Poetry / Poems
Otago University Press Time of the Icebergs: Poems by David Eggleton
Book SynopsisMuch of Time of the Icebergs was written while David Eggleton was a Writer-in-Residence at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in 2009. These are poems about the world we live in, tracing a dystopian present ''hurtling globalisation''s highway'' where ''Google tells Google that Google saves''. As he says ''I think of it as a collection for browsing and discovering things: soundscapes, seascapes, landscapes, contemporary politics and contemporary people, histories, traditions, and other things besides.''
£8.90
Otago University Press This City: poems
Book SynopsisThis City circles the globe from Florence to Palmerston North but the resulting volume is far more than so-called armchair travel. Topography and public space are a preoccupation (buses and trains, roads and houses, even Google Earth''s Street View all get a mention), but it is her evocation of the transient grounded in these spaces - snippets overheard on an Italian strada, scenes on a bus on Moxham Ave, imaginings of lives from long ago (Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson) - that leaves a taut and exciting impression of lives lived here, in this place, in This City.
£12.82
Otago University Press Edwin's Egg: & Other Poetic Novellas
Book SynopsisDuring her time as New Zealand''s Poet Laureate, Cilla McQueen worked on a project that explored a space between prose and poetry. It was published in chapters on the Poet Laureate website, and retitled Edwin''s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas . This work is now published for the first time in hard-copy format, combining McQueen''s evocative text with wonderful images from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.
£20.96
Otago University Press Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde's
Book SynopsisRobin Hyde’s extraordinary but short life (1906–39) included a precocious early career as poet and parliamentary reporter. As a journalist, she juggled writing for the social pages with highly political reporting on unemployment, prison conditions and the alienation of Maori land. She struggled with drug addiction and depression, single motherhood twice over, and a lengthy period as a voluntary patient in a residential clinic (The Lodge) attached to Auckland Mental Hospital in Avondale. Her life culminated in brilliant reporting on the Sino/Japanese War following a journey into China in 1938.Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Fortuitous Moment; 1934 Autobiography; 1934-35 Journal Fragments; 1935 October Journal Fragment; 'The Cage with the Open Door' (Oct 1935); 1936 Journal Fragment; Essay on Mental Health in New Zealand; Notes on the texts; Bibliography; Index.
£18.71
Otago University Press The White Clock: New Poems
Book SynopsisDelving both into ''the worlds of the mind'' and ''where he happens to be'', Owen Marshall brings us poetry that is steeped in the Classics, history and literature, and yet is alive with the vivid particulars of damp duffle-coats and hot-air balloons, beer and bicycles, willows and skylarks, kauri gum and limestone tunnels.
£8.90
Otago University Press Born to a Red-Headed Woman
Book SynopsisUsing the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles or song lines and spans more than four decades.
£13.46
Otago University Press Generation Kitchen
Book SynopsisMuch sought after by oil companies, ‘generation kitchens’ are sites where geological forces have combined to create conditions for oil production. By turns brooding and wittily observant, Richard Reeve’s fifth book of poetry meditates on the intrigues of fossil fuel companies and ecological despoliation, but also on personal rites of passage – on relationships, deaths, the turn of the seasons. Oracular and bardic, Reeve’s work is also paradoxically down to earth and gritty. He knows that, beyond the geopolitical framework, beyond the anthropocene moment, the landscape endures.
£13.46
Otago University Press The Conch Trumpet
Book SynopsisCalling to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand, The Conch Trumpet sounds the signal to listen close, critically, and "in alert reverie." David Eggleton’s reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes, and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, and the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world—the thisness of things: cloud whispers brush daylight’s ear, fern question marks form a bush encore, forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. In this latest collection, David Eggleton is court jester, philosopher, lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud.
