Poetry Books

Book SynopsisWalking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time's abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more..., these urgent poems carry our collective grief for all that is lost-'there was no one to grieve / so I walked beside them, taking it on.' ('Dead Swans on a Winter Coast') And alongside the losses, cultural and ecological, there is also vision, searing and politically acute. Prophetic in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, but with the lyric compression of William Carlos Williams, whose words provide the epigraph for this collection, Barnie imagines his quiet rural homeland occupied and brutalised in the central sequence, 'Occupied': 'the safety net / so full of holes you couldn't catch a whale in it [...]/ I knew the days of iridescence were lost for ever.' ('Iridescence') While in 'M.A.D.: The Sequel' rhymes skip along with an irony reminiscent of William Blake's use of nursery rhyme metre to convey horror. As the world is incinerated we hear: 'cry if you must / there was no one to gather / the heart's dust.' Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true. Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.

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Book SynopsisAcutely observed, incisive and precise, The Remaining Men sees Martin Figura combining precision, wit and compassion to produce a collection that is linguistically dexterous and deeply effective.

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Book Synopsisthe heart is an organ of perception, one of the body's brains as well as an image of romantic love, joy and despair. Setting out to explore the flesh and blood of the organ' in this journey of a transplant, Jacqueline Haskell excavates the metaphor with extraordinary intelligence and skill. Moving from science to the heart as an organ of memory, passion and so much more, the poetry in this collection is inventive and perspective-shifting, layering fact and emotion, folklore and ritual, mortality and life. Fascinating and deeply moving, Takotsubo is a compelling collection made all the ore so by its precision and suppleness of language.

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Book SynopsisGwnewch y pethau bychain Do the little things' (Dewi Sant/St David) is how Fiona Owen signs off her communications. And she is a poet who understands that the little things are actually the things to which we should be paying our deepest attention the small interactions between people, the word that matters, the objects that hold more than memory and, vitally, the land we live on, the air we breathe, the anima/ls and plants we live amongst and with, who teach us not to other' them for the sake of our humanity as much as for their sake and their survival. This is a collection that pulses with anima, the unconscious that moves through all life, bubbling up in these exquisitely realised, attentive poems.

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Book SynopsisJenny Morris has a gift for observation translated into fresh and lyrical imagery. In Eye Level she looks beneath the surface of memory with a wistful but never sentimental gaze. Here memory stains your bones' and we enter a landscape where mortality is never far away, yet there is also hope and resilience here, the ways in which we pass on hope to the generations below us because The story must go on and on.' Along the way, ancestors are honoured, the places and people who form us are witnessed and new generations are celebrated. Eye Level is a compassionate and intelligent collection leavened with verbal dexterity and wry humour from a mature and accomplished voice. A delight to read and re-read.

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Book SynopsisFrom objects imbued with meaning and memory to the places that nurture and anchor us, Denise Bennett's poetry is grounded in a sense of the sacredness of the everyday. There is keen attention to justice and relationships of integrity shine a bright light into dark places. The poetry here is not only accomplished but deeply felt. It comes from a place of listening and seeing with the heart and is delivered in imagery that is lucid, precise and moving.

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Book SynopsisWhen Shabtai Zvi of Smyrna, a 17th Century man of piety, if eccentric and unruly, proclaims himself Messiah, euphoria and devotion ripple through Jewish communities worldwide. Imprisoned for sedition by the Ottomans, Shabtai converts to Islam to escape the death penalty, but his story doesn’t end there, as true believers follow their messiah into conversion, creating a unique hybrid religion that survived in secret for centuries, and inspiring Jacob Frank to claim, a century later, to be Shabtai’s reincarnation (the subject of Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 winner, The Books of Jacob). A work of fiction that melds poetry, prose and play, Unbridled Messiah is constructed from eyewitness accounts (real and imaginary), letters and historical sources, delivering an extraordinary and spell-binding narrative enlivened by Shinebourne’s chorus of Heavenly Sisters, who play with the ‘facts’, adding irreverent and mischievous interpretations. Long-listed for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2020, Unbridled Messiah, is an ambitious, intelligent and inventive exploration of the multiple ways we approach and find salvation.Trade ReviewPnina Shinebourne is an utterly singular writer. Told in sharp, glinting shards, her stories leave the haunting impression of a lucid dream, strange and startling and making an urgent sort of sense. Unbridled Messiah is a vivid, unforgettable book. — Lucy Caldwell; Pnina Shinebourne’s writing pirouettes through the tricky territories of philosophy and religion. With a light and curious touch, she investigates what it means to be a believer, a woman, a prophet, or any creature shaped by gods and fates. If you could hear the cackles of angels, I imagine they would sound something like Unbridled Messiah. — Rowan Buchanen

