Poetry Books

Book SynopsisPlatinum Blonde is Phoebe Stuckes’ debut collection. Whether wildly or wryly funny, each poem presents an episode in the up-and-down life of the wise-cracking party girl. On the surface, this is a world of dancefloors and bathrooms, glitter and girls, love and disappointment, but beneath the laughter and antics these are self-questioning poems. Poems about self-belief, self-image, vulnerability and insecurity, loneliness, trauma and survival. Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019.Trade ReviewThe poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: “This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker.” And “Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself.” Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You’re going to love this book. -- Kim AddonizioPhoebe Stuckes’s Platinum Blonde is a relentless and relentlessly alive exploration of human interactions and very human desire, conveyed with a formal virtuosity and a real sense of the seduction of the imagination that is truly captivating. -- Ahren Warner * Gregory Awards judge's comment *While most artists merely hold up a mirror to the world, Phoebe Stuckes is not afraid to shake the whole damn thing while doing so. -- Phil JupitusTable of Contents9 Bleach 10 Carrie (1976) 11 Supermoon 12 Three spells 13 Monologue 14 Platinum Blonde 15 Bad Girls Club 16 Kiss me quick 17 Hell is a bus full of the men I’ve unsuccessfully tried to love 18 Advice for Girls 19 Sugar 20 Marshmallows 21 Blood 22 Stronger than me 23 Cassandra 28 Gold Hoop Earrings 29 Forgiveness 30 Why does he do that 31 Fear 32 Wolfish 33 Home 34 Blues 35 $$$ 36 Attempt 37 Look at me now 39 Fox 40 Disco 41 Bronski Beat 42 Romance 43 Sun Sign 44 Scorpion 45 Sext 46 BDSM 47 How to get over it 48 Proposal 49 Ghosts 50 Wet 51 Dinner 52 A good man is a humane mouse-trap 53 Kissing a girl in front of a Salvation Army church 54 Daughter 55 Thus I became a heart-eater 56 Purple Heart 57 Francesca Woodman 58 Pangea 59 Poem in which I leave and don’t come back 60 Lying 61 Is this thing on? 62 Confessional 63 Mad Chicks Cool

Read more less

Book SynopsisAoife Lyall’s debut collection Mother, Nature explores the tragic and tender experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood, from ante-natal complications and the devastating pain of miscarriage to the overwhelming joy of healthy delivery and normal infancy. Born and raised in Dublin, Aoife Lyall now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Shortlisted for the Hennessy New Writing Awards in 2016 and 2018, her work has appeared in many literary magazines.Trade ReviewThere are poems in this collection that knocked me clean to the ground, as others offered me a warm hand up and others still, which stroked my backbone as I sobbed. The subject is crucial, but it's the beauty of the poems which hold it all together. 'By law she carries you' is a line that I will never get out of my skin. * Hollie McNish *Here’s a debut collection with a voice that is very much its own, and a way of writing that is subtly daring. These poems are staggeringly tender. They are open, vulnerable and emotionally raw – and with this, they are poetically precise, exactly crafted gems. These are poems that want to give to the reader – my advice is to open this book and let them. -- Niall CampbellIn Aoife Lyall's beautiful, intimate debut collection, poignant and heart-rending personal experience nestles beside profound love and hard-earned wisdom. -- Helen SedgwickTable of Contents9 Prefatory note 13 Sounds of that day 14 Ubi Sunt 15 Hospital Canteen 16 The grave diggers 17 No flowers: by request 18 Haunted 19 Month’s Mind 20 Octopus 21 Silent Movie 22 Your name 23 Starry Night 24 Hermit Crab 25 Vaudeville 26 Easter Sunday 27 Epithalamion 28 Labour 29 After birth 30 Epidural 31 Treasure island 32 Syzygy 33 Caledonian sleeper 34 Ships in the night 35 Minute and far away 36 Soft spot 37 Fully Comp 38 Silt 39 Saturn 40 equilibrium (noun) 41 Aqua vitae 42 ‘Origami…’ 43 Sacrum 44 Conditions of Sale 45 Autumn 46 Trapeze 47 3oz 48 Seabed 49 Ithaca 50 Picking oakum 51 Loch Ness 52 Phonograph 53 Lighthouse 54 Today is a day for other people’s stories 55 Baby blanket 56 Marlfield House 57 The Wanderers 58 The ducks 59 Devoted 60 On the cusp 61 Absolution 62 While the others are away 63 Squall 64 Nita, Sri Lanka, 2005 65 Brough of Birsay, Orkney 66 Mother, Nature 67 Hatchling 68 Tree frog 69 Our neck of the woods 70 Cuckoo 71 Maternity leave 73 Acrania 77 Notes 79 Acknowledgements

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Passport to Here and There Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana. Her ninth collection of adult poems and her fourth book with Bloodaxe, Passport to Here and There makes a significant contribution both to Caribbean and to British poetry. Our Demerara voices rising and falling growing more and more golden like a canefield's metamorphosis from shoots into sugar -- the crystal memory shared with a river… Passport to Here and There is Grace Nichols's third new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and The Insomnia Poems (2017). It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.Trade ReviewTo write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers. Grace Nichols in this new collection of her work succeeds in revisiting her Guyana past to make poems of lightness and diction and depth of feeling. The Demerara region takes on heraldic relevance and the people in it, principally her parents, along with flora and fauna, populate a landscape of metaphoric and allegorical longing. Her simple diction belies a complex emotional intellect and a feel for the balance of a line, its weightlessness in collusion with a depth of feeling. This may be Grace Nichols at her best, in poems that chime with bright imagery and lasting phrasing worthy of chanting to undermine and contradict, if not bringing down the authoritarian edifices of our dangerous times. -- Fred D'AguiarNot only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean. -- Gwendolyn BrooksGrace Nichols has wit, acidity, tenderness, any number of gifts at her disposal. -- Jeanette WintersonFrom her first collection in 1983, I Is a Long Memoried Woman, she has been a strong presence in the linguistic interweave between the Caribbean and the UK. Her poetry and prose move easily between the poised world of Western culture, Old World history and myth, and the gritty rhythms of the Caribbean everyday… There is wit, irony and passion…real poise. -- Michelene Wandor * Poetry Review *Table of Contents9 Preface Rites of passage 14 If I Were to Meet 16 Litany 17 Picture My Father 18 Greensleeves 19 The Shilling and the Princess 20 Joy-riders 21 Ole Higue 22 Masquerade 23 Against the Tradewinds 24 Confirmation 25 A Chant for Mater 26 Sweet Fifteen 27 Spirit-rising 30 Georgetown Romance In the shade of a London plane tree 32 Viewing the Thames 33 In the Shade of a London Plane Tree 34 O Tea 35 Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November 36 Robin Redbreast 36 Nuptial on Brighton Beach 37 The Hills in Our Memory 38 Lewes Night Out 39 Tea with Demerara Sugar 40 Blackberrying Black Woman 41 Ode to a Daffodil 42 Battle 43 This Destiny Back-homing: Georgetown snapshot sonnets 47 Landing 48 Reunion 49 Where Blue Sea Turns 50 Bourda 51 Where My Childhood Left Him 52 El Hombre del Oro 53 From the Balcony of Eldorado 54 Price I Pay 55 In the Fleeting Now 56 Like an Heiress 57 Eldorado 58 Sorry 59 Against My Heart 60 Georgetown Interesting times? 63 Interesting Times? 64 At Stockwell Tube 65 In Praise of Surgeons 66 Kittitian Girl 67 Faith 68 Helen of the Gables 69 To Mark Your Passing 71 A Sacrament of Words 72 Lost in Translation 73 Apple and Mango 74 Rivers 75 Dawn Wind 76 Atlantic 80 Biographical note

Read more less

Book SynopsisWar of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. IImmensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English translation – published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and by New Directions in the US – longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals’, written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova’s assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of ‘weird’ ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.Table of Contents7 Acknowledgements 9 Translator’s foreword from SPOLIA (2015) 21 Spolia 45 War of the Beasts and the Animals from KIREEVSKY (2012) from Girls, Singing 69 Young aeronauts, floating to land… 70 In the white white sky… 71 Mother and Father didn’t know him… 73 What is that sweeper, mother… 75 A train runs right across Russia… 76 Over the field the guns howled… 77 Empty featherbeds cooling… 78 Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport… 79 Running, running… 80 By the church’s black fence Kireevsky 81 1. The light swells and pulses at the garden gate… 82 2. In the village, in the field, in the forest… 83 3. Tear tears along, chasing tear, and kicks it… 84 4. My lady neighbour drives out on black sables… 85 5. Where the dance was shaped in flame… 86 6. Chorus line, on our feet… 87 7. You my gifts, o my gifts… 88 8. Who guards our picket fences, our blooming hedges… 89 9. A deer, a deer stood in that place… 90 10. The last songs are assembling… from Underground Pathephone 91 Stop, don’t look, come close… 92 Don’t wait for us, my darling… Poems from earlier collections 97 Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof 100 (as they must) 102 Fish The Body Returns (2018) 107 The Body Returns

Read more less

Book SynopsisSeán Ó Ríordáin (1916-77) was the most important and most influential Irish-language poet of modern times. He revitalised poetry in Irish, combining the world of Irish literature with that of modern English and European literature, thus adding to the Irish tradition from the other side. His poems ‘seek to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and the place of the individual in a universe without meaning’ (Gearóid Denvir). Many of Ó Ríordáin’s poems came out of his struggle with the isolation, guilt and loneliness of life in mid-century Catholic Ireland experienced in Cork, the native locale also of the poet Greg Delanty, translator of Apathy Is Out. Ó Ríordáin’s poems have been translated by many poets, but until now no single writer has translated the majority of the poems. This collection gives a much more unified sense of Ó Ríordáin’s work, catching the poetry’s verve, playfulness and range and also ‘the music you still hear in Munster,/even in places where it has gone under’. It includes the dark, sorrowful poems Ó Ríordáin has usually represented with in anthologies but also poems of exuberance and celebration, notably ‘Tulyar’, one of the funniest satirical critiques of the Irish Church’s attitude to sex which matches any similar attack by Patrick Kavanagh or Austin Clarke. Seán Ó Ríordáin renewed poetry in Irish by writing out of the modernist sense of alienation, fragmentation and identity, but he also saw beyond Modernism’s confines to the connective matrix of our world.Table of ContentsClár | Contents 9 Preface 11 Introduction (2005-2017) an Eireaball Spideoige (1952) | from A Robin’s Tail Apologia 20 | 21 Apologia An Dall sa Studio 22 | 23 The Blindman in the Studio An Leigheas 24 | 25 The Cure An Cheist 26 | 27 The Question A Sheanfhilí, Múinídh dom Glao 28 | 29 Old Poets, Teach Me your Call Bacaigh 30 | 31 Beggar An Peaca 32 | 33 The Sin An Doircheacht 34 | 35 Darkness An Stoirm 36 | 37 The Storm Sos 38 | 39 Rest Cláirseach Shean na nGnáthrud 40 | 41 The Old Harp of Ordinary Things Do Dhomhnall Ó Corcora 42 | 43 To Daniel Corkery Adhlacadh mo Mháthar 46 | 47 My Mother’s Burial Na Fathaigh 50 | 51 The Giants Cúl an Tí 54 | 54 Behind the House Malairt 56 | 57 The Swop Cnoc Mellerí 58 | 59 Mount Melleray An Bás 64 | 65 Death Ceol 66 | 67 Music Oileán agus Oileán Eile 68 | 69 An Island and Another Island Saoirse 78 | 79 Freedom Siollabadh 84 | 85 Syllabling an Brosna (1964) | from Kindling A Ghaeilge im Pheannsa 88 | 89 O Irish in My Pen Rian na gCos 90 | 91 Footprints Claustrophobia 94 | 95 Claustrophobia An Feairín 96 | 97 The Maneen Seachtáin 98 | 99 A Week Reo 100 | 101 Cold Snap Na Leamhain 102 | 103 The Moths In Absentia 104 | 105 In Absentia An Moladh 108 | 109 The Praise A Theanga Seo Leath-Liom 110 | 111 O Language Half Mine Fiabhras 112 | 113 Fever Tost 114 | 115 Silence Tulyar 116 | 117 Tulyar An Lacha 118 | 119 The Duck Colm 120 | 121 Colm An Gealt 122 | 123 The Mad Woman Bagairt na Marbh 124 | 125 Dread of the Dead An Dá Ghuth 126 | 127 The Two Voices Soiléireacht 128 | 129 Clarity Catchollú 130 | 131 Catology Duine 132 | 133 People File Arís 134 | 135 Return again an Línte Liombó (1971) | from Limbo Lines Línte Liombó 138 | 139 Limbo Lines Súile Donna 140 | 141 Brown Eyes Ceol Ceantair 142 | 143 Local Music Cloch Scáil 144 | 145 Quartz Stone Aistriú 146 | 147 Transformation Tar Éis Dom É Chur go Tigh na nGadhar 148 | 149 After Sending Him to the Doghouse Solas 150 | 151 Light Bás Beo 152 | 153 Live Death Obair 154 | 155 Work Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim 156 | 157 Apathy Is Out Dom Chairde 158 | 159 To My Friends Mise 160 | 161 Me from Tar Éis mo Bháis (1978) | from After My Death Clónna Uber Alles 164 | 165 Forms, Above All Údar 166 | 167 Author Barra Na hAille, Dún Chaoin, Lúnasa 1970 168 | 169 Clifftop, Dunquin, August 1970 Gaoth Liom Leat 170 | 171 A Dithering Wind 175 Note on the translator

