Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA magnificent, semi-autobiographical sequence from a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Tiepolo''s Hound joins the quests of two Caribbean men: Camille Pissarro - a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 who leaves his native St. Thomas to become a painter in Paris - and the poet himself, who longs to rediscover the detail of a painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Published with 25 full-colour reproductions of Derek Walcott''s own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet''s desire to catch the visual world in more than words.Trade Review'This is a rich, hugely ambitious work, the mighty poem of a major poet in the full flight of his authority and curiosity, a Victorian-scale construction which thrilled me and which I will read again and again.' Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph; 'Tiepolo's Hound is a long, complex but coherent, almost Wordsworthian account of the growth of the poet's mind, which is interwoven with a biographical study, or poetic re-creation of the life and art of Camille Pissarro... beautifully written.' Vernon Scannell, Sunday Telegraph; 'Walcott explores the connections between the landscapes of childhood and those of art, he enters the mind of exile, unteases the presumptions of Empire...' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

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Book SynopsisMartin Wiggins is a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

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Book SynopsisRobinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced, but a major poet of the 20th century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry. This is a selection of his work.Trade Review"Ultimately Jeffers poems are regenerative, inspired, dynamic, and transcendent, creating an evocative and richly rewarding, even visionary, immersion in the natural world that for all its verbosity makes the world tangible and restorative. As editor Tim Hunt observes, Jeffers's work demands more than just simple contemplation of nature, but rather 'identifying with it and recognizing one's final and inevitable participation in it.'"—Jeffery Beam, Oyster Boy Review"[I]t is hard to see how anyone can read Jeffers's best poetry and not perceive greatness. His narrative verse rivals Wordsworth's or Byron's. It is electrifying; the skin prickles. . . . We will lose something of value if we let Jeffers slip away. He expresses California's peculiar ambience with unsurpassed vividness."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"Tim Hunt, one of the nation's leading Jeffers scholars, has done a masterful job of sorting and choosing from a huge amount of material."—San Francisco Chronicle"Most welcome . . . a volume for the core of American literature collections."—Booklist"The little prose Jeffers wrote is of the highest quality and the best of it is fortunately included in the back of The Selected Poetry."—New York Review"This is the second such collection. The first, from Random House in 1938, remained in print for more than 50 years. Hunt, editor of the five volumes of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, now provides an excellent replacement."—Virginia Quarterly Review"One of the major virtues of this selection is its appeal to ecologically-oriented readers. . . . From any critical angle or interest, this Selected Poetry is the best entry into Jeffers's major work."—ISLE"No other American poet has so emphatically preached the saving graces of nature, from galaxies to granite. Jeffers is more than the consummate poet of California and the Pacific Ocean, as many East Coast literati have called him with condescension. He is a poet of transhuman beauty, of disturbing prophecy. Freed from the shackle of his narrative poems, he stands as the preeminent American poet of nature, ecology, and science . . . he is one of our most important writers."—Science MagazineTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Tamar 1917-1923 2. Roan Stallion 1924-1925 3. The women at Point Sur 1925-1926 4. Cawdor 1926-1928 5. Dear Judas 1928-1929 6. Thurso's landing 1930-1931 7. Give your heart to the hawks 1931-33 8. Solstice 1933-1935 9. Such counsels you gave to me 1935-1938 10. Be angry at the sun 1938-1941 11. The double axe 1942-1947 12. Hungerfield 1948-1953 12. Last poems 1953-1962 13. Prose 14. Unpublished poems Indices.

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Book SynopsisIn 2013, Leanne O'Sullivan's husband Andrew suffered a severe infection in his brain. He spent just over three weeks in a coma, during which time his temperature soared to 42 degrees. When he finally woke it immediately became clear that his memory had been almost completely destroyed; he didn't even know his wife. More present and visual to him were the birds and wild animals that he believed he could see during his recovery: foxes, wildcats and herons - animals that seemed to be guiding him back. This became the starting point for poems that deal not simply with personal memory and recovery, but also the ways in which, collectively, even globally, we are trying (or not) to save entire species of plants and animals that we are now actually losing because of human activity. Nature has a voice that can speak back. This is a collection that celebrates the earth's intoxicating wildness as well as the richness and preciousness of human experience. Overall, we can rejoice in the fact that we're here, whatever the challenges. Winner of the inaugural Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2019. Shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019 and for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers' Week.Trade ReviewLeanne O’Sullivan is possessed of a haunting lyric voice which, in A Quarter of an Hour, draws us into an area of surface tension where personal crisis – a husband stricken and then recovering from a deadly illness – interacts with our experience of the non-human. Dawn, the poem that gives the book its particular title and focus, captures in its evocation of the dawning world the ‘here to not here’ of becoming; and as readers we are given access throughout to that dimension between the mundane and the mythic that normally eludes articulation, but here finds expression in limpid, precise poems. At once tender, exploratory and grace-filled, this finely orchestrated collection attests to the wholeness of natural life and, resonant with folkloric wisdom, it re-awakens the spirit to a fresh sense of the mystery and precariousness of our world. It is an astonishing achievement. -- Maurice Riordan * Judge of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award *

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Book SynopsisConfined to a private edition for decades, this volume sheds further light on E.E. Cummings’s prodigious vision and imagination.Trade Review"Cummings was one of the most spirited and original American writers of the 20th century." -- The Wall Street Journal"Mr. Cummings is not merely the perfect acrobat or the genius carefully, yet easily and very skillfully inhabiting everything which we really are and everything which we never quite live. His intention is not to be serious, but to be very serious and get away with it." -- Louis Zukofsky - Exile"In prose as much as in poetry, Cummings’s lines are a vehicle for typographical leaps of daring, experiments with and distortions of syntax. Even at its most controlled, it is distinctively a poet’s prose, looking to forge a new sound from language." -- The San Franciso Chronicle