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Book SynopsisSet to generate and influence discussions in the field for years to come, this is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. It will set the benchmark for all subsequent works on the subject, being the first book of its kind. Poetry films are a genre of short film, usually combining the three main elements: the poem as verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. This book examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry and video poetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. Provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. Includes interviews, analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film from its origins to the present. This is a very important, groundbreaking work on film poetry. The ideas discussed here are of great importance, and the diversity and breadth of the volume is especially impressive and very useful. This book brings together in one place crucial ideas and information for practitioners, students and academics, and is clearly and accessibly written. Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, this will be an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers. It explores working practices, processes of collaboration and the mechanisms which make these possible. It also reveals the network of festivals disseminating and theorizing poetry film and presents a compelling bibliography. This is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date. It is poised to become a major text in the field. Essential reading for academics teaching poetry filmmaking, moving image, film, media and media poetry, writing and art. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in those fields. Great potential for textbook adoption. Also relevant to poets, filmmakers, visual artists, graphic artists and theorists, filmmakers, screenwriters, art historians, philosophers, cultural commentators, arts journalists.Trade Review'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film is a unique and extraordinary contribution to this vibrant field of expression. Her landmark volume elegantly articulates the conceptual foundations, language, grammar, and vocabulary of poetry film and its cognate forms; delivers a concise and incisive history of the genre, and introduces students, practitioners and scholars to the field’s contemporary pioneers, methods of making, and varied narrative forms. Laden with rich and provocative illustration and example, The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as Bible, Guide to the Perplexed, and indispensable reference, fluidly integrating interviews with and notes by forty contributors into a coherent and beautifully structured progression. This book—a wonder in its variety, complexity, and ambition—is a superb read.' -- Marc Zegans, poet, poetry film and immersive theatre artist'The sentence on the cover says it all for me. Hard to believe it’s been more than 50 years since Sympathies of War, my first videopoem. I’m thankful that a book like this, the first of its kind, of its sheer scope, finally exists and humbled that I had a part to play in the flowering of a new genre of poetry. No one better than the indefatigable doyenne of videopoems, my good friend Sarah Tremlett to make it come true.' -- Tom Konyves, videopoet and theorist'This is an encyclopaedic, groundbreaking manuscript on an area of film production that definitely needs more attention, and stands to be the book to surpass for quite some time; the author knows her territory intimately ... It is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date; it’s very diverse, includes women, minorities and transgender filmmakers, and Tremlett's descriptions of the films, and the intent of the filmmaker poets, and is both accessible and clearly written. This is a sharp, up to the minute manuscript on the bleeding edge of film criticism. ... A book exploding with dazzling, evocative images and trenchant analysis.' -- Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Willa Cather Professor of English & Film Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln'This is a gem of a book. It brings together in one place crucial ideas and information for practitioner and academic. I wish very much that it had been available when I found my way into videopoetry ... Considering the scope of the subject matter, what has been achieved here in terms of clarifying and anatomizing is remarkable.' -- Dr Meriel Lland, writer, photographer and film-artist‘I loved reading this book. The Poetics of Poetry Film is an amazing resource for scholars and everyone interested in contemporary poetry.’ -- Dr Rebecca Kosick, Senior Lecturer in Translation and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol'An exhaustive study of Video Poetry by the remarkable Sarah Tremlett and over 40 contributors! I was fortunate enough to have read with Sarah at the Bury Text Festival and found her work to be amazing. She also appears in an issue of Ekleksographia edited by Judith Skillman. I recognize some names among the pioneers of the movement, including the Polypoet Enzo Minarelli. Congrats on this fantastic book! This is really wonderful!' -- Jesse Glass, American poet, artist, folklorist and Professor of American Literature at Meikai University, Japan.'Sarah Tremlett’s The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection offers a breathtaking range of glimpses at the historical flashpoints, formal anatomy, and major and minor contemporary makers and trends in what Tremlett alternately calls film poems and poetry film (and their sister, video poetry). [...] The book is impressively comprehensive in its representation and acknowledgment of the wide diversity of formal experiments and elements that constitute the history and present of “poetry film,”. [...] The Poetics of Poetry Film should serve as an important resource for scholars and filmmakers interested in contemporary aesthetic trends in this interdisciplinary field. It also offers an important archive of festivals and conferences on poetry film through its inclusion of interviews with festival organizers and writings by contemporary filmmakers working at the intersection of poetry and film.' -- Rebecca A. Sheehan, Projections: The Journal for Movies and MindTable of ContentsIllustrations Foreword Valerie LeBlanc Preface xix Introduction: Poetry, Song, Philosophy – The Combined Lyric Aesthetic PART ONE: FORM AND STRUCTURE 1. Terminology across Time 2. Realization and Structure 3. Voice and Narrative 4. Time and Mind 5. Constructing Dynamic Spatio- Temporality 6. Tonality, Light and Colour 7. Sound Design 8. Poet on Screen: Persona and Subjectivity PART TWO: ARTISTS’ VOICES 9. Contemporary Pioneers George Aguilar Enzo Minarelli Enzo Minarelli Tom Konyves Javier Robledo Peter Todd Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman Rosemary Norman Stuart Pound Heather Haley Thomas Zandegiacomo del Bel Zata Banks Gabrielė Labanauskaitė Dave Bonta Alastair Cook Marc Neys 10. Making Chaucer Cameron Marie Craven Lucy English Ian Gibbins Jane Glennie Suzie Hanna Kate Jessop Adeena Karasick Martha McCollough Matt Mullins Adele Myers Charles Olsen Caleb Parkin and Helmie Stil Helmie Stil Caleb Parkin Maciej Piatek Dave Richardson Othniel Smith Howard Vause Susanne Wiegner 11. Poetry Film and Videopoetry in Portugal and Spain: Alive and Thriving Charles Olsen Alexandre Braga Manuel Vilarinho Eduardo Yagüe Tarha Erena Alejandro Céspedes Celia Parra Jordan T. Caylor Belén Gache Santiago Parres Lola López- Cózar Agustín Fernández Mallo David Argüelles Redondo Ángel Guinda and Sándor M. Salas 12. Experimental Poetry in Argentina from the 1960s to the 1990s: Political Voice and Prefiguring the Turn to Digital Literature and Video Poetry Marisol Bellusci 13. Liberated Words: Developing a Poetry Film Festival and Workshops Butterflies Haven Workshop Helen Moore Howard Vause PART THREE: SELECTED NARRATIVE FORMS 14. Collections John D. Scott 15. Text- on- Screen 16. Video Haiku and Video Haiga Katia Viscogliosi and Francis Magnenot Judy Kendall 17. A Documentary Approach to Poetry Film 18. Dance and Movement Helen Mort 19. The Ecopoetry Film Meriel Lland Janet Lees Janet Lees Helen Moore and Howard Vause Helen Moore Overview Examples of Leading Poetry Film Festivals References Artists and Authors Index