Read more less

Book SynopsisAna Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Over the years, her poetry became symbolic of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian governments. This new translation combines five of her collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry. The poems of Predator Star (1985) and The Architecture of Waves (1990) chronicle a convulsed history and pose the question of how to resist the terror of history. Clock without Hours (2014) marks a return to rhyme, as Blandiana attempts a courageous renovation of traditional verse forms. Her fiercely militant voice – that helped inaugurate the postmodern idiom in Romanian poetry in 1984 – has modulated over time into a new tone of forgiveness and renunciation, expressed in meditations on the fragility and vulnerability of being. She has also written two collections of love poems which rank among the most beautiful in contemporary Romanian poetry – October, November, December (1972) and Variations on a Given Theme (2018) – the second of these composed after the death of her husband, Romulus Rusan, in 2016. A prolific and expansive poet, Ana Blandiana constantly re-invents herself. Her work ultimately reflects on universal issues, on human existence itself in our 21st-century consumer society.Trade ReviewBlandiana 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 *This is a collection that deals with change and its repercussions; the affects that can’t be seen coming and the way that large scale change can utterly de-centralise a person. -- Matt MacDonald * Glasgow Review of Books [on The Sun of Hereafter] *Table of Contents14 Introduction Four poems from the journal Amfiteatru (1984) 39 Children’s Crusade 40 I Believe 41 Limitations 42 Everything Predator Star (1985) 44 Soot 45 White 46 Definition 47 Twins 48 You Move 49 Icon 50 Through the Air 51 He Who Lives 52 Lullaby 53 At the Other End 54 Insomnia Sun 55 Belatedness 56 Inflation of Birds 57 Inward 58 March 25th, 1942 59 If 60 Courage 61 Nec Plus Ultra 62 Amber 63 The Weight of Snow 64 Union 65 Chimes of Ice 66 Shelling 67 How Easy 68 Sky or Earth 69 Exchange 70 On Principle 71 The Spell 73 The Scream 74 Towards the Mountains 75 My Hand 77 Questions 76 The Father 78 Remember 80 Body 81 Wind-blown Star 82 Soothing Song 83 A Blinding Animal 84 41 85 Compromise 86 Continuation 87 Axis 89 Footprints 90 My Eye 91 Outburst 92 Fir Tree Boughs 93 Harvest of Angels 94 The Bell That I Hear 95 Shore 96 Letters 97 Dance 98 Scale with a Single Pan 99 Tale 100 The Number of Birds 101 Wail 102 Surmise The Architecture of Waves (1990) 105 A Trap 106 Architecture in Motion 107 Signal 108 Earthquake 109 Passage 110 My Forehead 111 The Hour 112 Dies ille, dies irae 113 Cold Casting 114 The Path 115 Tableau 116 Of Love 117 Omphalos 118 Worms on the Move 119 Sleep 120 Subject 121 Unseen 122 Hide-and-Seek 123 A Chain 125 Motionless 126 Refrain 128 Systematisation 130 Nameless (1) 131 Witnesses 132 A Hell 133 Also in a Mirror 134 Full Moon 135 Exasperation 136 Beneath the Insults 137 That Old Point 138 To Strike 139 Gara de Nord 140 Plains 141 The Statues 143 Model 144 In Motion 145 One by One 146 Alone 147 Measure 148 In Its Scabbard 149 Molecules of Calcium 150 The Art of Dying 151 Earthly Sounds 152 Fallen from Heaven 153 Helter-skelter 154 Inscription 155 Head Down 156 Through Non-Being 157 A Straight Line 158 Countdown 159 Loneliness 160 A Less Charged Atmosphere 161 The Tomb Unburied 163 More and More 164 Open Bird 165 From Chaos 166 Torn Void 167 Colosseum 168 Clocks on Rails 169 Like Foam 170 Nameless (2) 171 Charred Remains 172 Nameless (3) 173 Rhetoric 174 Like Waves 175 Clio 176 Glue 177 Thermometer 178 Wooden Language 179 Obsession 180 Ballad Clock without Hours (2016) 183 White on White 184 Times 185 Nostalgia for Paradise 186 And So on and So on 187 Pause in Writing 188 Heretic 189 From Mirrors 190 Flow 191 One 192 This Beautiful Time 193 At a Pavement Café 194 Disease 195 Transplanted Church 196 In a Wound 197 Different Languages 198 Similarity 199 Green Icon 200 Silent Film 201 I was afraid 202 Nothing Further 203 That Year 204 Always Led 205 Web 206 My Horses 207 Curved Tiles 208 Symposium 209 Joyce’s Tower 210 Interior 211 Trees 212 In the Shade 213 Beneath the Snow 214 Dissolution 215 The Right to Shade 216 The Mirror within the Mirror 217 Facebook 218 Message 219 River with One Shore 220 Sketches 221 Not Afraid of Loneliness 222 Residues 223 A Game 224 Why? 225 Overdose 226 Mândrămărie Blue 227 Parnassus 228 Question 229 Angels in Their Pockets 230 Final Exam 231 Insectarium 232 An Hourglass without Sand 233 Rape 234 Birches 235 Like Birds 236 Between the Seconds 237 Sonnet 238 Clock without Hours October, November, December (1972) 241 Do you remember the beach? 242 Wait until October comes 243 Bitter Body 244 What Good Is Joy? 245 By the Gliding of the Moon 246 About the Country We Come from 247 I won’t remember any more 248 If we killed one another 250 I fall asleep, you fall asleep 251 Brightness of Death 252 My shadow is afraid 253 The one in me 254 Do I have the right? 255 Swing 256 Alabaster bodies of poplars 257 Two Suns 258 With a Soft Despair 259 While I Talk 260 I Only Have to Wait 261 Mother 262 Light inside Myself 263 Teach Me to Darkly Burn 264 You have no shadow 265 Crowned with poppies 266 You Haven’t Forgotten the Language of Plants 267 Our place 268 You Never See the Butterflies 269 If you don’t want to come back again 270 There was a time when trees had eyes 271 It’s tall and dark in me 272 I was taught 273 Lament in solitude 274 All the Peace in the Universe 275 Among Leaves That Are Almost Cold 276 Couple 278 Without you 279 Why not come back to the trees? 280 You Are the Dream 282 I had just begun to fear 283 Which of Us 284 Sometimes I dream of my body 285 I’m blinkered 286 The fog coming in 287 Alone and Without Any Thoughts 288 Oh Your Body 289 Close your eyes 290 Exile Variations on a Given Theme (2018) 292 I knew it was just a suit 293 I remember wondering once 294 Between the spirit and the body 295 Lately my life seems like a novel by Agatha Christie 296 Time, at times 297 ‘I have a pact with the mirror,’ you said 298 It’s as though we met in a bubble of soap 299 They sway, they sway 300 If there were microphones in houses 301 Without you 302 When I say, ‘to those in their graves’ 303 What if we decided to dream about each other 304 I’m afraid of the darkness 305 I don’t understand 306 ‘Where is the Gentleman?’ the old women asked me 307 What splendour suffering gives us 308 Now I pray to you 309 What is love? 310 It isn’t true that ‘Every Angel terrifies’ 311 I suppose you can also see it now 312 I’ve thought about what I’d like to tell you 313 The leaves are falling… 314 Is it easy to be dead? 315 Voices muffled by leaves 316 Everything begins with death 317 ‘I’d like for us to die together’ 318 Just as unwritten thoughts 319 I often wonder if what you knew here 320 Why won’t the moon let me sleep? 321 Always 322 In the phone, your photographs from spring 323 Nothing stands still 324 Your smile above the TV 325 Just as somewhere in Africa 326 If you feel forced, as I fear 327 Do you remember when you buried the seeds 328 Sleep is as mysterious as a road 329 There is a law – the Babinet-Mayer law 330 I’m not certain you can hear the sound 331 Why instead of darkness 332 We’re alone 333 I don’t know how to pray 334 Every gesture of mine 335 On holidays I feel you closer 336 When I was small 337 They ring and ring 338 All of the questions 339 I’ve read a lot of books 340 Where are you, really? 341 Where do the hours go? 342 New Year’s Eve 343 Light on light 344 Snow! 345 The life in your diaries 346 Perhaps the word love 347 Into the abyss that suddenly opened in the sky 348 You can only die in the present 349 Our parents and grandparents died 350 Do you understand what it means 352 The Translators

Read more less

Book SynopsisJenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong. Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake’s second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award.Trade ReviewThe trajectory between Clake’s debut collection and Museum of Ice Cream is logical but still beautifully unexpected: the linguistic precision and surreal swerves are stronger than ever, but something deepens and resonates as the voice transitions from instructive, to consoling, to lost, often within the same stanza. These are poems of such sadness and grace; fear transfigured by a powerful imagination into endlessly explorable terrains. Not so much to guide as to reach out to you in your own maze of confusion, wonder and dread; which is all I ever really ask of poetry. -- Luke KennardTable of Contents11 Cloud Appreciation Society 12 I would die for you in the best way possible 13 Wooden doll, total being 14 Immersive experience of all the things I want for myself (that are bad for me) 16 Vixen 17 How much longer until I get this out? 18 I wanted Agent Cooper to save my life 20 Sponge cake, pound cake, gateau 21 there is no marine snow here, my friend 22 Self-portrait as the opening of a window on a hot morning 23 Organisational Skills for the Hungry 26 Milk, Strawberry, Sugar 27 The omission is meaningless 28 M’s letters to tumblr 32 Like other women 33 I hid fish in my pockets and forgot about it for days 34 Siesta for Olivia 36 All our problems began with a woman eating 37 On feeling my eggshell heart break 38 Jen’s Sweet Shop 40 i am driving for hours tonight; i didn’t bring snacks 41 I could cry, yes, I could 42 It’s no longer about us, it’s got to be about me 44 Elegy for Balto from the Bottom of a Frozen Lake 46 Quayside of Dogs 47 Self-portrait as a pink dressing room 49 Bread, orange, aura 50 Oyster Delight 52 if you’re near the park, come find me, i’m having a picnic 53 Still life of newspapers folded on a bistro set 54 Sunday roast on a dark wood table 56 I try to make sense of things by standing very close to windows 58 Tell me if you prefer your carrots as sticks or coins and I’ll always remember 59 Garments I have dreamed of but will

Read more less

Book SynopsisDiana Anphimiadi is one of the most widely revered Georgian poets of her generation. Her award-winning work reflects an exceptionally curious mind and glides between classical allusions and surreal imagery. She revivifies ancient myths and tests the reality of our senses against the limits of sense. Boldly inventive, prayers appear alongside recipes, dance lessons next to definitions. Her playful, witty lyricism offers a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday. The poems in this selection have been collaboratively translated into English by the award-winning British poet Jean Sprackland and leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters. A chapbook selection of their translations of Anphimiadi's work, Beginning to Speak, was published in 2018 and praised by Adham Smart in Modern Poetry in Translation for capturing the 'electricity of Anphimiadi’s language' which 'crackles from one poem to the next in Bukia-Peters and Sprackland’s fine translation'. Georgian-English dual language edition. Co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Table of ContentsIntroduction Sleeping Beauty Poet in the Shower Prayer Before Bathing Iphigenia Helen of Troy Eurydice Persephone Medusa Cassiopeia (Three Back to Front Songs) Dance Lessons (3/4 Time) Studies Lesson Silent Writing Pompeii Soul Autism: Beginning to Speak Mute Braille Because Prayer Before Taking Nourishment Retrospective Why I No Longer Write Poems Winter Loss Dogs Bond Gardening for Beginners The Snake in the Yard Centaur etc Lost Upside-Down Immune Deficiency The Trajectory of the Short-Sighted Surrogate The Choice Tears in the Glass Evening Children The Forest Near the Window Exchange of Prisoners Entertainment Orchestra Reaping Song July Fair Copy Endangered The Second Coming About the Authors

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return. What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into its presence – the wisdoms of Anglo-Saxon verse, the metamorphoses of Norse and Celtic myth, the stoicism of classical thought and the far east – unforgettably phrased by a writer who, in the words of the TLS, ‘makes the language of his poetry an event in itself’. Subtly attuned to the rhythms of the turning world, these poems open with the passing of an old life and culminate in the birth of a new one. They bravely work the seam between the present and the past, between destruction and renewal, humanity and our environment, and make Earth House a timeless exploration of our timed encounter with the remarkable lives of our planet. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023, Earth House was Matthew Hollis’s long awaited follow up to Ground Water (2004), shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Award. He is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Award for Biography and Sunday Times Biography of the Year, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022). ‘A quietly magnificent book. Wholly lived. A magnificat in that way. Devoted to the austere and painful truths that poem by poem it discovers and quietly, as ever, magnifies. These poems sound a music like the warming subsong of a blackbird from the bare heart of a winter thorn, a cold cheer, a kindling blues.' – Tim Dee, author of Greenery ‘A magical combination of the delicate and the intense.’ – Julia Blackburn, author of Time Song ‘Enchanting…what good poems.‘ – Ronald Blythe, author of AkenfieldTrade ReviewIt’s taken Matthew Hollis 19 years to produce a successor to his debut collection, Ground Water, but Earth House was worth the wait. Well-nigh elemental in their evocation of time and landscape, the poems can have the effect of making their human protagonists look frail, marginal visitants to an indifferent world. At other times, particularly when Hollis returns to his native East Anglia, they are consummate exercises in psychogeography, where, however ancient the terrain, the people lead the dance. -- D.J. Taylor * The Tablet (Summer Reading) *Some poets take their time. Matthew Hollis’s second collection Earth House arrives this week 19 full years after his acclaimed debut Ground Water. In the meantime, Hollis has written a well received biography of Edward Thomas, whose poetry is a marked influence on his own. Like Thomas, Hollis writes with an unsentimental love of the natural world, in poems where landscapes he knows well are charged with a personal significance that’s often only hinted at. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Daily Telegraph (Poem of the Week) *Matthew Hollis’s Earth House is concerned with the ways our environment both roots and unroots us. Tied to the language, histories and ecology of Ireland and Britain, it is an elemental and expansive collection that builds from death to the birth of new life … If there is transcendence here it is to be found in the attention to the world around us, its nuance and fragility and our intimate connection to it, the 'cleft between the chassis and the sea'. -- Nikolai Duffy * The Tablet *Table of ContentsI 1. Causeway 5 2. The Sea Stick 6 3. Beck 8 4. Wastwater 9 5. A White Hart at Sykeside 10 6. All there ever is 12 7. Call 13 8. Stones 14 9. The Long Snow 21 Lone 22 II 1. Anglia 27 2. Iken 28 3. A Harnser for James 29 4. Winterton Ness 32 5. I will lift up my eyes 34 6. Where narrow water widens 36 7. The Island 37 8. Rooks 38 9. The Staithe 41 Deor 42 III 1. The Blackbird of Spitalfields 47 2. The Diomedes 48 3. Commute 49 4. Losing Time 50 5. Animal 52 6. The Collect 54 7. The Fox Runner 56 8. Leaves 57 9. A Bluebird for Rose 67 Wulf 68 IV 1. West 71 2. A Red Hairband in Iveragh 72 3. Cara 74 4. Four Roads 75 5. Landlock 76 6. The Mansion 78 7. Hedge Bird 79 8. Havener 80 9. Headland 89 Ruin 90 Place notes 93

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis new collection from one of Britain's most innovative poets is an exploration of identity in the face of loss. At its heart is a series of poems about the desolation of miscarriage. These poems try to understand the many different means we use to come closer to articulating, and avoiding, experience. Drawing on the language of comedy, improvisation, drag and clown, Low interrogates humour’s role in enacting the possibility of change. A thought-provoking, irreverent and challenging book, Low exemplifies Chrissy Williams' ability to find 'seriousness in the apparently trivial and ephemeral' (Poetry Review). Chrissy Williams' first collection Bear (Bloodaxe) was one of The Telegraph's 50 Best Books of the Year in 2017. She has also published several pamphlets, one of which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. Low is her second full-length collection).Trade ReviewChrissy Williams is my new favourite poet. -- Luke KennardThere is a profundity and care of phrasing here which is completely persuasive ... [a] sense of wonder and the rare combination of wit and sensitivity that is the hallmark of Williams’s style. -- Tim Dooley * The Poetry Review *Chrissy Williams is opening a new space for British experimental poetry ... with its generosity towards the reader via a light touch and warm experimentalism. -- Marcus Slease * Shearsman *Table of Contents11 on lipsyncing || for || your || life I 14 ! katya ! 15 the / perfect / woman 16 Bobbie Gentry, Shangri-Las, Sonic Youth 19 Tangled 20 poem = sorry 21 Beating Face 22 Signing Off II 24 Joke 25 Invisible Days 26 Voyage to the Copier Room 27 The Average Woman 28 Lamb 29 Making Kim-Joy’s Recipe for Multicoloured Shortbread Buttons 30 Aphra the Destroyer III 32 LIEBE IV 44 O Goat Moon V 48 LA Story 49 Improv 50 Magic Kingdom 51 Improv 52 Moon Illusion 53 Improv 54 At Griffith Observatory 56 Improv 57 Sunset and La Brea 58 Improv 59 Yellow Reflection 60 Improv VI 62 Dimpsy 63 Holdfasts 64 Introduction to Charts 71 Stingray Gambit