£16.46
Museum of New Mexico Press (Red Crane Books) New Mexican Poetry Renaissance
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£15.19
Miami University Press Fastness: A Translation from the English of
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£16.19
Miami University Press The ElectronGhost Casino
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£16.19
Heritage House Publishing Co Ltd Tributes to the Scarlet Riders: An anthology of
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£10.44
Caitlin Press A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems
Book SynopsisThis is an exploration of loose correspondence between one of Canada''s greatest musicians, Glenn Gould, and "K", an admiring fan. Braid weaves an intimate dynamic as K struggles with the loss of her hearing in one ear, finding her greatest comfort in Gould''s music -- particularly when he plays Bach. Gould''s poems don''t directly reply, but they do echo a response as he struggles with his own difficult life; his family, his health, his strong beliefs in how music should be presented and his personal habits considered "eccentric" by an ever-watchful press. K starts to accept her changing world, just as Gould begins a downward spiral into disintegration. In his final reflection, Gould acknowledges that in spite of his personal trials, his music now circles the world in the spacecraft Voyager as Earth''s example to other possible life forms of what is most beautiful in this civilisation. This is a striking and masterful volume of poems that does justice to Gould''s brilliance, offering insights into his personal life and art, even as it showcases Braid''s own virtuosity.
£10.44
Caitlin Press Lan(D)Guage: A Sequence of Poetics
Book SynopsisIn Ken Belford''s fifth book of poetry he takes us on a journey through Canada''s roadless north where he has discovered a third world gaze, looking out at industrialism and its impact on a region abundant in resources and natural beauty. This is an unsentimental and non-reactionary perspective, a deep investigation of the psychology of both the electronic revolution and postmodernism. It is also a collective conversation having to do with the mobile geographies of inequality. The poems are a study in the social cost of privilege and what it means to have access to power, surveillance and identity.
£10.44
Anchorage Press The House That Stands
Book SynopsisAn impressionistic long poem in twenty-two parts by Stefan Rose about residence life through a reimagining of the 60-history of the Trueman House residence at Mount Allison University. Typeset in Lanston Garamond and printed offset on Rolland Zephyr Antique Laid paper.
£14.39
Anchorage Press Ova Aves
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£22.94
Anchorage Press burninghouse
Book SynopsisIt is time we resist.And how I have strained and stretchedtaut against it, this time,tossing it off in some neglected corner of the kitchen,where it does not belong, can be ignored,until the odd moment of late-night coffee,nightmares recalled.-- from "hold fast"Taking its title from a child''s drawing of a burning house where "there is always the crucial act of rescue, saving somebody, nobody hurt and they can build another house as long as nobody dies," burninghouse peels away the veneer of the speaker''s existence to reveal the hypocritical inconsistencies that lie beneath, including weaning children, decorum in elevators, and homelessness. Deeply rooted in the passing of time, Deborah Stiles offers a clear-eyed perspective on the realities of motherhood and womanhood in an age when old patriarchal orders are in flux and our relationship with the natural world is under threat. "Now I turn my back on the gestures and the words usually in place there, at the door, and go, and that I do disturbs me."
£14.39
Anchorage Press Icarus, Falling of Birds
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£22.94
Anchorage Press Icare, chute doiseaux
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£22.94
Anchorage Press of a feather
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£29.74
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Siren Tattoo: a poetry triptych
Book SynopsisAn often challenging, sometimes harsh book of disparate poetic images, this triptych travels the full arc through desire, lust, loss, memory, anger, discovery, and celebration. From the distinctly urban to the emotionally uncompromising, these three women express, each in her own voice, a cry, a laugh, a scream-the hybrid of which culminates in the call for imprint: 'A Siren Tattoo'.
£8.54
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Lonesome Monsters
Book Synopsis'Lonesome Monsters' is a collection of prose and poetry from Vancouver writer Bud Osborn. Mr. Osborn's writing is as much chronicle, confession, testimony, as it is poetry-an unwavering account of inner-city struggle and the tenacity of the human spirit. "Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn's 'Lonesome Monsters' successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life." - Geist Magazine
£8.54
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Under the Abdominal Wall
Book Synopsis'Under the Abdominal Wall' is a moving collection of poetry, an elegy for ones loved and lost. The pieces in this volume focus largely on the subjects of childbirth, illness and loss-of a sibling and a parent. While the subjects of death and illness are forefront, they are countered by a theme of rejuvenation. McCartney addresses difficult, emotionally straining subjects head-on with strength, wonder and passion.