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Book SynopsisA tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media. Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too,” and #MeToo was trending. That tweet re-launched the ‘me too’ movement, which was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke. Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away does not attempt to deliver a comprehensive examination of how #MeToo is performed. What it does aim at presenting is a set of perspectives on the events identified as representative of the movement through a lens or lenses that are multinational, as well as work and analysis from a variety of time periods, written in a diversity of styles. By providing this means of engaging with examples of the many interpretations of and responses to the #MeToo movement, and by identifying these responses (and those of audiences) as provocations, of examples of how not to look away, the collected chapters are intended to invite reflection, discussion and, hopefully, incite action. It gives writers from diverse cultural and environmental contexts an opportunity to speak about this cultural moment in their own voices. There is a wide geographical range and variety of forms of performance addressed in this timely new book. The international group of contributors are based in the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, Scotland, Canada, India, Italy and South Korea. The topics addressed by writers include socially engaged practice; celebrity feminism, archive and repertoire; rape/war; misogynistic speech; stage management and intimacy facilitation; key institutions’ responses; spatial practices as well as temporal ones; academic call-outs; caste/class; political contexts; adaptation of classic texts; activist events; bouffon (a clown technique) and audience response Forms of performance practice include applied theatre, performance protest, verbatim, solo performance, institutional practice, staging of plays, street responses, academic, adaptation of classic text, play reading events and the musical. Although there is much to read in the media and alternative media on the #MeToo movement, this is the first attempt to analyse the movement from and in such diverse contexts. Bringing together twelve writers to speak about works they have either performed, witnessed or studied gives the reader a nuanced way of looking at the movement and its impact. It is also an incredible archive of this moment in time that points to its importance. Suitable for use in several graduate and undergraduate courses, including performance studies, feminist studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, environmental or liberal studies and social history. Essential reading for theatre workers, academics, students, and anyone with an interest in feminism, contemporary theatre or human rights. For artists considering projects that include the themes of #MeToo, and for producers and directors of such projects looking for good practices around how to create environments of safety in their organizations, as well as those who wish to organize communities of artists. For anyone interested in learning more about how to support the movement, or an interest in the specific social narratives told in each individual chapter. For women, feminists and anyone with an interest in the issues.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Judith Rudakoff “Vital Acts of Transfer”: #MeToo and the Performance of Embodied Knowledge Shana MacDonald Bite the Bullet: The Practice of Protest as a Coping Mechanism Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga Resisting Theatre: The Political in the Performative Effie Samara Supporting Brave Spaces for Theatre-Makers Post-#MeToo: A Chicago-Based Study on Rehearsing and Performing Intimacy in Theatre Susan Fenty Studham We Get It: Calling Out Sexism and Harassment in Australia’s Live Performance Industry Sarah Thomasson Toward the Origin of Performing #MeToo: Franca Rame’s The Rape as an Example of Personal and Political Theatre/Therapy Laura Peja and Fausto Colombo The Royal Court in the Wake of #MeToo Catriona Fallow and Sarah Jane Mullan Dissident Solidarities: Power, Pedagogy, Care Swati Arora Conversations with Noura: Iraqi American Women and a Response to A Doll’s House Mary P. Caulfield #MeToo Theatre Women Share Their Stories Yvette Heyliger Les Zoubliettes: Raging through Laughter—a Feminist Disturbance Sonia Norris “I’m the person to speak about myself”: Self-Declaration, Reversal of Power, and Solidarity in The Red Book Yuh J. Hwang Appendix: A Primer on the International #MeToo Movement Elise A. LaCroix Biographies of Contributors

