Poetry Books

Book SynopsisConvivialities is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists conducted over great distances and extended periods of time. These conversations focus on poetics, both the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, and critical categories) and the theory of poiesis (i.e., making). The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together, both to one another and to the sites and greater communities where we are situated. Convivialities investigates how the collected writers and artists craft their works, the contexts in which they make them, the intellectual and artistic histories that inspire their own ways of working, and the cultural issues that are at the core of their practices. And, perhaps most of all, it asks how they continue to create in a world ravaged by climate crisis, economic crisis, settler colonialism, and imperialism.

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Book SynopsisWhen forced to choose a topic for a mandatory high school project, Alex sarcastically says hummingbirds because one is hovering outside the window. Alex has no idea that this offhand choice will lead them to uncover hidden family histories in a mysterious journal from the 1860s, find an essential role in a community nest-finding network, open up to a vibrant ecosystem, and learn how a hummingbird disrupted a major pipeline project.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Nelson Ball Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman AwardMinimalist poetry for maximalist times.Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.Trade Review"Reading Sheets is a strange and wonderful experience. At times, composed fragments are isolated outbursts, constrained by the machine itself; on other occasions, inspiration flows freely over multiple pages. By its end, what begins as a whisper – ‘after years’ – crescendos over sixteen pages before closing on the cyclical refrain – ‘after years / years’. The cacophonous conclusion implies the continuation beyond this period of productivity and experimentation that the pamphlet captures, leaving the reader pondering the possibility of what is to come."—The Poetry Review"Sheets: Typewriter Works is at once an enigmatic gift and feat of curiosity. Anstee composes the 'eternal etcetera' in this collaboration between a poet and his late friend’s Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter. Sheets embodies a poet forwarding through language with love, carrying on through grief without backspace, tilting the page, pinning the voice. This collection is testament to how the language of love and grief can hold—and is itself—poetry."—Archibald Lampman Jury Citation"Master of the abundant small, Anstee makes space ring and strikes up the thingness of every word in this collection of the underinked, the overinked, the visual rhythm, the taptaptapestry, lovingly spooling back to past typers and out towards you."—Susan Holbrook, author of Ink Earl"Sheets: Typewriter Works furthers Anstee’s poetic explorations into and through the minimal, but through gestures that extend both the act and result of writing—both composition and erasure—into the deeply physical. The effect is striking and immediate... [...] There is a meditative kind of breathlessness to these understated gems, one that allows each poem to sit, not as a complete thought, but as individual gestures as both moments in space and as part of a lengthy, open-ended and even life-long sequence."—rob mclennan“I was intrigued by how the micro transcription of an event in time—like a fly landing on the page of a book—opens into reality at large.”—Aram Saroyan, author of Complete Minimal Poems

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Book SynopsisAn off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism.From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance.Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.Trade Review"Casually self-deprecating, cripplingly deadpan and cynical to the point of despair, fitzpatrick’s Sunny Ways is a record of fighting the noblest of fights — humanity’s fight for our future — and losing miserably. Extraordinarily perceptive, yet relatable to over-thinkers everywhere, Sunny Ways offers solidarity in a seemingly impossible struggle: to reconcile the banalities of everyday life in Canada with our collective responsibility for the ongoing destruction of our planet."—John Nyman, Carousel Magazine“In this caustic missive from life’s precipice, ryan fitzpatrick rejuvenates the storied pact of lyricism and ecology for our colonial present. Neither either/or nor neither/nor, fitzpatrick’s mordant inventorying of capitalism’s last crisis resists psychic despair and millenarian elation at once; making a refrain of negation and a torrent of its double-edged critique. In its abstentions and anathemas, essays and eddies, Sunny Ways jams its own sources as it lucidly refuses the hegemony of good cheer.”—Cam Scott, author of The Vanishing Signs“fitzpatrick’s work increasingly embraces an aesthetic core shared with what has long been considered a Kootenay School of Writing standard—a left-leaning worker-centred political and social engagement that begins with the immediate local, articulated through language accumulation, touchstones and disjointedness… [However,] fitzpatrick responds to the specific concerns of his Alberta origins, emerging from a culture and climate that insists on enrichment through mineral extraction even to the point of potential self-annihilation.”—rob mclennan"To write explicitly political poetry that resists pieties and platitudes and to explore responsibility for harm without giving over entirely to denial or becoming mired in shame is a difficult project, and fitzpatrick manages the challenge with dexterity and wit."—Winnipeg Free Press“ryan fitzpatrick’s Sunny Ways reorients oppositional points of language, negates affirmation, exposes the internal contradictions of our ecologically disinclined economics. fitzpatrick brings you in and out of yourself, criss-crossing your feeble desires with those of extractive industries. You long for a song to ease your trepidations about the future, but you are already in that future, and the song has long been forgotten.”—Anahita Jamali Rad, author of For Love and Autonomy and Still“A wonder of a book that makes strange and new the overlapping frames of the mind in an extractive culture: locally, nationally, internationally made. This is the better anthem for our petro-state, one that makes the rhetoric flow less smoothly. Sing that sand into the gears, poet.”—Wayde Compton, author of The Outer HarbourPraise for Coast Mountain Foot:“The lyric flux of ryan fitzpatrick’s poetry performs the ‘social intimacy’ at play when home is not a ‘static container.’ The poems pose an intimate tension questioning the spaces that fluctuate between living and working, renting and thinking, the coast and the foothills. These are neighbourhood songs of the self.”—Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking“In Coast Mountain Foot, ryan fitzpatrick enacts the empathy required to imagine spaces of possible connection outside capital. Charting the rapacious millionaire settler class currently reshaping cities everywhere, he presents Vancouver as a history of displacement, Calgary as a history of paving over. What holds a city together when everything is monetizable? Here in the struggle, fitzpatrick has carved out a space to form a social bond, if only for the length of a line.”—Nikki Reimer, author of My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan“‘No / solutions, only problematizations’ are on offer in fitzpatrick’s poems, which at turns offer biting critique, sidelong jokes or thoughtful questions … Through it all, fitzpatrick displays real command of the line, but resists showiness or performing emotion the way too many poets do, and the resulting poems ‘Don’t get / too sentimental // but don’t / abandon sentiment.’”—Winnipeg Free Press

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Book SynopsisArchipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly, and they keep the silence with them. This stringent, ferrous element sets her at odds with the eloquence and lyricism characteristic of the Italian poetic tradition, and may owe something to an alternative nationality, a different landscape. Though born in Rome, she comes from a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia, and the languages she was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena - and of late she has found herself also writing a number of poems in Logudorese. While her poems have a geographical sweep, there is also an insistence on domestic detail - balconies, crockery, sewing, cooking: elements often considered too humble to warrant poetic attention. But even here they are often set against a backdrop of war and insecurity, and a poem in these surroundings, such as her 'Kitchen', is as likely to be the site of a haunting. Her first book, Winter Residences, already posited an elsewhere, that of St Petersburg, and an elective affinity with another culture. With time, and with the emergence of her next four books of poetry, this sense of apartness has increased, as has the force and particularity of her language - and has made her, along with Valerio Magrelli, one of the most valued and original poets of her generation.

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Book SynopsisTen: the new wave presents poetry from some of the most exciting new poets in Britain today. These ten poets were selected for The Complete Works 2 mentoring project, a groundbreaking initiative to promote diversity and quality in British poetry, initiated by the writer Bernardine Evaristo. The poets follow on from the first group to take part in this scheme, whose work was published in Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra's anthology Ten: new poets from Spread the Word (2010). Most of those poets have gone on to win awards and have their poetry collections published. The new poets in this anthology are Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Inua Ellams, Sarah Howe, Adam Lowe, Eileen Pun and Warsan Shire. These poets have backgrounds in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, and their work draws on their multicultural heritage and tapestry. Many of them also work across art forms and have enjoyed success as playwrights, graphic artists and even in the martial arts. Talented, adventurous and culturally rich, these poets will open up new landscapes for the reader.Trade ReviewThese ten exciting poets record with confidence and vigour a tune rarely heard on these shores and this collection of their work is a boost to the body of contemporary British poetry. -- Carol Ann DuffyWhat fantastic poets they are: all those cultures, all that craft. -- Bernardine Evaristo

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Book SynopsisTua Forsstrom is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland's most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake is her first new collection since her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty, published by Bloodaxe in 2006. As Sweden's August Prize jury commented, this is poetry 'both melancholy and impassioned', expressing a 'struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction - against death in life'.Trade Review'Icy intensity - aphoristic as well as mystical - a fragility that is wholly particular - Forsstrom's visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness - the tenderness of snow' - Adam Thorpe, Observer. 'Tua Forsstrom's poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure - a survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others - She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Holderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof' - Claes Andersson. 'Forsstrom has a superb ability to use the everyday and the practical to get closer to the most complicated elements of life. Her language constantly goes through changes allowing the usual meanings of the words to be replaced by new insights which are a kind of magic ritual. Just like a Native American shaman, she can surely bring forth rain with her poetry if she wishes' - Gustaf Widen, Hofvustadsbladet.

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Book SynopsisNiall Campbell grew up on South Uist in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and his first collection, Moontide, is filled with images of the island's seascapes, its myths, its wildlife, and the long dark of its winters. Quietly reflective and deftly musical, these thoughtful poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love and the stillness of solitude. After winning an Eric Gregory Award in 2011, Niall Campbell published a widely praised pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, in 2012, and won the Poetry London Competition in 2013. Now this highly assured debut collection will establish him as one of the most distinctive lyric voices to emerge from Scotland in recent years. Poetry Book Society Recommendation, winner of the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, also shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.Trade ReviewNiall Campbell's ruggedly beautiful poems have a three-dimensional quality, as if sculpted from their images of grit, rope and sand: others seem to come from the sea itself, distilled down to their essence - short, intimate poems with a long finish. They welcome you into their world with a quiet assurance, in the voice of a seasoned poet. A stunning debut. -- Patience AgbabiThe persisting metaphor of the sea moves continually through this remarkable first collection. These are beautifully crafted poems which grow in impact with reading - from ghost dogs to beached whales, from Eriskay to Grez sur Loing, from Dostoevsky to Zola, the strength of this collection lies in its scope as much as its skill and originality. Though they are poems of islands and margins, they are neither insular nor marginal – their true value lies is their relevance - they talk to us of concerns that are our own; the forces and desires they describe, also drive us. Through poems which are in turn darkly lyrical, atmospheric, humorous and moving, Campbell proves himself an important new voice and a genuine talent to be reckoned with. -- John Glenday

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Book SynopsisInspired by a remark of Seamus Heaney, Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog. How many poems, Heaney wondered, was it possible to recall responding to, over a lifetime? Was it ten, he asked, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? Lifesaving Poems is a way of trying to answer that question. Giving himself the constraint of choosing no more than one poem per poet, Anthony began copying poems out, one at a time, as it were for safekeeping. He asked himself: was the poem one he could recall being moved by the moment he first read it? And: could he live without it? Then he posted each poem on his blog and said why he liked it. Word spread and soon his blog had thousands of followers, everyone reading and responding to the poems he talked about - and sharing his posts. Now Lifesaving Poems has turned into an anthology, not one designed to be a perfect list of 'the great and the good', but a gathering of poems he happens to feel passionate about, according to his tastes. As Billy Collins says: 'Good poems are poems that I like'. Anthony's popular personal commentaries are included with the poems. There are Lifesaving Poems by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, Jaan Kaplinski, Brendan Kennelly, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Norman MacCaig, Ian McMillan, Derek Mahon, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jo Shapcott, Tomas Transtromer, Wislawa Szymborska, and many, many others.

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Book SynopsisAmy Key's Isn't Forever is a spell book for feminine selfhood in a world where a sense of self is flimsy, elusive and unrequited. The poems in this book are obsessive in their desire to construct and breach the terms of their own intimacy. The poems have their own `narrative costume' but are vexed with it, not quite able to master the 'diligence of having a body'. This is a book where a tender and sabotaging shame of aloneness has taken root. Where wants cluster and are at war with each other. Where the heart is at once 'all lurgy' and an 'investment piece' to be saved for best. Where the sea is the only solace, but the sea is blase. The `ta-dah!' and candour of these poems is an exercise in Amy Key's imaginative protection and urge for personal extravaganza, an attempt to acknowledge but fight back the brutal inner voice. The obscure audience of the reader is never out of sight. Amy Key's first collection Luxe was published by Salt in 2013. Isn't Forever, her second book-length collection, is a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice.