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn The Voyage of St Brendan, A.B. Jackson tells the tale of the legendary seafaring Irish abbot in poetry and prose. After burning a book of fantastical stories, Brendan is compelled to sail the ocean with a crew of six monks in a leather-skinned currach; his task, to prove the existence of wonders in the world and create a new book of marvels. Discoveries include Jasconius the island-whale, a troop of Arctic ghosts, a hellmouth of tortured souls, a rock-bound Judas, and the magical castle of the boar-headed Walserands. Although the roots of this legend lie in early Irish tales and the Latin Voyage of Brendan the Abbot of the ninth century, Jackson has taken the 14th-century Middle Dutch version of Brendan’s voyage as the template for this engaging, witty and spirited interpretation, notable for its humour and inventiveness. The book is beautifully illustrated with a series of black and white linocuts by the American artist Kathleen Neeley, one of which features in colour on the cover.Trade ReviewA swirl of animals and monsters and miraculous things, an amazing sea voyage in the way of Coleridge’s Rime and Melville’s Moby-Dick, A.B. Jackson’s imaging of Brendan’s founding myth is a modern fable of the patron saint of whales. Jackson’s exquisitely subtle, uproarious, comical and transcendent work is extraordinarily concise and beautiful. Its words relish and reinvent The Voyage of St Brendan as a Dark Age rollercoaster ride. -- Philip HoareA.B. Jackson’s The Voyage of St Brendan is a feat of seriocomic storytelling. Informed by personal experience at sea in the far north, he uses Old Irish poetic forms while reflecting obliquely on polar exploration. Jackson’s Brendan is not cast in the lone explorer mould: when his brothers doubt, they share uncertainty, as a “composite fog-animal”. This book breaks happily with contemporary confessional trends, and invites us into its weird and gentle fictions. As the sailing saint himself calls out to Judas, “human flesh / deserves a break, some festive tenderness". -- Vahni CapildeoIn revivifying one the most enduring stories of Western Europe, A.B. Jackson has nourished his imagination widely – medieval source texts, the literature of polar exploration, and his own encounters with the sea and with Brendan’s native landscape of West Kerry. Also, crucially, he has reconnected the tale, in its mix of narrative prose and syllabic verse, to its Old Irish roots in Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran). Somewhat akin to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Jackson’s inventive, stylish versions of these sea-wonders are deeply re-imagined in keeping with their traditional sources, while also offering the contemporary reader a beguiling and authentic exposure to the marvellous. -- Maurice RiordanBrendan’s fabulous adventures are told in prose of singing concision and quatrains both measured and elastic. Jackson’s ear is super-fine, accomplishing in words a series of special effects to match those of the big screen. His images gleam, his rhythms and rhymes (“giddy” and “glad eye” my favourite) are jouncing and ingenious, making each poem a pleasure to read and re-read. -- Vidyan RavinthiranOne of the medieval world’s richest legends has been given a remarkable treatment by A.B. Jackson. This is an excellent contribution to the considerable literature on St Brendan. -- Glyn S. BurgessTable of Contents11 Brendan 14 The Burning of the Book 15 The Boat 16 Brendan’s Meditation 17 The Crew 18 Shore Song 19 The Great Fish 22 The Mermayd 23 Thirsting Souls 24 The Coagulated Sea 26 The Cliff-top Monastery 27 Interlude 28 The Rock Saint 29 Hellmouth 32 The Siren 33 The Stolen Bridle 34 Devils’ Mountain 36 Respite 37 Brendan’s Vision 39 Many Fish 40 The Turf Rider 42 Judas 43 Burning Birds 44 Multum Bona Terra 47 The Walserands 48 The Sea Leaf 50 The Sea Serpent 52 A World Below 53 The New Book 54 Home 56 Burial 59 Notes 68 Select bibliography Illustrations by Kathleen Neeley 13 St Brendan 21 Jasconius 31 Hellmouth 46 The Walserands 51 The Sea Serpent 57 Burial

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn exquisite collection from a poet at the peak of her powers, Tishani Doshi's Forward-shortlisted A God at the Door spans time and space, drawing on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to elevate the marginalised. Extending the territory of her zeitgeist collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, these new poems traverse history, from the cosmic to the quotidian. There is a playful spikiness to be found in poems like 'Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us', while others, such as 'I Found a Village and in it Were All Our Missing Women', are fed by rage. As the collection unfolds, there are gem-like poems such as 'I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase' which sparkles on the page with impeccable precision. Later, there are the sharp shocks delivered by two mirrored poems set side by side, 'Microeconomics' and 'Macroeconomics'. Tishani Doshi's poetry bestows power on the powerless, deploys beauty to heal trauma, and enables the voices of the oppressed to be heard with piercing clarity. From flightless birds and witches, to black holes and Marilyn Monroe, A God at the Door illuminates with lines and images that surprise, inflame and dazzle.Trade ReviewMay we always have the music and elegant fury of Tishani Doshi’s poetry. -- Fatima BhuttoI love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi. -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie * New York Times *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 Reads), on Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods *The title poem is a haunting vision of retribution… Doshi’s poem is exceptionally timely, although it was written before the rise of the #MeToo movement. It’s impossible not to cheer the boldness and liberation enacted by much of this book, and to be stirred by its bravery. To paraphrase one interviewer, Doshi is writing the anthems of her generation. -- Sandeep Parmar * The Guardian, on Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods *Table of Contents11 Mandala 12 Pilgrimage 13 Creation Abecedarian 14 The Stormtroopers of My Country 15 My Loneliness Is Not the Same as Your Loneliness 18 A Blue Mormon Finds Herself Among Common Emigrants 20 Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us 22 Every Unbearable Thing 25 Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers 26 Roots 28 In a Dream I Give Birth to a Sumo Wrestler 30 Instructions on Surviving Genocide 37 The Comeback of Speedos 38 Face Exercises for Marionette Lines 39 I Found a Village and in it Were All Our Missing Women 41 Contagion 42 Tree of Life 44 Homage to the Square 46 I Don’t Want to be Remembered by My Last Instagram Post 48 Everyone Has a Wilting Point 50 Tigress Hugs Manchurian Fir 51 Poems Lull us into Safety 52 After a Shooting at a Maternity Clinic in Kabul 54 They Killed Cows. I Killed Them. 59 Cell 60 Self 61 Collective 62 Nation 63 Species 64 Cosmos 67 The Coronapocalypse Will Be Televised 69 Variations on Hippo 72 A Dress is Like a Field 74 Postcard to My Mother-in-Law who at 16 is Chasing Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez 75 Together 76 Many Good & Wonderful Things 78 I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase 79 Bacterium 80 A Possible Explanation as to Why We Mutilate Women & Trees, which Tries to End on a Note of Hope 82 What Mr Frog Running Away from Marilyn Monroe Taught Me About #MeToo 84 Tiger Woman 85 We Will Not Kill You. We’ll Just Shoot You in the Vagina 89 Microeconomics 91 Macroeconomics 92 This May Reach You Either as a Bird or Flower 93 Petard 94 Rotten Grief 96 October Fugue 97 Do Not Go Out in the Storm 100 Listening to Abida Parveen on Loop I Understand Why I Miss Home and Why It Must Be So 102 End-of-Year Epiphany in the Holiday Inn 104 It Has Taken Many Years to See My Body 107 Hope Is the Thing 109 Survival 113 Notes 118 Acknowledgements

Read more less

Book SynopsisFresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies intertwined with passages about major life changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it, reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in his earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in 1956. These are wound around poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval, and life in contemporary England as tracked by a series of dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have been inhabiting. Covid poems run through the collection like a thread holding the book – and indeed the condition of England – together. The thread embraces the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about residual Jewishness experienced as a dialogue with the poet’s late father, as well as a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland. The book ends on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.Trade ReviewA brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history. The judges were impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting. -- Douglas Dunn * Chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize *A major contribution to post-war literature…Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity. -- Anne Stevenson * Poetry Review *Mapping the Delta touches upon nearly every meaningful human experience, every ‘moment’ in a lifespan, from falling in love to losing a parent… Mapping the Delta wears its emotionalism lightly and its beautiful images modestly. Best of all, it carries its wide experience, sweet hope, garrulous humour and wise joyfulness with life-affirming pride: an important corrective when so much else in the world seems dark and devastated. -- Bidisha * The Poetry Review *Table of ContentsFRESH OUT OF THE SKY 1 Waking to the Sea 15 Fresh out of the sky 16 Boarding house 17 A cigarette 18 Waking to the sea 19 Meet the parents 2 London Calling 20 Fairy tale 21 A wasp in the ear 22 Dream house 23 Neighbour 24 Christmas scene 3 Tom Brown’s Schooldays 25 Russian incident 26 Diesel or steam 27 Early Christian 28 Table manners 29 Matinee 4 An Age of Heroes 30 Tame sparrow 31 The romantic at nine 32 Romance of Munich 33 Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future 34 The cartoon version 5 The Weather Forecast 35 Peasouper 36 English rain 37 Wind of change 38 Cricket on Brighton Beach 39 The big freeze INSIDE THE YELLOW ROOM 43 The Yellow Room 52 Migrant 56 Variations on Leopold Staff 57 One nation GOING VIRAL 61 Uncle Zoltán’s plague times 61 Virus Arrival 62 Cruiser 62 Crush 63 Night train 63 Fragment 64 Night patrol Telling stories 65 Obverse 65 The dream animals return 66 Legend 66 Tradition 67 Growing wild Creatures 68 Dishes and spoons 68 The pigeons 69 The parrots 69 The penguins 70 The rats Night Watch 71 River 71 Dusk talk 72 Watchmaker 72 Like clockwork 73 The gates In the streets of a small town 74 Parchment 74 Ennui 75 The streets of a small town 75 Stopping train 76 Love poem in plague time Adding up 77 Counting 77 Minutes 78 Trainspotting 78 Figures 79 Where there is sorrow In wartime 80 Speech bubble 80 Wartime 81 The enemy 81 Disasters of war 82 Ministry In emergency 83 Emergency guide 83 Dry hands 84 The future 84 Fictions 85 Science fiction Uncertain terms 86 The angel of uncertainty 86 Addressing the nation 87 Comic turn 87 Ozymandias 88 Anger After we died 89 Lush 89 Bargain 90 Mouth 90 Blossom 91 After we died The consolations 92 Gift wrapped 92 Sylph 93 Diaphanous 93 Glory 94 Unscripted FIVE INTERLUDES 97 In praise of breathing 100 Hen Harrier 102 Morning song 103 Bear 105 Dotage NINE DREAM SONGS 109 Dream of the future tense 110 Dream of leaving 111 Dream of delay 112 Dream of townscape 114 Dream of screaming 115 Dream of dystopia 116 Dream of television 117 Dream of Moldova 118 Dream of the Danube BESTIARY 121 Orpheus 122 Ass 123 Lion 124 Stag Beetle 125 Fire Lion 126 Ram skull 127 Toad 128 Chauve souris 129 Owl as anagram 130 Ant 131 Ram 132 Emerging life form 133 Chained beast 134 Tortoise