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for Costa Poetry Award 2020Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020Shortlisted for John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2021Poetry Book of the Month - The Telegraph May 2020Included in Books of the Year 2020 - The TLS November 2020Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet – brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects – the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light – make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.Trade ReviewReviews'So much fire comes to life in snapshots on these pages ... The images are electrifying. Something marvellous occurs: a domestic scene becomes “a blow to the head / enough to knock the earth from its orbit.” I love this book.'Ilya Kaminsky 'Martha Sprackland's poems are virtuosic in their timing, texture, and detailed evocation. From poems of the hospital to poems of the shore, this is a fierce and fresh debut that rings with courage and intelligence. Citadel will seize you by the heart and lead you into deep and resonant territories, and when you return you will find yourself changed, strange to yourself, and wondrously enriched.'Fiona Benson'[Citadel] is keenly responsive to questions of place and displacement... Sprackland’s painterly visions linger long in the memory.'Aingeal Clare, The Guardian For previous work: 'Sprackland’s words pierce through the mundanity of the everyday, creating intense emotional landscapes [...] With Milk Tooth, Sprackland continues to establish herself as one of Britain’s finest young poets.' Robert Greer, The London Magazine For previous work: 'Sprackland refreshes the domestic and mundane in poems which are outwardly calm, but lit from within to reveal unusual visionary angles.' Eric Gregory Award Judges 2014 For previous work: 'Martha Sprackland is already a formidable technician. The sonnet is moved through quatrains and and a kind of terza rima, and there is deft and adept free verse. The result is a calm, taut surface to the poems which belies the heightened, sometimes gothic nature of the subject matter.' Ian Pople, The Manchester Review For previous work: '[A] commanding teller of the strange stories of others . . . Sprackland's best poems have the power of an irresistible tide.' Alison Brackenbury, PN Review For previous work: '[V]iolence or (in this case) "terrible dynamism" is figured with a tender precision . . . Sprackland forces a wonderful fascination upon her readers.' Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review'Citadel – despite its surface of smooth, confident lyricism – is a very strange book... Even the strangest descriptions have a rightness about them: “The bright/ metallic snip like a speckled thrush tapping/ a snail against a stone” is how Sprackland hears the sound of a man clipping his fingernails. How could anyone resist that?' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph'Martha Sprackland has filled the pages with sharp, delicious and multi-layered verse. To meld the symbolic with the historic into an interior dreamscape of pain and glory is no easy task. Citadel is elaborate, robust, pleasurable, and built to last.'David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry'Sprackland’s poetic process depends on the conversations held with an extreme figure from history, whose own voice has been long hidden, but without ever succumbing to biography or retelling. The end result is pleasingly strange; a collection which defies the limits of physics to find a timeslip between centuries old inner-city Spain and the north-west coastal towns of 21st century England.'Hannah Whaley, Dundee Review of the Arts'The most arresting book that I’ve read this year is Martha Sprackland’s 51 pages of poetry, Citadel (Liverpool University Press). I’ve returned over and again to this little work of perfect art: the language is so lithe, exact and rich; the painterly images such a joy; the sensibility so fine and rare. Citadel has a careful, agile, flowing structure: many poems in the voice of a sixteenth-century Spanish queen, and others in Sprackland’s own. Her luxuriant conjuring eloquence about objects, places and emotion reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s.'Richard Davenport-Hines, 'Books of the Year' in The TLS'Citadel is extraordinary. A chameleonic debut... I am deeply moved by this book, its tenderness and its violence.'Jack Solloway, 'Top 10 books of 2020' in Voice Magazine'These history-inspired works shine with a dark brilliance, with Sprackland’s rigorous scholarship combined with an artist’s eye.'Bidisha, The Poetry Review'Sprackland has the dizzying ability to jump-cut from past to present and back again quickly and to feel absolutely in control while doing it. [...] That gradual accumulation of change over centuries shows that small moments can make a big difference, and this is amplified by the sheer act of leaping into a pond or pool unlocking a “winter lived through and unbound”. I felt the water on my own skin reading this and was uplifted. [...] This collection is in many ways a catalogue, its own Hunterian collection, if you will, of the human body and mind. [...] What rings through the collection is a feeling of strength and of bearing things, of going on regardless, that sense of ‘devotion hopeless as any other’. [...W]hile we can’t see "exactly where everything will go", it seems that Sprackland has built a solid and impressive launchpad for the future. She deserves her plaudits.'Mat Riches, The Friday Poem'Such a moment[s] of profound emotional, physical and psychological experience must be the origins of the identification between two individuals so remote in time and Sprackland catches the paralleled shift of innocence to pained maturity in the brilliant final line: “Our little beds, bars of autumnal light falling through the curtains”.'Martyn Crucefix