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Book SynopsisI May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid brings together six contrasting but complementary poem sequences by ‘this brilliant lyricist of human darkness’ (Fiona Sampson) relating to family, fear, foreboding and felicity. Elective Mute is about autism and happiness; My Mother and Me on the Eve of the Chess Championships, about a mother who prefers lettuces to life; Fishtank (Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice), about a brother who is somebody else; Lambchop, about a creepy old man; The Boxer Klitschko, on finding refuge with swimming, dogs and a jovial uncle; and Helpless with Laughter, on what the parts of the body have to say about themselves. Like all of Selima Hill’s work, all six sequences in the book chart ‘extreme experience with a dazzling excess’ (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish..Trade ReviewSelima Hill's Jutland has an astounding vivacity. Hill is a complete original whose body of work is unique in British poetry and this volume is an example of her at her best. Jutland consists of two extended sequences: Advice on Wearing Animal Prints, a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives presenting the character Agatha, and Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-pits, portraying a little girl and her father. Each poem tells an uncomfortable truth, through fireworks of surreal images. Every image is a surprise, sometimes funny, usually shocking, but at the same time archetypal as a brand new fairy-tale, and all this is achieved with crystalline brevity. -- Pascale Petit * chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges, on Jutland *Hill has a consistently refreshing imaginative voice, and a habit of always somehow looking in the opposite direction from everybody else. Jutland, her latest book, is angry, funny, moving and unnerving by turns, with the best poems tackling father-daughter relationships, violence and forgiveness in an uncompromising style. Reading her work is the strange experience of feeling as though you are looking directly through a kaleidoscope, where everything you see shines more brightly than before, only half making sense. -- Charlotte Runcie * Daily Telegraph *Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine… Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess. -- Deryn Rees-Jones * Modern Women Poets *Table of ContentsElective Mute 19 The Fire 19 Thousands upon Thousands of Beetles 19 Elastic 20 The Bear 20 It Seems a Shame to Scream as Loud as Possible 20 I’m Sorry But I Think I Might Be Real 21 Summer Days 21 There’s More to Life than Swimming 21 Death and the Smell of Almonds 22 Coconut 22 Dumb 23 The Wedding-cake 23 PLEASE CARRY DOGS 23 Cows in Dreams 24 Rubber Bands 24 DEPTH CHANGE 24 Them 25 My Mother 25 My Head 25 Chatty 26 Made Entirely of Roses 26 Tiddlywinks 26 My Darling Spiders 27 Football 27 My First Boyfriend 27 If It Gets Too Noisy 28 My Wettened Balaclava 28 My Second Boyfriend 28 Blue Murder 29 Rubies 29 Snouts 29 Comfort 30 Sweetcorn 30 Cocoa 30 Fear 31 The Catastrophic Driving Lesson 31 Watches 31 Other People 32 Rubber Cow 32 Purple Eel-grass 32 To Disentangle Wool 33 Happiness 33 How To Smile 33 Telephone Numbers 34 Convivial 34 The Slowness of the Slow 34 Electricity 35 You and Me 35 Coffee? 35 Queen 36 Conversation in a Sheep Field 36 Having Fun 36 Seventeen Sheep 37 Children and Adults 37 Rothko and Mints 37 My Third Boyfriend’s Sunbed 38 Tickles 38 Praise and Dust 38 Arson 39 OK, OK, OK 39 Aphid 39 Hazelnuts 40 The Woman in the Changing-room and Me 40 She Follows Me Around and Upsets Me 40 In Love with Roger Federer 41 Swallow 41 Black and White Buttons 41 Why I Like Fish 42 People Who Wear Bobble-hats 42 The Huggers 42 Camping 43 Grab a Wrap 43 Simple Dunes 43 Skin 44 Havoc and Graciousness 44 Kangaroo 44 How to Sparkle 45 A Bird on a Cow 45 Empathy, Empathy, Empathy 45 Potato 46 Octopuses 46 A Person with a Saw and Some Chocolate My Mother and Me on the Eve of the Chess Championships 49 My Mother’s Underwear 49 My Mother on a Rock with a Sketchbook 49 The Precious Moments of My Mother’s Life 50 My Mother’s Handkerchiefs 50 My Mother’s Jeans 50 My Mother’s Powder 51 My Mother in the Shoe Shop 51 My Mother in Her Nightdress 51 My Mother in the Drawing-room 52 My Mother in August 52 My Mother’s Petticoat 52 My Mother in the Studio 53 My Mother’s Omelettes 53 My Mother and Me in the Library 53 My Mother in a Swimsuit 54 My Mother’s Husband 54 My Mother’s New Clogs 54 My Mother on a Mountain-top 55 My Mother on Holiday 55 My Mother’s Mother 55 My Mother Keeps Bees 56 My Mother’s Hat 56 My Mother’s Hair 56 My Mother and the Great Dane 57 My Mother with Flour on Her Hands 57 My Mother and the Snails 57 My Mother’s Book 58 My Mother’s Shoes 58 My Mother’s Washing 58 My Mother at the Tennis Courts 59 My Mother Like a Bird 59 My Mother at the House in Gortahork 59 My Mother Plays Strip-Jack-Naked 60 My Mother in Hangzhou 60 My Mother and Small Children 61 My Mother and Australia 61 My Mother, Normally Such a Sweet Person 62 My Mother in the Kitchen 62 My Mother’s Mortal Panic 62 My Mother by the Side of the Road 63 My Mother’s Ankles 63 My Mother’s Sponge 63 This Is How I Write About My Mother 64 My Mother and the Oceans 64 My Mother’s Car 65 My Mother’s Purse 65 My Mother and Flamingos 66 My Mother’s Silverware 66 My Mother Plays Charades 66 My Mother among the Butterflies 67 My Mother and the Sound of Chartreuse 67 My Mother in the Car Park 68 My Mother’s Gloominess 68 My Mother and the Rabbit 69 My Mother like a Dress Made of Pins 69 My Mother at the Open-air Swimming-pool 70 My Mother and the History of Art 70 My Mother’s Mattress 71 My Mother and the Sea 71 My Mother and Me on the Eve of the Chess Championships 71 Water for My Mother 72 My Mother and Men 72 My Mother’s Elegance 73 My Mother’s Doctor 73 My Mother at Night 74 My Mother in the Bath 74 My Mother in Heaven Fishtank 77 My Brother and the Chocolates 77 My Brother’s Pipe 77 My Brother at Night 78 My Brother’s Shoulders 78 My Brother’s Fish 78 My Brother and Santa Claus 79 My Brother’s Party 79 My Brother’s Shoes 79 My Brother’s Tie 80 My Brother’s Hands 80 My Brother in Tennis Shorts 80 My Brother as a Maybug 81 My Brother’s Patients 81 My Brother’s Papers 81 My Brother’s Mother 82 My Brother’s Bacon 82 My Brother’s Door 82 My Brother’s Voice 83 My Brother’s Eggs 83 My Brother’s Jolly Side 83 My Brother’s Questions 84 My Brother on the Lawn 84 My Brother’s Flute 84 My Brother’s Chair 85 My Brother on My Wedding Day 85 My Brother’s Eyes 85 My Brother’s Nose 86 My Brother’s Spectacles 86 My Brother’s Heart 86 At Home with My Brother Lambchop 89 An Elderly Silver-haired Gentleman 89 The Tulips 89 The Tennis Players 90 The Chandelier 90 The Swan 90 The Walking-stick 91 The Taxi 91 The Telephone 91 The Man Next Door 92 The Pigeons 92 The Forest 92 Girls 93 The Window 93 The Perfume of His Fabulous Pomade 93 The Jack Russell Terrier 94 The Doctors 94 The Fly 94 Cutlery 95 The Bandages 95 The Kitten 95 The Hornet 96 The Restaurant 96 The Nurse 96 The Patient 97 The Lily 97 Because He Never Sleeps 97 His Hairy Ears 98 The Lamb 98 The Pear 98 Visitors 99 The Bucket 99 The River 99 The Cow 100 Suddenly One Morning 100 The Tall House The Boxer Klitschko 103 The Little Pond 103 The Picnic 103 My Cow and Fish Dream 104 The House-mistress’s Chow 104 The Elephant House 104 My Grandfather’s Biscuit 105 When My Diamond-studded Sisters Scream 105 My Hamster, Concrete 105 Jelly Beans 106 What I Saw in the Changing-Rooms 106 Why They Wear Bikinis 106 The Waterfall 107 On Holiday with My Mother and Two Sisters 107 The Regulars 107 Goose 108 What My Mother Says and What She Does 108 The Weekend at the Lake 108 Stranger 109 Underwater 109 The Egg 109 Matron 110 The Pool in Winter 110 Selflessly Making Me Hot Meals 111 My Mother’s Ironing-board 111 The Man I Didn’t Know 111 Eating Cake outside Europe’s Biggest Swimming-pool 112 Girls Who Disobey 112 Meeting My Uncle for the First Time 112 My Uncle’s Blanket 113 Breakfast at My Uncle’s 113 Everywhere You Go There Is Sea 114 A Love of Horses 114 Magnetism 114 My Uncle in the Shower 115 My Uncle’s Kippers 115 My Uncle’s Bread-slicer 115 My Uncle’s Morris Traveller 116 My Uncle’s Boathouse 116 My Uncle’s Newfoundlands 116 The Mermaid 117 My Uncle’s Sunroom 117 My Uncle Sandwiches 117 The Relationships Between Numbers 118 Heaven 119 Shoes 119 The Shop 119 The Smallest of the Aunts 120 Walking to the Boathouse 120 The Tiny Sunhat 121 If I Want to Be a Hippopotamus 121 The Yacht 122 Take the Little Boat 122 What My Mother Wanted Helpless with Laughter 125 Ankles 125 Arm 126 Armpits 126 Belly 126 Biceps 127 Body 127 Body Parts 128 Blood 128 Bone 129 Bottoms 129 Brain 129 Breastbone 130 Breasts 130 Calves 130 Cheeks 131 Chin 131 Collarbone 132 Crotch 132 Cuticles 132 Ears 133 Elbows 133 Eye 133 Eyelashes 134 Eyelids 134 Face 134 Feet 135 Finger 135 Fingernails 135 Fringe 136 Groin 136 Hair 136 Hands 137 Head 137 Hearts 137 Heels 138 Hymen 138 Iris 138 Jaw 139 Kidney 139 Knees 139 Lanugo 140 Lips 140 Lungs 140 Muscles 141 Navel 141 Neck 141 Nerves 142 Nipples 142 Nose 142 Nostrils 143 Penis 143 Ribcage 143 Saliva 144 Shoulder-blades 144 Shin 144 Skull 145 Soul 145 Spine 146 Teeth 146 Thighs 146 Throat 147 Thumbs 147 Toes 147 Tongue 148 Veins 148 Vocal Cords 148 Womb 149 Wrists 149 Wristbone

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Book SynopsisGirls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unflinching collection of poems that weave between topics from violence against women to time and memory. Tishani Doshi's third full collection in English blends visceral power with artistic elegance, re-imagining form as it sifts through detail and emotion. It followed two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Begins Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Tishani Doshi was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2018 for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and for her accompanying dance performance of the title poem. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her fourth collection, A God at the Door, was published in 2021.Trade ReviewThe poet revels in a love of language; its capacity for ambiguity, for awe, to express emotional fragility. Sometimes playful and ambivalent, this is an invariably profound and excavating experience in its search for meaning. -- Linton Kwesi Johnson, Canon Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw * Judges of the Ted Hughes Award 2018 *Tishani Doshi’s third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, chillingly conjures an uprising of dead women who refuse to be silent victims of male violence... Elsewhere, there are frank and moving poems about the experience of ageing and pressures on women to reproduce, as well as a playful imagined meeting with a young Elizabeth Bishop in Madras and an ode to Patrick Swayze. -- Sandeep Parmar * The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Year 2018) *I've already read Tishani Doshi’s poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods but I know I’ll return to it many times. One of the poems talks about poets ‘holding the throat of life/ till all the sunsets and lies are choked out/ till only the bones of truth remain’ - that’s precisely what Doshi does in this intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. It’s very much a collection for this moment in history, but one that will endure long past it. -- Kamila Shamsie * The Guardian (Best Summer Books 2018) *Table of Contents13 Contract 17 Summer in Madras 18 Rain at Three 19 A Fable for the 21st Century 20 What the Sea Brought In 21 How to be Happy in 101 days 24 Fear Management 25 Ode to Patrick Swayze 26 Everyone Loves a Dead Girl 28 Monsoon Poem 32 Abandon 33 To My First White Hairs 36 Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome 38 Love in the Time of Autolysis 40 Jungian Postcard 42 Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods 44 Strong Men, Riding Horses 46 Disco Biscuits 47 Honesty Hotel for Gents 48 My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life 50 Your Body Language is not Indian! or, Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatanatyam Dancer 52 Saturday on the Scores 54 The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju 55 Tranås 56 Encounters with a Swedish Burglar 57 Pig-killing in Viet-Hai 60 Calcutta Canzone 62 Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum 64 Dinner Conversations 66 The Leather of Love 70 O Great Beauties! 73 Clumps of Happiness 74 Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras 76 Grandmothers Abroad 78 Poem for a Dead Dog 80 Find the Poets 82 The Day Night Died 83 Coastal Life 84 The View From Inside My Coffin 87 Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God 91 When I Was Still a Poet 95 Biographical note

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Book SynopsisImtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Luck Is the Hook is her sixth book from Bloodaxe. In these poems, chance plays a part in finding or losing people and places that are loved: a change in the weather, a trick of language, a bomb that misses its mark, six pomegranate seeds eaten by mistake; all these events cast long shadows and raise questions about who is recording them, about believing, not believing, wanting to believe. A knot undone at Loch Lomond snags over Glasgow, a seal swims in the Clyde, a ghost stalks her quarry at a stepped well, an elephant and a cathedral come face to face on the frozen Thames, a return ticket is thrown into the tide of Humber, strangers wash in. Even in an uncertain world, love tangles with luck, flights show up on the radar and technology keeps track of desire. Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2014 for Over the Moon and for her services to poetry.Trade Review'This is a passionate, uplifting collection of poems about language, love and loss, grief and joy, elegy and celebration. The loss of a great love makes poems of piercing beauty. In her finest book to date, Imtiaz Dharker finds resolution in language itself, and in a world the more loved for the sharpness of loss.' - Gillian Clarke [on Over the Moon]; 'Imtiaz Dharker's new collection is the crown to a celebratory, humane, wholly utterable, subtly crafted poetry. Its dark jewels are the magnificent poems of bereavement, which will surely endure. Reading her, one feels that were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate.' - Carol Ann Duffy [on Over the Moon]; 'Here is no glib internationalism or modish multiculturalism... Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices. There is an exultant celebration of a self that strips off layers of superfluous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that it has not diminished, but grown larger, generous, more inclusive' - Arundhathi Subramaniam, Poetry International.

