): European and African TravelsPoemsTranslator’s NotesIndex of Place Names

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.Trade Review'Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is a vital work of poetic witness. It is necessary, alive, resilient. Unflinching in its account of childhood abuse and trauma, it depicts a world ‘harsh as ash over sunshine’ and in its process of recovery, makes of it something beautiful and new.' Karen McCarthy Woolf'bird of winter reminds us that the root of courage, etymological and otherwise, is heart. Prepare, Dear Reader, to feel.'Nuar Alsadir'Alice Hiller’s project is the excavation of a city of grief from beneath the ashes of memory. It does what poetry does best: it makes a new, hard-won truth and a beauty of its absences and denials. Its partial shapes and unstable formal qualities consequently come to live in the reader.It doesn’t redeem, it scorches.'Sasha Dugdale‘This collection bears witness to the resilience of human nature, with poetry giving voice to the silences within that are so hard to talk about. Yet they must be voiced, and Alice Hiller has turned her devastating childhood experiences into a narrative of transformation that everyone should read.’ Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon‘Between the obscurity and bewilderment of her erasure poems, and her other visually arresting, formally playful work, Hiller never loses sight of the vivid world in which an escape from oppressive interiority is made possible.’ Juliano Zaffino'Alice Hiller’s potent debut collection, Bird of Winter, commands respect and reverence. Composure is required to absorb this essential and courageously intimate exploration of sexual abuse. [...] Hiller’s fearless writing is neither crude nor violent despite indicating unbearable violations. The specifics and long-standing impact of abuse are rarely written with such tender flair. [Her] words are cathartic, proud, persistent and we are compelled to read to further our understanding of a violation perturbingly common. [...] Through dynamic form and the powerful imagery of excavated histories, that offers a deeper awareness of the reality of sexual abuse and the consequent devastation, Hiller reclaims a voice that we are compelled to hear. This is a poet so brave, resolved to gather the ruins of an appalling early childhood and redefine herself as more than a catastrophic moment in time.'Victoria Lothian, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Hiller’s writing is precise, delicate and starkly austere. [...] These accessible poems often reflect the vulnerability of the speaker as a child and make use of white space and fragments of text. The disturbing subject matter is depicted with care and distance through searing image-making. An exceptional début, courageous and devastating in equal measure. This is a profoundly moving and important book, which oscillates between life and death, loss and regeneration, light and dark. The final poem ‘o goddess isis’ epitomises the speaker’s movement towards freedom, to ‘dissolve night’, ‘reveal the sunrise’.' Jennifer Lee Tsai, Mslexia'Through great erudition and a razor-sharp focus on image, this collection raises faultless victimhood from the ash like a phoenix. [...] With exacting erudition, a strong connection to the natural world, and the power of a witness statement, Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is beautiful to hold, a pleasure to open, and a testament of vindication. Hiller exorcises shame through beauty and assembles redemption with acute detail.'David Morgan O’Connor, RHINO'The book is an impressive example of the power of poetic control, in its choice of what information to share with the reader and its simplicity of diction and line. [...] The poems throw off the tethers ofsocially sanctioned silences around abuse till the unpunctuated and carefully punctured lines soar. [...] With their gaze resolutely on the grievous hurt arising from abuse, these poems are a deep reproach to the act of looking away. bird of winter will turn your gaze towards damaging behaviours that we know happen but can’t bear to focus on. Read it.'Claire Crowther, Magma Poetry'Alice Hiller’s debut poetry collection bird of winter is an act of witness, exceptional in its exploration of form, sources and landscape, and deeply humane in purpose. [...] Some poets wait patiently for poems to reach them like gifts from the elements, from air and water. Others build work from their own flesh, blood and bones, in defiance of censorship and silencing. Alice Hiller is a rare poet who uses both approaches to write an extraordinary testimony of trauma that offers fierce resistance, as well as hope to survivors of sexual abuse.'Pauline Rowe, Poets' Directory ‘Hiller offers extraordinary resilience and moments of immense, liberatory tenderness… This is a harrowing book, yes, but ultimately, with its invitation to “billow forth the wrecks we hold”, with its emphasis on resistance and joy, it is a staggeringly beautiful piece of life-affirming work.’ Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2023. ‘Have you looked / have you looked deeply?’ ask these poems, rooted in the human body and its movement through an interconnected living world. Bloom, Sarah Westcott’s second collection, approaches the cultural and physical spaces where human and non-human lives co-exist. These poems are attuned to a tender, bleeding world in which ‘all flesh is grass’ and language is matter. These are poems of resistance: attentive to non-human life, ‘eternal and plaintive … counter-balanced, strange.’ Here are field flowers, walled gardens and lost species, the particularities of ‘undistinguished things … seeds, waterbuts, palpable concerns’. Exploring sacrifice and loss, these poems push at the boundaries where girlhood and flower might bleed. These poems are a hymn to being alive in the twenty-first century - the frailties and vigour of life in all its dazzling form, its ‘looped breath, perpetual singing’.Trade ReviewReviews'Like a deep Summer meadow, "thrumming in wet light", Bloom teems with wild, restless energy: bird song, flowers, birth and death, the body in its ecstasy and decay. Sarah Westcott's beautiful poems pivot upon a strange dazzling curiosity. They urge us to kneel in the long grass and pay tender attention to the spaces within nature and within ourselves where life blooms.' Liz Berry'Sarah Westcott’s poems are an enquiry into perception, in which looking is refracted, and the line between subject and object becomes permeable. They look back to a time when “form and perception were … the same”, and trace the contours and textures of loss, the way longing sets birds “circling”, and green is “inconsolable”. And yet elegy is not the only key: there are celebrations, too, exhilarations of surface, colour, voices on and in the body. Bloom brings the human and its various others – the weathers, weeds, flowers and creatures - into delicate focus, attending to their forms and relationships with tender precision and care.' Mina Gorji‘Sarah Westcott in her second poetry collection Bloom, picks up where she left off with Slant Light; at once fully immersed in the natural world, and yet devastatingly unable to escape the body, its attendant implications of mortality, humanity, in a world that renders us tiny.’ Juliano Zaffino'Westcott blends dynamic, sensual language with the scientific [...] the poet-narrator of Bloom seems to almost bodily flow, meld and join with the natural world. [...] This second of the Westcott’s ‘sister’ collections shows us a powerful nature poet unafraid of a bolder reach in expression, where we are ‘one layer of carbon’ (The Turn) among so many others in nature, but one grounded in the particularity and exactitude of that world.'Ken Evans, The Manchester Review'Wescott create[s] a palimpsest of hymns to the natural world [...] Bloom is a subtle meditation on the underlying connection between humans and Nature with ecological overtones, rooted in passionate, precise observation.'Theresa Sowerby, Orbis Magazine'[Wescott] invokes moments of sanctity which have meaning for her without invoking theology. In this wide context, she reads as both eco-poet and love poet. What makes her an eco-poet (not strident but urgent) is her respect for life. [...] Because she often strikes a note of fine spontaneity, it would be easy to overlook that Westcott is a clever technician and witty with it. Several love-poems here are down-to-earth, high-flown and tender all in one. [...] Awareness of touch, of one texture against another, is an insidious (in a good sense) presence through poems which are invariably sensual at one level or another; she is also, however, making a point about the need to feel, the ‘civilisation’ that comes from a trembling awareness. 'Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry'Sarah Westcott's keen-eyed second collection, Bloom, deals in surfaces that shift, cut and resist. [...] It is a particular gift of Westcott's poems to connect directly with an animal nature that can slip past intellectual overlay. [...] These are poems that capture a sense of the things that are 'bewildering', 'tender' [...] Wescott reveals the multiplicity of our experience, its many truths. This is a mesmerising volume that invites us to rove, and in so doing, to leave a different track behind.'Lesley Sharpe, The Alchemy Spoon'The poems in this luminous book are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. [...] There’s something original about Westcott’s nature writing, something unsettling, where clarity of observation is never far from an obsessive sense of derangement. Maybe that’s because hallucination and actually seeing are closer to one another than we might think: our interiors influence our perception of the exterior. [...] The world is always rolling in this collection, brought to life by Westcott’s quick but careful observations: in flux and subjected to harmonious processes, always in bloom.'Daniel Bennett, Wild Court'With humility, reflectiveness, and careful attunement to her surroundings, Westcott calls for her readers to stop and contemplate the wonders of the natural world. Her language is tender and vivid. [...] These poems describe ordinary moments made noteworthy by the poet’s good eye and deft imagery. “All beginnings are naïve,” she writes, and, in this collection, her curiosity proves contagious.'Maggie Wang, Harvard Review'Eerie and sensuous ... Westcott’s poems seek to collapse the differences between human and non-human entities in order to show how human beings can contain multitudes' Dzifa Benson, Magma Poetry‘When we read Westcott we know ourselves, instantly, to be in another world, flowering… She is a deeply instinctive poet, at ease in her own poetical character… Westcott has a way of dissolving boundaries between self and other, self and world, self and time, so that any reader of hers must end up feeling: I want to be this way all the time. The word I want here is an over-used and badly understood one: natural. Reading Bloom makes one ache for that naturalness, but also, and this is rare, gives us a portal, a way of finding it.’ Nichola Deane‘Skilful patterning, sharp observation, sensuous evocativeness and startling leaps of metaphorical imagination give her poems a vivid, immediate impact, absorbing the reader in the experiences they present.’ Edmund Prestwich, London Grip