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Book SynopsisWinner • Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation Bawdier than The Canterbury Tales, The Fabliaux is the first major English translation of the most scandalous and irreverent poetry in Western literature.Trade Review"Like Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf,…Dubin reproduces the world and the feeling of the medieval tale…that travel joyfully from the Middle Ages to the present." -- R. Howard Bloch, from the introduction to The Fabliaux"Devilishly bawdy and irreverent…The 69 fabliaux presented here in their original French and translated into rascally, buoyant English by Nathaniel E. Dubin, are relentlessly scabrous, egregiously misogynistic, and exuberantly oppositional to ‘bourgeois respectability’ and the church…. Vivid, funny, robustly grotesque, and drolly outrageous, these satirical tales of lust, revenge, and folly feature lecherous peasants, fornicating priests, scoundrels, fools, and women wily and tough, castigated and abused…. An historic literary achievement bound to arouse vociferous discussion." -- Booklist"Pure, unadulterated fun…. A golden bough of erotic imagination and folk humor, peopled by randy wives, cuckolded husbands, fornicating priests, and priapic knights…. Ultimately, what’s so potent and profound about these risqué yarns is not their unbridled expressions of sexuality and vulgarity per se, but their unusual ability to provoke a carnivalesque laughter in all. Through denuding, debauchery, and bodily degradation, the fabliaux create a common denominator for humanity, an earthy, holistic world in which, to quote Bakhtin again, ‘he who is laughing also belongs to it.’ Flaunting unabashed obscenity in delightful verse, The Fabliaux is a book that would entertain the fans of Dr. Freud and Dr. Seuss alike." -- Yunte Huang - The Daily Beast"Fabliaux are comic tales, in verse, composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries…. The words used…have not been adjusted to conform to modern immodesty; the translation is literal…[This is the] first substantial collection of fabliaux, in any language, for today’s general reader." -- Joan Acocella - The New Yorker"The fabliaux, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist." -- Christopher Ricks - New York Review of Books"The fabliaux are important not only for their approach to humor, but for their focus on sex, class and wealth, and bodily functions like eating and defecating—all elements quite absent from more highbrow, courtly, or Church-sanctioned religious texts. Liveright’s edition serves as the largest and most complete collection of fabliaux, in English or French, ever published “for the general reader…" The Fabliaux is a reminder that medieval texts can remain engaging, lively, and, above all, funny." -- Charlotte Bhaskar - Zyzzyva

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Book SynopsisFernando Pessoa is Portugal’s most important contemporary poet.He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his “voices” is completely different in subject, temperament and style. This volume brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work published by Ecco Press in 1986.At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness. I think I have under control the reluctance I feel in having to share Pessoa with the public he should have had all along in America: until now, only the poets, so far as I can tell, have even heard of him, and delighted and exulted in him. He is, in some ways, the poet of modernism, the only one willing to fracture himself into the parcels of action, anguish, and nostalgia which are the grounds of our actual situation.—C. K. WilliamsPessoa is one of the great originals (a fact rendered more striking by his writing as several distinct personalities) of the European poetry of the first part of this century, and has been one of the last poets of comparable stature, in the European languages, to become known in English. Edwin Honig''s translations of Spanish and Portuguese poetry have been known to anyone who cares about either, since his work on Lorca in the forties, and his Selected Poems of Pessoa (1971) was a welcome step toward a long-awaited larger colection.—W. S. MerwinFernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of the twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if that is the word, two of our greatest poets, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn''t bad. Pessoa is the exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy. In Edwin Honig''s and Susan Brown''s superb translations, Pessoa and his ''others'' live with miraculous style and vitality.—Mark Strand

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Book SynopsisFinalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets.--Denise Levertov

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Book Synopsis?This posthumous commemoration and celebration of Sargon Boulus is a collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, Poetry and Memory, written a few months before he died.

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Book SynopsisAimed at students and readers of poetry at all levels, The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry takes a tour through a galaxy of examples, demonstrating how to come to terms with poetry's verbal, formal, emotional, and conceptual power. It shows how reading poems enhances our enjoyment and understanding of life.Trade Review'One of the advantages this book will have over competitors in the field is that its tone and approach are grounded in practical experience of introducing challenging texts to readers who are relatively inexperienced with (and not a little afraid of) poetry. Andrew Hodgson's guide manages to make reading poetry continuously exciting without sacrificing difficulty. Consistently literary, it makes the literary available rather than austerely or arcanely remote. Above, all students will listen because the advice is presented without condescension as if from a writer addressing fellow-practitioners. I will certainly be recommending this book to my first-year close readers and I am sincerely heartened by the fact that, published by Cambridge University Press, it is set to become a standard text.' Josie Billington, University of Liverpool'Any student of poetry, not just beginners, should find this book helpful and encouraging. Its tone is amiable but not condescending, its range of themes and examples is generous, and its insights are sensible, interesting and smart.' Michael Ferber, University of New HampshireDeeply thoughtful and superbly eloquent, this is the most inspiring guide to the study of poetry that I've ever encountered. It's an introduction and a masterclass at once. Like the literature it illuminates, this book has riches to offer readers of every kind. Refusing bullet points and jargon, refusing to flatten or over-simplify, Hodgson takes us seriously. Opening up conversation at every turn, he encourages us to embrace poetry in all its exhilarating complexity and to feel it changing our minds. He looks carefully under the microscope at rhyme and metre, form and voice, and – inseparably – he makes a powerfully sustained argument for the transformative presence of literature in our lives. … In sum it's as idiosyncratic, argumentative, stylish, loving and generally human as literature is and textbooks aren't.' Alexandra Harris, University of Birmingham'Hodgson's guide is lucid, learned, and just plain useful. He patiently and precisely describes the pleasures and value of reading and writing about verse. Filled with a wide selection of well-wrought exempla and some well-culled insights from poets themselves, the book beautifully describes why poetry matters and how it works. Like the best poets, Hodgson thinks and feels deeply about words.' Stephen Dobranski, Distinguished University Professor, Georgia State University'This is an incredibly useful, accessible guide for anyone interested in sharpening their appreciation of poetry. Andrew Hodgson's book manages to be engaging and friendly, even when introducing potentially intimidating topics like metre and scansion, without ever patronising the reader or reducing the complexity of the ideas raised. He also never loses sight of the fact that students need to discover their own reasons for engaging with poetry, beyond the mundane demands of university assessment. Through its series of wide-ranging and lucidly explored examples, his book inspires a further plunge into poetic history, by reminding us that poetry is a vital record of the diversity of human experience, rather than a rarefied separation from it.' Dr Sarah Parker, Loughborough University'… the book's language is accessible, lucid, and direct, rarely dipping into undefined poetic jargon. As such, The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry would be useful for technical communicators looking to reintroduce themselves to the act of reading poetry critically, or even those looking for a way to write a guide for difficult and diffuse subjects with clarity.' Dylan Schrader, Technical CommunicationTable of ContentsIntroduction: Reading Poetry; 1. Reading a Poem; 2. Studying a Poet; 3. Writing about Poetry; Epilogue: What Should You Read?; Glossary of Common Forms and Genres; Further Reading.