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Book SynopsisJinx: A ruinous charm, a quickdraw curse, a knight's move. Abigail Parry's first collection is concerned with spells, and ersatz spells: with semblance and sleight-of-hand. It takes its formal cues from moth-camouflage and stage magic, from the mirror-maze and the masquerade, and from high-stakes games of poker. Jinx asks about the equivocal nature of artifice, and the real mischief that underwrites the trick. The poems deal in forms of influence: in seduction and persuasion, infatuation and obsession. They want to talk about what we submit to, and what we are compelled by. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018.Trade ReviewThese are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and texture. In an explosion of gaming we find in the poems etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes - as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain. -- Jo ShapcottAbigail Parry brings a trickster's delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation. -- Christopher Reid

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Book SynopsisAs well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter. This is intelligent and pointed poetry in the tradition of Brecht, humanely political and generously engaged. The poems have the ease and the lightness of real mastery. They are moral in their insistence that human life can be lived well or badly, that it is up to us to choose well and to act wisely. Enzensberger is now writing with an increasing awareness of mortality, yet addresses social and political dangers and evils with undiminished urgency. This is a dual language edition expanding Enzensberger's earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems with work from his later collections Kiosk, Lighter Than Air and A History of Clouds. The translations are by Enzensberger himself and by Michael Hamburger, David Constantine and Esther Kinsky.Trade Review'Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a poet of formidable intelligence and range. Like Brecht before him, he combines an intense political imagination with lyric gusto. The reader discovers in him both a satirist and a friend' - George Steiner. 'A voice of ferocious urbanity, laying bare the horrors of the modern German state and resignedly picking out stark cameos of the human condition' - Peter Forbes, Financial Times.

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Book SynopsisYarn is about the stories we tell. Collected around four dramatic monologues - Hanoi Journal, The Cattle Farmer's Tale, The Travellers from Orissa and Aaron's Brother - Yarn includes an extended sequence of elegies, an account of a Warwickshire childhood and two stories about the Buddha. Ranging from the Holocaust to ancient India, from Kabir to modern Vietnam, using free verse, rhyme, prose poem and blank verse, Buddhist priest Maitreyabandhu's new collection is a vivid and at times disturbing account of the world we live in and the history that shapes us. His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was widely praised.Trade ReviewComposed of four discrete but symbolically linked sections, Yarn embraces the spirit, if not the strict form, of Japanese renga poetry, where, according to John Kerrigan, "what holds between poems becomes intrinsic". Blackbirds, chaffinches and robins fly from poem to poem, perching on the profusion of cherry blossoms, apple trees and poplars, while gentle winds blow throughout the book. These images recur in shifting forms, accruing layers of symbolism as they bind Yarn, and give the impression of a collection reaching for something just beyond the horizon... At its best, Yarn suggests a way of apprehending the world with all its quiet beauty, yearning and loss, and suggests "another kind of memory" – one that moves you to "repair the day / in thought […] then listen out for echoes. -- Frank Lawton * Times Literary Supplement *The best of these poems speak as much of psychological harm, uncertainty and the divisions we create as they do of unity, beauty, or well-adjusted contentment... In the end, though, the impression is of a poet who combines a self-effacing, observational stance with often searing, complicated feeling... Yarn is a collection where the transcendent promise of Buddhist enlightenment meets with the blunt reality of flawed humanity. -- Ben Wilkinson * The Poetry Review *His skills with form and his brilliant capture of colloquial speech, his obviously profound engagement with Buddhist thought and his commitment to poetry as a form of expression make him a unique figure in the UK literary landscape. -- Martyn Crucefix

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Book SynopsisAl-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. Famous in his native Sudan, the vivid imagery of his searing, lyric poems create the world afresh in their yearning for transcendence. In 2005 Saddiq’s poems were first translated into English by the Poetry Translation Centre for their first World Poets’ Tour. Since then he has received a rapturous reception from UK audiences. In 2010 a party was organised for him at London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology which holds a significant collection of ancient Sudanese artefacts. As a result of the success of this event (and earlier visits to the Petrie in 2005 and 2006), he was able to work in the Petrie Museum as their poet in residence during the summer of 2012. This led to a new book of poems, He Tells Tales of Meroe: Poems for the Petrie Museum (Poetry Translation Centre/Petrie Museum, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Born in Omdurman Khartoum in 1969, Saddiq has published four volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems in 2010. From 2006 he was the cultural editor of Al-Sudani newspaper until he was forced into exile in 2012. He was granted asylum in the UK and now lives in London. Arabic-English bilingual edition

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Book SynopsisThe Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention – of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze's first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.Trade ReviewJean ‘Binta’ Breeze… emerged in the 1980s as the first female dub poet, fusing reggae rhythms and music with the spoken word… Through the use of a variety of women’s voices and contexts, Breeze’s work challenged the usual stances of the dub and performance poetry tradition. Whether on stage, record or page, she spoke for – and to – black female experience, encompassing a wide range of subjects, styles and tonalities. -- Lyn Innes * The Guardian *Jean 'Binta' Breeze... was a poet who first came to prominence among Jamaica’s dub poets, but whose work quickly distinguished itself from its origins to gain a subtlety and versatility of its own. Dub poetry... was already capable of delivering powerful political messages. Breeze adopted this eagerly, but brought to it a more intimate voice that enabled her to advance feminism as well as openness about mental illness and sex...Her range included not only the polemical and the personal, but also more extended narratives and memoirs. -- Obituary * Daily Telegraph *The third world girl, at home for a while, sets these attractive poems in rural Jamaica. Her verandah looks out on the sea, and she goes for a swim most mornings. The collection takes us well beyond the village, the bar across the road, and the men who proposition her. The easy-going voice talks of personal development, celebrates friends and family, comments on mortality, freedom, gender and class. The poet is examining, subtly, a more or less contented return to where her life began. -- Mervyn Morris * Poet Laureate of Jamaica *Table of Contents9 The Verandah Matters by Kei Miller 13 Priming 16 Stranger 18 Homework 19 Evening 23 Football on the verandah 26 The casting of the roof 29 Departure of a daughter 31 After the World Cup 33 A visit from Scotland 35 Breakfast surprise 38 Birth 40 The rocking chair 41 Sound system 43 Tweet tweet 44 Heat 47 New men 48 Locking the door 51 Dorothy 53 Rainbow morning 54 No ghost 57 Tsunami 58 Rum 59 Visitation 61 Red, gold and green 62 Piercings 63 Christmas Eve 65 Chrismus 67 Presents 69 New Year’s Eve

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Book SynopsisAre we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland's fifth collection of poems, pursues these questions with the fierce abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of 21st-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.Trade Review'Tony Hoagland is a provocateur, a brash interventionist, a deeply engaged Whitmanian poet and critic who poses, like the master, as "one of the roughs".' - Edward Hirsch; '[Hoagland] walks the line between the high poetic and the mass-media idiom... His poetry expresses itself not just as a significant art, but as the best kind of entertainment.' - Los Angeles Times; 'Few [poets] deliver more pure pleasure. [Hoagland's] erudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache and longing, and they function, emotionally, like improvised explosive devices.' - Dwight Garner, The New York Times; 'He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"...Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield...making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don't...For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don't notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties.' - Henry Shukman, Poetry London; 'Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you're standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now - the present that we're already homesick for.' - Marie Howe; 'Tony Hoagland's high zaniness always makes us laugh, but his real substance issues from the personal, aesthetic and moral risks he invokes in poem after poem... What Narcissism Means to Me shows us our age and how great poetry is still possible.' - Rodney Jones; 'A Late Night Show of poetry hosted by a high priest of irony (check out the title)... These poems are very funny, but they are also sad, sharp-edged and ambitious... confiding, consistently irreverent and, in a way, comforting.' - Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times; 'Hoagland's central subject is the self, specifically, a prickly, grandiose American masculine poetic self, or to be more specific still, what the author ruefully labels in one poem "a government called Tony Hoagland"...there is something refreshing about his willingness to expose his crummier impulses.' - Emily Nussbaum, New York Times; 'It's hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn't make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland or a word in common or formal usage he would shy away from. He is a poet of risk: he risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score. The framework of his writing is immense, almost as large as the tarnished nation he wandered into under the star of poetry.' - Jackson Poetry Prize judges' citation

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Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Recommended Translation Irish-English dual language edition This is the first comprehensive critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It forms a sequel to Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella's pioneering anthology, An Duanaire 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), but features many more poems in covering the work of 26 poets from the past century. It includes poems by Pádraig Mac Piarais and Liam S. Gógan from the revival period (1893-1939), and a generous selection from the work of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who transformed writing in Irish in the decades following the Second World War, before the Innti poets – Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Biddy Jenkinson – and others developed new possibilities for poetry in Irish in the 1970s and 80s. It also includes work by more recent poets such as Colm Breathnach, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Micheál Ó Cuaig and Áine Ní Ghlinn. The anthology has translations by some of Ireland's most distinguished poets and translators, including Valentine Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O'Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and Mary O'Donoghue, most of them newly commissioned for this project. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc's anguished response to the bombing of Hiroshima, 'Aifreann na marbh' [Mass for the dead] have not previously been available in English. In addition to presenting some of the best poetry in Irish written since 1900, the anthology challenges the extent to which writing in Irish has been underrepresented in collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry. In his introduction and notes, Louis de Paor argues that Irish language poetry should be evaluated according to its own rigorous aesthetic rather than as a subsidiary of the dominant Anglophone tradition of Irish writing. Irish-English dual language edition co-published with Clo Iar-Chonnachta. [Leabhar na hAthghabhala is pronounced Lee-owr-rr ne hathar-bvola].Trade ReviewEvery so often... a book arrives which shows the possibility of reconsidering and reconceiving the way poetry works in Ireland: Leabhar Na hAthghabhála: Poems of Repossession (Cló Iar-Chonnacht/Bloodaxe) is one of those books… This is a terrific, open introduction to a century of Irish-language poetry and its connections and conjunctions animate the debates and breakthroughs and experiments, successful and otherwise, that comprise our living tradition. * The Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisTongulish is the language of sweet talk and honeyed words, babble and blather, quibble and quizzical. And tongulish is spoken throughout Rita Ann Higgins's lively new collection. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles, mischievous and playful in their portrayal of feckless folk and outcasts, flirts and weasels, gasbags and scallywags.Trade ReviewHiggins has always been a poet with a distinctive stance, never shirking her responsibilities as a public voice speaking on behalf of those who do not possess such a platforms. She is… both jocular and jugular, two traits that combine to make her a singular voice in Irish poetry… Passion and conviction walk hand-in-hand in these poems. -- Gerald Smyth * The Irish Times *Five years ago Rita Ann Higgins released Ireland Is Changing Mother, a poetry collection that doubled as a state-of-the-nation address. A call to arms and a hugely enjoyable read, it was an astute powerhouse of carefully chosen words that confirmed Higgins as one of Ireland’s great living poets. Tongulish, her 10th collection, is the follow-up… Tongulish features her trademark wit and warmth, while choosing to cast an eye towards private, domestic worlds and matters of communication… If Ireland is Changing Mother was the boom and bust, then Tongulish is the return to order. -- Eithne Shortall * Sunday Times Ireland *Tongulish, her 11th book of poetry, finds Higgins as intensively inventive and deliciously subversive as ever… The rebellious, innovative Higgins is one of his [James Joyce’s] distinctive heirs. Like Joyce, she knows just how to beat up the English language and her use of mythology, Irish language and Ireland’s past put her own inimitable stamp on her bang up-to-date present. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisWhen R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Clare Pollard's fifth collection Incarnation are about our children and the stories that we tell them. Whether looking at the discourse around pregnancy, describing the pain of childbirth or thinking about surveillance at soft play, they blur the personal and political. Pinocchio, Hamelin, Alice and The Tiger who Came to Tea make appearances alongside biblical tales: the ark, the whale's belly, the Moses basket in the rushes. There are poems for lost daughters - Amy Winehouse, Madeleine McCann, the victims of honour killings - and lost sons. There are also poems about innocence and responsibility which ask what it means to bring new human beings into this world, and how we shape them through our words.Trade Review‘In Clare Pollard’s fifth poetry collection Incarnation, she writes of pregnancy and mothers and children, of fairytales and news headlines and horrors. The follow up to her 2013 reimagining of Ovid’s Heroines with its emphasis on the possibilities (and necessities) of revising old stories, Pollard’s poems remain sharp and compelling.’ – Rosalind Jana, Stylist Magazine ‘Motherhood is one of the themes in Clare Pollard’s new collection; but the book also broadens out into forceful and compassionate poems about the sorrows of the world into which our children are born… Incarnation is a book which, from the very first poem, can startle the reader with its vivid and muscular language and bold imagery.’ - Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, London Grip ‘There are some stunningly powerful pieces in this collection on the theme of children and our relationships with them. Poems about pregnancy and childbirth are viscerally real… This – male – reviewer was captivated and moved throughout by the power of these poems. An outstandingly effective collection.’ – Frank Startup, The School LibrarianTable of Contents11 Jordan, September 2012 12 The Reef 14 Suffer 19 The Last Poem of Rabia Balkhi, Written in Blood on Her Bathroom Walls After Her Veins Were Cut by Her Brother 20 Kingdom 21 Knowledge 22 Message Beamed From Earth to Europa: 03:01 EST 23 Circuit 24 Afterbirth 26 The Very Hungry Animal 27 Solipsist Pantoum 28 Beholden 29 Digitalis 30 Ghazal of the Rose 31 Parables 33 The Human Child 34 Emmanuel 36 Object Permanence 37 At Peckham Rye 38 Lullaby over a Moses Basket 39 The Fair is Coming 40 Singapore 41 In the City of Shiva 43 The Day Amy Died 45 The Contradiction 46 Soft Play 48 Hamelin 49 23 Mindblowing Truths You Didn't Know About the Princess 51 The Pool of Tears 54 Pinocchios 55 Los Indignados 56 On Pie Corner 57 Sapiens 58 Leviathan 60 Lines after Rabi'ah al-Basri 63 Monte Alban 64 Boys 66 In the Horniman Museum