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Swing in the Hollow
Book Synopsis'Swing In the Hollow' is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton's language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience. "It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow." - Winnipeg Free Press
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Bogman's Music
Book Synopsis'Bogman's Music' is a debut collection of poetry that is both elegiac and sensitive in its exploration of family dynamics, the enduring power of childhood experience, and the healing ability of faith and love. "It's gritty and quirky, and at times almost spins out of but for a formality that always tends to rein in thing." - The Georgia Straight Governor General's Literary Award Nominee
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Rattlesnake Plantain
Book SynopsisWhether considering the simplicity of a butterfly in flight or the terror of a cancer diagnosis, Heidi Greco confronts the world head-on, yet always with the fresh eyes of the stranger in our midst. The issues she addresses belong to the world; the settings she employs are international. At times funny and irreverent, these are pieces that dissect relationships, poems that delve as easily into the mysteries of nature as they do into the intricacies of daily living-encounters we immediately recognize. But whether serious or fun in their approach, her penetrating and unsentimental eye is always there, steadfast on the goods. "In the beauty of the language and the striking images, there is a pervasive sadness, a sub-text of depression. ...'Rattlesnake Plantain' is a collection of poems about loving, not being loved. Baudelaire understood." - Prairie Fire
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Intensive Care: A Memoir
Book SynopsisOne night in April, after a Sunday soccer game, Alan Twigg couldn't remember the names of his two sons or his wife-and he couldn't hold a pen. An emergency CAT scan revealed a large brain tumour squeezed against his motor cortex. 'Intensive Care' tells the story of why this was a good thing. 'Intensive Care' isn't a medical survival story; it's a yearlong reflection on how the imminence of death can enhance life. The grass gets greener. Confirmation that one is loved is exhilarating, more powerful than any drug. On May 26th, 'The Globe & Mail' ran a front page story about a recent medical study that concluded one in five Canadians will have a tumour in their head at some point in their lives. Two days later, Dr. Christopher Honey, a neurosurgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, removed the benign tumour from Alan Twigg's head during a five-hour operation. He started writing again, in the Intensive Care ward, three hours later.
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Sideways
Book SynopsisHeather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers-and potential violence-hover like heat on the horizon. Whether theyre gangsta girls or riot grrrls, roaming the range or pacing the mall, Haley's women are always in the forefront, in the driver's seat, crankin' thewheel in their direction. Like wild horses bustin' loose, or an explosion in the kitchen, Haley's women know "how heady power is, how it lathers beneath a mount." Her characters bite life on the neck and take what they need; and just when they think it's gone, meaning happens. This is brawny and uncompromising language from a voice that demands to be reckoned with. "A supple and unusual book." - Lyle Neff, author of ' Full Magpie Dodge' and 'Bizarre Winery Tragedy'
£10.44
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Unravel
Book Synopsis'Unravel' addresses our universal experiences of time and place, and how those places shape who and what we are. 'Unravel' challenges our sometimes-complacent perceptions and justifies what we all hold dear: an address and an identity. "Armstrong pushes the potential of the lyric into darker places, inside the seams of bar booths, where things get lost." - The Georgia Straight
£12.34
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Singer, An Elegy
Book Synopsis'Singer, An Elegy' is a long poem memorializing the author's father and, equally, the now-obsolete industrial culture that shaped him. 'Singer, An Elegy' has rhetorical lightning flashes but aspires to much greater straightforwardness than Fetherling's previous poetry. " 'Singer, An Elegy' possesses all the fine qualities of Fetherling's prose and in many ways gives them their freest rein. Eloquent passages and striking phrases allow a wide experience and erudition to operate here with often startling appropriateness." - The Globe & Mail
£7.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Sleep of Four Cities, The
Book SynopsisPowered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in 'The Sleep of Four Cities' use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities-cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss-with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked-they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers. "Currin's poetry attends us, lighting the ball at midnight, where first love and first terror are arm-in-arm, waiting in their figurative, gesticulating disguises to welcome us to a primitive happiness." - Rain Taxi
£11.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Signs of the Times