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. Third Prize winner of the Laurel Prize 2022.What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an ‘extended sympathy’, and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as ‘the real world to which we belong’ and recover the means to save what we are destroying?Trade Review‘A book about seeing through the dark, Jemma Borg's Wilder enacts a subtle illumination between the crepuscular and haptic and the dazzling and epigrammatic. Light is life itself, photosynthesising, meteorological, caught in poems similarly, beguilingly, changeable, imbued with a timeless and deep ecological knowing, the fruitful surrender of the human heart.’ Linda France‘The versatility of this work bears witness to a very unusual combination of linguistic confidence and restless intelligence. Jemma Borg is no-one’s kind of poet but her own and that’s an extraordinary achievement.’ Susan Wicks'Borg makes us realise the vital connection between the human and the non-human, the physical and the psychological, the visible and the eclipsed. Like the collection’s title, there is wildness and magic in these poems.' Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review‘Borg’s vision of the natural world crackles with life and beauty and, rather than bewildering us, reminds us that the open landscape offers freedom and possibility.'John Field, The T.S. Eliot Prize'This collection considers not just the human impact on nature, nor the static observation of nature, nor even the post-human speakers of rocks or moss, but rather combines all these voices and points of view, and more, considers something inter-relational, to imagine all these elements coalescing and in conversation within a broader, holistic space. Between the joy of its noticings and the risks of its linguistic foraging, Wilder guides us through networks connecting and reconnecting to each other like root systems – a model for thinking perhaps, towards what we are still searching for.' SK Grout, Poetry School‘Startling poems on human life and the natural world… She [Borg] excels when analysing the natural world, from the “needlework of [ocean] currents” and the “siltstone honeycomb” of southern England to Dante’s grimly “flourishing” forest of the suicides.’ Jade Cuttle, The Times Literary Supplement‘Borg writes with a painter’s eye of “brute, smudged earth” at Broadwater Warren, of grass “tutting/with its many wet tongues”, but saves her best writing for the human species: “My son in his ancient world is swallowing dreams” is a terrific womb-with-a-view poem with the same kick as Dylan Thomas’s “Before I knocked”; the poet’s unborn son “coils at my navel, the pendulums/of his legs accruing bone, his soft hands/shuddering at his face”. Suspend your scepticism for the earnest eight-page hallucinogenic cactus-trip that closes the book; go with her, and you might be pleasantly surprised.’ Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph‘Wilder is an adventure in language combining the passionate with the forensic, the visual with the visionary… she's not afraid to project her work as a serious contribution to describing la condition humaine aimed at fullness and accuracy.’ Dilys Wood, ARTEMISpoetry‘Wilder experiments with nature to find a better perspective… [it] offers open reflections on climate-anxious selfhood in sharp verse.’ Jack McKenna, The Manchester Review‘Borg offers us a worldview which is profoundly more enchanted... this is a way of relating to life on earth which broadens the horizons of what nature poetry can achieve.’ SZ Shao‘“Marsh Thistle” is a beautifully robust and formal piece of what critic James Wood calls “serious noticing”. Who had noticed the humble marsh thistle so, before, and dared invest it with such imaginative rigour. It is a paean with something tough and daring about it.’ Kathleen Jamie, RSPB/The Rialto Nature and Place Competition report, in The Rialto