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Book SynopsisThere are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.Trade Review'Joanne Limburg's The Oxygen Man is an honest, difficult lurch through the aftermath of the suicide of her brother... This pamphlet expresses a "life goes on" sensibility alongside a grappling with true grief.' - Rachael Allen, Poetry London; 'Limburg's universe appears to be constantly twisting away from perception even as she pins it down in lines of singular economy.' - Poetry Book Society BulletinTable of ContentsThe Oxygen Man 10 Sister 11 Brother 12 Chaim 13 Welcome to the United States 14 From the Best Western 15 Your Lawn 16 Sylar and Elle 18 Double Act 19 Night Flight 21 Notes to an Unwritten Eulogy 23 Oxygen Man 24 Blue-eyed Boy 25 The Door 26 Proverbs 6:5-11 27 Not 28 On Holiday with Cotard 29 An Offering 30 The Young Dead Poets The Autistic Alice 32 Alice's Un-Birthday 33 Alice in Check 34 Alice in Reception Class 35 Big Alice 36 Alice's Walk 37 In the Garden of Live Flowers 38 Nothing but a Pack of Cards 39 Alice Between 40 Alice's Face 41 Advice for Alice 42 Tiny Alice 43 Alice's Brother 44 Alice's It 46 The Mad Hatter's Tea Party 48 Alice's Laws of Interaction 49 The Alice Case 51 Alice's Antism 52 Alice and the Red Queen 54 Alice's Checklist 55 Queen Alice 56 The Annotated Alice Other Poems 58 The Bus Riders' Creed 59 You're Not My Dad, John Inman 60 Hospital Psalm 61 Mammogram 62 Kaddish for Amy 63 The Loft Day 64 Swifts 65 A Run Round All Souls 66 Pretend to be Celia Johnson 67 Your Words 69 The View from Crieff 70 Dem Bones

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Book SynopsisTo be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore’s tenth and final poetry book, was her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, was added to all subsequent printings. Her posthumous retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 (2019), covers ten collections she published over four decades up to and including Inside the Wave. Costa Book of the Year 2017, winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry AwardTrade ReviewWe all felt this is a modern classic; a fantastic collection, life-affirming and uplifting. The poems carry powerful messages that speak to all of us. -- Wendy Holden * Chair of Judges, Costa Book of the Year 2017 *An astonishing set of poems - a final, great achievement. -- Moniza Alvi, Kiran Millwood Hargrave & Nick Wroe * Costa Poetry Award judges *Inside the Wave shows us not only what it is to be alive, but what it is like to be alive and to be mortal. It is a very special book indeed. -- Moniza Alvi * The Guardian *Table of Contents11 Counting Backwards 12 The Underworld 13 Shutting the Gate 14 In Praise of the Piano 15 Re-opening the old mines 16 Inside the Wave 18 Odysseus to Elpenor 20 Plane tree outside Ward 78 21 The shaft 22 Leave the door open 23 My life's stem was cut 24 The Bare Leg 26 The Place of Ordinary Souls 27 My daughter as Penelope 29 The Lamplighter 30 The Halt 31 Bluebell Hollows 32 A Loose Curl 33 Festival of stone 34 A Bit of Love 35 Winter Balcony with Dunnocks 36 Mimosa 37 Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen 39 The Duration 41 At the Spit 42 Terra Incognita 43 Four cormorants, one swan 44 Girl in the Blue Pool 45 February 12th 1994 46 What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for? 47 In Secret 48 All the breaths of your life 49 Her children look for her 50 Cliffs of Fall 51 Five Versions from Catullus 51 1 Through Babel of Nations 52 2 Undone 53 3 Sirmio 54 4 Dedication 55 5 Sparrow 56 Rim 57 On looking through the handle of a cup 58 Ten Books 60 Subtraction 61 My people 62 September Rain 69 Hold out your arms

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Book SynopsisThis stunning collection gathers never-before-seen poems, found by archivists in boxes kept at the Pablo Neruda Foundation in Chile in 2014. Neruda is renowned for poetry that casts away despair and celebrates living, fired by his belief that there is no unsurmountable solitude. Then Come Back presents Neruda's mature imagination and writing: signature love poems, odes, anecdotes, and poems of the political imagination. Translator Forrest Gander beautifully renders the eros and heartache, deep wonder and complex wordplay of the original Spanish, which is presented here alongside full-colour reproductions of the poems in their original composition on napkins, playbills, receipts, and in notebooks. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda simultaneously completes and advances the oeuvre of the Nobel Laureate. Discovered during the cataloguing of Neruda's papers, there are 21 poems in all, together with detailed notes about how they relate to his published work.Trade Review'These documents, along with the poems (some of them fragments), translated by Forrest Gander, provide insights into the writing and its familiar themes - love, poetry and the strength and beauty of the people and landscape of Neruda's native Chile. The book provides new glimpses of the poet, who died in 1973. In one poem, Neruda addresses his younger self and urges, "all right, young man, now / listen: / hang on / keep your silence / until the words / ripen / in you."... This brief visit with Neruda ends all too soon, yet reminds one why his work still matters.' - Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post; 'Recently discovered within the "jungle of the poet's manuscripts", these 21 untitled and previously unpublished poems, produced between the early 1950s and Neruda's 1973 death, continue his tradition of political engagement, love of homeland, and exaltations of nature and romantic love. These captivating poems are presented separately in English and Spanish, and annotated with contextual notes and background information including dates, interpretations, and descriptions of the documents themselves. This is Neruda at his finest, his eloquence and passion skilfully arranged in an accessible yet profound package.' - Publishers Weekly; 'This latest addition to the extensive inventory of Neruda's works is a miniretrospective that captures the essence of his more famous works; the poems here are certainly as deserving to form part of the poet's canon as any heretofore published collections. It's a real treat discovering long lost Neruda poems that do not disappoint.' - Library Journal; 'The poet and novelist Forrest Gander, already known for translations of Mexican poets, seems like the obvious pick to bring the new Neruda into English, and he does not disappoint. Neruda's organic creation, his erotic energies, bloom into "the flower that directs and sustains us, / the wheat that dies into bread and portions out our lives, / the mud with the smoothest fingers in the world."... Cosmonauts, Chilean flora and fauna, "Chilenos, / a poor people, / miners, / fishermen," figure in these pages, whose fluent style resembles Neruda's well-known odes; they are held together by the capacious emotions of the very quotable poet himself, for whom "the heart is a leaf / and the wind makes it throb."' - Stephen Burt, www.poets.org (Academy of American Poets); 'A literary event of universal importance.' - The Guardian

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Book SynopsisThe "disappearance" of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world's most tantalising mysteries - the subject of a BBC feature in 2009 called The Poet Who Vanished.After publishing two extraordinary poetry collections - and six satirical novels - she turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry, and suppressing her own books.Interviewed earlier in 1967, she spoke of her direct literary forebears as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: 'They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them...The main duty of the poet is to excite - to send the senses reeling.'Her poetry - published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) - is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was 'Bedouin of the London evening' in one poem: 'I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.'All her published poetry is now available here for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose. This second edition has an expanded introduction and an additional prose piece.Trade Review'My reading life has been immeasurably improved by Rosemary Tonks's Bedouin of the London Evening' - Max Porter, Guardian (Books of the Year 2015); 'The poet Rosemary Tonks her name in the 60s and 70s, then withdrew from public sight and published nothing in the later part of her life. Following her recent death, Neil Astley has collected and introduced her work in Bedouin of the London Evening. It's a highly original collection, mingling savage realism with a surreal fancy, and it restores an essential voice of late-20th-century British poetry to its rightful place.' - Andrew Motion, Guardian (Books of the Year 2014); 'The world has waited for this slim volume since 1973...It is important for two reasons. First, we can read again her challenging and original poetry, long out of print; and second, with her devoted present publisher Neil Astley's excellent introduction, we learn what happened to Tonks...Tonks repays deeper study: densely allusive, self-mocking, richly spiked with insight - and beauty. A great treat. An extreme spirit.' - Caroline Bowder, Church Times (Christmas books); 'Between 1963 and 1974, Rosemary Tonks published two collections of poetry as well as novels, short stories and reviews. Then she disappeared... Now, finally, Neil Astley has been able to compile her collected poems. And what a joy they are: sensuous, witty, alternately cool and hot-blooded. Tonks's verse, perfectly tuned to the life of cities, channels Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but always in her own easy voice.' - New Statesman, NS Recommends; 'Her reappearance in this important and well-documented book, which includes two penetrating reviews, a short story and an interview, is the best sort of rediscovery: one that disrupts our sense of poetic continuity even as it restores it.' - Patrick McGuinness, London Review of Books;'...like Plath, Tonks made an extraordinary jump with her second collection, arriving at a confident and utterly distinctive voice. Like Ariel, Iliad seems to open new doors in poetry; like Ariel, the new beginning was also an abrupt end.' - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday; 'After publishing two seedily glittering books of verse in the 1960s, Rosemary Tonks - who died this year- renounced literature. This exciting collection restores to us a unique oeuvre which evokes the 'sofas, fugs and cinemas' of post-war London, as though the French poet Baudeliare had written in a Soho greasy spoon.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times;'Forty years after her disappearance, this fascinating collection of her work returns her to us... this writing has unmistakable flair. It is bohemian, ardent, sensual and of its time.' - Kate Kellaway, ObserverTable of Contents9 Introduction by Neil AstleyNotes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) 45 Love Territory 46 Running Away 49 20th Century Invalid 50 Diary of a Rebel 51 Bedroom in an Old City 54 The Flaneur and the Apocalypse 55 Fear's Blindworm 56 The Solitary's Bedroom 57 Rainfield and Argument 58 Gutter Lord 60 Poet and Iceberg 61 Oath 62 Ace of Hooligans 65 Rome 66 Hypnos and Warm Winters 67 Escape! 68 Story of a Hotel Room 69 Bedouin of the London Evening 70 Boy in the Lane 72 Fog Peacocks 73 Poet as Gambler 74 Apprentice 76 Blouson Noir 77 Bedouin of the London Morning 78 April and the Ideas-Merchant 79 On the advantage of being ill-treated by the WorldIliad of Broken Sentences (1967) 85 The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas 87 The Sash Window 88 Epoch of the Hotel Corridor 89 Badly-chosen Lover 90 The Little Cardboard Suitcase 91 Hydromaniac 92 Students in Bertorelli's 93 The Desert Wind Elite 95 An Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes 96 The Ice-cream Boom Towns 97 Addiction to an Old Mattress 98 Song of the October Wind 100 Done for! 101 Orpheus in Soho 102 Dressing-gown Olympian 103 Farewell to Kurdistan 106 Black Kief and the Intellectual 107 The Drinkers of Coffee 108 To a Certain Young Man 110 A Few Sentences AwaySelected Prose 113 Note on Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms [1963] 115 Interview with Peter Orr [1963] 122 Cutting the Marble [1973] 132 The Wisdom of Colette [1974] 140 The Pick-up or L'Ercole d'Oro [1973] 157 On being down, but not quite out, in Paris [1976]