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Book SynopsisScenes of Moderate Violence is the debut collection from award-winning poet John Moynes. If you think that modern literature doesn’t include enough time-travelling cowboys, then this is the book for you. If you need poems about history, love, death, madness and the future then buy this book now. If you want a new pair of jeans you’re probably in the wrong shop. With poems ranging from the funny to the frightening, this is a book that refuses to be pinned down – and is perfect for readers who do the same. *‘John Moynes will make you laugh and make you think, and while he's at it he'll break your heart in a hundred different ways. Every poem in this collection is a thing of rare beauty. And so is each and every line. John manages to do that very difficult thing of being deeply wise while being deeply funny. And I deeply hate him for that.’Paul Howard, author of the Ross O’Carroll Kelly series

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Book Synopsis'On First Hearing Careless Whisper' is one of several poems in this compelling new collection that put time on pause to look at life through art, whether 1980s pop, or painting, or a congeries of writers including Emily Brontë, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Alice Munro, Fernando Pessoa and the New York Poets ... and several of Sansom's beloved contemporaries. But keenly-observed family life is at the centre of this warm, witty and moving book by one of our best-loved poets and teachers. Sansom evokes working-class life in the early and mid-twentieth century, through the 1970s of vinyl and tie-dye, and into the uncertain present day. We travel in his first car, and meet roofers, walkers, darts players and a pigeon fancier. We see Sheffield as it is seldom portrayed. His elegies celebrate Gerard Benson, children's poet and founder of Poems on the Underground; and Sarah Maguire, poet, translator and anthologist. All human life, and death, are to be found here. There is laughter and tears and a vivid evocation of a world that survives thanks to poems like these.Trade Review'A serious intelligence only lightly disguised as self-mockery and expressed via devastatingly clear-sighted observation.' - Mary Sara, The Yorkshire Post;'Peter Sansom's poems are eerie, and funny, and nostalgic and sad. They are full of loss, and yet offer such richness.' - Helena Nelson, Happenstance

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation. Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world.

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Book SynopsisParallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.Trade Review'John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else.' - The Independent

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Book SynopsisThe title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: 'Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?' The poems return to familiar places and themes from a later 'now', a revised perspective: memories are real, perhaps more vivid than before, but further off, measuring time and age. Ancient coins abound. In 'The Coin Cabinet' they are conjured in their variety by means of a series of epithetic evocations, so that one does not doubt their reality, or the complex mythology they evoke and the economy rooted in long traditions and rich in known, shared narratives. 'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through,' Thom Gunn wrote, 'there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed.'Trade Review'He inherits the tender, threatening profundity of Edward Thomas.' - Anne Stevenson

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Carola Luther's new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it? At the centre of the collection are three sequences, 'Letters to Rasool', 'Birthday at Emily Court' and 'The Escape'. On the Way to Jerusalem Farm moves through the world, seeking and finding not answers, but sometimes, a means of continuing. The speaker in 'Letters to Rasool' travels onward through scarred and depleted landscapes, and searches for a lost beloved. The ageing residents of Emily Court celebrate a birthday and dance. Spring of a kind still comes. And in 'The Escape' there are colours to be found in the distant sea: 'A whole translucent geology, / cross-sections of light and water'. Poetry for Luther is a way of finding a way, of making connections and sharing our complex lives in an interdependent present. The roles of lover and beloved become - almost - interchangeable in these richly visualised poems.

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Book SynopsisTo mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and its commemoration in Derry in January 2022, Carcanet proudly publish a new edition of Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, with a prologue from the Saville Report, an epilogue from the Prime Minister's House of Commons apology, and a new author's note.Trade Review'Thomas Kinsella is the most important and the most compendious Irish poet since Yeats.' - Thomas H. Jackson

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Book SynopsisEdna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was one of the most popular American writers of her generation, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Thomas Hardy once remarked that America had only two great wonders to show the world: skyscrapers, and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay. Poems and Satires restores that wonder to view, while also revealing Millay as a more innovative and versatile talent than she is usually given credit for being. It includes some of her wickedly funny satires (published under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd, out of print since 1924), as well as her acclaimed play Aria da Capo, and reveals her to be not only the defining 'flapper' poet of the 1920s but a crucial voice for the 2020s. The 'fierce and trivial' persona she cultivated in her early lyric poems and sonnets - with their dazzling wit and daring attitudes towards love and sexuality - captured the whirl of bohemian life in New York. In her genre-defying satires, she questioned society's treatment of women and artists in surreal stories and plays, non-fiction and spoof agony aunt letters, and even a Handmaid's Tale-esque dystopia disguised as an almanac from the future.