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Book SynopsisIncludes: Time of My Life; Neighbourhood Watch; Arrivals and Departures; Hero's Welcome; A Brief History of Women

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Book SynopsisThe Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words. The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third poetry collection. “The Defeat of Youth” is a moving sonnet sequence on the passage of innocence to experience, on familiar transformation of love into lust. Capturing the experience of youthful attraction, Huxley imagines the moment in which the beloved “leans, and there is laughter in the face / She turns toward him; and it seems a door / Suddenly opened on some desolate place / With a burst of light and music.” As the young man awakens to the life of another, his vision turns tragically pure, molding an image of “immanence divine,” a face “in a flash of laughter” and a “young body with an inward flame.” As the poem unfolds, however, he feels only shame to have touched “things deadly to be desired.” Throughout this collection, Huxley explores the poet’s tendency to sing and to praise the world’s fleeting beauty while “[o]ther young men have been battling with the days / And others have been kissing the beautiful women.” The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is the work of a poet uncertain of his visionary gift, doubtful of his art’s worth or purpose, yet sure of the power of language. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisFrom poetry slam champion Porsha O, a debut collection exploring black womanhood.

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Book SynopsisOne bitter Christmas Eve, a cold-hearted miser is visited by four ghosts. Transported to worlds past, present and future, Ebenezer Scrooge witnesses what a lifetime of fear and selfishness has led to, and sees with fresh eyes the lonely life he has built for himself. Can Ebenezer be saved before it's too late? Jack Thorne's joyous adaptation of Charles Dickens's timeless classic premiered at The Old Vic, London, in 2017, in a production directed by Matthew Warchus, and starring Rhys Ifans as Ebenezer Scrooge. It was revived at the Old Vic in 2018, 2019 and 2021.Trade Review'Dickens' tale of personal conscience and moral responsibility might be more relevant that ever... Thorne doesn't shirk the anger at social attitudes towards poverty, but also delivers a rousing festive feast that will leave even the most miserly curmudgeon filled with redemptive joy' * Radio Times *'Dickensian and modern, clever and heartfelt, gripping and touching and tuneable and serious and sometimes funny... its marvellously heartfelt Christmas quality would delight the original author' * TheatreCat *'Magical... Thorne's adaptation is traditional but with a modern twist that delights' * The Times *'Jack Thorne's new version of Dickens' story stands high on my list of favourites... combines the social anger with a genuine sense of festivity... this is Dickens done with love and affection. The fable's warning about the danger of treating poverty as if it were a moral vice could also hardly be more timely' * Guardian *'Provides everything you might want from a theatrical adaptation of Dickens's timeless (and never more timely) morality tale urging social responsibility and compassion... the new adaptation by Jack Thorne fuses fun with the macabre and a fine degree of psychological depth... both witty and deeply affecting' * Independent *'There is a contemporary resonance to it… a love song to Christmas and the redeeming power of theatre' * Observer *'Incredibly atmospheric... Jack Thorne's relatively faithful adaptation lets Dickens' words do their work, but then opens things up in a second half that is emotionally rich and, on occasion, truly moving' * The Stage *

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Book Synopsis “Few poets of the last thirty years have approached his diversity of formal innovations; few have communicated so intensively via performances and recordings, as often as not with integral musical settings; and few have proved so effective politically… a living modern classic for real.” —London Magazine “You can just hear the reggae drumbeat as his verse vacillates among fire, anger, fear, profound loss, and victory.” —Savoy Magazine, January 2007 “The man writes some of the most moving poetry to be found in popular music.—David Bowie in Vanity Fair “His observations are the rich fruits of both a lyrical childhood on a Jamaican farm, and his bottled anger on the streets of London. During his teenage years in Brixton, Johnson witnessed serial episodes of racial abuse and joined the Black Panthers movement in protest. There, he learned his history and culture, but found his own outlet.”—Caroline Frost, BBC Four Linton Kwesi Johnson is the most influential black poet in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things. Contains a full-length CD of Johnson reading.

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Book SynopsisThe second collection of searing poetry from a fat-activist feminist and internet sensation.

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Book SynopsisPoetry sensation Neil Hilborn returns with a highly anticipated second collection.

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Book Synopsis** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER **THE DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION FROM THE ORIGINAL MUMMY'S BOY, HUSSAIN MANAWER.'I remember the day I wrote my first ever poem, I was sitting on my bed in the attic and started jotting down lines on this little notepad, little did I know where it would lead me professionally, personally and also psychologically. This is my life's work to this date, all my notes, my favourite pieces that have served me through my darkest nights and carried me through every moment of pain, suffering, anxiety, panic and hardship.'Hussain's debut poetry collection will invite readers on his journey through depression and grief, and out the other side to a better place - there will be joy, hope, tears and laughter - the emotions that make up the fabric of human experience. His words will remind readers, that even in your lowest moments you can find the gold dust, Life is Sad and Beautiful will shift outlooks and stand as a powerful vehicle for growth and change.ABOUT HUSSAIN:Hussain Manawer is a globally acclaimed Poet, Mental Health Advocate and Producer - who was born in Newham and shortly after grew up in Ilford, Essex. Tagged 'The Original Mummy's Boy', Hussain derives much of his inspiration from his own experiences and intense grief at the sudden loss of his mother. Dignitaries, major brands and broadcasters seek him out to articulate the mental health struggles our world is facing. Amongst the credits to his name, commissions and collaborations include The Royal Family, The BAFTAs, The FA, Global Citizen, One Young World, Burberry, Anthony Joshua, Marcus Rashford, Tyson Fury, England FC, Peaky Blinders, Soccer Aid For UNICEF, Apple TV+ and many more.He most recently appeared alongside Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey in the mental health docu-series, 'The Me You Can't See', alongside Lady Gaga, Glen Close and others. Hussain's poetry can also be heard on the Archewell Audio Podcast Christmas Special with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Manawer was called upon earlier this year by The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to create the 'Mental Health Minute' which was broadcast on all radio stations with an all-star line-up including David Beckham, Joanna Lumley, Shirley Bassey, Jessie Lingard, Jamie Oliver, Anne Marie and Charles Dance.Trade ReviewAn important exploration of navigating the darkest places - and coming through with hope. -- Red MagazineIt's powerful stuff, piercing the heart of what it means to experience grief, articulating the most confusing parts of the fog. -- I-D

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Book Synopsis“Chekhov, speaking simply and never otherwise than as an artist and a humane man, shows us in fullness and plenitude the mystery of our lives.”—Eudora Welty “What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!”-Tennessee Williams The Seagull is Anton Chekhov’s brilliant four-act play that is considered a monumental work of drama, and one of the most sublime literary examinations of the complexities of love and friendship. First performed over a century ago, this play remains one of the most widely staged productions throughout the world. The four protagonists in The Seagull are all artists; Trigorin is a well-established writer, Arkadina is a renowned yet aging actress, her son Treplev is a struggling writer, and Nina is a young aspiring actress who is in love with Treplev. Success in love and in their art is a shared intent, yet within the play each character experiences an existential crisis in the darkness of unrequited love. With its play-within-a-play, its nods to Shakespeare, and intimate and profound character portrayals, this is an essential read for all serious students of drama and Russian literature. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Seagull is both modern and readable.