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Book SynopsisCarolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero’s church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to ‘talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the military aid.' A week later he was assassinated (and is only now being made a saint). Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of her second collection, poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma. When the book appeared in 1981, at a time when the conflict in El Salvador had finally forced its way into public awareness, it won her immediate recognition. Briefly available in Britain from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication by Penguin of Carolyn Forché’s long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (Penguin, 2018) followed by a new collection from Bloodaxe, In the Lateness of the World (2020). The Country Between Us has sold tens of thousands of copies on the US, where it has never been out of print. It won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.Trade ReviewHer collection of poems The Country Between Us (1981) has been reissued to accompany the memoir. It was a bestseller at a time when many Americans were increasingly aware and ashamed of US-sponsored brutality in its “backyard”. It’s fascinating to see how the two works qualify and complement each other across the intervening decades. -- Lorna Scott Fox * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIN SALVADOR, 1978-80 11 San Onofre, California 12 The Island 15 The Memory of Elena 17 The Visitor 18 The Colonel 19 Return 23 Message 25 Because One Is Always Forgotten REUNION 29 Endurance 31 Expatriate 33 Letter from Prague, 1968–78 35 Departure 36 Photograph of My Room 39 On Returning to Detroit 41 As Children Together 44 Joseph 47 Selective Service 48 For the Stranger 50 Reunion 52 City Walk-up, Winter 1969 54 Poem for Maya OURSELVES OR NOTHING 52 Ourselves or Nothing

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Book SynopsisLand of Three Rivers is a celebration of North-East England in poetry, featuring its places and people, culture, history, language and stories in poems and songs with both rural and urban settings. Taking its bearings from the Tyne, Wear and Tees of the title (from Vin Garbutt's song 'John North'), the book maps the region in poems relating to past and present, depicting life from Roman times through medieval Northumbria and the industrial era of mining and shipbuilding up to the present-day. The anthology has modern perspectives on historical subjects, such as W.H. Auden's 'Roman Wall Blues' and Alistair Elliot on the aftermath of the Battle of Heavenfield in the 7th century, as well as poets from past ages, starting with Caedmon, the first English poet, writing in the 8th century. There are classic North-East songs from the oral tradition of balladeers and pitmen poets alongside the work of literary chroniclers like Mark Akenside from the 18th century, followed by evocations of Northumberland by decadent gentry poet Algernon Charles Swinburne contrasting with grim tales of life down the pit by Tommy Armstrong, Joseph Skipsey and Thomas Wilson in the 19th century. The region's favourite tipple is championed by 18th-century poet John Cunningham in his eulogy 'Newcastle Beer', while 200 years later, Tony Harrison's defences are 'broken down / on nine or ten Newcastle Brown' in his 'Newcastle Is Peru' (1969). Durham is celebrated in a 12th-century priest's poem but is a trinity of 'University, Cathedral, Gaol' for Tony Harrison. The River Tyne flows through poems by Wilfrid Gibson, James Kirkup, Michael Roberts, Francis Scarfe from early to mid-20th century, while the region's dialects (from Northumbrian to Geordie and Pitmatic) are heard in poems by Basil Bunting, William Martin, Tom Pickard, Katrina Porteous and Fred Reed. Other modern and contemporary poets and songwriters featured include Gillian Allnutt, Peter Armstrong, Peter Bennet, Robyn Bolam, George Charlton, Julia Darling, Richard Dawson, the Elliotts of Birtley, W.N. Herbert, Alan Hull, James Kirkup, Mark Knopfler, Barry MacSweeney, Sean O'Brien, Rodney Pybus, Kathleen Raine, Jon Silkin and Anne Stevenson, as well as poets who've spent time in the North-East, such as Fleur Adcock, David Constantine, Fred D'Aguiar, Frances Horovitz, Philip Larkin, Michael Longley and Carol Rumens, writing highly memorable poems in response to the place, its people and their stories. The book's introduction is in two parts, with Rodney Pybus covering the historical background and Neil Astley the last 50 years. This emphasises the importance of the oral tradition during the centuries when little "written poetry" of note was produced in the region. There are also fascinating commentaries on key historical figures by the late Alan Myers.Table of ContentsVin Garbutt 14 John North Neil Astley 15 Land of Three Rivers: 1 Rodney Pybus 18 The Poetry of North-East England (1966) Andy Croft 30 Writing on Teesside: 1 (2010) Neil Astley 33 Land of Three Rivers: 2 Basil Bunting 38 What the Chairman Told Tom Andy Croft 40 Writing on Teesside: 2 (2010) LAND OF THREE RIVERS W.H. Auden 45 from New Year Letter Lilian Bowes Lyon 47 The Glittering North Mark Akenside 47 from The Pleasures of the Imagination A.C. Swinburne 49 Northumberland Basil Bunting 52 from Briggflatts Fred Reed 62 Springan HADRIAN’S WALL W.H. Auden 64 Roman Wall Blues Rudyard Kipling 65 The Roman Centurion’s Song Wilfrid Gibson 66 On Cawfields Crag Wilfrid Gibson 67 Chesterholm Wilfrid Gibson 67 The Watch on the Wall Frances Horovitz 69 Poem found at Chester’s Museum, Hadrian’s Wall Frances Horovitz 70 Rain – Birdoswald Frances Horovitz 71 Vindolanda – January Frances Horovitz 72 Brigomaglos, a Christian speaks… Frances Horovitz 73 The Crooked Glen Roger Garfitt 74 The Hooded Gods Gareth Reeves 75 Stone Relief Housesteads Esther Jansma 76 AD 128 Katrina Porteous 77 This Far and No Further Alistair Elliot 89 After Heavenfield Peter Armstrong 89 Between Greenhead and Sewingshields JARROW Bede 91 On Caedmon U.A. Fanthorpe 93 Caedmon’s Song Norman Nicholson 94 Caedmon Kathleen Raine 95 Northumbrian Sequence Anne Stevenson 104 Jarrow Carol Rumens 105 Jarrow Alistair Elliot 106 Talking to Bede W.N. Herbert 111 Bede’s World Jake Campbell 113 On Not Finding Bede Tom Kelly 114 Monument Tom Kelly 115 The Time Office, 1965 Tom Kelly 116 The Wrong Jarrow BORDERERS Traditional 117 The Battle of Otterbourne Fleur Adcock 121 Hotspur Peter Armstrong 127 Borderers Pippa Little 128 from Foray: Border Reiver Women 1500-1600 129 The Cheviots 129 Alicia Unthank’s Ark 130 The Robsons Gone 131 Truce Day Linda France 132 The Spur in the Dish Robyn Bolam 132 Raiding the Borders Katrina Porteous 134 Borderers Fred Reed 138 Northumborland (2) A.C. Swinburne 138 A Reiver’s Neck-Verse A.C. Swinburne 139 A Jacobite’s Exile (1764) NORTH TO SOUTH NORTHUMBERLAND Traditional 142 Old Border Rhyme Wilfrid Gibson 142 The Cheviot Traditional 143 Dunnie’s Song John Mackay Wilson 143 The Tweed Near Berwick Katrina Porteous 145 from Tweed Vincenza Holland 147 The Harbourmaster’s Daughter Anne Ryland 148 Midsummer Night, Berwick Peter Bennet 149 Duddo Stones Rodney Pybus 149 Routing Linn, Northumberland Linda France 151 Acknowledged Land Paul Summers 158 acknowledged land Tony Harrison 159 Stately Home Sir Walter Scott 159 from Marmion Wilfrid Gibson 162 Lindisfarne Katrina Porteous 163 Holy Island Arch Matthew Hollis 164 Causeway Cynthia Fuller 164 St Cuthbert on Inner Farne Andrew Waterhouse 165 Making the Book Katrina Porteous 167 A Short History of Bamburgh Fred Reed 168 Bamburgh Wind A.C. Swinburne 169 Grace Darling Michael Longley 172 Grace Darling Katrina Porteous 172 Charlie Douglas Katrina Porteous 174 The Marks t’ Gan By Katrina Porteous 175 Stinky Wilfrid Gibson 176 Dunstanborough Katrina Porteous 177 from Dunstanburgh Alistair Elliot 181 Deposition Katrina Porteous 182 Alnmouth Gillian Allnutt 184 At the Friary in Alnmouth R.V. Bailey 184 Druridge Bay Traditional 185 Felton Lonnen Basil Bunting 185 The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer Paul Batchelor 187 Butterwell Fred Reed 188 The Pit Heap Pippa Little 190 Seacoaling Tony Harrison 191 The Earthen Lot Traditional 192 The Blackleg Miner James Henry 193 ‘Two hundred men and eighteen killed…’ Joseph Skipsey 195 The Hartley Calamity Joseph Skipsey 198 The Collier Lad Joseph Skipsey 200 Get Up! NORTH TYNE, REDESDALE, COQUETDALE Robert Roxby 202 from The Lay of the Reedwater Minstrel Billy Bell 205 Winter on the Carter Fell James Armstrong 207 Wild Hills O’ Wannys Tom Pickard 209 The Raw Robert Hunter 212 Epitaph for Ned Allan Fred Reed 212 Northumborland (1) Basil Bunting 213 ‘Stones trip Coquetburn’ Colin Simms 214 from Hen Harrier Poems Colin Simms 214 ‘There are, were, four couples south of Cheviot…’ Colin Simms 214 ‘Formerly on traditionally-managed haughland…’ Colin Simms 215 Katharine Macgregor – of The Sneep, Tarset Colin Simms 215 ‘The cadence of a Strathspey, played slow…’ Peter Armstrong 216 Between Lord’s Shaw and Pit Houses Wilfrid Gibson 217 Sundaysight Wilfrid Gibson 218 Hareshaw Wilfrid Gibson 218 Hareshaw Linn Peter Bennet 219 Hareshaw Linn Billy Bell 220 An Old Shepherd’s Adventure at Bellingham Philip Larkin 223 Show Saturday Peter Armstrong 226 Bellingham James Armstrong 227 The Kielder Hunt Christy Ducker 228 How Mackie Did the Drowning, Plashetts Colin Simms 229 ‘Out, Northumberland, Out!’ Traditional 230 The Water of Tyne TYNEDALE, SOUTH TYNE, NORTH PENNINES Wilfrid Gibson 231 In Hexham Abbey Wilfrid Gibson 232 The Abbey Tower Wilfrid Gibson 233 Devilswater Wilfrid Gibson 234 Mother and Maid Terry Conway 235 Fareweel Regality Wilfrid Gibson 236 Fallowfield Fell Lauris Edmond 236 At Bywell Lilian Bowes Lyon 237 Allendale Dog W.H. Auden 238 Allendale Lilian Bowes Lyon 239 A Rough Walk Home W.H. Auden 241 The Old Lead-mine W.H. Auden 242 Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922) W.H. Auden 242 The Pumping Engine, Cashwell W.H. Auden 242 The Engine House W.H. Auden 243 Lead’s the Best W.H. Auden 245 The Watershed Jon Silkin 247 Killhope Wheel, 1860, Co. Durham Jon Silkin 248 Strike Jon Silkin 249 Spade Pru Kitching 250 Killhope Pru Kitching 251 What’s It Like Up There? Dorothy Long 252 Road Barry MacSweeney 253 No Buses to Damascus Barry MacSweeney 253 Cushy Number Colin Simms 254 High Fells, April 2011 Colin Simms 255 Where Rise Watters of Tyne, Tees, Wear NEWCASTLE John Cleveland 256 News from Newcastle Tony Harrison 260 Newcastle Is Peru Brendan Cleary 265 Newcastle Is Benidorm Ellen Phethean 266 Bacchantes Julia Darling 266 Newcastle Is Lesbos W.N. Herbert 268 The Entry of Don Quixote into Newcastle upon Tyne W.N. Herbert 270 Song of the Longboat Boys John Cunningham 271 Newcastle Beer Rodney Pybus 273 ‘Our Friends in the North’ George Charlton 275 A Return to Newcastle Robyn Bolam 275 Hyem Robyn Bolam 276 Moving On Julia Darling 277 Satsumas Julia Darling 278 A Short Manifesto to My City Julia Darling 278 Old Jezzy Anna Adams 279 The Wild Life on Newcastle Town Moor Michael Roberts 280 Temperance Festival, Town Moor, Newcastle W.H. Auden 281 from Twelve Songs Richard Kell 281 Traditions W.N. Herbert 284 The Hoppings Tony Harrison 284 Divisions Fred Reed 286 Brazen Faces Kathleen Kenny 286 Grainger Market John Challis 288 Gift of the Gab Fleur Adcock 289 Street Song Anonymous 290 A riddle on the steeple of St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Newcastle Peter Hebden 290 Thin Riddle Joan Johnston 292 On Falling Up Dog Leap Stairs Rodney Pybus 292 Salvaging Rodney Pybus 294 The Side Mark Knopfler 294 Down to the Waterline Bernardette McAloon 295 Mistress of the Crown Traditional 296 The Keel Row Traditional 297 Do-li-a Alan Hull 297 Fog on the Tyne Jimmy Nail 298 Big River James Kirkup 300 Tyneside, 1936 Rodney Pybus 301 Bridging Loans Rodney Pybus 307 Passed By Rodney Pybus 308 Down the Town Robyn Bolam 309 Where Home Started Tom Pickard 310 The Devil’s Destroying Angel Exploded Barry MacSweeney 312 I Looked Down on a Child Today Kayo Chingonyi 314 Baltic Mill Jen Campbell 314 Treading Water Ellen Phethean 315 The West End Stevie Ronnie 316 Rebuilding the West Edward Chicken 317 from The Collier’s Wedding Gillian Allnutt 322 About Benwell Gillian Allnutt 323 After the Blaydon Races Geordie Ridley 324 The Blaydon Races W.N. Herbert 325 The Blazing Grater, or, The Olympic Torch Passes Through Tyneside Andy Croft 326 from Great North Richard Kell 328 Cutty Sark Race, 1986 W.N. Herbert 330 Zamyatin in Heaton Sean O’Brien 331 Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright GATESHEAD Thomas Wilson 332 from The Pitman’s Pay Joe Wilson 335 Maw Bonny Gyetside Lass Tom Pickard 336 Gateshead George Charlton 337 Gateshead Grammar Mark Robinson 338 Angel of the North Jen Campbell 339 The Angel Jen Campbell 340 Angel Metal NORTH TYNESIDE Michael Roberts 341 H.M.S. Hero James Kirkup 341 Tyne Ferry: Night Francis Scarfe 342 Night Fishing Francis Scarfe 343 Trawlers William Watson 343 When the Boat Comes In Sting 344 Island of Souls A.C. Swinburne 346 The Tyneside Widow Traditional 348 Bobby Shafto William Lisle Bowles 349 Written at Tynemouth, Northumberland… Wilfrid Gibson 349 The Coast-Watch James Kirkup 350 Balloons in Sunrise James Kirkup 351 The Harbour: Tynemouth Michael Blackburn 352 The North Sea at Tynemouth Helen Tookey 352 At Tynemouth Peter Mortimer 353 View Mike Wilkin 354 Cullercoats Fred D’Aguiar 355 Whitley Bay Sonnets U.A. Fanthorpe 359 Tyneside in Winter R.V. Bailey 360 Whitley Bay Mark Knopfler 361 Tunnel of Love SOUTH SHIELDS James Kirkup 363 The Town Where I Was Born James Kirkup 364 View from the North East Francis Scarfe 365 Miners Francis Scarfe 366 Tyne Dock Francis Scarfe 367 Tyne Dock Revisited Francis Scarfe 368 In Memoriam Francis Scarfe 369 The grotto James Kirkup 370 Marsden Rock Francis Scarfe 372 The Knocker-up James Kirkup 372 The Knocker-up James Kirkup 373 View from the Town Hall, South Shields James Kirkup 374 Spring in the Public Gardens James Kirkup 375 The Old Clothes Stall, South Shields Market James Kirkup 376 South Shields Town Hall in Snow James Kirkup 378 The Old Library, Ocean Road, South Shields Jen Campbell 379 Cross-hatch WEARSIDE Traditional 380 The Lambton Worm Lewis Carroll 382 The Walrus and the Carpenter William Martin 386 His Bright Silver William Martin 389 Song of the Cotia Lass William Martin 391 Wiramutha Helix William Martin 407 Song James Kirkup 408 Penshaw Pastoral Johnny Handle 409 Jack Crawford Ron Knowles 411 Where in This Wind Tom Pickard 411 Ship 1431 Tom Pickard 412 What Maks Makems William Martin 414 A19 Hymn Jake Campbell 418 A184 Hymn DURHAM Anonymous 419 Durham Gillian Allnutt 420 Arvo Pärt in Concert, Durham Cathedral, November 1998 William Martin 422 Durham Beatitude Tony Harrison 423 Durham James Kirkup 425 Durham Seen from the Train Katrina Porteous 426 Durham Cathedral Mark Robinson 426 Durham Cathedral S.J. Litherland 428 Durham in February Heidi Williamson 428 River Wear, Durham David Constantine 429 ‘But with a history of ECT’ David Constantine 430 The Pitman’s Garden CO. DURHAM Traditional 431 Rap ’Er te Bank Tommy Armstrong 432 The South Medomsley Strike Tommy Armstrong 433 The Durham Lock-out Wilfrid Gibson 435 The Ponies John Seed 436 from Brandon Pithouse Anne Stevenson 443 Forgotten of the Foot Anne Stevenson 445 Salter’s Gate Dora Greenwell 446 To a Remembered Stream, and a Never-Forgotten Friend Dora Greenwell 447 Lilies J.C. Grant 449 A Camp in Chopwell Woods James Kirkup 451 Chester-le-Street from the Train James Kirkup 451 View of Ferryhill Richard Dawson 451 The Ghost of a Tree Peter Armstrong 453 A695 Hymn Peter Armstrong 454 Among the Villages Gillian Allnutt 454 The Singing Pylons Cynthia Fuller 455 Esh Winning Cynthia Fuller 456 Lost Landscape Cynthia Fuller 457 Deerness Valley J.S. Cunningham 458 North George Charlton 460 Sea Coal Bill Griffiths 461 The Box-Eggs Bill Griffiths 463 The Strike Anna Woodford 464 Two Up Two Down Mark Robinson 465 Dalton Park/Murton Jock Purdon 466 The Easington Explosion Katrina Porteous 467 The Pigeon Men Eddie Gibbons 468 Early Morning, West Hartlepool, 1963 TEESDALE Sir Walter Scott 469 from Rokeby Thomas Babington Macaulay 474 A Jacobite’s Epigraph Richard Watson 475 from My Journey to Work W.H. Auden 479 The Engine House Andrew Young 479 In Teesdale Lindsay Balderson 480 High Force to Low Force Anne Hine 481 Low Force Pat Maycroft 481 Cockfield Fell in Winter Pauline Plummer 482 Whorlton Lido Anonymous 483 A Darlington rhyme John Horsley 483 Darlington Fifty Years Ago Marilyn Longstaff 485 Darlington Gordon Hodgeon 486 North Tees Epiphany Mark Robinson 487 Teesdale, Thornaby MIDDLESBROUGH Angus Macpherson 489 from Cleveland Thoughts; or, The Poetry of Toil A.E. Tomlinson 492 Furnaces Wilfrid Gibson 493 Cleveland Night Wilfrid Gibson 494 Fire Andy Croft 495 Sunlight and Heat Andy Willoughby 500 The Cold Steel Keith Porritt 500 Smelter Maureen Almond 503 The Works Mark Robinson 504 Dockside Road, South Bank Mark Robinson 505 Teesport, Redcar Jo Colley 506 Peg Powler Bob Beagrie 506 Cook, The Bridge and the Big Man Bob Beagrie 507 Occasion for Keeping Shtum Angela Readman 508 Acklam Rainbow Angela Readman 509 Easterside ’59 Angela Readman 509 Easterside ’89 Maureen Almond 510 Boro Babe Jo Colley 511 Boro Girl CLEVELAND Andy Willoughby 512 from Between Stations Pauline Plummer 513 On the Gare at Night Andy Croft 514 Redcar Sands Gordon Hodgeon 514 Potato Sellers – Cleveland Pauline Plummer 515 Saltburn FAREWELL Sean O’Brien 516 from Never Can Say Goodbye Traditional 517 Bonny at Morn 518 Acknowledgements 523 Index of writers 525 Index of places