Read more less

Book SynopsisMen Who Feed Pigeons brings together seven contrasting but complementary poem sequences by ‘this brilliant lyricist of human darkness’ (Fiona Sampson) relating to men and different kinds of women’s relationships with men. The Anaesthetist is about men at work; The Beautiful Man with the Unpronounceable Name is about someone else’s husband; Billy relates to friendship between a man and a woman; Biro is about living next door to a mysterious uncle; The Man in the Quilted Dressing-gown portrays a very particular old man; Ornamental Lakes as Seen from Trains is about a woman and a man she’s afraid of; while Shoebill is another sequence about a woman and a man, but quite different from the others. Like all of Selima Hill’s work, all seven sequences in this book chart ‘extreme experience with a dazzling excess’ (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. Shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection.Trade ReviewArguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry…Despite her thematic preoccupations, there’s nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill’s work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon…using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama…hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn… So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry – not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics. -- Fiona Sampson * Guardian *Selima 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 *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 ContentsThe Anaesthetist 19 The Anaesthetist 19 The Banker 19 The Care Worker 20 The Chauffeur 20 The Childhood Sweetheart 20 The Classics Teacher 21 The Cousin 21 The Dancer 21 The Dentist 22 The Doctor 22 The Doctor of Philosophy 22 The Driver 23 The Duke 23 The Entomologist 23 The Ex 24 The Farmer 24 The Father 24 The Film Director 25 The Finn 25 The Friend 26 The Gardener 26 The Geek 26 The Great-grandfather 27 The History Teacher 27 The Man Who Sits in Saunas 27 The Married Man 28 The Mathematician 28 The Monk 28 The Nurse 29 The Opera Singer 29 The Painter 30 The Patient 30 The Photographer 30 The Poacher 31 The Retired Solicitor 31 The Sailor 31 The Son 32 The Supply Teacher 32 The Tennis Coach 33 The Tennis Player 33 The Tractor Driver 33 The Treasurer 34 The Uncle The Beautiful Man with the Unpronounceable Name 37 Standing on His Doorstep 37 A Happy-looking Man 38 The Beautiful Man Whose Name I Can’t Pronounce 38 Never Go Upstairs in the Daytime 39 In the Tiny House 39 The People Who Still Call Themselves My Loved Ones 40 The Toes of the Woman I’ve Never Met 40 A Café We Could Go To 40 God’s Gift to Wasps 41 A Cup of Tea 41 The Face of the Woman I’ve Never Met 42 Never Even Hope 42 A Woman, a Cyclist and a Teapot 43 The Nose of the Woman I’ve Never Met 43 Hating Me Would Be a Waste of Time 44 What Kind of a Woman Am I? 44 The Word Marriage 44 Baby 45 I’m Never Going to Think of Him Again 45 Bicycles and Tricycles 45 Krasznahorkai, Djokovic, Leghorn 46 They Said It Would Be Hard 46 Eating Potatoes in the Shed 47 The Cake 47 European Night Train Guides 48 Spearmint Freshbreath Mouth-freshening Beads 48 I Hear or Think I Hear on Moonlit Nights Billy 51 My Mother’s Extraordinary Hair 51 What It Feels Like to Talk to Him 51 The Plateau Phase 52 Stone 52 Crab 52 Jelly 52 Raging Torrents, Soaring Peaks 53 Rain 53 I Try to Please Everyone 53 The Woman with the Broken Leg 54 Honey 54 Sheep 54 The Sun in All Its Glory 55 His Childhood 55 Romance 55 Restaurant 56 The Long Wait 56 Skinny-dipping 56 The Married Couple 57 The Gents 57 Other Members’ Towels 57 Expensive French Cheeses 58 Brandysnaps 58 Everyone Is Watching 58 Friendship 59 As We Leave 59 The Compliment 59 Prawn Cocktails 60 Me and Juan Martín del Potro 60 Doll 60 A New Pair of Fleece-lined Gloves 61 Sitting as Still as I Can 61 Baby 61 The Red-haired Swimmer 62 The Tea Is Cold 62 Fancy Cakes 62 Pain 63 Teabag 63 The Jolly Sailor 63 Shopping 64 My Life as a Pair of Crocs 64 The Extra-large Crab Sandwich 64 The Sea 65 On the Beach 65 Kindness 65 Trolley 66 Dinner 66 Piglets 66 The Surgeon’s Ring 66 Walking Back to Happiness 67 Sadness 67 Hollyhock 67 Chihuahuas 68 God 68 The Brunette 68 The Tea Is Never Hot Enough 69 Teddy 69 Chickens 69 Pink-and-white Fairy-cakes 70 Furniture 70 Semolina 70 Buttered Toast 71 The Warmth of the Knife 71 Teapot 71 Sand 72 Midge 72 Cupcake 72 Every Time He Hurts Me I Tell Myself 73 The Man Who Never Smiles 73 Chocolate Pudding 73 His Mother’s Dog 74 Table 74 Poodle 74 The Buffalo 75 Bucket 75 What We Need to Think About 75 Hand 76 Corridor 76 The Smile 76 Solutions 77 Photographs of Women with Straight Hair 77 Ammonia 77 In Giant Shorts 78 The Plan 78 Him and Me 78 The Currant Bun 79 A Person Who Is More Amenable 79 Armadillo 79 Giraffes 80 Battleships 80 My Idea of Fun 80 Coffee-pot 81 Thirty Murdered Women 81 Two Bananas and a Frog 81 The Good Fortune of the Man Sitting Opposite Me 82 Badger 82 Mount Fuji 83 Pig 83 My Mother’s Car 83 Oxygen 84 Life and Death 84 I Used to Cry 84 Electroencephalographs 85 A Normal Person 85 His New Bobble-hat 85 Prayer 86 Other People’s Noses 86 Little Billy 86 Rhinoplasty 87 Golden Sands 87 Hospital 87 A Racehorse Called Rhododendron 88 Sunshine 88 Duty Doctor 88 Profiteroles 89 The Visitor 89 Ears 89 Mother R 90 The Hospital at Night 90 Kilimanjaro, Kilimanjaro, Kilimanjaro Biro 93 The Visitor 93 Like a Man Who’s Never Been in Love 93 Rectitude 94 My Uncle and Me in the Tobacconist’s 94 My Uncle’s Drawing-room 95 My Uncle’s Kitchen 95 The Billiard Room 96 My Uncle’s Bentley 96 My Uncle’s Vegetable Garden 97 My Uncle’s Blazer 97 Newts 97 A Housekeeper, a Butler and a Horse 98 Brothers 98 The Baths 99 My Uncle’s Mother 99 My Uncle Plays the Piano 99 More than Seven European Languages 100 Artichoke 100 Poppet 101 Silverfish 101 Hotel Wellingtonia 102 Doll 102 The King 103 The Illustrated Guide to British Moths 103 Chocolate Sardines 103 Vivarium 104 When Biro Barks 104 Doctor 104 The Bell 105 My Uncle’s Horse 105 Cow 106 The Doctor 106 Photograph of a Baby 107 Key 107 The Word Jodhpurs 107 Berries 108 Spiders 108 My So-called Personality Disorder 108 What to Wear on Horseback 109 Fathead 109 My Uncle’s Bedroom 110 Cheerfulness 110 Ostriches The Man in the Quilted Dressing-gown 113 His Hairy Ears 113 His Semolina 114 His Most Precious Possession 114 His Incomparable Picnics 115 His Stony Silence 115 His Slender Ankles 116 His Little Rest 116 His Missing Spectacle-case 117 His Passion for Musicals 117 His Itchy Fingers 117 His Curvy Ladies 118 His Dusty Dressing-gown 118 His Useful Walking-stick 119 His Toasty Socks 119 His Shaky Hands 120 His Love of Opera 120 His Pinks 120 His Starry Nights 121 His Enormous Feet 121 His Victoria Sponge 122 His Big Blue Face 123 His Bushy Hair 123 His Mugs of Coffee 124 His Sticky Florentine Ornamental Lakes Seen from Trains 127 Sandy Hollows, Godless Pines 127 The Pit of His Stomach 128 His Eyes 128 Californian Waffles 129 Warmth 129 His Hand 130 Man on a Lawn 130 Chickens 130 The Height 131 The Golden Pennies 131 You Either Love a Person or You Don’t 132 Sauerkraut 132 Chicken Thigh 132 Windowpane 133 The Eerie Llama 133 The Chair 133 My Horse-hoof Soup 134 Castle 134 Fear of Coffee 135 Wedding Cake 135 The Tank 136 Bitter Chocolates on a Silver Tray 136 The Mourner 137 Why I Love Gyrocopters 137 The Tall Man 138 One Morning in July 138 Ornamental Lakes as Seen from Trains Shoebill 141 Elbow 141 Snowdrop 142 Hare 142 It’s Like a Dream 143 Pig 143 Bird 144 The Wall 144 The Edge of Town 145 Mole 145 Watcher 146 You Hold Me in Your Lap 146 Your Hair Against My Back 147 Fish 147 Skinny as a Rake 148 Sandbag 148 Ugly 149 Like the Flightless Birds 149 Goblin 150 The Love of Your Life 150 Mice 151 The Coat 151 Hands 152 The Hospital in Winter 152 Cats with Spots 153 Suitcase 153 Your Beautiful Long Hair 154 You Tell Me That You Love Me 154 The House 155 The Moth at Night 155 Cake 156 Bedside-locker Pig Farm 156 Frosty Weather 157 Dot 157 Summertime

Read more less

Book SynopsisClare Shaw’s fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love shows that poetry can say as much as about who we are – and especially how we feel – as psychology. They also feed each other. Harry Harlow’s famous experiments on baby monkeys changed the course of psychology. They proved that we need care, contact and love – and they inflicted profound and lasting suffering on their subjects. Clare Shaw’s poems in Towards a General Theory of Love are driven by the same furious need to understand the experience of love and its absence. Harlow’s findings, attachment theory, mythology and art are set alongside stories of attraction, grief and desire. The book is inhabited by the character of Monkey, who shows by example how early attachments and trauma may shape us, but how ultimately the individual – like the reader – will come to realise her, his or their own general theory and practice of love.Trade ReviewThere is a quiet, cool, authentic voice to the poems of Flood. A flood that destroyed Clare Shaw’s home town, mental illness, self-injury, the end of a relationship, are all experiences recounted with factual detachment… There is a sense that the poet’s most intimate surroundings have betrayed her, but the stillness and control with which Shaw writes reveal quiet layers of intensity drawn from unstable places. -- Carla-Rosa Manfredino * Times Literary Supplement, on Flood *Caught 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 * The Yorkshire Times, on Flood *Hold your breath when you read Clare Shaw’s poems. Startling, searing, scorching, this is an emotional blast of a book. -- Jackie Kay * on Straight Ahead *Table of Contents9 What the Frog Taught Me About Love 10 Letter to My Mother 11 Elegy for My Grandma 13 abcedarian 14 The Night Your Mother Died 15 This is a very small poem 17 An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief. 18 Morecambe Bay as Grief 20 Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother 21 Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn 22 The Day Thou Gavest 23 Lesbian Conception in the Euston Hilton 24 Midwife, Calderdale General Hospital 26 Nocturne for My Daughter 28 This Is About My Mother 29 Child Protection Policy 30 A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation 31 Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories 33 My Bedroom 34 An account of my reading from six to sixteen years old. 35 I Ask Monkey How He Sleeps. 36 The Impact of Neglect on the Developing Brain 37 Why Did the Monkey Cross the Road? 38 Monkey Talks About Self Injury 39 Monkey Writes a Story About God 40 Monkey Joins a Dating App 41 Self Portrait as Monkey Getting Drunk 42 When I look at her 43 Monkey Teaches Me Map-reading Skills 44 What the Goldfish Taught Me about Love 45 Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus entering the water 46 Night Swimming, Derwentwater 48 Love as an Adder in Grizedale 49 Love as DIY 50 My Girlfriend Did Not Believe in Ghosts 51 Love as a Poem 52 The Titanic Reflects on the Recent Ending of a Long-term Relationship 53 Self-portrait as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore 54 I come from Kergulen 55 Love as a SatNav 56 Love as a Global Pandemic 57 What the Moon Taught Me About Love 58 Total Social Isolation in Monkeys 59 Love at the William Thompson Recreation Centre 60 Lorry Driver 61 The Garden of Earthly Delights 62 Everything Is a Gift 64 You couldn’t make it up 65 Information for Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Rape 67 Other than Personality Disorder, what term could you use to describe these people? 68 Self-portrait as Hermaphroditus coming out of the water 69 Monkey Invites Me to Imagine 70 Chronicles of Narnia 71 If Love is Snow 72 Things I find attractive in a person 73 Instructions for Care 74 Day after a Migraine 75 Monkey Reads William Blake 79 Acknowledgements