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Book SynopsisThe Apple Cart, Too True to Be Good, On the Rocks, and The Millionairess is a collection of four of George Bernard Shaw's most interesting plays. They stretch from 1929 to 1935 and coincide with the Great Depression.Table of ContentsIntroduction Select Bibliography Chronology The Apple Cart Too True to Be Good On the Rocks The Millionairess Explanatory Notes

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Book SynopsisExplorations of plant consciousness and human interactions with the natural world. From apples to ayahuasca, coffee to kurrajong, passionflower to peyote, plants are conscious beings. How they interact with each other, with  humanity and with the world at large has long been studied by researchers, scientists and spiritual teachers and seekers. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence brings together works from all these disciplines and more in a collection of essays that highlights what we know and what we intuit about botanical life. The Mind of Plants, featuring a foreword by Dennis McKenna, is a collection of short essays, narratives and poetry on plants and their interaction with humans. Contributors include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times’ best seller Braiding SweetgrassTrade Review “This is the book I have been waiting for! For far too long a deep ignorance has prevailed that plants are just inanimate objects. Now for the benefit of the whole of humanity The Mind of Plants dispels the darkness of that ignorance. The book is a bouquet of beautiful essays which delighted me with the knowledge that the plants are living organisms and we need to celebrate their sublime qualities with awe and gratitude. It is an enlightening book! The Mind of Plants integrates the science of ecology and biology with the pleasure of poetry and literature. It should become an essential part of the curriculum of all schools and universities. And of course it should be read by all those who wish to learn about the intricate mystery of plant life.” — Satish Kumar, Founder of Schumacher College, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist “This marvellous and hugely important book brings us a vitally important gift: the gift of melting – of melting our human consciousness into the varied and multifarious intelligences that live and thrive in the world of plants. Speaking to us through their human interlocutors, the plants in this book urge us to heal the disastrous split between ourselves and the world of nature so tragically instigated by Descartes and his many followers and successors. May the rich teachings from our plant kith and kin in this splendid book reawaken us to the wondrous sentience of our living planet, now brought so close to disaster by the greed and blindness of the modern world.” — Dr. Stephan Harding, Deep Ecology Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Holistic Science, Schumacher College. Author of Animate Earth and Gaia Alchemy “For millennia, we have taken the vegetable world for granted, deeming it inferior and devoid of inner purpose or complexity. This beautifully-curated volume combines research, cross-cultural narratives and personal experiences to unveil a profoundly different plant world, inviting us to rethink what we mean by intelligence and to reevaluate our place in Nature with open minds and renewed humility.” — Marcelo Gleiser, 2019 Templeton Prize Laureate, author of The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected “I hope this important, wide-ranging, and easy-to-read book enjoys a broad audience including researchers and people who simply love being in the presence of all types of florae. I'm sure that the more we study plants the more we'll see that the real question at hand is not if they have their own sorts of minds, but rather why plant minds have evolved and how they're used. "Animal-centric" views about "minds" need to be broadened to include all living beings on our magnificent planet. Science has already shown that merely visiting plants can alter herbivory, including seed production and competition—the Herbivory Uncertainty Principle—so let's keep the door open about the inner lives of the diverse florae that bless Earth. As someone who has studied nonhuman animal minds for decades, I've seen many changes in the narrow and dismissive views that once questioned whether nonhumans really had minds, and I'm sure that we'll see a similar broadening of attitudes about plant minds as relevant studies are performed and people shelve the idea that the notion of plant minds is absurd and anti-scientific.” — Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and A Dog's World: Imaging the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans "This eclectic 21st century Herbal will take you on a joyous ride of discovery of connection between plants and people. Through the medium of stories, poetry or science the complexity and beauty of plant intelligence is reflected. This surprising, illuminating and diverse collection is a much needed antidote to 'plant blindness' so common in our societies, encouraging us to see, hear and feel the green life all around us. Throughout the book there are beautiful illustrations that bring the text alive". —Anya Ermakova, PhD is a member of Chacruna Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants “I absorbed Mind of Plants whole in just two days. With impressive breadth this book introduced me to plants around the world and to their place in different cultures. From metaphorically setting down roots to the literal thoughts engendered by electrical pulses, each chapter elegantly introduced different concepts and made me reflect as much on myself as on the natural world.” — Alice Little, Writer in Residence, Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, alicelittle.co.uk “Forget those weary stereotypes of hippies intoning to their geraniums. In this elegant, necessary and provocative collection, a new generation of philosophers, scholars, scientists, writers, artists and poets examine their relationship with plants, not as materials or useful things or means to our ends, but as kin. They ask us to put our preconceptions to one side and to receive plants as they actually are, all the while grappling with those most perplexing and tabooed philosophical questions: what is it to be a plant? and even, can plants actually think? Their answers will delight, enchant, challenge, and doubtless infuriate, but to be asking such questions at this moment of anthropogenic ecological crisis could not be more timely. They may yet change the way you view plants forever.” — Andy Letcher D.Phil (Oxon.), Ph.D is a Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College, UK, where he is Programme Lead for the MA Engaged Ecology. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom “Ryan, Viera, and Gagliano have cultivated an exemplary herbarium of stories, poems, and deeply personal essays centered around plants themselves. Each contribution begins from the uncommon assumption of intelligence in plants and presents novel ways of thinking about and with each species. Incorporating critical insights on plants from the sciences and humanities, The Mind of Plants is sensuous, grounded, and accessible. This book is vital for anyone who has ever felt a connection with a plant.” — Laura Pustarfi, Ph.D., Plant Studies Scholar “The Mind of Plants is a portal. The diverse, intimate layers of human and vegetal voices and experiences move us beyond the confines of our homo sapiens centrality to absorb, open to, and be opened by the ways trees and plants know, initiate, navigate, socialize, shape—mind— their lives and communities. Each plant encounter in these pages spins our modern conditioning a little, and a little more—softly, sensually, profoundly shifting what is continually re-enforced as the only paradigm through which to be with and know the green world: as inert resource solely for human consumption and well-being. Emerging from the portal, changed and humbled, we are held in a deepened sense of awe, interconnection, love, respect, perspective, and empathy for the minded aliveness and engagements of plants in their own right. The Mind of Plants is a portal of vital and overdue importance.” — Dr. Sarah Abbott, interdisciplinary researcher of sentient relations of trees, and associate professor at the University of Regina “The Mind of Plants is an enchanting collection of short reflections on the privileged encounter with plants as cognitive, mindful beings. Poetic, essayistic, and very personal, this book is full of insightful thoughts which are filling an important lacuna in human understanding that science cannot explain: The mind emerges from the encounter with a myriad of other beings. The Indigenous Amazonian people have long known and experienced their rainforest as a field of mind. To plug into the intelligence of this forest is a practice, that once discovered, has kept the author’s strong ties to these territories alive over decades.” — Ursula Biemann, artist, curator, and theorist “From apples to Ayahuasca, from spinach to Xiang-Si, this wide-ranging collection serves up forty essays and fourteen poems that, each in its own singular voice, collectively meditate on how and why plants scratch, sting, enchant, nourish, illuminate, intoxicate and enslave us. The contributors—including biologists, ethnobotanists, chemists, physicians, anthropologists, philosophers, writers and artists from diverse cultural backgrounds—enliven the emerging field of study on plant intelligence by interweaving poetry, personal stories, scientific findings and spiritual insights, sometimes within the same entry. Authors Jeremy Narby and Prudence Gibson invite us to “vegetalize” our thinking as well as our writing, while Alex Gearin warns of the dangers of projecting human intentions onto the radical otherness that constitutes the plant mind, lest we “reckless sorcerers of the Anthropocene” leave the world a sadder place. Equal parts herbal manual and alchemical spell book, this beautifully illustrated volume will appeal to scientists, shamans and poets alike.” — Glenn H. Shepard Jr., Ph.D., Ethnobotanist and Museum Curator at the Goeldi Museum, Brazil “How can you not love a botanical treasure trove that begins with apples and ayahuasca, ends with yoco and yopo and features inspired writing from luminaries like Robin Kimmerer, Luis Eduardo Luna, Dennis McKenna and Jeremy Narby? A feast for the heart, mind, and ethnobotanical soul!” — Mark Plotkin, PhD, Ethnobotanist and Host of the Plants of the Gods Podcast “Crafted by more than fifty wise spirits, The Mind of Plants offers us a key to the planetary garden.” — Zheng Bo, PhD, Filmmaker and artist