Book Synopsis'Signs of the Times' reunites the poetry of Bud Osborn and the woodprints of Vancouver printmaker and painter Richard Tetrault. As with their first collaboration, 'Oppenheimer Park', 'Signs of the Times' is both an unflinching look at Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and a beautiful object in its own right. "The linocut and woodcut prints that constitute half of the art of this volume are exquisite their elegance....This volume is the best value for your money you coulod ever hope as lovers of art, as lovers of people. It puts art into your sweaty hands; it forces you to engage in the politics of humanity" - Prairie Fire
£999.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Cusp/detritus: an experiment in alleyways
Book SynopsisRooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. 'Cusp''s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen's muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe's haunting photographs of Vancouver's neglected spaces and rejected objects, 'Cusp/detritus' is a testimony to an obsession with the lost. "It is intentionally unsettling, disturbing, sad, and you cannot deny it, a celebration of a life." - Prairie Fire
£10.44
Anvil Press Publishers Inc I Cut My Finger
Book Synopsis'I Cut My Finger' is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed 'Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected' (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures. "Many of his narrative poems can best be called surreal. With their fancifully imaginative stories and wonderfully absurdist takes on the world, it's as if you're watching bizarre cartoons on YouTube." - Prairie Fire "A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." - TaddleCreek
£11.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Suicide Psalms
Book Synopsis'Suicide Psalms' is both hymn and visceral scream-of loss, despair, hope and ultimately redemption. These poems are drawn out with quick precision, as if they were indeed written in haste, or delirium, before tightening the noose or firing the pistol or jumping off of the ledge. Even though the media has recognized suicide as an epidemic, it is still not "talked" about outside of grief management and support groups. The subject remains taboo, and those left behind face a legacy of silence, shame and guilt. The poems in the first section of the book "Suicide Notes" attempt to answer the question "why"? Their density of language, slippage of syntax, sound play, repetition, and visceral imagery engender both empathy and relief, as each poem bears witness and pays homage. The work also addresses a larger collective malaise: the disintegration of society and "self," the loss of innocence and exploitation of youth, and the hopelessness and despair that smoulders under the veneer ofcorporate greed, rabid consumerism, and the resultant addictions, aberrations and violence. "And so it is that those friends who have lived close to suicide become the prophets who might lead us through the gathering darkness of our despairing ecocidal age-into more honourable, tender, sustainable ways of living together on this groaning, delicate, crying earth. 'That something better rises out of the ashes.' This is Rowley at her heart stammering, howling, apocalyptic, playful, musical best."- Di Brandt "The poems of Mari-Lou Rowley's 'Suicide Psalms' are deft, double-edged, 'kill sites bedded with violets,' songs of violent beauty. Scalene: the constantly shifting, sharpening edges and angles (no two sides ever the same) of 'Suicide Psalms'' three movements balance, ultimately, in a perfect complex structure. Dissonant; harmonic. Rowley's poetry, as always, a snapping, synaptical singing, stinging electric. In the necessary, unpredictable climate of 'Suicide Psalms', 'the windfingers/all possible points of entry/conclusions/ways out.'"- Sylvia Legris
£11.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Inventory: Poetry by Marguerite Pigeon
Book Synopsis'Inventory' is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, the book explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the mysterious, extinct dodo bird, to entities that blur the line between person and thing. In this way, the collection highlights the often hidden dimensions of the objects we encounter, including their temporal, political, locational and psychic aspects. It offers an opportunity for readers to reconsider their own investments in what, by dictionary definition, should be static categories. " 'Inventory' by Marguerite Pigeon examines life's often forgotten elements. From her portrait of "meaning" to her idyllic details of a clothespin, Pigeon is a master of naked realism and organic descriptions of expression. Her first publication, 'lnventory', was short-listed for the 2010 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The book explores the lucid philosophy of simple pleasures it's a refreshing truth bound in a small package. 'lnventory' is a front-to-back read that meshes simplicity and intricacy in a witty and intelligent style. Pigeon's work is a gem of purity in a complex world." - Poetry is Dead Magazine
£11.39
NeWest Press 14 Tractors
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£14.39
Brindle and Glass Publishing, Ltd A Ghost in Waterloo Station
Book SynopsisThe poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut. Swallows enter their nests high on the white stacked walls at Indian Lodge as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from. There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history--all delivered in a voice distinctive in its combination of narrative, whimsy, and psychological observation.