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his exploration of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic. With unexpected playfulness and irrepressible humour, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorisations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another. Chen Chen's debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was published in the UK by Bloodaxe in 2019.Trade ReviewChen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’ blues, of Dickinson’s "so cold no fire can warm me" and of Michael Palmer’s comic interrogation. What unifies the brilliance of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a voice desperate to believe that within every one of life’s sadnesses there is also hope, meaning, and – if we are willing to laugh at ourselves – humor. This is a book I wish existed when I first began reading poetry. Chen is a poet I’ll be reading for the rest of my life. -- Jericho BrownChen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities asks how one might find humour, hope and joy amid the tensions that arise from conflicting loyalties. Queer, Asian-American and immigrant experiences collide to inform Chen’s sensual and vivid verse which attests to the surreal and dream-like nature of memory… Following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, Chen reaches for the sublime by offering his reader the seemingly quotidian… Chen reminds us in this tender and free-wheeling debut that all relationships are “a feat of engineering”, whether with one’s country, one’s family, or oneself. -- Mary Jean Chan * The Guardian *A book that is miraculous in all its pain, trauma, and humor… This is a book that is part elegy for the past and part love song for the future. This remarkable debut is hopefully the first of many possibilities to come. -- Victoria Chang * Tupelo Quarterly *Table of ContentsI A Favorite Room 13 Summer [I have a...] 14 Doctor’s Note 15 Higher Education 16 Summer [You are the...] 17 The School of Australia 18 Items May Have Shifted 20 The School of Morning & Letters 23 The School of Fury 25 Winter [The grackles flap...] 27 The School of Your Book / Letter to Jennifer S. Cheng 29 Study Abroad 31 we’ll be gone after these brief messages 33 II Winter [Big smelly bowel...] 37 The School of Red 39 a small book of questions: chapter i 40 The School of More School 44 & then a student stands up, says, Are you serious? 45 a small book of questions: chapter ii 47 Winter [You become increasingly...] 49 Elegy While Listening to a Song I Can’t Help But Start to Move to 50 a small book of questions: chapter iii 53 a small book of questions: chapter iv 54 a small book of questions: chapter v 56 One Year Later: A Letter 57 Summer [Your emergency contact...] 61 a small book of questions: chapter vi 62 a small book of questions: chapter vii 65 The School of Logic 67 The School of a Few or a Lot of My Favorite Things 69 a small book of questions: chapter viii 72 III Origin Story 75 Winter [It’s April. But...] 77 In the World’s Italianest Restaurant 82 Summer [The sunflowers fall...] 85 Things the Grackles Bring 89 After My White Friend Says So Cool Upon Hearing Me Speak Chinese... 90 Every Poem Is My Most Asian Poem 91 I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule 92 four short essays personifying a future in which white supremacy has ended 95 Chen No Middle Name Chen 98 The School of Song, Uno, & Dinnertime 99 One Year Later: Her Answer 102 The School of Keyboards & Our Whole Entire History Up to the Present 103 Autumn 106 IV I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party 111 ode to my beloveds & brevities 113 我疼你 115 The School of Night & Hyphens 119 Ode to Rereading Rimbaud in Lubbock, Texas 120 The School of You 122 Zombie Kindnesses 125 Lunar New Year 127 Spring 128 The School of Eternities 129 Spring Summer Autumn Winter 134 The School of the Unschoolable 136 The School of Joy / Letter to Michelle Lin 138 * Notes 144 Acknowledgments 145

Read more less

Book SynopsisAleš Šteger was born in 1973 in Ptuj, Slovenia – where he grew up – then part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito, which gained its independence when he was 18. He published his first collection in 1995 at the age of 22, and was immediately recognised as a key voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets not only in Slovenia but throughout central Europe. Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected. His influences are mainly European, including the Serbian master poet Vasko Popa, as well as German and Spanish-language poets he has translated into Slovenian, such as Bachmann, Benn, Huchel, Neruda and Vallejo. He has added his own strand of writing to the distinctively European genre of prose poems in pieces which describe everyday objects in minute terms, only to explode in the imagination through what he perceives in them. He is also known for his prose books and experimental writing including his Written on Site pieces.Trade ReviewAleš Šteger is a poet of the mutable world, “emptied of solidity”, writing “between/ The time of the word/ And the time/ When/ A word/Is devoured”. Emerging in the aftermath of the wars that broke former Yugoslavia into many countries, Šteger has become one of the most significant European poets of the new century. In his hands it is as if poetry were giving up its last secrets, “when books don’t open to speak but to whisper”, and metaphors are “instantly dispersed by a galactic wind". His language slips through fissures of time and space, where, for example, “Hayden plays his saxophone in the Hotel Europa Regina” and all manner of ordinary things become objects of cosmic wonderment: bread and knives, shoes, seahorses, toothpicks, earrings and paperclips. We are fortunate to have these selections from five of his books and also new poems, translated beautifully by Brian Henry. More than a new Selected, this is a gift to the English language and a bridge between worlds. -- Carolyn ForchéAnd what if, just as you open one of those rare, thrilling books in which a terrific foreign poet is carried into English by a terrific poet-translator, the poets tell you, “You have five minutes / Until I turn out the lights.” Better get going, reader. In this long-awaited Selected Poems, Aleš Šteger imagines the poet (which is to say, you, everyone) as a figure of disappearance, slipping through cracks, stepping through two doors at once, turning into quotation, becoming a word, vanishing into a wood, finding a world in which objects – a walnut, an egg, shoes – are awake and looking back, drawing, maybe dragging the poet into a drama that we suddenly see has always been shared. Just so, in a Šteger poem, a piece of meat stuck between the teeth can be linked to revolution and “Whoever thinks hope misses it.” Although Šteger’s poems have that lightness about them that Italo Calvino so admired, they can be, you’ll soon see, devastating. Šteger’s work has earned a huge international audience so that while you’ve been reading this little paragraph, this book has gone into yet another edition. -- Forrest GanderAleš Šteger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: Šteger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Tomaž Šalamun to the whole new level. What is that level? It’s Šteger’s very own kind of wisdom: "Between truth and man / I choose waiting.” What is the source of this wisdom? “I got stuck in silence,” the poet says, “therefore I write.” To which one might add: he knows loss, therefore his poems are beautiful. In these remarkable translations by Brian Henry we are lucky enough to behold in English the work of this major Slovenian voice. -- Ilya KaminskyTable of Contents11 Translator’s note from KASHMIR (1995) 14 About the Realistic and Romantic Schools 15 With Closed Eyes 16 Thirst 17 Lullaby 18 Walnut 19 Kashmir 20 A Thousand Doors 21 For You from PROTUBERANCES (2002) 24 36 Seconds 25 Zero Gravity 26 Citrus 28 Protuberances 29 Anticyclone 30 Sandwerder 31 Ptuj–Pragersko–Ljubljana 32 Still life 33 Plié 34 Between Bread and Salt 35 Returning home 36 Europe from THE BOOK OF THINGS (2005) 38 A 39 Egg 40 Knots 41 Stone 42 Grater 43 Urinal 44 Chocolate 45 Raisins 46 Ant 47 Umbrella 49 Bread 50 Hand Dryer 51 Stomach 52 Pupa 53 Knives 54 Jelly 55 Bandage 56 Mint 57 Shoes 58 Sea Horse 59 Saliva 60 Toothpick 61 Cork 62 Windscreen Wipers 63 Hayrack 65 Wheelbarrow 66 Earring 67 Salmon 69 Shit 70 Paper Clip 71 Aspirin 72 Parcel 73 Chair 74 Candle from THE BOOK OF BODIES (2010) 77 The children in our village 79 For two days I’ve been cleaning 80 Your private apocalypse 82 For whom do the angels play? 84 I wake up without my right hand 86 Many weeks nothing 89 She was a little girl with pompoms 91 We go 17 miles on foot 93 Here is just one of the entrances 95 The smell of rotting logs 97 She spends her afternoons sitting 99 With a cheek pressed 100 Above the red button it says 103 Still, when I turn the corner 105 After only half an hour 107 Who mediates for you? 108 A German Shepherd beside a girl 110 The ancient Roman walls 112 The closer the deadline 114 Of all the healers 116 I’ve scattered my body 118 The word BARE 120 The word BUT 122 The word EATS 125 The word END 127 The word FOLDS 129 The word HERE 131 The word HOLE 134 The word LIMPS 136 The word MISSING 137 The word NEAR 138 The word NO 140 The word PASS 141 The word PFFF 143 The word SAVES 146 The word SEEDS 148 The word SULLIES 150 The word TATTERS 152 The word WAITING 153 The word WALKS 154 The word YET from ABOVE THE SKY BENEATH THE EARTH (2015) 159 The Boy 160 Gnashing Teeth 161 The Revolt Against the End of Summer 162 Time Is 163 Man and Truth 164 WWW 165 Olympics 166 O E 167 My Body Is a Central Committee 168 Erasure of Possibilities 169 Magic Square 170 The Whole World Is a Uterus 171 My Mother 172 Permanently on Loan 173 The World Is Without Culprits 174 Sweet Snow 175 The Sky 176 White Shirt 177 Elementary Laws 178 Lindens in the Desert Sand 179 I Feel Everything 180 Behind a Curtain 181 No One 182 A Place 183 Above the Sky Beneath the Earth 184 Five Assertions from TESTIMONY (2020) 186 You ask me 187 Ancestors 191 Between this 192 On a plate 193 Ant 194 The world will return 195 Rain teaches us 196 When someone asks NEW POEMS 198 In the children’s hospital 200 My dear father 201 My little god 202 Only tonight 203 Mountain 204 In front of the border 205 Swimming pool 206 Syracuse 207 Outside a station of the metro 208 What are our poets smiling at? 209 An old poet 210 Pines 211 Dead kitten 212 The Sun Walks Behind Me 213 What is half an hour 214 The Autobiography of H 221 Notes 223 Acknowledgements 224 Note on translator