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Book SynopsisBullhe Shah’s work is among the glories of Panjabi literature, and the iconic eighteenth-century poet is widely regarded as a master of mystical Sufi poetry. This striking new translation is the most authoritative and engaging introduction to an enduring South Asian classic.Trade ReviewThe lucid and informative introduction by the volume’s editor and translator, Christopher Shackle, takes readers through the trajectory of Sufism from Persia to India and the several orders within the movement in India. But most useful is a short essay on the themes of the lyrics. The poems that follow open up in all their appeal, universal and timeless in their great subject of love, endearing in their simplicity of expressiveness. -- Neel Mukherjee * New Statesman *Drawing from the Sufi tradition of mysticism, Bullhe Shah wrote poetry that is sharp, simple and immortal. His verses question strictures of organized religion and societal norms. They are beautiful paeans to romantic and mystical love underpinned by rich spiritual philosophy. -- Pragya Tiwari * India at LSE blog *

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Book SynopsisPenguin presents the unabridged audio CD edition of Mythos written and read by Stephen Fry.THE TIMES AUDIOBOOK OF THE WEEK''Perfect for the 21st Century. Ebullient, funny, Fry retells the Greek myths with elegance'' The Times''A cracking good story'' The Times Literary Supplement ''A wondrous new immersion in ancient stories we only thought we knew. Page to page, Mythos is brilliant, funny, erudite, inventive, surprising and enthralling'' Richard North Patterson''Fry''s lively writing certainly conveys his lifelong passion for Greek myths . . . It''s a rollicking good read'' The Independent_________No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly and brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. They are like us, only more so - their actions and adventures scrawled across the heavens above. From the birth of the univTrade ReviewThe Greek myths are told to you here by the ever-soothing voice of Stephen Fry, who takes you from Zeus to Athena with his typical humour. The Greek gods of the past become relatable as pop culture, modern literature and music are woven throughout. It is joyfully informal yet full of the literary legacy threaded through so much of the tapestry of contemporary Greece * The Guardian *Wit and erudition are impressively evident . . . Read by Fry with his accustomed ebullient showmanship [he] gives the legends modern resonance by telling them with a contemporary colloquial twist' -- AUDIOBOOK of the WEEK * The Times *Mythos is the best thing he's written since his superb first novel . . . it is entertaining and edifying - one cannot really ask for more than that * The Telegraph *Fry's lively writing certainly conveys his lifelong passion for Greek myths . . . It's a rollicking good read * The Independent *Fry reimagines the Greek myths with wit, warmth and humanity, bringing them into the modern age. A welcome addition to any bookshelf * Book Bag *Mythos is Stephen's vivid retelling of the Greek myths. Bringing to life the Gods, monsters and mortals of Ancient Greece, he reimagines their astonishing stories for the modern world. * Express and Star *Perfect for the 21st Century. Ebullient, funny, Fry retells the Greek myths with elegance * The Times *A wondrous new immersion in ancient stories we only thought weknew. Page to page, Mythos is brilliant, funny, erudite, inventive, surprising and enthralling -- Richard North Patterson * - *[Fry] exhibits prodigious learning, a great facility with words, and enormous erudition and enthusiasm * Mail on Sunday *Lively, humorous and intimate, this retelling has real charm * The Guardian *Fry takes us from Zeus to Athena with humour. The Greek gods of the past become relatable as pop culture, modern literature and music are woven throughout. Joyfully informal yet full of the literary legacy * Guardian *Fresh revivals of the myths of ancient Greece. In his own imitable style, Fry takes an erudite look at the doings of gods, goddesses, kings, queens and ordinary mortals * The Bay *I quite like Mythos, Stephen Fry's book on the Greek myths - he makes them amusing. I like people that illuminate the past with humour -- Jools HollandMythos has the gripping nature that one would hope for from a modern blockbuster. Filled with a sharp and delightful sense of humour, Stephen Fry's many witticisms making it an even more enjoyable read. I would recommend it for so many reasons * The National *Brilliant . . . Stephen Fry's writing style makes it appealing to all. There's something for everyone * The Herald *Reimagines the lives of ancient Greek gods and goddesses through a humorous lens, using casual language and making valuable comparisons to modern characters or events. It's also just really, really funny * American Express Essentials *Arguably the greatest living Englishman * Indendent on Sunday *The patron saint of British intelligence * Daily Telegraph *National Treasure: noun - someone or something regarded as emblematic of a nation's cultural heritage, such as Stephen Fry * Oxford English Dictionary *