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Book SynopsisThis study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet’s art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the ‘poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley’s work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley’s poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet’s life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley’s artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley’s poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.Trade ReviewReviews'Callaghan reads Shelley’s letters and their biographical concerns to illuminate his poetry, tracing the shifting relationship between the poet’s poetry and life. She shows that Shelley refused and exploded the boundaries between the personal and poetic by reconfiguring life events within his poetry and drama. The boundary between the poet’s life and art is a difficult one for a critic and often less useful than close textual analysis. Callaghan makes a case for the ways in which Shelley transmutes the personal into transformative poetry with Shelley’s understanding that ‘the poet man are of two different natures’ and that the ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, where truth and eternity clash.' Tears in the Fence'Callaghan is a confident judge and writer … an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley’s often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley’s work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early poetry more seriously on artistic terms than it has been so far. Shelley’s Living Artistry will make study of his correspondence much more central to future accounts of his work. Shelley’s Living Artistry is, then, a notable contribution to contemporary study of Shelley and, in particular, provides a useful reminder of the different genres and modes in which he wrote and the often taut relations between them.' Ross Wilson, Cambridge Quarterly‘A valuable, ranging and deeply informed contribution…to any reader sympathetic to neo-formalism, and indeed any reader sympathetic to Shelley (who can be as frustrating a poet as a brilliantly incandescent one), this study will repay attention.’Christopher Stokes, The BARS Review‘In Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, Madeleine Callaghan offers a stimulating and absorbing account of the way that Shelley self-consciously stages his artistic development in his poetry and his efforts to "[transmute] the dross of the personal into the gold of art"...In short, Shelley’s Living Artistry makes a convincing case for reading Shelley’s poetry "through the lens of the letters" so as to bring into focus important aspects of his artistry and develop "a fuller consideration of Shelley’s poetic achievement".’Jonathan Quayle, English: Journal of the English Association‘Shelley’s art, in Callaghan’s monograph, is living. It is not something that has been created or recreated, but rather like the statue of Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, needs only to be touched to feel its living warmth.’ Dana Van Kooy, European Romantic Review'This is a compellingly argued book, and it represents a serious and substantial addition to Shelley scholarship. What is particularly refreshing, however, is that Callaghan is not simply an expert scholarly reader of Shelley. She quite clearly loves his poetry and is not afraid to say so, or to reach for superlatives when only superlatives will do. It is this passion for the poetry and for understanding the depths of Shelley’s artistry that drives her close reading and animates her account of individual texts. Surely a poet as attuned to the revolutionary potential of reading as was Shelley would be pleased to have found such a reader.' Daisy Hay, Keats-Shelley JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts1. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab2. ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna3. ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook4. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo5. ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci6. ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry7. ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems8. ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of LifeBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisMention Robert Frost and people instantly think of snowy woods and less-traveled paths and rural neighbors meeting to fix their stone fence. But what does Robert Frost have to do with science? You might be surprised. Born in 1874, Frost lived through a remarkable period of scientific progress, including the development of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, the Big Bang theory, the discovery of the structure of DNA and the beginnings of space travel. Possessing a powerful intellect driven by keen curiosity, Frost was highly knowledgeable about the science of his time and infuses his poetry with imagery and language borrowed from science. Frost not only uses the language of science to enrich his poetry in the same way he uses classical, historical, biblical and literary allusions, but he also uses ordinary language to create sophisticated metaphors based on scientific concepts such as evolution and entropy. A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost represents the first systematic attempt to catalogue and explain all of the references to science and natural history in Frost’s poetry. The book, which is organized chronologically, uses language that is accessible to laymen and is supplemented by numerous illustrations, and appendices that should make it a valuable resource for teachers and scholars. Trade Review'What a wonderful idea Virginia Smith, with her strong scientific background, had in providing us with A Scientific Companion to my grandfather’s verses! Always impressed by Rorbert Frost’s deep understanding of his natural surroundings – in botany, archaeology, astronomy, among others – we learn here just how his scientific knowledge enriches the metaphorical language of many of his verses. As a teacher of his poems, I frequently note the need for such a Companion: the heal-all in “Design,” the iris in “Iris by Night” that is not a flower, or the complex interaction of fruit, trees, ancestral primates, and a young girl, in “Wild Grapes,” one of my favorites. Richly illustrated, the volume will help you move ever more deeply into the poet’s layers of meaning while, at the same time, awaken you to the endless mysteries of the universe.'Lesley Lee Francis, author of You Come Too: My Journey With Robert Frost and Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900–1918'More than half a century ago, C. P. Snow lamented that science and the humanities had become so specialized that their practitioners could no longer speak to one another. With the publication of A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, Virginia Smith proves the exception to the “two cultures” divide. A professor of biochemistry at the United States Naval Academy, Ms. Smith is also an astute reader of Frost’s poetry. In combining her “avocation and vocation,” as Frost advises in “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Ms. Smith demonstrates the breadth of Frost’s engagement with science and carefully discloses how Frost used the lessons of science—in astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, and natural history—to inform his poetry. In doing so, she provides devotees and scholars with an invaluable primary resource that will surely stimulate new thinking about our most thoughtful and complex American poet.' Robert Bernard Hass, author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science and co-editor of the Letters of Robert Frost'Any lover of Frost’s poetry will be delighted by Virginia Smith’s A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost. It brings an exciting new perspective to many of the poems we have all long admired. Now with her book as our guide through all the allusions to matters of science that Frost continually turned to in writing his poetry, we can experience and appreciate these poems more fully. Smith has not missed a single one of these allusions, providing us with clarifying details of the significance and history of specific words and phrases in the poems related to the fields of botany, ornithology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, physics, and the technology of his day. But her book is not merely a catalog of Frost’s use of scientific language and imagery; Smith puts her commentaries in the context of where he was living, the books he was reading, the people he knew, and the discussions of the times. Each entry is meticulously documented, drawing on an impressive body of research, often primary sources, including what he had read, courses he had taken, and letters he had written and received. The ninety one illustrations throughout the book further illuminate and enrich our understanding of Frost’s fascination with science. While scholars will surely make use of this book for academic study, I urge the multitude of readers who have made Frost their favorite poet not to pass up this opportunity to get to know his poetry more deeply and enjoy it even more.' Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, author of Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind His New England Poetry'Robert Frost was one of the few poets who knew as much about science as he did the humanities. Here at last in one volume Virginia Smith allows readers to see just how deeply informed and rich with scientific knowledge Frost’s poetry could be.' Jonathan N. Barron, director of The Robert Frost Society and author of How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter'The careful research Smith has conducted into Frost’s reading is a great strength of this volume... A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost will help scholars and students alike see new dimensions in Frost’s poetry.’ Steve Knepper, The New England Quarterly 'A professor of chemistry and an active Frost scholar, Virginia F. Smith is uniquely positioned to contribute to these interdisciplinary conversations. In A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, she draws on her authoritative knowledge of both scientific concepts and of Frost’s life and work to give us an invaluable guide to scientific references in Frost’s poetry. The book not only illuminates these references, it also makes clear the significance of scientific ideas to Frost as both man and poet. Any engaged reader of Frost will benefit from having this Companion at his or her elbow while leafing through the poems.'Marissa Grunes, The Robert Frost ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionA Boy’s Will North of Boston Mountain Interval New Hampshire West-Running Brook A Further Range A Witness Tree Steeple Bush An Afterword A Masque of Reason In the Clearing Uncollected Poems Works Cited Annotated Bibliography Concordance of Plants Concordance of Animals

