A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Poetry Wales Press The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems
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£11.69
Poetry Wales Press Escape Room
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£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Collected Poems: Volume One 1968-1997
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£16.99
Poetry Wales Press Collected Poems: Volume Two 1997-2021
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£16.99
Poetry Wales Press Say It With Me
Book SynopsisRooted in everyday life, the voice of Say It With Meis wry, candid and knowing. At once lighthearted and unafraid to speak of the darkness in our lives, these poems record and lament that which is miraculous, strange and ordinary. Most significant are the remarkable stories concerning love, suicide the body, parenthood, loss, memory and family.
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Into the Same Sound Twice
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£6.00
Poetry Wales Press Viva Bartali!
Book SynopsisInspired by the lyrical, mythic mode of Italian sports journalism from the 1930s to the 1950s, Viva Bartali! is a biography-in-verse of the iconic Italian cyclist Gino Bartali (1914? 2000), two-time winner of the Tour de France (1938, 1948), known both as ? Gino the Pious? because of his fervent Catholic faith, and as Ginettaccio (? Gino the Terrible? ), owing to the short shrift he so often gave the Press.Conjuring Bartali at crux moments in his personal and professional career, through joy and tragedy, defeat and victory, the collection places us alongside the young rider proving his mettle and adding to his palmarè s in the edgy atmosphere of Mussolini? s Fascist Italy, whose political ideology he loathed. From amateur races to the professional one-day classics and on to Tour de France glory, Bartali is seen alongside his fellow riders as both vulnerable body and é lite athlete; both cycling? s hard man and fond and bereaved father; both kneeling believer and climbing god.The collection gives us an insight into the complex relationship that underpinned his great rivalry with the campionissimo (? champion of champions? ) Fausto Coppi ? the ? man of glass? against Bartali? s ? man of iron? . It was a rivalry that a divided a nation and defined a sport. We are with Bartali at the 1948 Tour de France when he takes a phone call from the Italian prime minister, who asks him to do his part in diffusing a political crisis that could have tipped over into violence. And we witness his remarkable secret missions in the saddle as a courier throughout Tuscany during World War 2, carrying forged identity documents that helped save the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews. It was a deed he never spoke about ? one for which he was named ? Righteous Among the Nations? by Yad Vashem in 2013.
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Octopus Mind
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£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Leaving the Hills
Book SynopsisLeaving the Hills by Tony Curtis is a collection full of stories from everywhere by a great Welsh poet at his best. From the Welsh mountains to the Hollywood Hills, these lyrical poems explore events from both history and modern life, questioning how far we? ve really progressed. Filled with dramatic monologues and personalities as various as Roger Bannister, Muhammed Ali, Billie Holiday and Claude Debussy, Leaving the Hills is a collection which explores and defines the times we live in. The title becomes a metaphor for that moment when we are forced to choose what to take and what to leave behind. Curtis chooses moments of brilliance, of epiphany, of knowledge and of vividness. In these poems, there is everything he would wish to save from the fire.