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Book SynopsisUmberto Saba (1883-1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation. National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet's use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction.Trade Review'Saba's poetry seems like the pure sound of a voice, a voice nearly freed from the bonds of words. The monody is pure feeling, in a musical state.' - Eugenio Montale

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize The Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2021 Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree, Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to 'stillness exercises' recording microenvironments - emotional and aural - around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation. Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.Trade Review'Industrious and prolific, Vahni Capildeo is a writer of apparently effortless variety in form and content... She belongs to no tribe or school or movement. This may make her a 'poet's poet', one for the cognoscenti; and yet... she deserves the widest audience possible.' - Times Literary Supplement; 'Capildeo remains a sui generis talent.' - The Telegraph; 'She is, among much else, a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.' - The Guardian

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Premio Valle Inclán Prize 2023. Mexican poet, teacher and translator Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published several books, two in English thanks to the brilliant poet-translator Forrest Gander, who has put this composite volume together, the first time Bracho has been extensively published in the UK. An extensive selection from Bracho's earlier work, which 'altered the landscape of Mexican poetry' (World Literature Today), is accompanied by the entirety of her new book, of which Gander writes: 'Although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The "plot" follows a general trajectory-from early to late Alzheimer's-with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness. We come to know an opinionated, demonstrative elderly woman whose resilience, in the face of her dehiscent memory, becomes most clear in her adaptive strategies. The poems involve us in the mind's bafflement and wonder, in its creative quick-change adjustments, and in the emotional drama that draws us across the widening linguistic gaps that reroute communication. Bracho's poems have philosophical and psychological underpinnings even when they are descriptive. Her work has always managed to mix abstraction and sensuality, but in this book the two merge into a particularly resonant combination. 'We are inside a mind, maybe many minds, considering a mystery with signal attentiveness, openness, and love.'

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Book SynopsisThe Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether 'we feel the feelings that we call ours'. The second, mainly composed of 'daughter sonnets', describes bringing up children in a foreign language. The third, 'Die Schreibblockade', German for writer's block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma. The fourth cycle is about translation. A libretto commissioned by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti follows, about Ravel's interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Gwyneth Lewis writes, 'Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. His The Feeling Sonnets are an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages' spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.' Born in Leningrad, Ostashevsky grew up in Brooklyn. He is now based in Berlin and New York. In his last full book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by NYRB Poets, discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. His previous book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages.Trade Review'Feelings proliferate in The Feeling Sonnets, and first among them is the feeling that we have to ask what we mean by feeling. It is to feel his way toward an answer to that primary question that the brilliant poet Eugene Ostashevsky has written this collection of vivacious, witty, and anguished poems. As the poems unfold, language gets caught up in proliferative play. The poet flounders through fields of feeling, one felt word spilling out of another, one spelt word spelling another. Feeling moves from one cultural or linguistic context to another, doubling and redoubling the potential for meaning and the potency of meaning's prolific uncertainty and occasional absurdity. And extending through the linguistic microsystem of vowels and consonants that shift meanings from place and place (and even nation to nation) is the exquisite sensibility of a poet, erudite, humble, and closely watching over those he loves. This is an extraordinary and beautiful book.'- - Lyn Hejinian;'Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. The Feeling Sonnets is an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages' spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.' - Gwyneth Lewis

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Book SynopsisWhen in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic. As organising and generating principle for the essays he chose the alphabet, and the result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of topics from Aachen to Zoos, passing by Alexandria, Luciano Berio, Ivy Compton-Burnett, reflections on his own early works The Echo-Chamber and Flow, Langland's Piers Plowman, the idea of repetition in life and art, and much else. Josipovici reminds us that he has previously 'plundered episodes in my life to illustrate the intertwining of memory and forgetting, the desire to remember and the need to forget', and here he has someone say to him: 'You don't seem to be afraid of revealing a great deal about yourself.' 'I don’t think I feel it that way,' he responds. 'I can "reveal" precisely because it does not seem to be part of me. It seems to belong to someone else, a writer I have lived with, an immigrant I have known.' Loquacious, funny and incautious, this surprising book is in effect a kind of expressionist self-portrait as well as a meditation on a hundred days of the pandemic.Trade Review'Gabriel Josipovici is one of our most brilliant writers - every new book is an event to look forward to.' - Deborah Levy, Man Booker Prize Nominee

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scupham's hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling 'Curtain Call', often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and historical, which haunt the present. All business is unfinished business: one can be caught out by a sudden phrase, or the look back of a landscape once seen sporting a different disguise. Invitation to View is framed by poems considering possible visitors to the poet's 400-year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind; it is haunted by the variety of the efforts and gestures they have made in bringing house and garden alive. Time will do its best to modify and forget all that they leave. Many gestures were theatrical: poetry picnics, productions of Shakespeare... the dead welcomed with the living. Tom Stoppard's words from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can provide an absent epigraph: 'Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.'

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2023 by the American Literary Translators Association. The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice. Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe - not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.