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing? The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know? A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being. Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.Trade ReviewGreta Stoddart sets transience against endurance: the certainty of human mortality against the mysteries of forbearance. -- David Harsent * Chair of Judges, Roehampton Poetry Prize, on Alive Alive O *Colloquial, faintly unruly, the poems travel light on adventures of consciousness, channelling the energies of a big, agnostic imagination into new forms. -- Carol Rumens * Poetry Review, on Alive Alive O *When not confronting life and death as we most vividly encounter them, Stoddart’s poems suggest the ways in which our mortality is ever-present in daily life… Alive Alive O is a compelling book, defiant in the face of life’s losses. -- Ben Wilkinson * Times Literary Supplement *Table of Contents11 The Act 13 Where to look 15 A glass of water 16 What is a question 18 Perfect Field 20 Second Nature 22 Three tulips in a milk bottle 24 Clay 26 Slow Cinema 28 Adult Education 29 Fool 30 How I come to clean the windows 31 Smile 33 Birds Britannica: Exhibition Catalogue 36 Cold and lonely wastes 37 Concorde 39 The little living room 41 School Field 42 Remote 44 Constellation 46 Consider the mornings 49 Once upon a time 50 Untimely 54 Walking into church 55 Spell 56 The long grass 57 Performance 58 Flowers for my ego and a dark stage 59 The Rose Garden 63 I wish I could be ‘fresh, honest and brave’ 64 Yesterday I planted a tree 65 What is a tree 66 My life came up to me and said 68 Lie in a field on your back

Read more less

Book SynopsisAmerica’s Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was known for provocative poems which interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. The poems in his final collection Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland’s signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our continuing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of scepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland’s devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He was 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 pushed the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.Trade ReviewHe 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 HoweThe 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 *Table of ContentsBible All Out of Order 3 Gorgon 5 Immersion 7 Disclosure Agreement 9 Botany 11 Why I Like the Hospital 13 Squad Car Light 15 Turn Up the Ocean 17 The Reason He Brought His Gun to School: A Blues 19 Butter 21 Diagnosis 23 Nature Is Strong 25 Illness and Literature 27 “On a Scale of 1–10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?” 28 Bandage 30 American Story 32 Ode to the West Wind 35 How the Old Poetry Happened 36 I Don’t Ask What You’re Thinking 38 Causes of Death 40 Virginia Woolf 42 Four Beginnings for an Apocalyptic Novel of Manners 44 The Power of Traffic 46 Weather of Pain 48 Autumn 50 On Why I Must Decline to Receive the Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending 51 Mistaken Identity Librarian Syndrome 53 Landscape without Jason 55 Walk 56 Success 57 Dante’s Bar and Grill 59 King of the Night 61 Siberia 62 Economica 64 The Decline of the Roman Empire 65 Cuisine 66 The Interfaith Chapel Is in the South Terminal 68 Homework 70 Reading While Sick in the Middle of the Night 71 Harbor 72 Incompletion 73 Sunday at the Mall 74 Among the Intellectuals 76 In the Beautiful Rain 77 Peaceful Transition 79 Afterword by Kathleen Lee 83

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. Her posthumously published Collected Poems is a remaking of Anne Stevenson’s earlier Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), expanded to include poems from her final three books, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020), drawing on sixteen collections which are presented in their original order of publication.Trade ReviewStevenson’s accomplishments as a poet are nothing short of vast. Her work is by turns tender-hearted, funny, argumentative and lyrical. Her sense of place is exquisitely refined, and place in her poems becomes a moral stance, a place to stand and regard the world. -- Jay Parini * The Guardian, paying tribute to Anne Stevenson *While Anne Stevenson is most certainly, and rightly, regarded as one of the major poets of our period, it has never been by virtue of this or that much anthologised poem, but by the work or mind as a whole. It is not so much a matter of the odd lightning-struck tree as of an entire landscape, and that landscape is always humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury, which only serve to bring out the humanity. -- George Szirtes * London Magazine *Her poems are remarkable for her penetrating questioning of the way we see things and her interpretation of the world around us. -- Alan Taylor * The Herald *Table of Contents17 Note on the text 20 Source texts from Living in America (1965) 23 The Traveller 24 The Women 24 To My Daughter in a Red Coat 25 Living in America 26 Harvard 26 Fairy Tale 27 In Winter 28 Love 29 The Garden of Intellect 30 Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Hut 30 Two Quatrains 31 Still Life in Utah 31 Nightmare in North Carolina 32 Nuns 32 Ann Arbor (A Profile) 34 In March 34 After Her Death 35 Apology 35 The Dear Ladies of Cincinnati 37 Opera Piece 37 Sierra Nevada 39 The Grey Land from Reversals (1970) 43 ‘Birth’ 44 Reversals 44 Aubade 45 Sous-entendu 45 On Not Being Able to Look at the Moon 46 Two Love Poems 47 In the House 49 The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument 49 Stabilities 50 The Victory 50 The Suburb 51 The Loss 52 New York 52 The Watchers 53 The Takeover 54 The Unhappened 55 Morning 55 One Sunday 56 England 58 Fen People 58 In Middle England 60 The Return 60 The Mother 61 A River 62 American Rhetoric for Scotland from Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems (1974) 67 Siskin 68 Generations 69 At Thirteen 70 Coming Back to Cambridge 72 Theme with Variations 73 Five Poems of Innocence and Experience 73 The Crush 73 The Marriage 73 The Affair 73 The Demolition 75 Old Scholars 76 Travelling Behind Glass 82 On the Edge of the Island Correspondences (1974) 83 Correspondences: A Family History in Letters from Enough of Green (1977) 155 To Write It 155 The Sun Appears in November 156 North Sea off Carnoustie 157 The Exhibition 158 East Coast 158 Fire and the Tide 158 Summer 159 The Bench 159 Boating Pool at Night 159 Winter Flowers 159 The Lighthouse 160 Night Wind, Dundee 160 Aberdeen 161 The Mudtower 162 Path 162 With My Sons at Boarhills 164 By the Boat House, Oxford 164 Ruin 165 Posted 165 Wanted 166 Drought 166 Ragwort 166 The Minister 167 The Doctor 168 Enough of Green 169 A Summer Place 170 People Around 171 Early Rain 171 Respectable House 172 Meniscus 172 Resurrection 173 The Sirens Are Virtuous 175 In the Orchard 175 Cain 176 Temporarily in Oxford 177 The Price 177 Thales and Li Po 178 After the End of It from Minute by Glass Minute (1982) 181 If I Could Paint Essences 182 Buzzard and Alder 182 Burnished (A Riddle) 183 Swifts 184 The Three 185 The Garden 186 Himalayan Balsam 187 At Kilpeck Church 189 Walking Early by the Wye 190 After the Fall 190 Whose Goat? 191 Giving Rabbit to My Cat Bonnie 192 The Fish Are All Sick 193 Pennine 193 Ah Babel 194 From the Men of Letters 195 Small Philosophical Poem 196 He and It (A Pathetic Fantasy) 197 The Figure in the Carpet 198 About Crying 198 Poem for a Daughter 199 The Holly and the Ivy 200 Transparencies 202 Lockkeeper’s Island 204 Earth Station 205 The Man in the Wind 206 Sonnets for Five Seasons 206 This House 206 Complaint 207 Between 207 Statis 208 The Circle from The Fiction-Makers (1985) 211 From an Unfinished Poem 211 The Fiction-Makers 212 Making Poetry 213 Waving to Elizabeth 214 Re-reading Jane 215 The Blue Pool 216 Shale 217 A Dream of Stones 218 Where the Animals Go 219 Musician’s Widow 219 Gannets Diving 220 Ailanthus with Ghosts 221 Two Poems for Frances Horovitz 221 Red Rock Fault 222 Willow Song 224 Demolition 225 A Prayer to Live with Real People 226 Forgotten of the Foot 228 Signs 229 In the Tunnel of Summers 230 Gales 230 Spring Song 231 On Watching a Cold Woman Wade into a Cold Sea 232 Household Gods 233 November 233 Claude Glass 234 Epitaph for a Good Mouser 234 Divorcing 234 Hands 236 Dreaming of the Dead from Winter Time (1986) 239 Jarrow 241 From the Primrose Path 242 This 243 A Love Sequence 244 The Morden Angel 245 Naming the Flowers from The Other House (1990) 249 In the Nursery 249 The Other House 251 Talking Sense to My Senses 251 Elegy 253 What I Miss 253 Inverkirkaig 254 Icon 255 Journal Entry: Impromptu in C Minor 257 North Easter: April, 1986 258 Night Walking with Shadows 259 Night Thoughts and False Confessions 260 And even then 260 Call them Poppies 261 ‘All Canal Boat Cruises Start Here 262 Inquit Deus 263 From the Motorway 264 Stone Fig 265 Cramond 266 Celebrity 267 Eros 268 Three Poems for Sylvia Plath 268 Nightmares, Daymoths 269 Letter to Sylvia Plath 272 Hot Wind, Hard Rain 272 Seven Poems after Francis Bacon 272 1 Study for a Portrait on a Folding Bed 273 2 Study of a Dog 274 3 Three Figures and Portrait 274 4 Seated Figure 275 5 Portrait of a Lady 276 6 Triptych 276 7 Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh 277 Journal Entry: Ward’s Island 279 Little Paul and the Sea 280 Calendar from Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993) 283 Salter’s Gate 284 From My Study 290 Cold 291 Brueghel’s Snow 292 Four and a Half Dancing Men 293 Washing the Clocks 294 Negatives 296 The Professor’s Tale 297 Hans Memling’s Sibylla Sambetha (1480) 297 Politesse 299 A Quest 300 Trinity at Low Tide 301 Visits to the Cemetery of the Long Alive 301 Hadrian’s 301 A Sepia Garden 304 Bloody Bloody 306 Black Hole 307 Lost 307 A Tricksy June 308 To witness pain is a different form of pain 309 Binoculars in Ardudwy 310 When the camel is dust it goes through the needle’s eye 311 Painting It In 312 Late 313 Terrorist 314 Two Poems for John Cole and One for Annabel Cole 314 Dinghy 315 Cambrian 316 After You Left from The Collected Poems 1955-1995 (1996) 318 Occasional verses 318 The Parson and the Romany 319 Ballad of the Made Maid from Granny Scarecrow (2000) I 323 Vertigo 323 Innocence and Experience 324 The White Room 325 A Surprise on the First Day of School 326 Going Back 328 John Keats, 1821–1950 329 Arioso Dolente 331 ‘Love Stories and a Bed of Sand’ II 332 Moonrise 332 Clydie is dead! 334 Incident 334 Suicide 335 Skills 336 An Angel 338 Granny Scarecrow 339 Freeing Lizzie 341 Phoenicurus phoenicurus 342 Pity the Birds 343 Comet 344 The Wrekin 346 False Flowers 347 Kosovo Surprised by Mozart 348 Leaving 349 Old Wife’s Tale 349 On Going Deaf 350 A Luxury 352 Oysters 353 To witness pain is a different form of pain 353 The Theologian’s Confession 354 Whistler’s Gentleman by the Sea III 355 A Parable for Norman 357 Poem for Harry Fainlight 358 Invocation and Interruption 360 A Present 361 The Name of the Worm 363 The Miracle of Camp 60 366 A Ballad for Apothecaries 370 Postscriptum from A Report from the Border (2003) 373 Who’s Joking with the Photographer? 374 The Writer in the Corner 375 Washing My Hair 376 Two Poems for Nerys Johnson 376 Portrait of the Artist in an Orthopaedic Halo Crowned with Flowers 376 Passing Her House 378 Red Hot Sex 379 Haunted 380 Passifloraceae 380 A Marriage 381 Hearing with My Fingers 382 At the Grave of Ezra Pound 383 Skin Deep 384 Cashpoint Charlie 385 A Hot Night in New York 385 New York Is Crying 387 A Cradle of Fist 388 Clovenhoof ’s-bane 388 A Report from the Border 389 Branch Line 390 A Tourists’ Guide to the Fens 391 Carol of the Birds 392 To Phoebe 393 Questionable 393 Prophylactic Sonnets 395 The Inn Some Poems from Cwm Nantcol 396 The Wind, the Sun and the Moon 396 The Unaccommodated 397 Under Moelfre 398 Why Take Against Mythology? (1) 398 Why Take Against Mythology? (2) 399 Attacking the Waterfall 400 Spring Poem 401 Without Me 402 May Bluebells, Coed Aber Artro 403 Green Mountain, Black Mountain from Poems 1955-2005 (2005) 412 A Riddle for Peter Scupham 412 In the Weather of Deciduous Souls 413 An Impenitent Ghost 413 Fool’s Gold 414 17.14 Out of Newcastle 415 It looks so simple from a distance… 416 Four Grim Fairy Tales 416 1 Rapunzel 416 2 Sleeping Beauty 417 3 Was Cinderella Ever Happy? 417 4 If Wishes Were Fishes 418 Christmas Comfort and the Green Man 421 Toy 419 As I Lay Sleeping 420 Killing Spiders 420 Melon meaning melon 421 Toy 422 Variations on a Line by Peter Redgrove from Stone Milk (2007) 424 Prelude from Piers Plowman 425 A Lament for the Makers 447 Near the End of a Day 448 Stone Milk 449 Before Eden 451 The Enigma 452 Waving Goodbye 452 Orcop 453 Inheriting My Grandmother’s Nightmare 454 An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything 456 Jet Lag 456 City Lights 456 Beach Kites 458 The Blackbird at Pwllymarch from Astonishment (2012) I 461 The Loom 462 Constable Clouds and a Kestrel’s Feather 463 Bird in Hand 464 Teaching My Sons to Swim in Walden Pond 467 Night Thoughts 468 Paper 470 On Line 472 An Exchange in the Time Bank II Sonnets and Variations 473 It’s astonishing 473 Doppler 474 After the Funeral 474 Elegy: In Coherent Light 475 The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves 475 The Master and His Cast 476 Not a Hook, Not a Shelf, Maybe a Song? 476 How it is 477 The Voice 477 Caring More Than Caring 478 Carols in King’s III Ardudwy 479 ‘Wind from the North…’ 480 Night Snow 480 Thaw 481 Spring Diary 481 Arrival Dream 481 Snow Squalls 481 North Easter 482 A Clearer Memory 482 Then like a present 483 On Harlech Beach 484 Drench 484 On Reflection 485 October Song 485 Goat Cull in Cwm Nancol 486 Roses in December IV 487 Photographing Change 488 In the Museum of Floating Bodies and Flammable Souls 488 All Those Attempts in the Changing Room 490 Tulips 492 The Password 493 Five Poems in Memory of a Marriage 493 A Match 493 After Words 493 Hotel New Year 494 Epitaph for a Hedonist 494 A Visit 496 Demeter and Her Daughter 500 Spring Again 500 Notes from Completing the Circle (2020) 507 Preface 511 Saying the World I 512 Anaesthesia 512 Poppy Day 514 Sandi Russell Sings 515 Defeating the Gloom Monster 517 A Dream of Guilt 518 Improvisation 519 Completing the Circle 520 Ann Arbor Days 521 The Day 522 Choose to be a Rainbow II 523 How Poems Arrive 524 Dover Beach Reconsidered 525 The Bully Thrush 526 Winter Idyll from My Back Window 527 Goodbye & Cheers 527 Shared 528 Voice Over 528 Candles 529 A Compensation of Sorts 530 After Wittgenstein 531 Now We Are 80 534 An Old Poet’s View from the Departure Platform III 535 As the Past Passes 535 The Gift Bowl 538 Pronunciation 543 At 85 544 Notes Appendices 546 Index of titles and first lines 557 Selected bibliography 559 Biographical note