£10.44
Poetry Wales Press Fruits of Labour
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£6.00
Poetry Wales Press Cling Film
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£6.00
Pushkin Press Salad Anniversary
Book SynopsisThis internationally bestselling book took the world by storm on its publication. Covering the discovery of new love, first heartache and the end of an affair, these poems mix the ancient grace and musicality of the tanka form with a modern insight and wit. With a light, fresh touch and a cool eye, Machi Tawara celebrates the small events in a life fully lived and one that is wonderfully touched by humour and beauty. This book will stay with you through the day, and long after you have finished it.Trade Review"these poems mix the ancient grace and musicality of the tanka form with a modern insight and wit. With a light, fresh touch and a cool eye, Machi Tawara celebrates the small events in a life fully lived and one that is wonderfully touched by humor and beauty. This book will stay with you through the day, and long after you have finished it." — Reading Group Choices"It is no wonder this book triggered a cultural phenomenon in Japan. She describes the source of her desires and frustrations with such precision that they become universal. . . Machi Tawara’s Salad Anniversary is an acutely self-aware portrait of modern life and love. . . Sensorial experiences string together past, present, and future, creating a narrative based on emotionally evocative images. " — Asymptote Journal"Haruki Murakami is doleful, Hanya Yanagihara’s crestfallen, Banana Yoshimoto is a near infinite abyss. The poet Machi Tawara is of a different ilk; she has a distinctly sanguine tone. . . Tawara is a champion of gratitude and glee, best capturing simple satisfactions. . . From the garden to the produce aisle, her verses are full of zest—combining a feeling of contentment with images of ripening fruit. . . Tawara’s tanka bunch together like an overfull vine of grapes, creating powerful narratives that often have a timeless feeling, like that of a folk legend. . . It is the weaving together of the part (her hopeful tanka) and the whole (the narrative of her poems) that yield such a fruitful collection, perfect for the coming summer." — The New Orleans Review
£9.49
Intellect Books Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching:
Book SynopsisUsing Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learnt contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. In what is an invaluable collection, this book is directly beneficial to arts researchers and educators, addressing the key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment. Table of ContentsForeword Shaun McNiff Preface Ross W. Prior Chapter 1: Introduction: Artist–Educator–Researcher Ross W. Prior Part 1: Aesthetic Education and Ways of Knowing in Art Chapter 2: Art as a Procedure of Truth Malcolm Ross Chapter 3: ‘Not Sure’: The Didactics of Elusive Knowledge Peter Sinapius Chapter 4: Art as the Topic, Process and Outcome of Research within Higher Education Ross W. Prior Chapter 5: A Different Way of Knowing: Assessment and Feedback in Art-Based Research Mitchell Kossak Part 2: Developing Our Practice in Postgraduate Education Chapter 6: Doing Art-Based Research: An Advising Scenario Shaun McNiff Chapter 7: Research–Practice–Pedagogy: Establishing New Topologies of Doctoral Research in the Arts Jacqueline Taylor Chapter 8: The ‘Epistemic Object’ in the Creative Process of Doctoral Inquiry Carole Gray, Julian Malins and Maxine Bristow Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching Chapter 9: Finding My Visual Research Voice: Art as the Tool for Research Megan Lawton Part 3: Involving Students and Others in Art as Research Chapter 10: Making and Material Affect: From Learning and Teaching to Sharing and Listening Mah Rana and Fiona Hackney Chapter 11: Using Art to Cultivate ‘Medical Humanities Care’ in Chinese Medical Education Daniel Vuillermin Chapter 12: Entanglement in Shakespeare’s Text: Using Interpretive Mnemonics with Acting Students with Dyslexia Petronilla Whitfield Chapter 13: Dancing as a Wolf: Art-Based Understanding of Autistic Spectrum Condition Kevin Burrows Part 4: Current and Future Issues in Arts Learning and Teaching Chapter 14: Making Art and Teaching Art: Harnessing the Tension Libby Byrne and Patricia Fenner Chapter 15: Future Approaches in Using Artistic Research from Human Experience Petar Jandric ́ and Sarah Hayes Notes on Contributors
£26.55
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs: Cyclic
Book SynopsisPresents a first analytical study that looks at the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten's John Donne, Thomas Hardy and William Blake solo song cycles. By questioning when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, Sly shows that Britten's personal selection and arrangement is indispensable to understanding these cycles' extra-musical communication. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words (poems by Hardy) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake - composed in 1945, 1953 and 1965 respectively - each represent a philosophical exploration. The terrains set out by the three poets are distinct, but also engage one another in important and unexpected ways. Their cyclic architectures are expressed not only in their poetic arrangement, but in their musical settings. Key relationships and motive remain central for Britten. Keys convey a network of interconnections, create groupings of songs, and establish levels of tonal affinity or distance. Motive - often intervals that can fit into any melodic, harmonic or rhythmic context - is used to create aural affinities between or among individual songs. This book also offers a broader narrative revealing Britten's evolving philosophical convictions in post-war Britain. While it may not be the case that Britten intended any broader philosophical comment, the works together outline the cold and brittle state that emerges from loss and aligns with their composer's increasingly stark outlook on humanity.Table of ContentsPreface 1: Britten's Clever Subconscious 2: The Holy Sonnets of John Donne 3: Winter Words 4: Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Coda Bibliography Index
£66.50
Gibson Square Books Ltd Gardening in Slippers
Book SynopsisLiz Cowley's first volume of bestselling humorous gardening cameos inspired by early morning gardening, out in a new series design and large gift format, with five new cameos.