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Laurel Prize 2022What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on us all, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.Trade Review‘Miller is a poet of concept as much as rhythm and sound, who is unafraid to stand in the naked light of artistic insufficiency, and ask her questions, and leave behind her declarations of love and goodness.’ Juliano Zaffino'Alice Miller takes a critical lens to our current malaise, tackling the current decline of our climate and planet to the way technology has both advanced and stunted human civilizations. A collection which feels as if it’s somehow speaking to us all.'Anthony Anaxagorou'Everyone has a hand in the fire, everyone is responsible for the flames that will come to ‘each’ town. Miller’s poetry subtly calls to individual agency and what we stand to lose by making selfish choices. [...] What Fire is concerned with our capacity to change while examining the world on the point of a precipice. [...] The end is not the end, but a chance to start again.'Charlie Baylis, Wild Court 'You can write pessimistically but still produce great poetry. That's the message to take from Alice Miller's third collection, What Fire. The title poem is a nightmarish fantasia, with sinister overtones of "night and fog" resonating with recent European history. As with much of Miller's work, it is both chastening and brilliant.'Nicholas Reid, The New Zealand Listener

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Book SynopsisYeats, Philosophy, and the Occult is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship, which also includes an examination of Yeats’s poetic practice through a manuscript of the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, “The Phases of the Moon.” The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats’s response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats’s debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats’s understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work’s theory of “contemporaneous periods” affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats’s reading of Berkeley and his critics’ appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley’s idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats’s mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.Trade ReviewReviews ‘The book concludes with two appendices... consolidating the book’s position at the cutting edge of the ‘archival turn’ in Yeats studies and new modernist studies more generally.’ The Year’s Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsList of Figures and TableList of AbbreviationsList of ContributorsIntroduction1. “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come - Wayne K. Chapman2. Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats’s Art and Philosophy - Katherine Ebury3. “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats’s “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s - Charles I. Armstrong4. W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead - Neil Mann5. Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem - Matthew Gibson6. The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision - Graham A. Dampier7. Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen - Colin McDowellAppendicesI. Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses’ LibraryII. Yeats’s Notes on Leo Frobenius’s The Voice of Africa (1913)Index

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humour and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn't hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life--even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question ‘What isn't hell?’ and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a red violet cerulean handkerchief.Trade Review'Katie Farris is brilliant in her imagining of survival and depends on the music of language as proof, “a language I can read/this scene has a door/I cannot close I stand/within its wedge/I stand within its shield.” Standing In the Forrest of Being Alive is an enchanting book of poems that question and praise the body even as it deteriorates. You are holding in your hands words that come across as chants, as spells, as prayer.' Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Tradition‘Katie Farris’s debut collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is frank and vivacious, weaving out of the complexity of life an argument for life.’ ALHS, PRISM international‘These poems are coy and sexy, work as memoir and lyric, engage rhyme and rhythm, insulate within the poetic world and engage outside with nature. They are funny, too… [“To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest”] creates a layering of the language of medicine with the language of poetry, across the body of the speaker… that language, and poetry, is both an act of creation, and a breaking down; to make something new of the diagnosis; to find a path forward to hope.’ SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon

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Book SynopsisA chilling poetic reflection on the world we have inherited and the destructions that made it. To confront time, pre-modern Arabic poems often began with the poet standing before the ruins, real and imagined, of a beloved’s home. In Postcards from the Underworld, Sinan Antoon works in that tradition, observing the detritus of his home city, Baghdad, where he survived two wars—the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 and the First Gulf War of 1991—and which, after he left, he watched from afar being attacked during the US invasion in 2003. Antoon’s poems confront violence and force us not to look away as he traces death’s haunting presence in the world. Nature offers consolation, and flowers and butterflies are the poet’s interlocutors, but they too cannot escape ruin. Composed in Arabic and translated into English by the poet himself, Postcards from the Underworld is a searing meditation on the destruction of humans, habitats, and homes.Table of ContentsPrayerPsalm (I)The DayThe New GodFrom the Lost GospelsFrom Eve’s ConfessionsDivine FailureI Hear It Blind SongThe Saz PlayerGarmentA Heavy HeartVisitationIn my next lifeA FeatherAutumn in HeavenTrain of the DeadIntervalMurmurBlack ButterflyBirth CertificateAnother DayRest Your HornsThe PoetSlow MailDays Like ThisDismembermentA HeadAfterwords An Ordinary DayLetter to al-MutanabbiA PhotographOne Night; In Many CitiesHeard on New Year’s EveA Handbag in China TownA Butterfly in New YorkWinesongI Don’t Visit My MotherAngels on my CeilingAngelus NovusAn Alternative HistoryCrossingPhosphorusCrazy HorseAnamorphosis?/Iraq We Shall WaitLetter to My AncestorThe Angel’s TrumpetThe Day’s CatchThis Was Not WrittenA Postcard from the UnderworldNostalgia for LightA New SunPsalm (II)SceneWars A Prisoner’s SongTo an Iraqi InfantA Prism; Wet with WarsDelvingPhantasmagoria IPhantasmagoria IISiftingThe Milky WayWrinkles on the Wind’s ForeheadStringsA SignFrom the Diary of a GhostJust Another Evening (in black & you)AbsenceAfterword