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Book Synopsis A Beautiful Composition of Broken is inspired by some of the events expressed artistically by Samantha King in the bestseller Born to Love, Cursed to Feel.  It serves as a poetic documentary of the lives of people who have been mistreated, misunderstood, and wrongfully labeled in a way that limits them in this world.  The author’s most personal volume yet, A Beautiful Composition of Broken builds a conceptual bridge between r.h. Sin’s earliest work and his forthcoming series, Planting Gardens in Graves. Trade Review"That [past] relationship continues to fuel his writing, which encourages women to dump lesser men, avoid jerks, and stand up for what they want." (Sheila Marikar, The New Yorker)

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Book SynopsisZimbabwean poetBilly Chapata provides a thought-provoking take on the universal experiences of love, pain, and what comes next through messages of empowerment. This collection of poetry and prose will justify heartache and inspire the fortitude to survive and prosper.Chameleon Aura presents a harmonious blend of experience and advice through a chaptered series of prose and poetry that focuses on shared experiences in love and loss. Emboldened words and phrases capture the essence of the author''s message and distinguish his unique style. Chapata''stouching narrative celebrates humanity for their biological resilience and undeniable worth. This collection leaves readers warm with hope for growth, rebirth, and, most prominently, self-acceptance.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry PrizeRichard Osmond's debut collection Useful Verses follows in the tradition of the best nature writing, being as much about the human world as the natural, the present as the past: Osmond, a professional forager, has a deep knowledge of flora and fauna as they appear in both natural and human history, as they are depicted in both folklore and herbal - but he views them through a wholly contemporary lens. Chamomile is discussed through quantum physics, ants through social media, wood sorrel through online gambling, and mugwort through a traffic cone. In each case, Osmond offers an arresting and new perspective, and makes that hidden world that lives and breathes beside us vividly part of our own. This is a fiercely inventive, darkly witty and brilliantly observed debut from a voice unlike any other you have read before - and as far from any quaint and conservative notion of 'nature poetry' as it is possible to get.Trade ReviewUseful Verses is a remarkable first collection: great precision of language married to a uniquely informed and focused view of the natural world. -- William BoydOsmond's job as a wild-food forager makes it unsurprising that his debut collection, Useful Verses, should be such a treasure trove of information. But what gives his poems energy is not just that they exhibit a deft authority on plants and poisons, remedies and road-kill, but that they are equally attuned to human and digital environments. The result is a work that reveals much about the world, both ancient and modern. * Guardian *‘Useful Verses is a wonderfully original collection, which relishes and renews everything that poetry can do with language. It’s also a challenging vision of our relations with the natural world.’ -- Professor Edna Longley, Chair of the judging panel for The Seamus Heaney Centre: First Collection Poetry Prize 2018

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Book Synopsis A best-selling volume of Pablo Neruda''s poetry in an English-Spanish edition. Pablo Neruda is one of the world''s most popular poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda''s questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of intuition and pure imagination. This complete translation of Pablo Neruda''s El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda''s original Spanish-language poems alongside William O''Daly''s English translations. In his introduction O''Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda''s poetry, writes, "These poems, more so than any of Neruda''s other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith." When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist. "Neruda''s questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O''Daly''s translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous." --Publishers Weekly Pablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile''s ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973. II. Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots? Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile? Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain? XIV. And what did the rubies say standing before the juice of pomegranates? Why doesn''t Thursday talk itself into coming after Friday? Who shouted with gleewhen the color blue was born? Why does the earth grievewhen the violets appear?

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021 A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020 An Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year 2020 Sinead Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017). There is throughout Morrissey's work a civic dimension: her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery.Trade Review'Sinead Morrissey gains power with each collection. She's one of those generous writers whose images and structures open so invitingly that your response is to grab a pen and write back to her: in other words, an inspiration.' - Hilary Mantel; 'Morrissey's poetry combines deep feeling with a probing, philosophical intelligence.' - The Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisOn 19 April 1621, a woman named Elizabeth Sawyer was hanged at Tyburn. Her story was on the bookstalls within days and within weeks was adapted for the stage as The Witch of Edmonton. The devil stalks Edmonton in the shape of a large black dog and, just as Elizabeth Sawyer makes her demonic pact, the newlywed Frank Thorney enters into his own dark bargain in the shape of a second, bigamous marriage. Torn between sympathy for Sawyer and Thorney and a clear-eyed assessment of their crimes, the play was the finest and most nuanced treatment of witchcraft that the stage would see for centuries. Lucy Munro's introduction provides students and scholars with a detailed understanding of this complex play.Table of ContentsList of illustrations General editors’ preface Preface Introduction Prince Charles’s Men, 1618-22 Collaborations Reading Elizabeth Sawyer in 1621 Witchcraft and Bigamy: 1621 and 1658 Danger and Death: Tragicomedy and Domestic Drama in 1621 Curtain and Cockpit: Staging the Supernatural in 1621 London and Lancashire: Staging Witchcraft in 1634 The Witch and the Dog Staging The Witch of Edmonton: 1921 to 2014 Edmonton on Stage The Witch and the Dog: Reprise Forget the Hobby Horse! Printing The Witch of Edmonton: 1658 and 2014 Quarto Paratext THE WITCH OF EDMONTON Appendix: Doubling chart Abbreviations and References Abbreviations used in notes Works by and partly by Shakespeare Editions of The Witch of Edmonton collated Other works cited Modern productions cited

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Book SynopsisIt's the 15th century and the Archbishop of Canterbury, worried over impending legislation that would effectively rob the Church in England of its power and wealth, convinces Henry V to forego this pursuit in favour of laying claim to France. This title presents the historic tale of war and peace between England and France in the reign of Henry V.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of poems by doctor and acclaimed poet, Glenn Colquhoun, is based on his experiences in medical practice, where doctors are often described - or accused of - 'playing God' but where outward confidence hides a constant battle with uncertainty.