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and practices that have become commonplace – from disproportionate arrest rates, to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning. Now, acclaimed poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background – weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved – it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains. Illuminating what it means to live in this frightening age, and what it means to bear witness, the ferguson report: an erasure is an engrossing meditation on one of the most revealing texts of modern times. Nicole Sealey won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021 with an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, earning the judges’ praise for creating ‘new moments of lyrical beauty and contemplation’ out of ‘stifling obfuscations’ to shine ‘a light on all that the report tries to hide’, with Shivanee Ramlochan calling it ‘a poem of resonant cultural and social value’. The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is published simultaneously by Knopf in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Nicole Sealey’s first collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.Trade ReviewNicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure comes to us first in fragments – at times not even syllables, ah or id – but as a feeling, the unsayable constructing itself as we read along or listen. The paced rhythm is almost painfully made as if fleshy blips on the heart meter – a ghostly master text beneath. One feels subliminal truths cumulate out of a visceral engagement, and then the emergence of eight inspired poems. -- Yusef KomunyakaaTable of Contentsacknowledgements i. pages one to twelve ii. pages thirteen to twenty-one iii. pages twenty-two to thirty-four iv. pages thirty-five to thirty-nine v. pages forty to forty-nine vi. pages fifty to sixty-four vii. pages sixty-five to seventy-seven viii. pages seventy-eight to eighty-four ix. lifted poems about the work biographical note

Read more less

Book SynopsisA poet of existential magnitude, deep intellect and playful subversion, America’s Nicole Sealey writes poems that are restless in their empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human. The ranging scope of enquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast – at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential – is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge. Ordinary Beast was first published in the US by Ecco in 2017, and was a finalist the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and for the PEN Open Book Award. This first UK edition of her debut collection is published by Bloodaxe in 2023 at the same time as her second book of poetry, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021.Trade ReviewOrdinary Beast showcases a versatile artist as she plumbs an array of themes – racial injustice and gender marginalization – by appropriating forms popularised by dead white guys: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Donne. Her variations are vigorous, beguiling… Ordinary Beast is a triumph, and we can look forward to future spectacular work from this extravagantly gifted poet. -- Hamilton Cain * Leonard Prize Reviews *Table of Contents13 medical history 14 a violence 15 candelabra with heads 17 hysterical strength 18 legendary 19 it’s not fitness, it’s a lifestyle 20 happy birthday to me 21 the first person who will live to be one hundred and fifty years old has already been born 22 in igboland ♦ 25 legendary 26 heretofore unuttered 27 and 29 cento for the night i said, “i love you” 41 virginia is for lovers 43 clue 46 c ue 49 unfurnished ♦ 53 imagine sisyphus happy 55 underperforming sonnet overperforming 56 legendary 57 an apology for trashing magazines in which you appear 59 Even the Gods 60 In Defense of “Candelabra with Heads” 61 instead of executions, think death erections 62 unframed 63 object permanence 65 Notes

Read more less

Book SynopsisRavage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance. Optik: A History of Ghost, the opening triadic poem, typifies Kristján Norge's early work and is a meditation on Greek optics, horary ghostliness and illumination by fire. Composed in 1950, Optik draws on letters twelve and thirteen of the correspondence between scientist-inventor Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott on natural magic, to isolate the figure of 'John Christ' whom Norge positions as a visionary homunculus created from the saline ash of alchemical phantasmic experiments. Ravage is the centrepiece of the collection, a numinous tract written in the months preceding Kristján Norge's disappearance in 1961, convinced he was a demon. Washed up in a storm, subsistence on Bàs had proved an increasing strain on Norge, who felt his self-exiled status intensively. In response to both this isolation and the unexpected revelation of his demoniacal status, Norge evolved a complex amnesiac system, aware that if only he could forget this singular aspect of himself, then release might follow. Inevitably cryptic, this Norgesian schema has been recovered from fragments concealed at ten sites on the Scottish island. Norge's impression of Eilean a’ Bhàis as an underworld threshold leant weight to his suspicion that the island was indeed attracting the Sluagh nam Marbh, or Host of the Dead, a Gaelic westerly wind of malign voices that allegedly imparted the knowledge of his demonhood to him. Optik: A History of Ghost and Ravage are supplemented by additional archival materials which flesh out Norge's intellectual and personal concerns. Among these is a detailed schema of his amnesiac process, items of correspondence, maps, photographs and logbook entries. A work of fiction entitled The Wind of Voices, which is based on this mercurial period in Norge's life, concludes the collection. MacGillivray is the Highland name of writer and artist Kirsten Norrie. She has published three other poetry books, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog/Red Hen, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019).Trade Review'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 HutchinsonTable of ContentsNote On the Text Foreword by MacGillivray I. OPTIK: A HISTORY OF GHOST Kristján Norge, 1950 (ms 1.01) I GLANCE II GLINT III GLARE II. RAVAGE Kristján Norge, 1961 (ms 1.02) Poem Astonishments of Fire The Palatine Graffito, (acc. 1.01) SPECULUM ANTE The Star-Ravaged Co(r)pse Mirror of Smoke: Articulate Flame الجبھة (Lunar Mansion X) Mirror of Flame: Articulate Heat Sequences for a Tariff Mirror of Heat: Articulate Fire The Charred Arrow Shaft Mirror of Fire: Articulate Wood Meat Spirit Mirror of Wood: Articulate Charcoal Sump Mirror of Charcoal: Articulate Animal Knightless Animal Mirror: Articulate Trial Craven Mirror of Trial: Articulate Recall Wounded Centaur Mirror of Recall: Articulate Smoke Legere SPECULUM RETRO The Dead Reckoning III. ADDITIONAL MATERIALS Kristján Norge (acc. 1.01) Kristján Norge's Amnesiac System essay by MacGillivray Fear Eun Lota essay by MacGillivray on Kristján Norge Reversible Halts poem by Kristján Norge An Aerial View of Hell first draft poem by Kristján Norge Travails of A Spirit-Ravaged Skeleton by Kristján Norge TRAN-QUIL-ITY essay by Kristján Norge Notes on Optik by Kristján Norge Photograph of letter from The Poetry Review to Luce Moncrieff Dubhan Island Maps Photograph of lion skin wrist band owned by Norge Photograph of Norge's ancestors crofting on Shetland Photograph of centaur card used by Norge Photograph of Norge's polished steel shaving mirror Photograph of scraps from Dubhan Crofthouse Photograph of letter to Luce from Kristjan Norge Amnesiac System by Kristjan Norge Photograph of diary entries by Luce Moncrieff Photograph of Luce Moncrieff's loom Photograph of Kristján Norge walking on Dubhan Photograph of logbook entries by Kristján Norge IV. APPENDIX THE WIND OF VOICES Acknowledgements MacGillivray bibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisFleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.Trade ReviewAdcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach. -- Carol Ann Duffy * The Guardian *Adcock's reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucent…those who see in such poems only flatness are missing the power of a voice which teases both reader and subject. -- Jo Shapcott * TLS *Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian *Most of Fleur Adcock’s best poems have something to do with bed: she writes well about sex, very well about illness, and very well indeed about dreaming… Her imagination thrives on what threatens her peace of mind, and only when she is unguarded can these threats have their full creative effect. Hence the importance of bed: it is the place where the elegant artful barriers that she builds from day to day are most easily over-thrown… Throughout her writing life, she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of orderliness and good clear sense; but she has made an even finer one from loosening her grip on them. -- Andrew Motion * TLS *Table of ContentsEarly poems from THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE (1964) and TIGERS (1967) Note on Propertius 25 Flight, with Mountains 25 Beauty Abroad 28 Knife-play 29 Instructions to Vampires 30 Incident 31 Unexpected Visit 31 For Andrew 32 For a Five-Year-Old 33 Comment 34 Miss Hamilton in London 34 The Man Who X-Rayed an Orange 35 Composition for Words and Paint 36 Regression 37 I Ride on My High Bicycle 38 Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow 39 Hauntings 40 Advice to a Discarded Lover 41 The Water Below 42 Think Before You Shoot 43 The Pangolin 44 HIGH TIDE IN THE GARDEN (1971) A Game 47 Bogyman 48 Clarendon Whatmough 50 A Surprise in the Peninsula 52 Purple Shining Lilies 53 Afterwards 54 Happy Ending 54 Being Blind 55 Grandma 56 Ngauranga Gorge Hill 57 Stewart Island 58 On a Son Returned to New Zealand 58 Saturday 59 Trees 61 Country Station 62 The Three-toed Sloth 63 Against Coupling 64 Mornings After 65 Gas 67 THE SCENIC ROUTE (1974) The Bullaun 77 Please Identify Yourself 78 Richey 79 The Voyage Out 80 Train from the Hook of Holland 81 Nelia 81 Moa Point 82 Briddes 82 The Famous Traitor 83 Script 84 In Memoriam: James K. Baxter 86 St John’s School 88 Pupation 89 The Drought Breaks 89 Kilpeck 89 Feverish 91 Folie . Deux 92 Acris Hiems 94 December Morning 95 Showcase 95 Over the Edge 96 The Net 96 An Illustration to Dante 97 Tokens 97 Naxal 98 Bodnath 99 External Service 100 Flying Back 100 Near Creeslough 102 Kilmacrenan 102 Glenshane 102 THE INNER HARBOUR (1979) Beginnings: Future Work 105 Our Trip to the Federation 106 Mr Morrison 106 Things 108 A Way Out 108 Prelude 109 Accidental 110 A Message 110 Proposal for a Survey 113 Fairy-tale 113 At the Creative Writing Course 113 Endings: The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers 114 Off the Track 115 Beaux Yeux 115 Send-off 116 In Focus 116 Letter from Highgate Wood 118 Poem Ended by a Death 118 Having No Mind for the Same Poem 119 Syringa 120 The Thing Itself: Dry Spell 121 Visited 121 The Soho Hospital for Women 121 Variations on a Theme of Horace 125 A Walk in the Snow 126 A Day in October 127 House-talk 129 Foreigner 129 In the Dingle Peninsula 130 In the Terai 130 River 131 To and Fro: The Inner Harbour 132 Immigrant 134 Settlers 134 Going Back 136 Instead of an Interview 138 Londoner 139 To Marilyn from London 139 BELOW LOUGHRIGG (1979) Below Loughrigg 143 Three Rainbows in One Morning 144 Binoculars 144 Paths 145 Mid-point 145 The Spirit of the Place 146 The Vale of Grasmere 146 Letter to Alistair Campbell 147 Declensions 148 Weathering 149 Going Out from Ambleside 150 SELECTED POEMS (1983) In the Unicorn, Ambleside 155 Downstream 155 The Hillside 156 This Ungentle Music 156 The Ring 157 Corrosion 157 4 May 1979 158 Madmen 158 Shakespeare’s Hotspur 159 Nature Table 159 Revision 161 Influenza 161 Crab 162 Eclipse 163 On the Border 163 The Prize-winning Poem 164 An Emblem 165 Piano Concerto in E Flat Major 166 Villa Isola Bella 167 Lantern Slides 168 Dreaming 169 Street Song 169 Across the Moor 170 Bethan and Bethany 172 Blue Glass 172 Mary Magdalene and the Birds 173 HOTSPUR (1986) Hotspur 177 Notes 182 THE INCIDENT BOOK (1986) Uniunea Scriitorilor 187 Leaving the Tate 187 The Bedroom Window 189 The Chiffonier 189 Tadpoles 191 For Heidi with Blue Hair 192 The Keepsake 193 England’s Glory 195 The Genius of Surrey 196 Loving Hitler 197 Schools: Halfway Street, Sidcup 198 St Gertrude’s, Sidcup 198 Scalford School 198 Salfords, Surrey 199 Outwood 200 On the School Bus 201 Earlswood 202 Scalford Again 203 Neston 203 Chippenham 204 Tunbridge Wells 205 The High Tree 206 Telling Tales: Drowning 207 ‘Personal Poem’ 208 An Epitaph 209 Being Taken from the Place 210 Accidents 210 On the Land 211 Icon 212 Drawings 213 The Telephone Call 214 Incidentals: Excavations 216 Pastoral 217 Kissing 217 Double-take 218 Choices 219 Thatcherland: Street Scene, London N2 220 Gentlemen’s Hairdressers 221 Post Office 222 Demonstration 223 Witnesses 224 Last Song 225 TIME-ZONES (1991) Counting 229 Libya 230 What May Happen 230 My Father 231 Cattle in Mist 232 Toads 234 Under the Lawn 235 Wren Song 236 Next Door 237 Helianthus Scaberrimus 238 House-martins 238 Wildlife 239 Turnip-heads 240 The Batterer 241 Roles 241 Happiness 242 Coupling 242 The Greenhouse Effect 242 The Last Moa 243 Creosote 244 Central Time 245 The Breakfast Program 247 From the Demolition Zone 248 On the Way to the Castle 248 Romania 250 Causes: The Farm 251 Aluminium 252 A Hymn to Friendship 253 Smokers for Celibacy 255 Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy 257 Meeting the Comet 263 LOOKING BACK (1997) I Where They Lived 273 Framed 273 The Russian War 275 227 Peel Green Road 275 Nellie 276 Mary Derry 278 Moses Lambert: The Facts 280 Samuel Joynson 280 Amelia 281 Barber 282 Flames 282 Water 283 A Haunting 283 The Wars 285 Sub Sepibus 286 Anne Welby 286 Beanfield 288 Ancestor to Devotee 288 Frances 289 At Great Hampden 291 At Baddesley Clinton 292 Traitors 294 Swings and Roundabouts 295 Peter Wentworth in Heaven 296 Notes 298 II Tongue Sandwiches 299 The Pilgrim Fathers 301 Paremata 302 Camping 302 Bed and Breakfast 303 Rats 303 Stockings 304 A Political Kiss 305 An Apology 305 Festschrift 306 Offerings 306 Danger: Swimming and Boating Prohibited 307 Risks 308 Blue Footprints in the Snow 309 Summer in Bucharest 310 Moneymore 311 The Voices 311 Willow Creek 312 Giggling 313 Trio 314 The Video 314 NEW POEMS (2000) from POEMS 1960-2000 Easter 317 High Society 317 For Meg 318 A Visiting Angel 319 It’s Done This! 320 Kensington Gardens 321 DRAGON TALK (2010) Dragon Talk 327 My First Twenty Years: Kuaotunu 331 Linseed 331 Illiterate 332 Food 333 Lollies 333 Rangiwahia 334 Drury Goodbyes 335 3 September 1939 335 Sidcup, 1940 336 My First Letter 337 Ambulance Attendant 337 Off Duty at the Depot 338 Just in Case 338 Fake Fur 339 A Rose Tree 339 Glass 340 Casein 340 Glitterwax 341 Bananas 341 Clay 342 The Mill Stream 342 Morrison Shelter 343 Direct Hit 343 Mr Dolman 344 Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar 345 Frant 345 Biro 346 Woodside Way 347 Sidcup Again 347 August 1945 348 Signature 348 On the SS Arawa 350 Unrationed 351 The Table 351 Back from the War 352 Temporary 353 Strangers on a Tram 353 Her First Ball 354 Precautions 355 Next: Miramar 356 Summer Pudding 356 Lost 357 That Butterfly 358 An Observation 358 Outside the Crematorium 359 A Petition 359 To the Robins 360 A Garland for Rosa 361 Fast Forward 363 GLASS WINGS (2013) At the Crossing 367 For Michael at 70 367 An 80th Birthday Card for Roy 369 Finding Elizabeth Rainbow 369 Spuggies 370 Fox 371 The Saucer 371 The Belly Dancer 372 Ingeburg 373 Alfred 374 Match Girl 375 Alumnae Notes 376 Nominal Aphasia 376 Walking Stick 377 Macular Degeneration 377 Mrs Baldwin 378 Charon 378 Having Sex with the Dead 379 Testators: Robert Harington, 1558 380 Anthony Cave, 1558 380 Alice Adcock, 1673 381 Luke Sharpe, 1704 382 William Clayton, 1725 383 James Heyes, 1726 383 Henry Eggington, 1912 384 William Dick Mackley 387 The Translator 388 Intestate 391 Campbells: Elegy for Alistair 392 Port Charles 392 What the 1950s Were Like 393 The Royal Visit 394 The Professor of Music 395 Coconut Matting 396 Epithalamium 396 A Novelty 397 My Life With Arthropods: Wet feet 398 Dung Beetle 399 Caterpillars 399 Stag Beetle 400 Praying Mantis 400 Flea 401 Hoppy 402 Stick Insects 402 To the Mosquitoes of Auckland 403 Crayfish 403 Slaters 404 Ella’s Crane-Flies 405 Orb Web 405 My Grubby Little Secret 407 In Provence 408 Unmentionable 408 Phobia 409 Blow Flies 410 Bat Soup 411 Lepidoptera 411 Bees’ Nest 413 Dragonfly 414 THE LAND BALLOT (2014) Where the Farm Was 417 The Sower 418 The Pioneer 419 Sam’s Diary 420 District News, I 422 Bedtime Story 423 The Fencer 423 This Lovely Glen 424 Migrants 426 A Manchester Child 427 Baggage 429 Celebrations 430 The School 431 Mr Honor. 432 District News, II 433 The School Journal 434 Fruit 436 Mount Pirongia Surveyed 437 The Obvious Solution 437 Milk 438 The Bush Fire 439 Beryl 440 Cousins 440 Telegraphese 441 The Family Bible 442 Bush Fairies 443 Settlers’ Museum 445 Evenings with Mother 446 The Buggy 446 Eight Things Eva Will Never Do Again 448 Eva Remembers Her Two Brothers Called James 449 Eva Remembers Her Little Sisters 450 The Germans 451 Brown Sugar 452 Supporting Our Boys 453 Armistice Day 454 The Way Forward 455 The Hopeful Author 457 A Friend of the New 458 Shorthand 459 The Bible Student 459 A Profile 461 District News, III 461 Mr S. Adcock 462 The Probationer 462 Te Awamutu Road Rant 464 The Sensational 466 The Kea Gun 467 Sole Charge 469 The Plain and Fancy Dress Ball 470 The Swimmer 472 Visiting the Ridgeways 473 Reconstituting Eva 473 Ragwort 474 Walking Off 476 The Roads Again 476 The Hall: A Requiem 478 Barton Cottage, 1928 479 Cyril’s Bride 480 Nostalgia Trip, 1976 481 Jubilee Booklet, 1989 483 The Archive 483 State Highway 31 484 Notes 485 HOARD (2017) I Loot 489 Mnemonic 491 Her Usual Hand 492 Six Typewriters 493 Flat-Warming Party, 1958 494 The Anaesthetist 494 The Second Wedding 495 The Sleeping Bag 496 A Game of 500 497 La Contessa Scalza 497 North London Polytechnic 498 Election, 1964 498 Kidnapped 499 II Ann Jane’s Husband 500 Mother’s Knee 500 Camisoles 502 The March 502 You, Ellen 504 III Hortus 509 A Spinney 509 Fox-Light 511 Albatross 511 Cheveux de Lin 513 My Erstwhile Fans 514 The Bookshop 514 Maulden Church Meadow 514 Oscar and Henry 515 Real Estate 516 The Lipstick 516 Hair 517 Pacifiers 517 Bender 518 Hot Baths 518 Standedge 519 Hic Iacet 519 IV Pakiri 520 Helensville 521 Ruakaka 521 Blue Stars 522 Fowlds Park 524 Mercer 525 Alfriston 526 Thames 527 Raglan 528 Miramar Revisited 529 Carterton 530 Tinakori Road 531 High Rise 532 The Old Government Buildings 533 Lotus Land 535 THE MERMAID’S PURSE (2021) The Mermaid’s Purse 539 Island Bay 539 The Teacher’s Wife 540 The Islands 544 A Bunch of Names 544 The Fur Line 546 A Feline Forage in Auckland 546 House 547 Peter’s Hat 548 A Small Correction 549 In the Cupboard 549 Giza 550 Siena 551 Realms 551 In the Cloud 552 Hollyhocks 552 Berries 553 Amazing Grace 554 Käthi Bowden in Bavaria 555 Divining 556 Welsh 557 This Fountain 558 Magnolia Seed Pods 558 Bats 559 Novice Flyer 562 Wood Mice 562 Sparrowhawk 563 Election 1945 564 The Little Theatre Club 564 The Other Christmas Poem 565 Anadyomene 566 Victoria Road 566 To Stephenie at 11pm 567 Lightning Conductor 567 The Annual Party 568 Letting Them Know 570 Blackberries 570 Tatters 571 The Old Road 572 Poems for Roy: i.m. Roy Fisher, 1930-2017 Dead Poets’ Society 575 Jade Plant 576 Double Haiku 576 Elm 577 Four Poems and a Funeral 577 Maundy Thursday 2017 578 An April Bat 579 Porridge 579 Annual Tribute 580 Winter Solstice 581 Snowman 582 Mayonnaise 582 Notes 584 NEW POEMS (2024) from COLLECTED POEMS Stint 587 Sorry! 587 Priam 588 Thaw 588 Optimistic Poem 589 Notice to Foxes 589 Goliath 590 A Woodlouse for Kevin 591 Conditional 592 The Lift Shaft 592 Between the Toes 593 O Westport in the Light of Paul Durcan 593 Monica 594 Saint Brigid 595 Saint Christopher 595 Mildred’s House 596 Poor Jenny is a-weeping 596 In the Desert 598 Jacky 598 Being Ninety 600 Notes 602 Index of titles 605 Index of first lines 612 Acknowledgements 623