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Book SynopsisA profound poem on the mystical and the ecstatic and about our connection with nature. Beachlight is a sustained poem divided into smaller parts that take on the anonymous voices of those lost and forgotten. A walk along a Singaporean beach transforms into a meditation that bridges an ecological consciousness to the sexual and the homoerotic. The poems in Beachlight expose revelations about the nature of desire, inviting readers to walk beside—and inside—them, reminding us of what we gain when we abandon ourselves to nature and exhorting us to reclaim our primordial connections to the world and to one another.

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Book SynopsisLyrical and powerful poems that serve as a powerful reminder of the human cost of war. Those who believe in the currency of patience / Were burned out in the alleyway.The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb's verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere murmurs engraved on stones, long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At the heart of Alkatreb's work lies a preoccupation with trauma and the profound burden of alienation that accompanies exile. Nascent memories are shrouded by the scars of sleep, and words find themselves nostalgic for destruction. The ubiquity of violence that Alkatreb channels into his poetry does not tolerate enclaves of innocence. The Screams of War is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a stark reminder of the harsh realities faced by those trapped in conflict.

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Book SynopsisSergio Raimondi’s work engages in the most complex issues of his time, including globalisation, colonialism, industrialisation and environmental degradation. Yet all his concerns are rigorously analysed through the medium of the poet’s art, steeped in literary tradition and craft. He is widely considered Argentina’s most important and influential contemporary poet, with an international reputation. Many of Raimondi’s poems address what might seem unlikely subjects for poetry: industrial practices, global trade, or labour legislation. Yet among the allusions, the immense research, the unsparing gaze, and the expert skill of the language there’s also room for desert-dry humour, touches of self-deprecation and immense empathy for individuals caught up in seemingly implacable historical processes. This volume includes a generous selection of his poems from Poesía civil (Civil Poetry) and Lexikón (Lexikon) in bilingual Spanish-English facing-pages format. A substantial introduction by the translators places Raimondi’s work in its literary and wider cultural context, and reflects on the challenges faced when bringing his unique poetry into English.Table of ContentsIntroductionSelected PoemsGlossary

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Book SynopsisTraherne's voice can be heard as never before. THE TABLET Thomas Traherne [1637? - 1674], a clergyman of the Church of England during the Restoration, was little known until the early twentieth century, when his poetry and Centuries of Meditations were discovered. There have beensince miscellaneous publications of his poetry and devotional writings. The Works of Thomas Traherne brings together all of Traherne's extant works in a definitive, printed edition for the first time. It will include both his published and unpublished works, and his notebooks, presenting them insofar as possible by manuscript, giving due attention to their physical aspects and to their integrity as manuscript books. Volumes II and III make available the Commentaries of Heaven, preserved in one manuscript held at the British Library. Organised topically, it was intended to cover the whole of the alphabet but extends only through `A' and part of `B', with 95prose articles altogether. It possesses the characteristics of a commonplace book, encyclopaedia and dictionary, and contains poetry, meditations, philosophical discourse, and polemic. The unusual range of subjects treated, from `Abhorrence' to `Ant', `Aristotle' to `Atom', shows Traherne to be an imaginative and compelling writer in his approach to Christian theology, while maintaining both his integrity and orthodoxy as a priest.Trade ReviewThe Commentaries is a huge work that is absolutely essential for students and scholars of Traherne. This is the first time it has been published in its entirety, and its publication will undoubtedly spark new explorations into Traherne's work. [...] Ross's project as a whole is an exciting prospect for Traherne scholars, but the publication of the Commentaries alone is a monumental achievement and one that will be of tremendous significance. * SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS *Table of ContentsIntroduction List of Topics Commentaries of Heaven Textual Emendations Appendices Glossary

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Book SynopsisFirst full study and edition of the works of George Lauder, "the poet whom Scotland forgot". The Scottish poet George Lauder began as a "university wit", by imitating anti-papal satires popular in the Italian Renaissance. He set off for London as a young man, looking for patronage, but instead became an officer in the army, seeing service in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Denmark and Sweden -- an experience which provides the backdrop to the poetry of his mature years. At the Restoration he wrote a lengthy poem of advice to Charles II, and his final masterwork was a poetic conflation of the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Lauder was influenced by Ben Jonson, William Drummond, and by the Metaphysical and the Caroline styles. His personal library testifies to his wide range of interests, and to his acquaintance with European literature in neo-Latin and other languages. This volume traces Lauder's career, collects all his surviving verse (presented with full notes and commentary), and examines his interactions with certain of the greatest intellectuals of the Dutch Golden Age. Lauder was a British patriot and a loyal supporter of the House of Orange; above all, however, he is the author of a unique corpus of highly accomplished poetry. ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Groningen, Netherlands.Table of ContentsGeorge Lauder: Scoto-British European Cultural contexts Arms and the man Lauder as poet Lauder's library George Lauder: the Man and his Art Texts The poetic corpus Treatment of texts Poems by Lauder Poems to Lauder Lauder Correspondence Commentary to poems by Lauder Bibliography