£10.44
Unbound Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Book SynopsisIt is New Year at Camelot and a mysterious green knight appears at King Arthur’s court. Challenging the knights of the Round Table to a Christmas game, he offers his splendid axe as a prize to whoever is brave enough to behead him with just one strike. The condition is that his challenger must seek him out in a year and a day to have the deed returned. Sir Gawain accepts and decapitates the stranger, only to see him pick up his head, walk out of the hall and ride away on his horse. Now Gawain must complete his part of the bargain, search for his foe and confront what seems his doom… Michael Smith’s translation of this magnificent Arthurian romance draws on his intimate experience of the North West of England and his knowledge of mediaeval history, culture and architecture. He takes us back to the original poetic form of the manuscript and brings it alive for a modern audience, while revealing the poem’s historic and literary context.The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with detailed recreations of the illuminated lettering in the original manuscript and the author’s own linocut prints, each meticulously researched for contemporary accuracy. This is an exciting new edition that will appeal both to students of the Gawain-poet and the general reader alike.
£15.29
Carcanet Press Ltd Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisFinalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020. Winner of an English PEN Award. Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laabi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laabi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from 'beyond the borders of what is human', as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are 'the only weapon we've left'. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is 'right here / inside me / like a second body', and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that 'epic of silence'. These poems, Laabi's 'bitter fruits of the murderous twilight', renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet's duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laabi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laabi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.Trade Review'Laabi's rhythm and flow come through in these incantatory verses of struggle and love for a reimagined land.' - World Literature Today
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems: Volume I
Book SynopsisFrance’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.
£16.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Posthumous Cantos
Book SynopsisEzra Pound's Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale's Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound's Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into a companion book to the Cantos, running from 1917 to 1972 and including the Cantos he wrote in Italian in 1944-5. An Italian edition was published in 2002 and revised in 2012. This is the first English edition of a crucial part of the Pound canon. Posthumous Cantos is arranged to reflect the eight phases of the Cantos' composition. Pound's writing suffered the consequences of the turbulent history of his century. World War I left the cultural world he came to Europe for in ruins; and the aftermath of the World War II in which he took a contrary side, made his work, like his life, discontinuous, a sequence of brilliant moments and profound ruptures.
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd The Met Office Advises Caution
Book SynopsisShortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Rebecca Watts's debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry. In assured style, Watts positions herself where Wordsworth, Frost and Hughes have stood; with an original point of view and an openness to the possibilities of form, she retunes the genre for modern ears. From the wide-open plains of ecology and social history to the intimate enclosures of dreams, homes and bodies, these poems approach their often-unusual subjects with the clarity and matter-of-factness of Simon Armitage and with humour that recalls Stevie Smith, spinning memorable scenes and vivid images from the material of ordinary language. Animals, as familiars and omens, abound. Weather anticipates and directs human drama, under the analytic and tender watch of a poet influenced as much by science and realism as by Romanticism. As landscaper, orienteer and companion, Watts finds new ways of negotiating the complex territories of our physical and emotional worlds.Trade Review'What a joy to find a writer so capable of creating narrative within the poetic, humour within philosophy, wildness and drama within the quotidian. Watts has a rare, perceptive eye, searching intelligence and gorgeous levity. This is a striding and far from standard debut.' Sarah Hall; 'Rebecca Watts' poems adopt strange and illuminating vantage points - the bird's-eye view of a hawk, or a Victorian lady surveying a street from a penny-farthing - to do poetry's work of telling the truth, but telling it slant. Watts is particularly attuned to those points where human and non-human creatures meet and interact, and writes with intelligence and incision.' Emma Jones; 'With Watts we get this sense of the creative mind being strung out and pushed to its limits.' The Poetry School
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Vladimir Mayakovsky: And Other Poems
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize. 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.'Trade Review'A genius poet.' David Burliuk; 'He had a major gift.' Joseph Brodsky; 'In 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' and Other Poems the poet James Womack has put together the comprehensive selection of Mayakovsky's poems I have long been waiting for. His fresh translation allows English readers to appreciate the non-aligned and passionate personality of the Russian poet. I recommend a few lines twice a day to protect against dry academic writing.' The Times Higher Education Best Books of 2016