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Book SynopsisAna Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.Trade Review'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' - Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley -- Charles Altieri * UC at Berkeley *

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Book SynopsisFriedrich Hölderlin was one of Europe’s greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine’s widely-praised Hölderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hölderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hölderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hölderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later. Hölderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and – as he thought – sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age. Constantine has translated Hölderlin’s translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. The plays themselves need no introduction or apology. These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Carl Orff used Hölderlin’s texts for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), with the producers of recent DVDs of Orff's operas later choosing to use Constantine’s texts for their English subtitles.Trade ReviewConstantine goes for an "equivalence of spirit" in a more familiar idiom. This is at once a bold and humble undertaking, and has produced poetry of a remarkable luminosity and intensity, written in rhythms and cadences which recreate, both in their extremities of grief and their urgent hope, the immediacy of the original. -- Karen Leeder * Oxford Poetry *

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Book SynopsisFrieda Hughes's fable-like poems draw on her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, a lifelong engagement with nature and itinerant wildlife, and later experiences when living in Australia, London, and most recently, Wales. They cast light on two worlds, giving a mythic dimension to contemporary life - depicting with an artist's keen eye the particular nature of beast, fish and fowl. Strange creatures, fabled beings and inner voices come to life in startling poems set both in city streets and hospitals as well as in psychic landscapes and reinvented tales. Out of the Ashes brings together work from four collections: Wooroloo (1999), Stonepicker (2001), Waxworks (2002) and The Book of Mirrors (2009). These show a progressive peeling back of the layers of metaphor and allegory as the reader travels a road into a world informed by increasingly personal experiences and memories, through which the poet has been tested, challenged, and found new direction. The book takes the reader on a journey through a life - Frieda's poems examining the ideas of argument, resolution and the acceptance of what cannot be changed. They include poems relating to the death of her father, Ted Hughes, and the loss of her brother Nicholas to suicide at 47, as well as recollections of adolescence following a childhood affected by the loss of her mother, Sylvia Plath. The selection excludes poems from Forty-five (2006), available in the US from HarperCollins, and Alternative Values: poems & paintings (2015), published separately by Bloodaxe.Trade Review`An accomplished painter, she brings to her poetry the same landscape of contrasts, in her vivid descriptions of light and dark, struggle and release, the cleansing properties of fire. She is a courageous poet with a rich palette and the ability to create some startling and memorable images.' - Maura Dooley & Jamie McKendrick, PBS Bulletin; `Her book is about aloneness, about cathartic confrontation and rebirth...The position of the confessional voice in this poetry is quite deceptive - the "I" can be both public and personal. Such poems outflank the obvious. This is poetry come out of siege.' - John Kinsella, Observer

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Book SynopsisWhen Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work `has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life'. Her latest collection, wake, shows the two beginning to meld into one: to speak for, even as, one another. As her title signals, these are poems about looking back, keeping watch over the dying and death of an old world and the ways of being human in that world; but also forward, waiting for the new world and being ready to awaken to it when it comes. There are, as always in her work, many displaced people. No one here is fully at home in the world. These are turbulent times - individually and collectively - and the poems here reflect that. And yet the poems are more `among' than `about' people: speaking out of the horde, and the hoard, of humanity as a whole.Trade Review`Her writing roams across centuries, very different histories and lives, and draws together, without excuse or explanation, moments which link across country, class, culture and time... Her poems progress over the years to a kind of synthesis of word-play and meditation. In her work the space between what is offered and what is withheld is every bit as important as what is said. She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure.' - Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate, for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Award Committee; `To read her poems is to be struck by their elemental, worn, limber intelligence, what Adam Thorpe, the poet, playwright and novelist, praises as their sense of `half-revealed mystery'. Her startling, beautiful, mythic work was recognised earlier this year with the award of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.' - Jonathan Doering, The Friend

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Book SynopsisAssembly Lines asks what it means to be here and now, in post-industrial towns and cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery. From schools and workplaces and lives lived in 'a different town, just like this', these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards - whether the geological strata that underpins a 'dithering island' or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses' hooves. This is a new Midlands realism, precision-engineered, which seeks wonderment in unlikely places. By turns both fierce and tender, the poems in Jane Commane's first book-length collection re-assemble the landscape, offer up an alternative national curriculum and find ghosts and strange magic in the machinery of the everyday. Between disappearances and reformations, the natural and the man-made, the lines are drawn; you might try to leave your hometown, but it will never leave you.Trade ReviewJane Commane’s first collection Assembly Lines… enjoys the “commonplace miracles” of the ordinary people who make the wheels go round… The whole book is an elegy for a generation of “Midlands kids” who “grew up in the back seats / of the long-gone marques of British manufacturing"… -- Andy Croft * Morning Star *What a joy to read these poems and be led by Jane Commane through Edgelands Midlands – its secret geologies and ghostly factories, 'dog eared estate-avenues' and restless classrooms. In these vivid, fierce poems melancholy and unease spangle the Midlands air like dust and 'heartsick towns' search for new ways to be and begin again. The poems in Assembly Lines work with magic and tough tenderness and linger in the mind long after their shift is done. A shining debut from one of poetry's brightest guiding lights. -- Liz BerryAssembly Lines is a marvellous collection: mature, clear, brilliantly visioned in lost worlds of cities, lives and livelihoods. It speaks, almost telepathically, to the nation as it is and as it was: broken, divided, where the hope lies thinly and can be caught only in perception. This is writing as an act of community, even when the community may never listen or has never cared. Yet by default of these poems, where writing is also an act of attention, and attention an act of love, every poem here is a kind of love poem. It is like listening to a long solo in the dark. A song to the Midlands. -- David Morley