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Book SynopsisSa'di Yusuf has long been acknowledged as Iraq's foremost living poet and one of the pre-eminent modernists of Arabic poetry. In this first book-length study in English on the subject, the author seeks to provide a comprehensive look at Yusuf's literary accomplishments through thematic analysis and close readings that place his texts within wider literary contexts. Encompassing discussions of more than a hundred poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major poet of our time.Trade Review"Ever since I began reading Sa'di Yusuf he has become the one who appealed the most to my poetic taste. He is one of our greatest poets. Poetry led him -- or rather he led poetry -- to revolt against the transcendence of poetic language and in its stead to create a new language: one characterised by austerity and its core by the search for essence. In this way poetry in his poems becomes life itself -- life in all its fullness and spontaneity." -- Mahmud Darwish."Sa'di Yusuf is a poet of universality and multiple open visions enabling us to discover the poetics of the real world." -- Abbas Beydhoun, Lebanese poet and critic."Sa'di Yusuf was born in Iraq, but he has become, through the vicissitudes of history and the cosmopolitan appetites of his mind, a poet, not only of the Arab world, but of the human universe." -- Marilyn Hacker, American poet and critic.Table of ContentsTransferring Life into Words; "I Walk with Everyone but Each Step is Mine"; Poet of His People: 1955-1963; Exile, Homecoming, Exile: The Aesthetics of Displacement; War, Metapoetics and Minute Realities: The Later Poetry; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together a number of John Schad's very best uncollected essays, interleaved with a selection of autobiographical poems and a striking new work that brings together both critical and creative modes of writing. Turns thus plots the intriguing trajectory of Schad's very distinctive work over the last twenty years -- a trajectory that moves from a series of essays that juggle Christian, Marxist and Derridean intuitions, through a radically literary engagement with Deconstruction, to a daringly critical-creative mode of writing. In this exciting new field, as in the more established world of literature and religion, Schad is an idiosyncratic and sometimes audacious pioneer. The book is to be published simultaneously in hardback and paperback to accommodate adoption on critical-creative courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.Trade Review"Schad reads as he dreams, or dreams as he reads." - Derrida TodayTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Disequilibrium of German Identity; An Overview of Holocaust Studies & Its Causes; The Roots: Anti-Semitism or German Theory of Race?; The First Apex: The Problematic Nature of the German National Identity; The Second Apex: Race Theory Re-examined; The Third Apex: German Jewry; The Fateful Triangle: Some Insights for the Future; A Changing Self-Image vis-a-vis the Holocaust; Post-War German Structure, Attitudes & Identity; Conclusion: The Force of Nationality in the Past & in the Future; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together a number of John Schad's very best uncollected essays, interleaved with a selection of autobiographical poems and a striking new work that brings together both critical and creative modes of writing. Turns thus plots the intriguing trajectory of Schad's very distinctive work over the last twenty years -- a trajectory that moves from a series of essays that juggle Christian, Marxist and Derridean intuitions, through a radically literary engagement with Deconstruction, to a daringly critical-creative mode of writing. In this exciting new field, as in the more established world of literature and religion, Schad is an idiosyncratic and sometimes audacious pioneer. The book is to be published simultaneously in hardback and paperback to accommodate adoption on critical-creative courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.Trade Review"Schad reads as he dreams, or dreams as he reads." - Derrida TodayTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Disequilibrium of German Identity; An Overview of Holocaust Studies & Its Causes; The Roots: Anti-Semitism or German Theory of Race?; The First Apex: The Problematic Nature of the German National Identity; The Second Apex: Race Theory Re-examined; The Third Apex: German Jewry; The Fateful Triangle: Some Insights for the Future; A Changing Self-Image vis-a-vis the Holocaust; Post-War German Structure, Attitudes & Identity; Conclusion: The Force of Nationality in the Past & in the Future; Index.

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Book SynopsisThis book title derives from Henley's most famous poem 'Invictus', which has been used as the name of a Hollywood film and for the International Paralympic Games sport event created by Britain's Prince Harry. The poem's stanzas have been popularised by Winston Churchill, Aung San Suu Ky and President Obama, and used to literary effect by C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde and in Casablanca. But this fine short lyric has unfortunately overshadowed Henley's other considerable literary output. Henley was the archetypal Man of Letters -- a poet, reviewer, essayist, journalist, historian and newspaper hack. His friendships with Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and Yeats places him at the centre of the Victorian literary milieu. As editor of the National Observer he published writers as diverse as Kipling, Shaw, Hardy and Wells. He promoted new forms of expression in literature and art, and was a close friend of Rodin and Degas. The book reproduces key essays which relate to Henley's thinking on poetry, poets and the writing process, as well as his early and late poetry (some only recently discovered and attributed), unpublished verses, ephemera appearing in manuscript archives and important unpublished (often anonymous) essays. A scholarly introduction and critical notes serve to explain the significance of his poetry, the provenance of the material, and provide a context for his literary work in relation to historical events. Henley is often referenced in literary criticism, but until now has not been subject to book-length critical review. John Howlett set outs the case for his significance as a poet and writer in the context of Henley's central role in the publishing direction of Victorian literature.