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Book SynopsisAt the volcano's edge, in exilic space, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or in the acid clouds of Venus, Mina Gorji's Scale traces life at its limits. The poems range across scales of distance, temperature and time, from vast to minute, glacial to volcanic, Pleistocene to present day, constellation to millipede. Adapting to the cold of a new continent opens a chromatic investigation of feeling. Shifting between scales, from insect to ancient star, Scale explores the forms, conditions and frequencies of survival. Scale builds on the considerable achievement of Gorji's first book, Art of Escape (2019). When it was selected for the Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Tristram Fane Saunders wrote about the 'incisive clarity' of Gorji's work, calling one poem 'perfection in miniature'. Gorji's poems feed into current ecological concerns, but in no conventional or clichéd way. Marina Warner described her poems as 'building a place of safety – for herself, her family, her readers, and all those who are wandering and uprooted; her poetic methods take their cue from the many marvellous creatures she evokes and the multiple protective measures they adopt – nests, camouflage, mimicry, display. Above all, language can help create shelter.'Trade Review'Gorji constructs intricate, considered poems which encourage us to democratise our attention and empathy' - The Guardian

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.Trade Review'a significant literary voice within Caribbean literature and the Caribbean diaspora' - Clare Westall

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Book SynopsisJee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain kinds of peace. Inspector Inspector is his second Carcanet book (Steep Tea was published in 2015 and chosen as a Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times), and it develops his earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice. Steep Tea dialogued with women poets from across the world; Inspector Inspector struggles with the legacies of fathers, personal, poetic and political. Threaded through the erotic poems and poems based on interviews with fellow Singaporeans living in America are thirteen palinodes in the voice of the speaker's dead father, which he answers when the father's voice falls silent. Jee Leong Koh's is an inclusive, generous and forgiving imagination, with an enviable mastery of traditional and experimental forms.Trade Review'The Singapore-born poet's first UK publication is disciplined yet adventurous in form, casual in tone and deeply personal in subject matter. Koh's verse addresses the split inheritance of his postcolonial upbringing , as well as the tension between an emigre's longing for home and rejection of nostalgia' - The Financial Times

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Book SynopsisThere is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot', the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature – birds, plants, weathers – comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.Trade Review'Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.' - Gillian Clarke

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2023. Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Tara Bergin's third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin's book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.Trade Review'Bergin's is an original voice of great power that flicks between speech and song, and between the borrowed and the wholly owned, with consummate ease.' - W.N. Herbert (Chair of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize Judging Panel)

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2023. Stav Poleg's poems are about cities, what they contain and what they lack; and all cities are habitable and analogous, The City: London, New York, London, New York, Rome. 'Think 'La Citta / e la Casa', pages revealing city by city as if every city / is cut into rivers and sliced into streets down to the seeds of each scene.' This, her much anticipated debut collection, includes work from her 2017 pamphlet Lights, Camera, and from Carcanet's New Poetries VIII, as well as poems that have featured in The New Yorker, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and PN Review. Her poems are fascinated by the freedom of motion and its constraints: how by means of technique they defy the gravity that draws them down the page to a conclusion. They subvert what they see and, as language, they also subvert how they see: we are always seeing but with all our senses, including our ears and our semantic facilities, our echo detector, how the poems relate to one another and how they relate to the worlds of art and invention in different modes and ages. Poleg regularly collaborates with fellow artists and poets - her graphic-novel installation, Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2014.Trade Review'I love how [her work] quietly shows what poetry can do that film can't' - Ramona Herdman

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Book SynopsisWinner of A Somerset Maugham Award 2023. Winner of An Eric Gregory Award 2023. Winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023. By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.Trade Review'Nuanced, challenging, sometimes hilarious, often anguished, this impressive reimagining of The Odyssey makes for an unforgettable road trip; Gao's Odysseus is a nervy and compelling traveller, a sort of non-hero, itinerant and always somewhat lost. Waylaid with Gao in hotel bars and tour buses, we are estranged, sensitized as we go to the dislocations and non-belonging of children of the world's diasporas, and also to the structures of appropriation and exploitation embedded in travel. We are all conditioned and implicated; but perhaps this acute and attentive Odysseus is exactly who we need to help us listen to the buried histories of Imperialism, to "wait a little differently, mourn a / little more".' - Fiona Benson;'These poems reject the heroism of the legible "I". If a central figure emerges it might be that of the Anti-Translator, not there to disclose personal information but to reveal the bareness of our "corpse-lives". Jay Gao's Imperium marks a new chapter in British poetry, bringing to bear a new complexity, richness of thought and influence.' - Will Harris

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Book SynopsisThis is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.Trade Review'This is a poet's book, his mind wide open to the cultures of the world [...] luscious, musical and precise' - Gillian Clarke on 'The Palace of Oblivion'

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Book SynopsisIn Poppy, Joseph Minden explores how the totems of remembering are always, also, sites of suppression. The poems in this debut collection take in a research trip to the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme, an ill-fated visit to Penang, rumours of the Opium Wars, fragments of family myth and a fear of familiar vampires – all grimy with the trash of establishment British history. In these pages, Adlestrop meets 'Robin Hood / bewitched by a leg of tandoori chicken' and drunk Brits stumble around the Menin Gate with 'Lest We Forget' stitched into their polo shirts. Sometimes accompanied by the historian, Jason, and perpetually haunted by an old flame, Mina, the protagonist of the poems tries to separate memory from nostalgia and empire from heritage. Longing is enmeshed in old ideas and historical material from which it must be torn away. Minden makes disturbing rhythms out of the detritus he finds around him, using documentary evidence, personal testimony, dream narrative, prose, rhyme and the soft hammer blows of repetition to craft a haunted, memorable music.Trade Review'a master poet and one who is unafraid of turning his honed and crafted style to longer form poems' - The Gull Magazine