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Book SynopsisThe territory of Clare Shaw's third collection isn't one she chose herself, but one which chose her: the flooded valley and the ruined home. The 2015 floods in Britain left whole swathes of the country submerged, including her home town. Flood offers an eye-witness account of those events, from rainfall to rescue, but ripples out from there. Intimately interwoven with the breakdown of a relationship, flooding serves as a powerful metaphor for wider experiences of loss, destruction and recovery. Testifying equally to the forces that destroy us and save us, flood runs through the book in different forms - bereavement and trauma, the Savile scandal, life in an asylum. Yet ultimately, this is a story of one life as it is unravelled and rebuilt, written from the heart and from the North, in a language as dangerous and sustaining as water.Trade ReviewCaught directly in the deluge’s rising tide, Shaw is a witness who gives incantatory evidence of poetry’s power to define, rather than simply describe, the existential pain of being caught helpless in maelstroms both external and psychological. -- Steve Whitaker * Yorkshire Times *

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Book SynopsisStates of Happiness, Suzanne Batty’s second full-length collection, begins with an extended sequence written in memory of her twin sister. This explores their relationship from shared birth to her twin’s early death from Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare degenerative disease. Suzanne Batty’s gifts of empathy and imagination combine to produce a profoundly moving elegy telling the hidden story of growing up as the “well” twin and exploring the meaning of illness and wellness in the light of her own experiences. The collection as a whole extends her range and probes more deeply her primary concerns - the uncertainty and necessity of love and the drive to find meaning and healing through the medium of language. The search for states of happiness, no matter how fleeting, is at the heart of this collection. These are poems which move from the everyday to the visionary, in which the physical world reflects changing emotional and perceptual states. Anarchic and sensuous, they fearlessly encounter both beauty and darkness, enabling a new and deeper connection with the world.Trade ReviewSuzanne Batty’s States of Happiness is an extraordinary collection that explores mental anguish. It begins with a complex sequence of poems in memory of her twin sister, who died of a rare degenerative disease. Though the book is dark and disturbing, it is also filled with chinks of light. The poems are as compelling as any thriller and full of insight and empathy. -- Jackie Kay * The Guardian (Books of the Year 2018) *Reading these tour-de-force poems is to encounter shadow-wonders and brilliant terrors, often drawn from the molten core of childhood, its fury and rue. Here is extraordinary witness in poems that recall the work of Janet Frame in their confronting both of mental anguish and the transformations that are the hard won and healing reward for the descent into such perilous depths. States of Happiness is distinguished by its implacable grace. It invites us ‘"to lie down in Samuel Beckett’s boat, your arms full of lilies". -- Penelope Shuttle

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Book SynopsisRuth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966, and her retrospective, New & Collected Poems, in 2010. Her poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. Her poems ‘give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events’ (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. She has always drawn on a wide range of subject-matter, yet the arc of her attention has shifted in her later work, the meaning and effect of the passage of time becoming more central and fascinating as she ages. Written during her 80s, the poems of Somewhere Else Entirely are shadowed by the death of her husband Alan Sillitoe. The book also includes several short pieces of prose, memoirs of childhood years spent in the USA: firstly, those from zero to five years old, then a group about the ages between 10 and 15, during the Second World War, when their mother took her and her brother Harry back to their American birthplace.Trade ReviewHer New & Collected Poems, representing half a century's work, asks us to read her writing life as a journey that never really ends, even with publication of a monumental achievement...an extraordinary maturity of voice and vision. The essential continuity of her work is immediately striking; the poems affirm her own sense of poetry (and life) as a constant happening, the past a perpetual present.' – Fran Brearton, GuardianTable of Contents11 Meditations on Yellow 12 Late Spring Evening in the Suburbs 14 The Ides of March 16 The Motorway 17 In the Square 17 i Snowdrops 18 ii The Choice 19 Oxygen Mask 20 Alan’s Jacket 21 Somewhere Else Entirely 22 A Meeting with My Dead 23 Froth 24 Sand 25 Torsion 26 Numinous 27 Magic 28 Empty Space 29 Regret 30 Wonderful 31 The Red Shirt 32 Blind Love 33 Inside a Yellow Laburnum Tent… 34 Chestnut in Spring 35 Chestnut 36 The Playground 37 Ladbroke Square Notes 38 The Jungle 39 The Log 40 Westward Streaming Cloud 41 Venus 42 Coquillage 43 Hunter’s Moon 44 At the Allotment 45 Ars Anatomica 46 Aloe 47 World Events 48 Time and Function 49 Timeless Waters 50 Continuation 51 The Next Station 52 Petulant 53 The Poet’s Funeral 54 Daisy 55 Thought-forms 56 Underground 57 At Baker Street Underground Station 58 Elementary 59 A Republican Tale 60 Floor-walker 62 Male and Female Created He Them 63 What Ails Thee, Santa? 64 Madame Lavitte 65 Three Men 68 …only then 69 Them 70 The Mother 71 The Difference 72 Art and Action 73 New Year Wish 77 A Living Creature 78 Language 79 Tomato 81 The Grand Concourse 83 Tightrope Walkers 85 Marranos 87 My First Library 90 The Scratch 91 Goldenrod 93 The Dove Dress 95 Rover 98 The Graduation Dress 100 Malted Milk

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Book SynopsisThe Gaelic Garden of the Dead is three Books of the Dead bound as one. This trilogy comprises an alphabet of trees, ten dream pattern poems and thirty-five death sonnets deconstructed to Mary Queen of Scots. Saturated with the languages of arboreal myth, magic and folklore in Gaelic culture, the first book, The Gaelic Garden of the Dead, is a forest quartet whose letters enunciate the imagery of their own form and function, drawing on the traditional Scots Gaelic alphabet of trees. Among reflex-men and co-walkers are corpse measuring aspen rods, the pine hanging tree and the poison yew. As a meta-narrative of ecological preservation and a comment on ancient language culture, The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is a grove of observation: ‘Love’s eyes are colourless: a motive for moving through underworlds.’ A Crisis of Dream, the middle book, is a sequence of ten dream diagrams. Many of the dreams delineated in the second book inform other parts of the trilogy. The third book, In the End Is My Beginning: 35 Destroyed Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots, consists of thirty-five Petrarchan sonnets for each of the steps Marie Stuart descended to execution. Composed on the anniversary of her death at Fotheringhay, the sonnets were then chewed for the fifteen minutes her lips were said to move after decapitation. Their delicate reconstruction becomes a moving meditation on Mary’s brutal demise: ‘Once, my heart had a skeleton.’Trade ReviewMacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer bite. Blood-boltered, thrawn and unco, her work is a Samhain of unexorcised historical memory, ventriloquised with the ‘cognition of bone’. Here the blasted landscapes of the pre-forgotten present give way to the richer patternings of the tree alphabet, all under the sovereignty of our highland Orpheus, the executed Mary Queen of Scots. Not since Sorley MacLean hymned the woods of Raasay have the ghosts of the Gaelic past bestrode the present more imperiously. -- David Wheatley"Violent and formal" – the phrase is John Berryman’s – in a language both lupercal and arboreal, MacGillivray’s The Gaelic Garden of the Dead is magnificent. It is neither violent or formal for its own sake, but rebels against complacent, lyrical histories in voices compressed to a haunting and haunted diamond precision. What vivid strangeness, for instance, to hear again the unsung recusant poet, Mary Queen of Scots, in our secular millennium? The chromatic lines balance splendidly on the razor-edge between imaginary and real time, making her a high modernist in the tradition of her great voice-walkers and forebears Burns, Scott, and MacDiarmid. You are holding in your hands a spell of sibylline leaves -- Ishion HutchinsonOcculted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. A sequence of cards dealt in the wake of shamanic seizures that happen, and happen again, only because the poet insists on their ghostly witness. Here are songs of fierce tenderness and subtle cruelty. They sting in salt like a Highland curse. I relish every breath of the fall and crush. -- Iain SinclairTable of ContentsThe Gaelic Garden of the Dead 7 A Crisis of Dream 55 In My End Is My Beginning 79 Acknowledgements 155

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Book SynopsisJen Campbell’s first collection The Girl Aquarium explores the realm of rotten fairy tales, the possession of body and the definition of beauty. Weaving between whispered science and circus, she turns a cracked mirror on society and asks who gets to control the twisted tales hiding in the wings. Semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category) Shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019Trade ReviewPoetry of innocence and wonder. Poetry of darkness and deformation. The poems about girlhood experiences are daringly original. -- Daljit NagraThese poems push and pull you, making strange bedfellows of butchery, freaks, and the inner lives of girls. Her roller-coaster of vivid images threaten to tear the paper. -- Melissa Lee-HoughtonI am impressed by the boldness, close to wildness, of Jen Campbell’s imagination. As well as being fascinated, I take her very seriously. -- Christopher ReidThis blistering poetry collection explores showmanship, the so-called freak industry, fairytales and spectacle – and, in fact, it doesn’t so much unpick these things as smash them to pieces and make them new… I love so much about it: how it kicks against tropes of disfigurement, how science jostles against fantastical circus, how it explores the way in which girls’ bodies can be sites of both self-discovery and exploitation. It is defiant, bold, brilliant. As the penultimate poem states, “Smash this circus to the ground. -- Elizabeth Macneal * The Guardian (Top ten books about circuses and spectacle – No 2: The Girl Aquarium) *Table of ContentsI 10 Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 11 #1 12 Girl Lunar 13 The Exorcism of the North Sea 14 Memories of Your Sister in a Full Body Wetsuit 16 Appendix 17 Movement 18 The Girl Aquarium 20 Half-full 21 Etymology 22 What he did can be found in Genesis 23 Luminiferous Aether 24 I wish to tell you body parts 27 The Magician’s Daughter 28 The Chicken, the Egg and My Sister 29 The Patron Saints of Animals II 32 Hero 33 Miss Eliza’s Skeleton Factory 34 The Doll Hospital 36 The Bear 37 The Angel of the North 38 Swimmin 39 Birdlasses 40 Netted 42 Merlasses 43 Small Infinities 45 A Song of Herself 46 Angel Metal 47 On Crucifixion 48 The Art of Saving Other People 49 Orange Brain. Flowered Brain. III 52 Hello, Dark 54 Butterfly Dresses at the Westminster Aquarium (1880) 55 What the Bearded Lady Told Me 56 I Heard She Had a Strawberry Heart 57 The Glow-worm Chasers 58 Kitchen 59 How to Weigh Nothing 60 In Fields She Wasn’t Scarin Crows 61 On Display at the Hunterian Museum 62 The Woman’s Private Looking-glass 64 The Day We Ran Away from the Circus 71 Biographical note

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Book SynopsisSpiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).Trade Review'There is so much history in Harry Clifton's poems, so much geography, landscape, cityscape, repeopled precincts of the imagination, so much human drama and comedy; so many people, mythic, unlikely and hauntingly real. And all of it is limned with a masterful formal dexterity and an apparently limitless cultural curiosity' – C.K. Williams.; 'The poems begin with something seen, remembered, or suddenly known, or a melancholy feeling about time passing, or complex emotions about love, and then they take a longer view, or hold their breath while a new tone, filled with sonorous risk and odd wisdom slowly seeps into an end-line of a stanza or a new section of a poem… There are moments when you hold your breath… and you sit up in pure delight… there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece. It displays Clifton’s reticence and technical skill against the need to let the poem soar into a truth that emerges from the gap between the words, and then it allows the words themselves to glide up and out in all their hushed and controlled beauty' - Colm Tóibín, Irish Times on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.; `His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism… His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God…dreams of becoming flesh again… an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space’ – Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times on Secular Eden.Table of Contents9 To the Next Generation 10 Redesdale Estate, 1956 12 Endgame 14 The Accursed Questions 15 After Mao 16 Across the River 17 Ruins 19 Daytime Sleeper 21 The Egg-wife 22 Therese and the Jug 24 Before Christ 25 A Flight into Egypt 26 Pity and Terror 28 Art, Children and Death 29 Disfavour 31 The Stage-door 32 The Achill Years 34 Horace 35 The Bible as Literature 37 At Racquets 38 The Pit 40 Wreckfish 42 The Dry-souled Man 44 Trance 46 Auden in Shanghai 47 Anabasis 49 from Red Earth Sequence 54 Zhoukoudian 56 Come and See Us Sometime 57 To the Philippians 58 Toronto Suite 59 Ballinafull, 3 July 2014 60 Death’s Door 61 Goodbye to China