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Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensible to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield's structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.Trade ReviewJane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart. -- Wislawa SzymborskaA profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings…It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield…In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness. -- Czeslaw Milosz * Prze Kroj (Poland) *Her poetry is a rich and assured gift…an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction… The poems’ realised ambition is wisdom. -- Alison Brackenbury * Agenda *

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Book SynopsisUS Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Bloodaxe published his Selected Poems in 2007. At 82, Merwin produced ‘his best book in a decade – and one of the best outright’ (Publishers Weekly), and a collection which has won him his second Pulitzer Prize in the US and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK. The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in his latest collection. ‘I have only what I remember,’ Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound-the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and ‘our long evenings and astonishment’. In ‘Photographer’, Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by ‘someone who understood’. In ‘Empty Lot’, Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?Trade ReviewIn his best book in a decade – and one of the best outright – Merwin points his oracular, unpunctuated poems toward his own past, admitting, ‘I have only what I remember’, and offering what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen… The poems show the marks of having weathered “the complete course / of life”, but also feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom: “the morning is too / beautiful to be anything else”. Gorgeous poems about enduring love melt time as well, looking toward a moment when we will be no older than we ever were. * Publishers Weekly *A fastidious, elegant writer, he is a calligrapher of consciousness, a fine penman aware that he is writing not on parchment but in water… Merwin is the unmistakable heir of the Emerson and Whitman who so ecstatically hymned flux. -- M. Wynn Thomas * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisThe nineteenth-century French classic about the swordsman-poet with the nose too large to be taken seriously, in an acclaimed English translation by Anthony Burgess. This translation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre, London, in July 1983, with Derek Jacobi as Cyrano. Burgess's translation was subsequently used as the basis of the sub-titles for the 1990 film version of Cyrano de Bergerac starring Gérard Depardieu.Trade Review'Anthony Burgess's ingenious translation serves Rostand's wit while adding a few fillips of its own' * New York Times *'Emotional depth Rostand himself would surely have envied... Burgess' extravagant verse keeps its contours, yet trips off the tongue almost as though it were contemporary speech' * The Times *'The bounce and brilliance of Anthony Burgess' translation' * WhatsOnStage *

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Book SynopsisAn ominous play set in a cruel world of dark realism, an acknowledged masterpiece from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Harry Hope's Saloon is a waterfront bar full of life's failures. They exist barely, living on the knowledge that love is a chimera and despair is perpetual; that the desires they cultivate of an impossible future are only ever pipe dreams, because the only thing to look forward to is death. And then one day Hickey walks in with his own personal brand of hope, and his urge to make them face the truth. Written in 1939, Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh was first staged at the Martin Beck Theater, New York, in October 1946. It had its UK premiere at the Arts Theatre, London, in January 1958. 'A dramatised neurosis, with no holds barred, written in a vein of unsparing implacable honesty' Kenneth Tynan 'O'Neill, the great patriach of Broadway and the playwright who laid out the map on which all contemporary American drama is still written – Iceman is the first truly great epic of the modern American theatre, and its legacy is the intimate stripping of the soul which we now take for granted in drama worldwide' Sheridan Morley This edition of The Iceman Cometh includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.

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Book SynopsisWordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable schooling and the drudgery of apprenticeship. He read and then wrote "medieval" poetry which he passed off as genuine. When the poems he wrote in his own name brought him some success, he went to London to seek his fortune as a writer. After six months' struggle, too proud to admit defeat, starving and alone, he killed himself in his attic room. He was seventeen. There is more to Chatterton than the romantic archetype. His poetry was admired by Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth; as Grevel Lindop says in his introduction, "Chatterton's work contains in essence the whole of Romanticism". This selection, with its detailed notes, shows the historical significance and unexpected range of Chatterton's poetry, and also enables the reader to enjoy it for its rich resonance and wonderfully memorable rhythms.

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Book SynopsisTo catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

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Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. This first anthology of 'Apocalyptic' or neo-romantic poetry since the nineteen-forties includes over 150 poets, many well known (Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham), and others quite forgotten (Ernest Frost, Paul Potts). Over forty of the poets are women, of whom Edith Sitwell is among the most exuberant. Much of the contents has never previously been anthologised; many poems are reprinted for the first time since the 1940s. The poetry of the Second World War appears in a new context, as do early Tomlisnon and Hill. Here readers can enjoy an overview of the visionary-modernist British and Irish poetry of the mid-century, its antecedents and its aftermath. As a period style and as a body of work, Apocalyptic poetry will come as a revelation to most readers.

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Book SynopsisA harrowing, intense drama about people-trafficking, set inside a container lorry. A freight container, somewhere in Europe. Inside are five people with one common aim: to reach England and start a new life. Can they trust the agent to get them there? Can they rely on each other? And how far will each of them go to get what they want? Clare Bayley's play The Container was first performed (inside an actual container lorry) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2007. It won a Fringe First Award for outstanding new writing on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and an Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award.Trade Review'Riveting, eloquent drama' * Observer *'Devastating... dramatises the terrifying experience [of illegal migration] as one of the key journeys of our time... electrifying drama' * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisA heartrending drama about family, betrayal and forgiveness, spanning four generations and two hemispheres. From the writer of the award-winning film Lantana. When the Rain Stops Falling moves from the claustrophobia of a London flat in 1959 to the windswept coast of southern Australia, and into the heart of the Australian desert in 2039. It interweaves a series of connected stories as seven people confront the mysteries of their past in order to understand their future, revealing how patterns of betrayal, love and abandonment are passed on. Until finally, as the desert is inundated with rain, one young man finds the courage to defy the legacy. Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling was commissioned and first produced by Brink Productions in Australia. It was premiered at the Scott Theatre, University of Adelaide, in February 2008. The play received its European premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in May 2009.Trade Review'Superb... fiendishly ingenious... utterly compelling' * Guardian *'A work of gripping mystery and emotional depth... something very special' * Daily Telegraph *'Extraordinary... grabs you by its imagination, its heartrending originality, its tragic vision' * Sunday Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisWhat is that, trailing your footsteps, breathing softly down your neck? Rediscover the magic and wonder of the original Grimm Tales, retold by master-storyteller Philip Pullman. In this stage version by Philip Wilson, you'll meet the familiar characters – Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel – and some unexpected ones too, such as Hans-My-Hedgehog, the Goose Girl at the Spring and the remarkable Thousandfurs. Full of deliciously dark twists and turns, the tales come to life in all their glittering, macabre brilliance – a delight for children and adults alike. These Grimm Tales, adapted for the stage by Philip Wilson from Philip Pullman's version of the original tales, were first performed as immersive storytelling experiences underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, London, in 2014, and Bargehouse on the South Bank in 2015. They also offer plentiful opportunities for youth theatres, schools and amateur companies looking for a vivid new version of the classic fairytales.Trade Review'A genuine delight… a compelling and brilliant collection for varying abilities, rich with imagination… gives teachers versions of these stories that would work with any year group' * Teaching Drama *'Beautifully done, and thrilling to stumble upon... atmospheric to the point of inspiring awe' * Telegraph *'A magic box of glittering surprises' * The Times *Table of ContentsThe First Set of Tales Little Red Riding Hood Rapunzel The Three Snake Leaves Hans-my-Hedgehog The Juniper Tree The Second Set of Tales The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich The Three Little Men in the Woods Thousandfurs The Goose Girl at the Spring Hansel and Gretel Faithful Johannes The Donkey Cabbage