£17.99
Brindle and Glass Publishing, Ltd What We're Left With
Book SynopsisThe poems in Ben Murray'' s debut collection, What We'' re Left With, reflect on disconnection as a feature of contemporary urban experience. Murray'' s poems tackle themes of isolation, loneliness and human separation from nature. Murray creates trademark images of surprising loneliness and suburban angst: sog-white mornings/ of caffeinated mouths/ mating Cheerios/ O to empty O. The poet longs for mall-free days of sprawling languid under a pre-cancerous sun when we hurry up/ and wait, to become men. Writing about climate change, the poet asks how long until hibernating bears/ shake November from their sleep-under fur/ and start snorting around for off-season/ bargains. Capable of many different registers, Murray writes, in assumed voices, of grief and memory beyond his own immediate experience, something he describes as tapping into some larger collective autobiography.
£17.99
Brindle and Glass Publishing, Ltd One Crow Sorrow
Book SynopsisLisa Martin-DeMoor''s debut collection of poetry, One Crow Sorrow, is both fearless and vulnerable-an exploration of grief and loss that is rooted in life affirmation, in deep attention to the natural world. From a tangle of snowflakes in Saskatchewan to cell masses like dislodged icebergs, the earth and body inform one another, their cycles of life entwined. The resulting poems explore grief as an extension of love, and mortality as an extension of living. Pain, she writes, is the opened bloom of beauty.
£17.99
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Frenzy
Book SynopsisIn Greek mythology the muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In 'Frenzy', Catherine Owen pays homage to the muses in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author's, some those of others. In "Flood-Ghazals," she takes the leaping form of the Persian ghazal and makes it fluid, out of entirely, loosened from its couplet bounds and set free as an unravelled block of threads. "Cobalt Moments" are paeans to a place and its temporalinhabitants-a punk-metal bar in Vancouver and some of its crazy denizens, an attempt to capture the rhythms of this hypnotizing zone of intense music and liminal people. "Opposite Angel's" is a satirical fable of the muse-seeker. How the artist, perhaps unwittingly, ends up placing their muses, especially when they are human, alive, and of the desired gender, on a pedestal. "One Week in Her Life" covers eight random days, in which the poet rambles through the urban world, facing various incongruities, griefs, absurdities, while reveling in little glimpses of peace. "agitate" is a long poem about a photographer's sojourn along a Vancouver Island beach on a trek to chronicle sea surfaces. Environmental, gendered, and artistic critique collide in her mental and physical reality as she dreams of emerging from the frenzy to establish one pure moment of beauty in the world. "Catherine Owen is a neo-romantic bard whose idiosyncratic poetry is barbed with aspects of Tough Love wed to the groom of nihilism. This poet wears a black mood for a wedding dress as she casts invective against bourgeois normalcy. Mistress of neologism and its conflicted ally-ambiguity?-this musifier is unabashedly shameless in making herself "lovesick". A poet taster's head spins, which may not be a bad thing. In an era of political correctness and its self-righteous terrorisms, Owen's muse skateboards over society's niceties as her love junkie heart leaps like an adolescent butterfly. Revel in the nuancesof light and darkness doing a tango in the ineffable quest for the muse's many forms." - Joe Rosenblatt (poet, artist, editor, and recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award) "Catherine Owen is an extraordinarily gifted poet. It's not just the sheer sonic pleasure of her language or the largesse of her endlessly inventive imagery but that she is unsettled and unsettling, deeply disobedient and yet almost selfless in her surrender to form. These poems, and especially the Flood-Ghazals, take you down and then drag you up again, gasping for air." -Robert Priest (poet, songwriter, playwright, winner of the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award)
£11.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Vs.