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Book SynopsisTraditional accounts of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an ‘original genius’ whose talents set him apart from the mainstream of contemporary literary culture. But in recent years there has been a major shift of direction in Clare studies. Jonathan Bate, Zachary Leader and others have helped to show that Clare, far from being an isolated genius, was deeply involved in the rich cultural life both of his village and the metropolis. This study takes impetus from this new critical direction, offering an account of his poems as they relate to the literary culture of his day, and to literary history as it was being constructed in the early nineteenth century. Gorji defines a literary historical context in which Clare’s poetry can best be understood, paying particular attention to questions of language and style. Rather than situating Clare in relation to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, John Clare and the Place of Poetry considers his poetry in relation to eighteenth-century traditions as they persisted and developed in the Romantic period. This timely book is for scholars and students of Clare and eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry, but it should also appeal to the expanding audience for John Clare’s work in the UK and USA.Trade ReviewMina Gorji's study of Clare is by far and away the finest critical account of his work to appear. In her compelling, indeed outstanding, analysis, Gorji shows how Clare's poetry is both vernacular or 'russet', as he termed it, and subtly allusive and complex. Although he was portrayed as an uneducated peasant poet, Gorji is the first Clare scholar to show the extent of his literary debts - debts which show his wide reading in English poetry (he left a library of over four hundred books when he died). Admirers of Clare and readers of poetry, will find their horizons immeasurably broadened by John Clare and the Place of Poetry. Tom PaulinMina Gorji's John Clare and the Place of Poetry gracefully and elegantly combines a number of the most significant strands in recent Romantic criticism. Her understanding of Clare is influenced by the history of the book, studies in print culture, an interest in his social class and his place in Romantic-period literary culture. Gorji combines all of these elements with a surefooted and subtle attention to the details of Clare's poetry, and the book that results is likely to prove a touchstone in studies of Clare for some time. Gorji's understanding of the complexities of Clare's sites of reception is one of the real strengths of the book...The Clare that emerges is as subtle as he is complex: Gorji provides a powerful case for a reassessment of his work. David Stewart, Years Work in English Studies * Years Work in English Studies *Gorji hears Clare's poetry creatively and she is alert to the music of the verse in a way that makes her explications unique. She makes an original contribution to Clare studies, reading the poet with and against authors that one might never have thought had any more than passing influence upon him such as Daniel Defoe and William Shenstone. Bridget Keegan, Wordsworth Circle * Wordsworth Circle *John Clare’s genius is at last widely acknowledged and we place him high in the ranks of the English poets -- but his 'peasant' origins mean that we still think of him as a one-off, a rural phenomenon outside the literary mainstream. In this groundbreaking study, Mina Gorji disposes of this assumption for once and all... Thanks to Gorji, we can no longer afford to patronize Clare. Jonathan BateTable of Contents Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: Artfully Artless Chapter 2: Uncouth Rhymes Chapter 3: Village Minstrel Chapter 4: Rustic Spenserian Chapter 5: The Place of Poetry Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisArmageddon is a contemporary epic poem about the major event of our own time. Written in blank verse, it narrates the defining event for civilisation today: the American President Bush's struggle against the Islamic extremism of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in the course of which Bush transforms himself, the US and the world. It follows the War on Terror from September 11, 2001 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which some believe were illegally waged for reasons of oil. Covertly supported by Iran, bin Laden is shown as possessing at least 20 nuclear suitcase bombs (a purchase confirmed by Hans Blix of the IAEA in 2004), some of which he plans to explode simultaneously in 10 American cities - hence the title. The poem presents all sides of the War on Terror and makes sense of the first decade of the 21st century. Armageddon is Nicholas Hagger's second poetic epic. It is the successor to his Overlord, which was the first major poetic epic in the English language since Milton's Paradise Lost. Overlord was about the Second World War from D-Day to the dropping of the atomic bomb and also followed an American hero, Eisenhower. Like Overlord, Armageddon is also in the tradition of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, and its epic sweep includes higher and lower worlds in the Universalist manner. Both qualify as American epics, though written by an English poet. The only other poet to have written two major poetic epics is Homer.Trade ReviewHe hits a pace, a tilt that really carries the reader along. Everything comes as a subordinate clause to his dramatic momentum, a hand waving out of the express train window. (Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate) His poetic felicities include a poetic mix of Eliot, Pound and Blake; the judicious invention of his own psychological terms to guide his progress; an unafraid nakedness, linked to philosophic and scientific adventuresness; genuine visionary leanings and occasional lyric beauty. (Sebastian Barker, past chairman of The Poetry Society)

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Book SynopsisA legendary animal, the Sasquatch is hunted by many but seen by very few. These philosophical reflections about the disappearance of species, both real and imagined, can also be read as a dirge for a species, culture, or language in irreversible decline.

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