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisElaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems.The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.Trade Review'Elaine Feinstein has made the juncture between poetry and memoir her own. As befits a poet who is also a master of fiction and biography, she writes with casual erudition and an acute storyteller's eye. Her forays into European culture and history are dazzling.' Fiona Sampson; 'For more than 40 years, Feinstein has been writing intensely lyrical, finely crafted poems.' Independent; 'Here we have a life, a person in the world opened up with intelligence and tact.' Martina Evans, The Irish Times
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Diary of the Last Man
Book SynopsisWales Book of the Year 2018. Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.Trade Review'Robert Minhinnick's new collection confirms his status as one of the most important poets of these turbulent times. Bleakly elegiac, environmentally political, vital and visionary, his poems cast an extraordinary light over our darkening landscapes.' - Carol Ann Duffy; 'Robert Minhinnick is the leading Welsh poet of his generation.' - Sunday Times; 'Minhinnick is a poet of the moment...his best work takes you and places you slap bang in the middle of an experience. Like a mini tardis.' - The Big Issue
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Peelin Orange: Collected Poems
Book SynopsisPeelin Orange is the definitive Collected Poems by one of Jamaica's leading voices, the current Poet Laureate, Mervyn Morris. These poems explore the everyday, the erotic, love and the melancholy and comedy of being. Often drawing upon Creole dialect, Morris explores his Jamaican heritage with trademark musicality. Each poem offers a pared-down shard of concentrated feeling and social observation. This Collected Poems is a landmark tribute to the winner of the Order of Merit (Jamaica) 2009 and highlights his distinguished contribution to West Indian Literature.Trade Review'One of the most significant poets in the Caribbean.' - Wasafiri Magazine
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd In These Days of Prohibition
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, `revving on a wish'.Trade Review'Caroline Bird's In These Days of Prohibition is equally pleasurable and disturbing, because it understands the genuinely strange ground on which we must build our thoughts and our emotions. In work of great and frequently comic poise it captures moments of absolute loss of control, and absolute freedom. We recognise that sustained unsettling comic virtuosity is the startling agent by which we engage with such loss, such freedom.' - W.N Herbert (Chair of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize Judging Panel); 'Her poems burst with linguistic energy.' - Times Literary Supplement; 'What an original captivating and spellbinding voice. Bird is fearless. She's dangerous and witty too with a rare quality of imagination.' - Lemn Sissay; 'Bird is irrepressible; she simply explodes with poetry. The work erupts, spring-loaded, funny, sad, deadly - you don't know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word BANG on it.' - Simon Armitage
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd In Darkest Capital: Collected Poems
Book SynopsisIn Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, `Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and `Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond. Along the way there are homages to Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, Kurt Schwitters, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Cage and Tom Raworth. His poems do not break down into form and content but insist on a continuity between lyrical purpose and critical thinking. An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism, Milne’s Collected Poems captures the `skewed luxuriance’ (Guardian) of his eco-socialist poetics.Trade Review`Drew Milne is a formalist par excellence. He is a syllable counter, a shape shifter, and above all he is a sonic machine. His native inclination as a formalist is at once modernist and Marxist. But one could also say, simply, that Milne is a late Romantic lyric-poet with a political imagination. His latest turn to lichen introduces a sense of scale to the vulnerable and tenuous relationship we have to the natural world and gives a plaintive urgency to his song.’ - Peter Gizzi; `Beckoning disjunctions and witty deformations shine their torch on tawdry contemporary realia, but lyrical moments and Scottish echoes fill the interstices with pleasing difference.’ - Edwin Morgan on Sheet Mettle; `Lyrical social critique becomes a plausible art . . . Milne’s rhetoric displays a subtle, internalized argument that draws one to its cause.’ - Marjorie Welish on Go Figure
£17.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Joy
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale’s fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. `Joy’ is a monologue in the voice of William Blake’s wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it `an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing’. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto `silent’ dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the `maligned and misaligned’.Trade Review'Addictive writing, compelling and tender.' Malika Booker
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Venus as a Bear