Book Synopsis'Vs.' is a collection of poems chronicling the author's foray into the world of amateur boxing. A shy, bookish woman you'd never expect could hit someone in the face, Ryan was soon hooked on the physical and mental challenge of the sport, as well as the camaraderie of the club's members and volunteers. When the club announced an upcoming white collar fight-an opportunity for novices to participate in an actual bout-she nervously decided to test her mettle. The writing of these poems became a way to process what she was learning in the ring as well as a method of exploration around her decision to participate in the fight. The poems explore her reasons for taking on the challenge, the way the sport changed her perceptions of herself and her capabilities, and how her relationship with her husband factored into the adventure. 'Vs.' is part instruction manual, part rationalization. Throughout the collection the author reflects on what it means to be a woman and a fighter, as wellas a poet and a fighter. But, ultimately, 'Vs.' is about the fights we all face: brain vs. body, intention vs. action, perceptions vs. identity, and who we are vs. who we want to be. "The poems in Kerry Ryan's 'Vs.' come at you like quick jabs of light the writing is taut, worked over, sinewy, spare, and lean but never mean. A delightful collection. What else can be said? These poems pack a punch." Jeanette Lynes, Author, 'The New Blue Distance' "Muhammad Ali, keep your guard up. You're being measured by a better boxing poet. Kerry Ryan has the clarity of vision that comes with a boxer's discipline and daring, the grace of a true poet's music of body and mind made one." Robert Kroetsch, Author, 'Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait' Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award
£12.34
Anvil Press Publishers Inc The Song Collides
Book Synopsis'The Song Collides' takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world-and then back again via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life is an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simultaneous and nearly imperceptible process that lasts, we hope, at least until the exit. Calvin Wharton's poems in 'The Song Collides' pulse and soar with the sounds of beautiful music. Whether a specific one of 'The Song Collides'' lyrics, prose poems, sonnets, or elegies mentions music or not, Wharton's mastery of his art never fails to bring his words to resonant life in the ear and mind. He is a connoisseur of precise details that, transformed through his attention to the musicality of language, ring within the reader's memory like a favourite tune. -Tom Wayman, author of 'High Speed Through Shoaling Water' Here is a poetry ofgentle surprises, of the enjoyment of "salt air, sweet water / qualities that feed days / and grow into years," of ironies that enrich, "every answer lost in the question following." And even when we are reminded of everyday "skimpy wishes," how good to read these nuances so carefully shaped for our pleasure, each reminding us to "begin wherever you are, / but first look around." - David Zieroth, 'The Fly in Autumn'
£12.34
Anvil Press Publishers Inc You Exist. Details Follow.
Book SynopsisEach new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In 'You Exist. Details Follow.', his seventh full-length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessional poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, each poem breathes with the signature weirdness, the sharp wit and gentle awe that Ross is known for. Here you'll find new poems from Ross'songoing Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. "A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems, 'You Exist. Details Follow.' Stuart Ross is no punk kid, but he writes with a refreshing snark. It's a voice much in evidence in his latest book, a collection of poems called 'You Exist. Details Follow.' (Anvil Press). He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions. Here are a misplaced tuba, badly sewn dog suits, and Highway 6 Revisited, about a butcher waking from a dream of meat, then dancing down a country road. Then you come across 'French Fries', a charming story of a child pretending to be asleep during a road trip: 'You smell French fries. It is time/to pretend to wake up.' In another poem, Ross wisely and parenthetically writes: (Tension is a good thing sometimes. For example, you shouldstick it in art.) Stuart Ross loves that tension, fortunately for his readers." -Uptown (Winnipeg)
£12.34
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Trobairitz
Book SynopsisTwenty-first century metalheads; twelfth century troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz- what could they possibly have in common? The creation of an often misunderstood and at times reviled genre for one; for another, a kin preoccupation with the questioning of structures set up by class, gender, and religion. "Describing metal fans as "raw birds, eyes banged out of their heads," Owen's loving scorn allows her to walk a fine line between paying homage to the subculture and dissecting its darkness." - Winnipeg Free Press
£13.29
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Playdead Press Pig [Swamp] Songs
Book Synopsis"The leaves fall, or is it snow? Ralph is stuck in a swamp on the enemy''s wasteland. He sings a Pig Song or two. Pig [Swamp] Songs is a work which listens to the world without striving neurotically after character and plot. It eludes definition. Rooney''s writing is in a vein where as much is received as projected. He doesn''t shout at you. He engages only with love, loss, death and the possibility of the infinite. The Pig Songs are the echo we crave, proof of our connectedness to a universe that exists beyond the fragile, disposable bodies in which we can seem helplessly enclosed. They are the mark, the stain, the rhythm of our common blood, of family, friends, of love. - from the introduction by Simon Usher"
£10.44
Cinnamon Press The Painters Who Studied Clouds
Book SynopsisBrimming with wit, moments of acute observation and imagination, and written in a wry, self-deprecating Billy Collins-esque style, Will Kemp's third collection is replete with refreshing images for the things that enrich life, from clouds to sport, art to music. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
£11.52
Palavro Govanhill Mythology
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£12.34
![Pig [Swamp] Songs](http://bookcurl.com/cdn/shop/files/9781910067918.jpg?v=1722549644&width=645)