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Book SynopsisA funny, painful and deeply moving play about loss - and cooking. Lucy has lost something very important. One minute Jo's there, the next he isn't, leaving Lucy with a pile of half-cooked food and a collection of invited (and uninvited) guests. As Lucy acclimatises to her new situation, she is absorbed, along with her visitors, into an intimate and sensory experience. Pamela Carter's play What We Know was first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2010. This edition includes recipes by Rosie Sykes that can be used in a production of the play.Trade Review'Painful, tantalising and deeply moving' * Herald *'A perfect metaphor for loss and for the disbelief and grief that ensues... innovative, sensitive, entertaining theatre' * edinburghguide.com *

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Book SynopsisEngland is in crisis. Fields are flooded, food is scarce and fear grips the land. William Bloor, a foxfinder, arrives at Judith and Samuel Covey's farm to investigate a suspected fox infestation. The Coveys' harvest has failed to meet their target and the government wants to know why. Trained from childhood, William is fixated on his mission to unearth the animals that must be to blame for the Coveys' woes. But as the hunt progresses, William finds more questions than answers… A darkly comic, spell-binding dystopian drama, Dawn King's Foxfinder won the 2011 Papatango New Writing Prize and premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London. Foxfinder had its West End premiere at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by Rachel O'Riordan.Trade Review'Sharp of tooth and riddled with a clawing dread, Dawn King's 2011 rural drama is a fierce and fabulous beast... King's writing feels at once wonderfully strange and naggingly familiar, with echoes of Caryl Churchill's Far Away and Arthur Miller's The Crucible' * The Stage *'The play, riddled with alternative facts, conspiracy theories and fake news, sits right at home in the post-truth world we're told we live in' * WhatsOnStage *'A darkly thrilling new play' * Daily Telegraph *'Dawn King's play shines out like a beacon... the most compelling new work I have seen this year.' * Guardian *'Grippingly atmospheric, dark and tense... We may not find any foxes here but we'll certainly uncover some terrific young talent' * Evening Standard *'Clever and original... remarkable script' * Spoonfed *'Excitingly unusual... fascinating ideas' * The Times *

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Book SynopsisRomanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategiesamong them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environmentas it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theoTrade Review"Reading this always arresting, often startling study feels a little like reading a poem by Donne; unlike things and scales of attention get pressed together to yield a new kind of understanding, at once intellectual and emotional. . . . [The Calamity Form] is a page-turner, the likes of which I can’t remember encountering. Reading Nersessian is like talking to a person of enormous intelligence, originality, creativity, energy, wit, confidence, and style who also works to make herself unknowing enough—vulnerable, susceptible enough—to channel the unheard melodies of the best known of Romantic era poems." -- Marjorie Levinson * Critical Inquiry *"The Calamity Form injects a Marxist soul into Deconstruction’s veins. . . [The Calamity Form] is thoroughly a book of the present and is poised to become a touchstone of contemporary Romantic studies." -- Bakary Diaby * Los Angeles Review of Books *"The Calamity Form gives a compelling demonstration of how we might have our formalist cake and eat history too. . . . Formalism doesn’t mean a total sidelining of the historical, but a commitment to studying how literature creates structures that are abstracted from the world. . . . The Calamity Form is a work of Marxist criticism whose key tenet and admirable example is to call for Marxist critics to do their jobs carefully: to use the tools of formal analysis to make precise, ambitious claims about how texts mediate the conditions of their composition." -- Jack Chelgren * Chicago Review *"Nersessian reads promiscuously, in the best sense, across disciplines, traditions, and languages. It's a densely crafted book fairly brimming with ideas—there is action on every page—and it's written with brio and an almost Pynchonesque vocabulary. . . . Nersessian’s prose takes risks and in a small way is commensurate with the excesses she charts so well in Keats or with which she rhymes in Adorno. It is likely we will be coming to terms for years to come with this distinctive foray into clouds of unknowing." -- Ian Balfour * Studies in Romanticism *"Calamity form is simply 'a caution against taking the heroic possibilities of literature too seriously.' That leaves plenty more to take seriously, chiefly the experience of these texts, which Nersessian both plumbs and re-creates with erudition, verve, extraordinary intelligence, and a literary mind par excellence." -- William Galperin * Modern Language Quarterly *"Nersessian brings a new and deeper understanding to Romantic poetry’s response to capitalism, but she also includes discussions of 20th- and 21st-century visual media. Because of this range and the author's attentive 'thinking about the limits of historical materialism for literary study', this probing, erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in such subjects as formalism, ecocriticism, Marxist theory, and literary theory as well as to those who study literature." * Choice *“Acute, lyrical, beautifully researched, and crisply argued, The Calamity Form tracks the ‘slender promise’ of momentary solace Romantic poetry made in the face of early nineteenth-century capitalism. Though Nersessian ratchets down the claims that have been made on the poetry’s behalf, she neither imagines it as simply making peace with the world as it was, or as guilty of the failure to change it. Instead, The Calamity Form sees in its archive a myriad of subtle openings onto possible futures, offering not a solution to capitalism but a range of wary, vigilant attitudes toward it, probing something like what Nersessian suggests Keats thought was ‘the upside of degradation.’ It is a powerful book.” -- Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University“To name the Industrial Revolution as ‘the calamity form’ is to begin at the end, at the birth of a total transformation that will promise planetary death. This book intervenes into an astonishing multiplicity of debates: poetry and its scholarship, ecocriticism, the matter of capital, literary theory, and more. It renovates Romanticism and takes its place in the blossoming field of Marxist poetics. But perhaps most of all it is a demand, careful and clear, that we unmake the world that gave us this calamity and the calamity that gave us this world. At this late date, a romantic communism is no longer possible; a communist romanticism herein makes its return.” -- Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis"Anahid Nersessian's star has ascended at a pace almost unheard of in our contemporary moment, where ambitious theory is mostly in abeyance, and the sheer glut of publications, to say nothing of our deracinated academic labor market, makes it nigh impossible to gain a hearing beyond one’s narrow disciplinary specialism. Nersessian stands out in part because hers is a critical voice that often enough refuses the scholarly commonplaces of our age, not least an adherence to positivist notions of 'context' and the 'archive.' Of her three monographs to date, The Calamity Form is, I think, the best." * Genre *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Parataxis; or, Modern Gardens Chapter Two: Wordsworth’s Obscurity Chapter Three: Keats and Catachresis Chapter Four: Apostrophe: Clouds Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

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