Book SynopsisThe Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice. Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance. They tend toward, and tend to, the inanimate and non-human, tenderly disclosing their forms of sentience. We have feelings for creatures, objects and places, but where do these affinities come from? How do things, as things, affect us, remain mysterious while making themselves known? For Capildeo answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm; exploring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; criss-crossing the British Isles with the Out of Bounds poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales. Many of the poems respond to real places, objects and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications. They dwell on bodies and dwell in the body, inviting ardent, open forms of reading, in the spirit of their composition.Trade Review'This is a highly original collection in form and content, with blunted messages and sharp polished undertones. One to read slowly and savour.' - Poetry Salzberg Review on Measures of Expatriation
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Now We Can Talk Openly About Men
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.Trade Review'The admired vernacular brilliance of Martina Evans's poetry is applied here to her most ambitious work to date, bringing to vivid life one of the most terrible periods of Irish history from the Troubles around 1920 to the Civil War, as witnessed and experienced by two generations of women ... No other poet currently writing in Britain and Ireland can rival Evans's ability to represent the impact of the political on the personal without easy histrionics. This is a remarkable document, a major work.' - Bernard O'Donoghue
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Dear Pilgrims
Book SynopsisWith `Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His `I’, like theirs, makes space for a reluctant `us’. Dear Pilgrims includes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a `new testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his `Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God’.Trade Review'No poet writing today takes this spiritual task so seriously: nor achieves it with such exemplary, luminous grace.' - The Irish Times; 'Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God - ?? specifically with the local and physical God that is the central figure of the gospels - these are poems with all of John Deane's familiar richness. A deeply welcome collection.' - Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; 'On a simple level, the poems in John F Deane's Semibreve (Carcanet) are elegies for the past and specifically for a lost brother. More profoundly, they teach us how bereavement, touched by a poet's tongue, can become a shared gift: "wonders of the flesh and spirit, a road-map for a shattered faith"'. - The Guardian
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Gilgamesh Retold
Jenny Lewis relocates Gilgamesh to its earlier, oral roots in a Sumerian society where men and women were more equal, the reigning deity of Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk, was female (Inanna), only women were allowed to brew beer and keep taverns and women had their own language – emesal. With this shift of emphasis, Lewis captures the powerful allure of the world’s oldest poem and gives it a fresh dynamic while creating a fastpaced narrative for a new generation of readers.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Dictator
Book SynopsisDictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials, links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.Trade Review`Philip Terry treats the tablets like elements of code to be cracked open for contemporary eyes and ears. [His] version is original and powerful; he does not try to mend the fragments into a legible whole, but remembers the poem’s shattered state.’ - Marina Warner
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Book SynopsisThe Collected Poems (Second Impression) of Jamaica's Poet Laureate (2017-2020) and winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2019. Lorna Goodison is a poet alive to places, from the loved and lived-in world of Jamaica where she began and started a family, to the United States and Canada where she has made her teaching career, but always re-connecting with her Caribbean roots. She travels with an ear alert to histories and voices. How differently English sounds in the tropics and in colder lands, at seaside in sunlight and on prairies, mountains and in cities. The same words say quite different things, depending on who speaks them and who's listening, obeying or resisting. She covers a wide range of subjects and themes, too. Her instinct is to celebrate being alive in a world that is rich but in peril. `And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore?' asks Derek Walcott. `Joy.' The `mango of poetry', eaten straight from the tree, Goodison somehow finds growing in Wordsworth country and in Sligo, in Russia and Norway, in Spain and Portugal which spilled their empires into the Caribbean, in Cape Town and Far Rockaway.Trade Review'A rooted, organic delight, true in its intonations to the Jamaican language she loves, fresh in its wit and pain and in the high, spiritual gossip of its leaves.' - Derek Walcott
£16.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Gallop: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisAlison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, Dreams of Power, gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on `a thrumming lorry'. The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.Trade Review`Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.’ - Gillian Clarke (National Poet of Wales)
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Significant Other