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Book SynopsisFor half a century of ever-broadening vision, award-winning poet Harry Clifton has addressed what the Irish Times calls ‘his large concerns and his angular relationship to Ireland, one that produces extraordinary verbal and emotional effects’. His latest book is a quest, through origin and migration, South America to the North of Ireland, Khao I Dang refugee camp to Glasnevin graveyard, for a lost maternal ground. Harry Clifton has published ten other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014), Portobello Sonnets (2017) and Herod’s Dispensations (2019).Trade ReviewSoul, song and formal necessity, Clifton has all three – he is one of the poets who matter. -- Derek MahonThe poems begin with something seen, remembered, or suddenly known, or a melancholy feeling about time passing, or complex emotions about love, and then they take a longer view, or hold their breath while a new tone, filled with sonorous risk and odd wisdom slowly seeps into an end-line of a stanza or a new section of a poem… There are moments when you hold your breath… and you sit up in pure delight… there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece. It displays Clifton’s reticence and technical skill against the need to let the poem soar into a truth that emerges from the gap between the words, and then it allows the words themselves to glide up and out in all their hushed and controlled beauty. -- Colm Tóibín * The Irish Times, on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass *What I love about Harry's work is that he's an outsider... Much like Joyce, he's one of these people who writes about Ireland with the great insight that only a sense of self-exile can bring. With this new collection, Herod's Dispensations, he's talking about a creative rebirth brought on by a trip to China, but he's also talking about the ageing process and about coming back to Dublin to settle. -- Jessica Traynor * RTE Radio 1's Arena (Irish Poetry books of 2019), on Herod's Dispensations *Table of ContentsPART ONE i.m. Dorothy Francesca Brandon Clifton, 1928–2019 11 A Ship Came from Valparaiso 12 Chile 13 To the Engineer Herbert Ashe 15 Sin-eater 16 Neruda 17 Rapa Nui 18 The Widow Transitito 19 Stepmother 21 Woman’s Home Companion 22 The Zeal of the Convert 24 What a Boy Should Know 25 Atacama Clothes-dump 26 Mother and Son 27 Whatever It Is 28 A Woman Drives Across Ireland 30 A House Called Stormy Weather 32 The Aching Void 33 Goodnight Antofagasta 35 White City PART TWO 39 Glasnevin Clay 42 Gainor Crist 43 The Has-beens 45 Going Feral 46 Alice 48 Staten Island Ferry 49 Harvard Yard 50 The Fur Trade 52 The Gig with the Golden Microphone 54 On Ventry Strand 55 Amergin 57 Nafooey 59 The Salmon Cages 61 Radio Silence 62 After the Barbarians 64 Inscape PART THREE i.m. Mary Bridget McKavanagh Madden, 1925–2014 69 The Felling 72 In Brontë Country 73 Spinsters 74 Notes for a Townland 75 Honesty 76 The Decoys 77 The Sweep 78 Jericho 80 The Place of the Stonings 81 The Pure Source 83 Diatomite 84 The Ulster Cycle 86 Toome 88 Germinal 90 Praeger 91 The Earliest Breakfast in Northern Ireland 92 At the Grave of Seamus Heaney

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Book SynopsisAn Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. Helen Ivory’s new collection The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with ‘Housewife Psychosis’ recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.Trade ReviewHelen Ivory creates a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony and disquiet. She possesses a strongly-grounded narrative voice which, combined with her dextrous transformative takes both on reality and on what lies beyond reality’s surface, puts one in mind of the darker side of Stevie Smith who said that poetry 's a strong explosion in the sky'. -- Penelope ShuttleA direct approach, via deep folklore and dream imagery, to the conundrum of being a woman…in keeping with what I think we mean when we say 'women’s writing'. This book is mischievously dark, rich with anti-logic and harnessed to the power of something we used to call magic. -- Katy Evans-Bush * on Waiting for Bluebeard *She is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating stunning images with an economy of means…Ivory has established an eerily engaging style. Her poems are like mobiles suspended on invisible threads, charming to watch as they seem to spin by themselves in the air, but capable of administering more than a paper cut on the sensibility of the reader. -- James Sutherland-SmithTable of Contents9 Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Sorceress to Live 10 All the Suckling Imps 12 The Kept House 13 Curse 14 Wunderkammer with Weighing Scales and Hospital Bed 15 Beggar Dark 16 Wunderkammer with Black Coffee and Ghost Moth 17 Wunderkammer with Escher Stairs and Cheshire Cat 18 Housewife Psychosis 20 The Fainting Room 22 The Little Venus 23 Cunning 24 Dissecting Venus 25 Stripped 26 Baba Yaga No Longer Reads the News 27 Poppet 28 By Water 29 Female Casebook 6 30 Chair 31 The Parlour Maid 32 Labourer’s Wife 33 The Elevation 34 Walking Backwards 35 Falling 36 Farmer’s Wife 37 Stillborn 38 The Boatman’s Wife 39 The Housekeeper 40 Wunderkammer with Needle Girl and Tool Kit 41 The Dolls’ House Mysteries 43 Doll Hospital at the Top of the Hill 44 Wunderkammer with St Dymphna Tea Towel 45 The Reformed Woman 46 Wunderkammer with Homestead and Aeolian Harp 47 Ordeal by Water 48 Wunderkammer with Ophelia and Hospital Bath 49 Wunderkammer with Glass Plate Photograph 50 Besom 51 Selling the Wind 52 The Hanged Woman Addresses The Reverend Heinrich Kramer 53 Bitch 54 Scold’s Bridle 55 Hellish Nell 56 Six Signs You Might Be a Slattern 57 The Goddess Gets Her Close-Up 58 Pygmalion 59 Anger in Ladies &c 60 Vessel 63 Notes

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Book SynopsisIncendiary Art confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men. Dynamic sequences, including a compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, Patricia Smith reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal, visionary book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history now. Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 2018 NAACP Image Award, Incendiary Art was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.Trade ReviewIncendiary Art is the fire this time. An epic in five movements where history becomes tragedy, becomes farce, becomes fable. Where the reader becomes complicit, where outcomes burn into forgotten memories, and where nobody gets off the hook. -- Marlon JamesAs with Smith’s previous books, one encounters an urgent voice on the page that is exuberant, sharp, and questing in its search for understanding of the fatalities that besiege black life in America. The imaginative qualities of these poems and others are what make them captivating. She is a poet of immense originality, and these poems are a testament to her powers. -- Major JacksonPatricia Smith is a masterful poet, performer, and pundit. And while her chosen field is the form and grace of language, her gift to the world that orbits the Black experience is truth. -- Walter MosleyTable of ContentsI. Incendiary That Chile Emmett in That Casket Enigma of the Shadowbox Swine Incendiary Art BlessBlessed Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985 Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure The Then Where Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968 Reemergence of the Noose Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure ReBirthday Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963 Runaway 10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure Hey, who you got in here? Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992 Black, Poured Directly into the Wound No Wound of Exit Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921 See What Happen When You Don't Be Careful Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014 XXXL Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure How to Bust into a Black Man's House and Take a Boy Out II. When Black Men Drown Their Daughters The Five Stages of Drowning Sentencing Why the Verdict Just Don't Sound Right; or, The Bobbing Baby Blues This is no movie On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers Meanwhile, the Mother When Black Men Drown Their Daughters Blurred Quotient and Theory III. Accidental Sagas of the Accidental Saint The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After IV. Shooting into the Mirror Sometimes Elegy The First 23 Minutes of the First Day Without Requiem And He Stays Dead Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure Incendiary Art: The Body Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisWhen she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'. An encouraging example to all late developers, this particular bird's voice took its time: she didn't become a poet until she was 45. But these examples of her very earliest work show the latent mastery and the rapid development of the craft that would bring her wide critical acclaim and an affectionate general readership. The mysteries of the trade gradually reveal themselves as rooted in a wide and uncensored range of subject-matter, a life-time's love of words, and an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of form and voice. Recognising her role so late, she was a woman in a hurry; there wasn't time for self-consciousness or grandiose notions of 'vocation'. 'A poet,' she said, 'is a smuggler. He imports things clandestinely which are not supposed to have got through the customs.' Poetry 'happened to me', she would say. Her job? To listen, to pass it on.Trade ReviewThe peerless U.A. Fanthorpe roots herself in the very earth of English poetry, connecting herself to Hughes and Browning, but also and more pertinently to the real experience of English living so clear-eyed and so, well completely poetic. -- Stephen FryU.A. Fanthorpe is an extraordinary poet, one of the best of our 20th and 21st centuries. So quietly that we didn't notice what was happening, her poetry changed the way we see, the way we write. -- Gillian ClarkeU.A. possessed an endearing patriotism that was founded lastingly on love, not shakily on superiority. All her poems, in fact, were sourced in love. She could make the difficult accessible and accessible complex. She had not a smidgeon of pomposity or ego or self-regard. Indeed, if she had a fault as a poet, that fault was a closet virtue – modesty. She would have demurred herself, but U.A. Fanthorpe exerted a great influence on contemporary poetry. -- Carol Ann DuffyTable of Contents7 Introduction by R.V. Bailey 19 A confused noise within 21 A funny set up 22 A high wind 23 A marriage 24 Administrator 25 All Souls 26 An honest enquiry 27 Apology for clarity 28 At Cadbury 30 Boarding kennels 31 Complaints Department 32 Consultant’s holiday 33 Crab 34 Cured depressive 35 Defeated 36 Demonstration of leuco-coagulation treatment to a conference of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists 38 Diagnosis 39 Durdham Down 40 Eavesdropper 41 Fairy-tale 42 For Sappho 43 From a bestiary 45 Gay Christians 46 George Herbert’s church at Bemerton 47 Gingerbread maker 48 Headmistress 49 House-hunting 50 In-patients 51 Infidelity 53 Introducing… 55 Job description: poet 56 Linguist 57 Management committee 58 Meeting at night 59 Miss Morris 60 Misunderstood 61 November in Bristol 62 O and M study: the boatman 65 Obsessive’s song 66 On a dead social worker 67 On behalf of Chaos 68 Paper friends 69 Passer-by 70 Phoenix 71 Playtime 72 Poem for temps 73 Problem picture 74 Rites de passage 75 Rodmell churchyard 76 Sexual delinquent 77 Sir 78 Song of the flea 79 Swifts 80 T-group 81 The bowl of roses 82 The brides of Christ 84 The golden girls 85 The head housemaid tells the receptionist a joke 87 The receptionist 88 This quiet little Welshwoman 89 To the Holy Ghost 90 Typist 91 Wise children 93 Woman’s world 94 Writer’s garden

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Book SynopsisTony Hoagland's poems interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. His new poems are no less observant of the human and the worldly, no less sceptical, and no less amusing, but they have drifted toward the greater depths of open emotion. Over six collections, Hoagland’s poetry has become bigger, more tender, and more encompassing. The poems in Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God turn his clear-eyed vision toward the hidden spaces – and spaciousness – in the human predicament. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge. This UK edition of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God also includes additional poems from another recent US collection of his poetry, Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017).Trade ReviewThe writing is classic Hoagland: accessible and conversational, sometimes humorous, as he scrutinises everything from a book he's reading to mortality and the emotions that arise when he thinks of the music of Leonard Cohen while sitting in a hospital waiting room... The work raises important questions 'about the hazards of playing at innocence', why our culture can't seem to make progress and why no one seems to recognise the impending environmental crisis. * The Washington Post *He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"…Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield…making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don’t…For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don’t notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties. -- Henry Shukman * Poetry London *Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now – the present that we’re already homesick for. -- Marie HoweTable of ContentsI 13 Entangle 15 A Walk around the Property 16 The Romance of the Tree 17 Happy and Free 18 Which Would You Prefer, a Story or an Explanation? 19 Nobility 20 No Thank You 22 Proof of Life 23 Distant Regard 25 Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God II 29 In the Waiting Room with Leonard Cohen 31 Ten Questions for the New Age 33 Ten Reasons We Cannot Seem to Make Progress 34 Epistle of Momentary Generosity 35 A Short History of Modern Art 37 Theater Piece 39 Couture 40 An Ordinary Night in Athens, Ohio 41 Inexhaustible Resource 42 Achilles 43 Examples of Justice 44 Better Than Expected III 47 The Truth 48 Frog Song 49 Scotch Tape 50 Playboy 52 Dinner Guest· 53 Rain-father 55 Moment in the Conversation 57 Marriage Song 58 Trying to Keep You Happy · 59 Taking My Medicine 60 The Third Dimension 62 The Classics IV 65 Upward 67 Good People 69 Cause of Death: Fox News 71 Real Estate 72 Legend · 73 Data Rain 74 Confusion of Privilege 75 Hope 76 I Have Good News 78 Into the Mystery V from RECENT CHANGES IN THE VERNACULAR 81 Questions of Influence 83 What They Told Me at the Boys’ Club in Gainesville 85 Noon at the Gym 86 The Age of Iron 88 Maybe a Hero Is Crossing the Mountains 90 Ken, Don’t Go to Meet the Ex-Girlfriend 92 Butter 94 Empire

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