Read more less

Book SynopsisFleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.Trade ReviewAdcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach. -- Carol Ann Duffy * The Guardian *Adcock's reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucent…those who see in such poems only flatness are missing the power of a voice which teases both reader and subject. -- Jo Shapcott * TLS *Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut. -- Fiona Sampson * The Guardian *Most of Fleur Adcock’s best poems have something to do with bed: she writes well about sex, very well about illness, and very well indeed about dreaming… Her imagination thrives on what threatens her peace of mind, and only when she is unguarded can these threats have their full creative effect. Hence the importance of bed: it is the place where the elegant artful barriers that she builds from day to day are most easily over-thrown… Throughout her writing life, she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of orderliness and good clear sense; but she has made an even finer one from loosening her grip on them. -- Andrew Motion * TLS *Table of ContentsEarly poems from THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE (1964) and TIGERS (1967) Note on Propertius 25 Flight, with Mountains 25 Beauty Abroad 28 Knife-play 29 Instructions to Vampires 30 Incident 31 Unexpected Visit 31 For Andrew 32 For a Five-Year-Old 33 Comment 34 Miss Hamilton in London 34 The Man Who X-Rayed an Orange 35 Composition for Words and Paint 36 Regression 37 I Ride on My High Bicycle 38 Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow 39 Hauntings 40 Advice to a Discarded Lover 41 The Water Below 42 Think Before You Shoot 43 The Pangolin 44 HIGH TIDE IN THE GARDEN (1971) A Game 47 Bogyman 48 Clarendon Whatmough 50 A Surprise in the Peninsula 52 Purple Shining Lilies 53 Afterwards 54 Happy Ending 54 Being Blind 55 Grandma 56 Ngauranga Gorge Hill 57 Stewart Island 58 On a Son Returned to New Zealand 58 Saturday 59 Trees 61 Country Station 62 The Three-toed Sloth 63 Against Coupling 64 Mornings After 65 Gas 67 THE SCENIC ROUTE (1974) The Bullaun 77 Please Identify Yourself 78 Richey 79 The Voyage Out 80 Train from the Hook of Holland 81 Nelia 81 Moa Point 82 Briddes 82 The Famous Traitor 83 Script 84 In Memoriam: James K. Baxter 86 St John’s School 88 Pupation 89 The Drought Breaks 89 Kilpeck 89 Feverish 91 Folie . Deux 92 Acris Hiems 94 December Morning 95 Showcase 95 Over the Edge 96 The Net 96 An Illustration to Dante 97 Tokens 97 Naxal 98 Bodnath 99 External Service 100 Flying Back 100 Near Creeslough 102 Kilmacrenan 102 Glenshane 102 THE INNER HARBOUR (1979) Beginnings: Future Work 105 Our Trip to the Federation 106 Mr Morrison 106 Things 108 A Way Out 108 Prelude 109 Accidental 110 A Message 110 Proposal for a Survey 113 Fairy-tale 113 At the Creative Writing Course 113 Endings: The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers 114 Off the Track 115 Beaux Yeux 115 Send-off 116 In Focus 116 Letter from Highgate Wood 118 Poem Ended by a Death 118 Having No Mind for the Same Poem 119 Syringa 120 The Thing Itself: Dry Spell 121 Visited 121 The Soho Hospital for Women 121 Variations on a Theme of Horace 125 A Walk in the Snow 126 A Day in October 127 House-talk 129 Foreigner 129 In the Dingle Peninsula 130 In the Terai 130 River 131 To and Fro: The Inner Harbour 132 Immigrant 134 Settlers 134 Going Back 136 Instead of an Interview 138 Londoner 139 To Marilyn from London 139 BELOW LOUGHRIGG (1979) Below Loughrigg 143 Three Rainbows in One Morning 144 Binoculars 144 Paths 145 Mid-point 145 The Spirit of the Place 146 The Vale of Grasmere 146 Letter to Alistair Campbell 147 Declensions 148 Weathering 149 Going Out from Ambleside 150 SELECTED POEMS (1983) In the Unicorn, Ambleside 155 Downstream 155 The Hillside 156 This Ungentle Music 156 The Ring 157 Corrosion 157 4 May 1979 158 Madmen 158 Shakespeare’s Hotspur 159 Nature Table 159 Revision 161 Influenza 161 Crab 162 Eclipse 163 On the Border 163 The Prize-winning Poem 164 An Emblem 165 Piano Concerto in E Flat Major 166 Villa Isola Bella 167 Lantern Slides 168 Dreaming 169 Street Song 169 Across the Moor 170 Bethan and Bethany 172 Blue Glass 172 Mary Magdalene and the Birds 173 HOTSPUR (1986) Hotspur 177 Notes 182 THE INCIDENT BOOK (1986) Uniunea Scriitorilor 187 Leaving the Tate 187 The Bedroom Window 189 The Chiffonier 189 Tadpoles 191 For Heidi with Blue Hair 192 The Keepsake 193 England’s Glory 195 The Genius of Surrey 196 Loving Hitler 197 Schools: Halfway Street, Sidcup 198 St Gertrude’s, Sidcup 198 Scalford School 198 Salfords, Surrey 199 Outwood 200 On the School Bus 201 Earlswood 202 Scalford Again 203 Neston 203 Chippenham 204 Tunbridge Wells 205 The High Tree 206 Telling Tales: Drowning 207 ‘Personal Poem’ 208 An Epitaph 209 Being Taken from the Place 210 Accidents 210 On the Land 211 Icon 212 Drawings 213 The Telephone Call 214 Incidentals: Excavations 216 Pastoral 217 Kissing 217 Double-take 218 Choices 219 Thatcherland: Street Scene, London N2 220 Gentlemen’s Hairdressers 221 Post Office 222 Demonstration 223 Witnesses 224 Last Song 225 TIME-ZONES (1991) Counting 229 Libya 230 What May Happen 230 My Father 231 Cattle in Mist 232 Toads 234 Under the Lawn 235 Wren Song 236 Next Door 237 Helianthus Scaberrimus 238 House-martins 238 Wildlife 239 Turnip-heads 240 The Batterer 241 Roles 241 Happiness 242 Coupling 242 The Greenhouse Effect 242 The Last Moa 243 Creosote 244 Central Time 245 The Breakfast Program 247 From the Demolition Zone 248 On the Way to the Castle 248 Romania 250 Causes: The Farm 251 Aluminium 252 A Hymn to Friendship 253 Smokers for Celibacy 255 Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy 257 Meeting the Comet 263 LOOKING BACK (1997) I Where They Lived 273 Framed 273 The Russian War 275 227 Peel Green Road 275 Nellie 276 Mary Derry 278 Moses Lambert: The Facts 280 Samuel Joynson 280 Amelia 281 Barber 282 Flames 282 Water 283 A Haunting 283 The Wars 285 Sub Sepibus 286 Anne Welby 286 Beanfield 288 Ancestor to Devotee 288 Frances 289 At Great Hampden 291 At Baddesley Clinton 292 Traitors 294 Swings and Roundabouts 295 Peter Wentworth in Heaven 296 Notes 298 II Tongue Sandwiches 299 The Pilgrim Fathers 301 Paremata 302 Camping 302 Bed and Breakfast 303 Rats 303 Stockings 304 A Political Kiss 305 An Apology 305 Festschrift 306 Offerings 306 Danger: Swimming and Boating Prohibited 307 Risks 308 Blue Footprints in the Snow 309 Summer in Bucharest 310 Moneymore 311 The Voices 311 Willow Creek 312 Giggling 313 Trio 314 The Video 314 NEW POEMS (2000) from POEMS 1960-2000 Easter 317 High Society 317 For Meg 318 A Visiting Angel 319 It’s Done This! 320 Kensington Gardens 321 DRAGON TALK (2010) Dragon Talk 327 My First Twenty Years: Kuaotunu 331 Linseed 331 Illiterate 332 Food 333 Lollies 333 Rangiwahia 334 Drury Goodbyes 335 3 September 1939 335 Sidcup, 1940 336 My First Letter 337 Ambulance Attendant 337 Off Duty at the Depot 338 Just in Case 338 Fake Fur 339 A Rose Tree 339 Glass 340 Casein 340 Glitterwax 341 Bananas 341 Clay 342 The Mill Stream 342 Morrison Shelter 343 Direct Hit 343 Mr Dolman 344 Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar 345 Frant 345 Biro 346 Woodside Way 347 Sidcup Again 347 August 1945 348 Signature 348 On the SS Arawa 350 Unrationed 351 The Table 351 Back from the War 352 Temporary 353 Strangers on a Tram 353 Her First Ball 354 Precautions 355 Next: Miramar 356 Summer Pudding 356 Lost 357 That Butterfly 358 An Observation 358 Outside the Crematorium 359 A Petition 359 To the Robins 360 A Garland for Rosa 361 Fast Forward 363 GLASS WINGS (2013) At the Crossing 367 For Michael at 70 367 An 80th Birthday Card for Roy 369 Finding Elizabeth Rainbow 369 Spuggies 370 Fox 371 The Saucer 371 The Belly Dancer 372 Ingeburg 373 Alfred 374 Match Girl 375 Alumnae Notes 376 Nominal Aphasia 376 Walking Stick 377 Macular Degeneration 377 Mrs Baldwin 378 Charon 378 Having Sex with the Dead 379 Testators: Robert Harington, 1558 380 Anthony Cave, 1558 380 Alice Adcock, 1673 381 Luke Sharpe, 1704 382 William Clayton, 1725 383 James Heyes, 1726 383 Henry Eggington, 1912 384 William Dick Mackley 387 The Translator 388 Intestate 391 Campbells: Elegy for Alistair 392 Port Charles 392 What the 1950s Were Like 393 The Royal Visit 394 The Professor of Music 395 Coconut Matting 396 Epithalamium 396 A Novelty 397 My Life With Arthropods: Wet feet 398 Dung Beetle 399 Caterpillars 399 Stag Beetle 400 Praying Mantis 400 Flea 401 Hoppy 402 Stick Insects 402 To the Mosquitoes of Auckland 403 Crayfish 403 Slaters 404 Ella’s Crane-Flies 405 Orb Web 405 My Grubby Little Secret 407 In Provence 408 Unmentionable 408 Phobia 409 Blow Flies 410 Bat Soup 411 Lepidoptera 411 Bees’ Nest 413 Dragonfly 414 THE LAND BALLOT (2014) Where the Farm Was 417 The Sower 418 The Pioneer 419 Sam’s Diary 420 District News, I 422 Bedtime Story 423 The Fencer 423 This Lovely Glen 424 Migrants 426 A Manchester Child 427 Baggage 429 Celebrations 430 The School 431 Mr Honor. 432 District News, II 433 The School Journal 434 Fruit 436 Mount Pirongia Surveyed 437 The Obvious Solution 437 Milk 438 The Bush Fire 439 Beryl 440 Cousins 440 Telegraphese 441 The Family Bible 442 Bush Fairies 443 Settlers’ Museum 445 Evenings with Mother 446 The Buggy 446 Eight Things Eva Will Never Do Again 448 Eva Remembers Her Two Brothers Called James 449 Eva Remembers Her Little Sisters 450 The Germans 451 Brown Sugar 452 Supporting Our Boys 453 Armistice Day 454 The Way Forward 455 The Hopeful Author 457 A Friend of the New 458 Shorthand 459 The Bible Student 459 A Profile 461 District News, III 461 Mr S. Adcock 462 The Probationer 462 Te Awamutu Road Rant 464 The Sensational 466 The Kea Gun 467 Sole Charge 469 The Plain and Fancy Dress Ball 470 The Swimmer 472 Visiting the Ridgeways 473 Reconstituting Eva 473 Ragwort 474 Walking Off 476 The Roads Again 476 The Hall: A Requiem 478 Barton Cottage, 1928 479 Cyril’s Bride 480 Nostalgia Trip, 1976 481 Jubilee Booklet, 1989 483 The Archive 483 State Highway 31 484 Notes 485 HOARD (2017) I Loot 489 Mnemonic 491 Her Usual Hand 492 Six Typewriters 493 Flat-Warming Party, 1958 494 The Anaesthetist 494 The Second Wedding 495 The Sleeping Bag 496 A Game of 500 497 La Contessa Scalza 497 North London Polytechnic 498 Election, 1964 498 Kidnapped 499 II Ann Jane’s Husband 500 Mother’s Knee 500 Camisoles 502 The March 502 You, Ellen 504 III Hortus 509 A Spinney 509 Fox-Light 511 Albatross 511 Cheveux de Lin 513 My Erstwhile Fans 514 The Bookshop 514 Maulden Church Meadow 514 Oscar and Henry 515 Real Estate 516 The Lipstick 516 Hair 517 Pacifiers 517 Bender 518 Hot Baths 518 Standedge 519 Hic Iacet 519 IV Pakiri 520 Helensville 521 Ruakaka 521 Blue Stars 522 Fowlds Park 524 Mercer 525 Alfriston 526 Thames 527 Raglan 528 Miramar Revisited 529 Carterton 530 Tinakori Road 531 High Rise 532 The Old Government Buildings 533 Lotus Land 535 THE MERMAID’S PURSE (2021) The Mermaid’s Purse 539 Island Bay 539 The Teacher’s Wife 540 The Islands 544 A Bunch of Names 544 The Fur Line 546 A Feline Forage in Auckland 546 House 547 Peter’s Hat 548 A Small Correction 549 In the Cupboard 549 Giza 550 Siena 551 Realms 551 In the Cloud 552 Hollyhocks 552 Berries 553 Amazing Grace 554 Käthi Bowden in Bavaria 555 Divining 556 Welsh 557 This Fountain 558 Magnolia Seed Pods 558 Bats 559 Novice Flyer 562 Wood Mice 562 Sparrowhawk 563 Election 1945 564 The Little Theatre Club 564 The Other Christmas Poem 565 Anadyomene 566 Victoria Road 566 To Stephenie at 11pm 567 Lightning Conductor 567 The Annual Party 568 Letting Them Know 570 Blackberries 570 Tatters 571 The Old Road 572 Poems for Roy: i.m. Roy Fisher, 1930-2017 Dead Poets’ Society 575 Jade Plant 576 Double Haiku 576 Elm 577 Four Poems and a Funeral 577 Maundy Thursday 2017 578 An April Bat 579 Porridge 579 Annual Tribute 580 Winter Solstice 581 Snowman 582 Mayonnaise 582 Notes 584 NEW POEMS (2024) from COLLECTED POEMS Stint 587 Sorry! 587 Priam 588 Thaw 588 Optimistic Poem 589 Notice to Foxes 589 Goliath 590 A Woodlouse for Kevin 591 Conditional 592 The Lift Shaft 592 Between the Toes 593 O Westport in the Light of Paul Durcan 593 Monica 594 Saint Brigid 595 Saint Christopher 595 Mildred’s House 596 Poor Jenny is a-weeping 596 In the Desert 598 Jacky 598 Being Ninety 600 Notes 602 Index of titles 605 Index of first lines 612 Acknowledgements 623

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses archetypal images to speak to a place in us that's not tied to fashion. It is mostly specific to a particular Irish landscape, with an awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBackalong, a dialect word from Nia Broomhall's native Somerset, describes any point in the past. Her impressive debut collection observes distant past and recent past through poems of place and origin as well as tracking the process of grieving for someone w?ho was right there, not so long ago.

Read more less

Book SynopsisInA Bird Called Elaeus, poet and translator David Constantine presents a selection of poems fromThe Greek Anthology, a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by around 300 authors.The Greek Anthologyis a marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine.ForA Bird Called Elaeus? his small anthology of the vast original ? David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man?s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. Through his translations, Constantine brings already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction. For the Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws.These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it?s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWilliam Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East England, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the mythology and sacred sites of India.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEmilie Jelinekâs poems chart the estrangement between a daughter and her brilliant, charismatic and often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love, music and violence â where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Winner of the 2024 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year 2017Velkom to Inklandt is a collection of poems in which Sophie Herxheimer brings to life the voice of her German Jewish Grent Muzzer Liesel, whose somewhat abrasive but eminently humane perspektiff she's been unable to forget.Liesel came to live in Britain in 1938, with her young family. Her husband was one of many scientists saved by the speedily set up Council for Academic Refugees.Playing on the difficulties of the English lenkvitch and vokebulerry, the poems tell of an immigrant's attempts to fit in and make her home in a new country at war with her own.This fascinating sequence addresses alienation, survival, friendship, marriage, motherhood and loss against a backdrop of a London which has almost disappeared but at the same time remains straynchly familiar.

Read more less

Book Synopsis'Favourite Poems We Learned at School' and its companion volumes 'More Favourite Poems We Learned at School' and 'Favourite Poems We Learned at School as Gaeilge' are enduring bestsellers in Ireland. The illustrated edition takes forty of the most popular poems from the three volumes and juxtaposes them with classic photographs of children, schoolrooms and teachers of times past - some humorous, some quirky, some poignant. The anthology contains such gems as "The Village Blacksmith", "Daffodils", "Sea Fever" and "All Things Bright and Beautiful", which readers will remember with affection from their own schooldays. It is truly a collection to treasure.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection Mona Arshi’s debut collection, 'Small Hands', introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother’s death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi’s poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi’s is a daring, moving and original voice.Trade ReviewReviews 'It is a testament to Mona Arshi's talent that, after a decade of not reading any poetry at all, her work had me clambering for old anthologies. Of course, little of what I read afterwards was as elegant, moving, haunting or true. Nothing less than Britain's most promising writer.' Sathnam Sanghera, The Times'Deliciously varied in form and approach, tone and voice, Mona Arshi’s poems display a tantalising ‘instability’ – each one prismatic and glittering. She opens a clear, suggestive window onto many aspects of life and inner life, on her cultural background, for instance, and on the tragic loss of a brother. So often one thinks, pulled up in amazement, ‘Where did that come from?’ that I’m tempted to the use the word ‘genius’.'Moniza Alvi'There is an extraordinary keenness, sharpness, poignancy and precision in Mona Arshi's poems. They deal with loss, pleasure and the sheer particularities of life with striking grace, constituting something like ‘an erotics of the spirit’, tenderly and imaginatively taking apart and reassembling language, registering everything necessary. Time and again she hits the perfect note. It is rare to find a first book as beautiful as this.'George Szirtes'Mona Arshi’s debut collection certainly lives up to that claim. Her work draws on a rainbow of influences, including her Punjabi Sikh heritage. Fuelled by grief at her brother’s death, but encompassing a range of human experiences, her poems have the vividly uncanny quality of dreams, as the surface of ordinary things shifts to reveal something quite disturbingly different. Her use of imagery is startlingly original: pomegranate seeds are ‘unborns ticking/in blisters of heat’.' The Lady'Mona Arshi proves she has the tools to move and startle her audience with precisely-crafted work.' Dundee University Review of the Arts'Small Hands is a beautiful, minimally-designed and tiny edition – even the font is noticeably smaller than the industry norm – and Liverpool University Press have done an excellent job making the physical object match the work inside it. The collection is full of curious, shifty poems that seem intent on approaching their subjects sidelong, or from multiple angles at once. If this approach sometimes makes it difficult to get an accurate read on the poem’s message, it does make for work that seems to offer up something different with every reading.Dave Poems'This is an intriguing, powerful collection.'Cath Nichols, Poetry Wales'Small Hands seems to offer an early ripening of what promises to be a vintage trip into ‘foreignation.’Ken Evans, The Manchester Review'Small Hands is a brimming miscellany of poems. [A] prominent and enjoyable aspect of Arshi’s work is its sensuality and awareness of the body; this is a collection full of hands, feet, mouths, lips, eyes, wrists, hair and, ubiquitously, skin. [...] Arshi combines a liking for obliqueness, sometimes even coolness, with a desire to push what language can do and a willingness to experiment with form.'Martyn CrusifixTable of Contents The Lion Entomological Specimens Practicing Your Skills Insomniac What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage Taster Bad Day in the Office You Are Not My Mother’s Hair The Gold Bangles ‘Jesus Saves’ Ticking On Ellington Road Cousin Migrant The Daughters Different Principles of Enclosure Day Ghost This Morning The Bird Almost September Phone Call on a Train Journey Small Hands In the Coroner’s Office April 18th of November Notes Towards an Elegy The Urn The Rain That Began Elsewhere Gloves My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer Ghazal Ghazal Ode to a Pomegranate Bulbul Parvarti waits for the return of Shiva, after the slaying of Ganesh Lost Poem Large and Imprecise Baby Wireman Barbule The Found Thing Woman at Window Mr Beeharry’s Marriage Bureau Mrs M Unravels Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter Hummingbird

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisSeren is more than delighted that the poet Katrina Naomi has joined our list. The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, is her vibrant, heartfelt and tragi-comic collection of poetry. In this book she reveals a childhood fraught with family dislocation, upsets and even occasional violence, and finds, through her art, moments of grace, humour and redemption.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisMuch With Body is modern and approachable, with an undercurrent of irony. All in all, a powerfully potent reading experience Buzz MagazineI was moved by this collection which places the joy of nature alongside the lived experience of those who suffer, the wild and free next to images of confinement and inaccessibility. Atkin has crafted poems in both traditional and highly experimental forms with huge success. - London GripThis collection is a keeper, I can't recommend it highly enough.- Caroline Bracken Atkins splits her collection into three unique parts. Atkins begins with refreshing perspective on the innocence and light-hearted descriptions of her experience with her local wildlife in Cumbria. Her next section is focused on ignored poetry from Dorothy Wordsworth, taking on an experimental style to share Atkins' struggle with lockdown, weather and illness. In her final section, Atkins highlights the ableism she experiences, linking the medical to the personal and her identity as a long-term sufferer from a chronic illness.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less