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies - loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction - that make up a life. The habit of foisting human agendas on non-human worlds is challenged. Must we still describe willows as weeping? In the twenty-first century, is it possible to be 'at one' with nature? The poems reflect on our desire to locate likeness, empathy and kinship with our environments, whilst embracing inevitable difference. As the narratives belonging to animal fables, Doomsday Preppers and climate change deniers are adapted, new metaphors are found that speak of both estrangement and entanglement. Drawing at times from her residency in the Amazon rainforest, Galleymore delves into a world of pink-toed tarantulas, the erotic lives of barnacles, and caged owls that behave like their keepers. The human world revises its own measure in the light of these poems.Trade Review`Galleymore evokes an abundance of `other' worlds in these beautiful poems through a combination of simplicity, empathy and sheer Blakean joy.' - Rachael Boast; `The love poem's conventions are defined by the exclusive passions between a lover and a beloved. But for Galleymore the beloved is so many of the things in the world, the `eight million differently constructed hearts' which includes the squid's, the snake's, also the limpet's. And so she writes a new sort of love poem, one of inclusion, and hope.' - Juliana Spahr
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Girl
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2019 East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award. In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire.Trade Review`This is a book about human bodies: freckles, fists, itches and that "private reek". Graphic, funny and tender, these poems jostle with bodies that swim, jog, f*ck, medicate, spin on dodgems, grow up and grow ill. Girl is a quivering, kicking reminder of what it is to be alive.' - Clare Pollard; `These are poems of brave surrender to the accident of living, the constant somersault, and regardless of whether the change is huge or tiny - a thunderbolt or an unexpected freckle - it is always fundamental, always shattering, always a thrill.' - Caroline Bird; `Rebecca Goss's voice is quietly passionate. Her forms are exquisitely crafted. Her themes, of human fragility and of our bodies' capacity for pleasure and pain, are universal.' - Vicki Feaver
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Nineveh
Book SynopsisNineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.Trade Review'The poems in Nineveh take ancient clay and sculpt vigorously innovative shapes: how very refreshing to plunge into a collection which re-thinks historical Jewish religion and culture with such subversive, witty originality. `Revelatory’ is not too strong a word.' - Carol Rumens
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Donegal Tarantella
Book SynopsisThis sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.Trade Review'a music which is all their own, through which the reader can enter a unique dialogue between elegy and celebration' - Eavan Boland; 'a deep interiority and soaring lyricism... a showing forth of the earth.' - Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; 'A revelation in its range and depth. These poems are written out of Moya Cannon's enduring preoccupations: with history – especially the history of exile and displacement – with music, language, loss. True to the shifts of real experience, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes ironic, she deploys an understated technique, in a voice that is deliberate, exact and witty. Here are poems, landscapes alive with birds, people and stories, that show us our world, our past and culture through the gift of just, joyful words; they help us to reflect and to live.' - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Afterwardness
Book SynopsisA 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019. Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible. She has created in this unprogrammatic series, mixing memory, history, daily life, all her intersecting geographies and cultures, a self-portrait in all her moods, anxieties and delights. The sonnet form is stretched in all sorts of fruitful directions. Just as she adapted the ghazal form to English use, here she puts the Petrarchan sonnet to striking, unfamiliar use, widening the possibilities of the form. The poems are rich with Khalvati's personal history, her Iranian origins, her long years in Great Britain. The poems play between cultures, ancestral and acquired.Trade Review'I found these sonnets to be exquisite and remarkable, not only for Mimi Khalvati's formal virtuosity but also for her bold and brilliant charting of new ground, in exploring the energies of absence, silence and unknowing. The poet's ear in these poems is attuned not to obvious noise but to night sounds, faint traces, on those whose lives lack narrative or 'underscript'. These poems are playful, moving and brimming with a fierce intelligence, and in this collection, her ninth, Mimi Khalvati is writing at the very height of her lyric power.' - Hannah Lowe
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems: Volume II 1939-1962
Book SynopsisWilliam Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume II reissued as a Carcanet Classic. After 1939, William Carlos Williams had embarked on the great original experiment that led to his magnificent, faulted master-work 'Paterson', and the work in the second volume of The Complete Poems provides a luminous record of his developing strategies, the emergence of a firm sense of 'the variable foot', and of the unaffected, secular and democratic voice of a poet who remains the great American modernist. It includes the collections he published alongside Paterson - The Wedge (1944), The Clouds (1948) and The Pink Church (1949); the two books in which he developed his distinctive three-step line, The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955); and his final Pulitzer Prize volume, Pictures from Breughel (1962). As in Volume I, previously uncollected pieces are arranged chronologically and placed between the individual books. Williams's verse translations from four languages are also included. Williams remains challenging not because he is obscure but because he is so wonderfully direct. To reveal some of Williams's techniques of revision the editor prints some poems in earlier and later versions, and a few of the poems from the suppressed 1909 volume are included so that we can measure the extent of his growth. As in Volume I, there is a full editorial apparatus.
£21.25
Carcanet Press Ltd So Many Rooms
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry 2020. The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month August 2019. So Many Rooms, the debut collection from Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winning poet Laura Scott, moves with its own lyric strangeness, opening up different rooms and also different worlds.Trade Review`So Many Rooms is beguiling and lyrically persuasive. Scott's fine formal control and her mesmerising shifts of imagery underpin poems of sensual intelligence, thoughtfulness and poetic beauty.' - Sasha Dugdale; `Not just a gathering of poems, but an intricate through-composed work in which images and stories are turned and refigured from page to page. These are short lyrics on big canvases - mythic, ambitious and richly engaging.' - Michael Symmons Roberts; `These are intimate poems, grounded, yet dreamlike, revealing the beauty, gravity and power at the core of the everyday. They're all the more compelling because it's as if the poems are allowed to make their own discoveries with the poet knowing exactly when to step back, and when and how to intervene.' - Moniza Alvi; `Concealing as much as they reveal, Laura Scott's eloquent fables combine acute attention to minutiae (`the creases in gloved fingers') with a beguiling sense of the world's unpredictability. These unerringly deft poems reveal what Marianne Moore once called the `mystery of construction', bathing the everyday in a light both compassionate and uncanny. So Many Rooms is a startling debut collection from a formidably gifted poet.' - Mark Ford
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd In Her Feminine Sign
Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix taamarbuta, `the tied circle’ – a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humour reminiscent of Wisława Szymborska, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, tracing new circles of light.Trade Review'terse, unadorned, stripped and ironic... her voice is the inescapable voice of Arab poetry today.' - Pierre Joris
£10.44
Carcanet Press Ltd A Kingdom of Love
A Kingdom of Love is a lyrical interrogation of the place of the sacred and profane in a demythologised world from poet and Anglican parish priest, Rachel Mann.
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems
Book SynopsisElizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism and theology, she received numerous awards, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems. This New Selected Poems comes forty years on from her first Carcanet Selected, which it honours by retaining her original choices while adding a substantial number of poems from her several later collections. Edited by Rebecca Watts, whose debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Prize, this book is a new take on a poet whose human sympathy and religious faith are transferable and timeless.Trade Review'She's a major poet of our time.' - Germaine Greer
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Art of Escape
Book SynopsisA Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020). Among Mina Gorji's poems in New Poetries V (2011) was one about Houdini entitled 'The Art of Escape' which returns here as the title poem. This colourful and vivid first collection continues the course of Mina Gorji's meticulous explorations of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformation of an armadillo into music. These poems shift by degrees until new patterns and sounds emerge, transforming the familiar into unexpected configurations. Art of Escape is a wonderful casting off into the complex waters of adult life, in which change has become the constant.Trade Review'Here are poems of unsparing clarity, unflinching, each one an acute canticle of remembrance... Art of Escape marks the beginning of a splendid new voice in British poetry.' - Ishion Hutchinson; 'Mina Gorji's poems take small, careful steps over a treacherous terrain, securing their meanings with steady intent. Deceptively straightforward statement mingles with natural lore and observation to create complex, delicate structures.' - Jamie McKendrick; 'With these luminous, tender, yet tough poems, Mina Gorji is building a place of safety - for herself, her family, her readers, and all those who are wandering and uprooted.' - Marina Warner; 'Her poems resemble the curious animals they seek to represent - enigmatic, sometimes armour-plated, inviting yet also protective of their inner mysteries.' - Jahan Ramazani
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Deformations
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.Trade Review'Dugdale proves herself a powerful voice by writing about visual art, poetry, and history, 'in reverse'' - Antony Huen
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSince C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning. Feminist and queer scholars have since laid claim to Rossetti; but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti's ambition while attending, too, to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist and fantastical elements in her work.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd The Captain's Verses
Book SynopsisThis dual language edition is reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitán as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.
£13.49