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Book SynopsisThis new selection of Donald Davie's poems spans six decades. It traces his protean trajectory from austere beginnings to riskier dislocations of shape and syntax, through to his extended late-meditations on form, content, and spirit. To apply his own critical definition of syntax, his is a poetic of articulate energy, the restless redistribution of force – an abiding resource and inspiration.Trade Review'[Davie's] poems thrive on the restless energy that drives their author on from form to form and place to place. Few poets are more likely than Davie to persuade new readers that poetry can still be a matter of concern and pleasure.' - Martin Dodsworth, The Guardian

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Autumn 2022. [To] The Last [Be] Human collects four extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, PLACE, fast, and Runaway—by Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience. Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when "the future / takes shape / too quickly", when we are entering "a time / beyond belief". They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form... Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a "whirling robe humming with firstness". To read these four twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book: The earth said remember me. The earth said don't let go, said it one day when I was accidentally listeningTrade Review'A mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its continuation' - The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. A The Irish Times Book of the Year. More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.Trade Review'The poems in More Sky perform as one sustained hymn, socialising the reader around an environment where material class, artefact, image and mood all work to resist each other. Though such a fraught and contradictory space, the psychology of Carrick-Vartyas verse asks us to consider the ways addiction, fatherhood and the longings of a son coalesce to form a deep and ineffable yearning. These are tender, interior poems that contain all the hallmarks of realism while being masterfully set against an image-range both expansive and unhinged. Carrick-Varty has created something wholly individual and inspired with this collection.' - Anthony Anaxagorou; 'Whatever I expected as I sat to read it for the first time, I failed to anticipate More Sky. How could I have known how complete it would be, how achieved? These poems are loaded with frightening beauties, lines and ideas that inhabit one - rather than merely stopping by for a brief visit - from the moment they're encountered, and together these poems accomplish an even rarer thing: They make a particular, personal story felt by the reader as if lived by the reader, which is better and more difficult than diluting a story by making it universal. More Sky is a debut as strong as any debut I've read in years.' - Shane McCrae; 'These poems make up a memory system. Each by each, they recover a father-son journey through drink and time. Now brutally, like broken glass under foot. Now gently, like being carried over the jagged edges. Cutting and healing. Joe Carrick-Varty writes with a sharp eye and a strong hand.' - Jeanette Winterson

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Book SynopsisA The Telegraph Book of the Year. Laura Scott's second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book's energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth's sense: 'an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.'Trade Review'Written with devastating precision, The Fourth Sister is filled with poems that move and grip in equal measure. It proves that Scott is one of the most exciting voices writing today in England.' - Leo Boix;'I so love Laura Scott's poems: elegant, taut, and both thrillingly curious and full of curiosity, they conjure their magic from that perfect space "between telling and withholding". In this beautiful, mysterious collection, she leads us into the dark woods of longing and grief, holding us rapt in the spell of the moment, until - like the fourth sister - she deftly "slips the story's collar".' - Liz Berry;'Like the birds which appear in motif throughout this collection, Laura Scott's poems can turn on a wing, startling us with their displays of unexpected beauty. Her graceful - and frequently grace-filled - poems call our attention to life's off-stage moments, illuminating shadowed corners of what might so easily be lost from view.' - Kathryn Simmonds

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Book SynopsisWhen his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often surprised by grief in the oddest corners, the poet takes us through rooms, routines, and rituals of bereavement, the memory of love, a shared life and separation. A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints, Stephenson has written a remarkable first book, moving and, despite everything, a hopeful record of a gay relationship. It is also a landmark elegy collection.Trade Review'Hard Drive approaches the elegy through a kaleidoscopic, inventive and genuinely moving use of form... Stephenson looks death in the eyes, and holds his nerve like few others.' - Seán Hewitt; 'A brilliant and innovative formal poet, Stephenson here applies his great gifts, with heart-breaking clarity and bravery, to the most unfaceable of subjects. The result is a beautiful hymn to the human capacity for love.' - Jonathan Edwards; 'This is poetry for anyone who has ever lost someone... poetry that celebrates and mourns those deep connections that we make in life.' - Niall Campbell; 'Paul Stephenson brings all the tender mechanisms of language to sustain the weight of grief: this is an extraordinarily moving and accomplished collection.' - Penelope Shuttle

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2024. A The Telegraph Book of the Year. The Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month August 2023. The Grid is about the end of worlds, ancient and modern. In three sequences of poems interspersed with Mandel's own translations from classical texts, figures of obsession and loneliness try to decrypt what Maurice Blanchot called 'the writing of the disaster'. Like a detective novel, the title sequence pieces together archival fragments into a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the half-forgotten scholar behind the decipherment of the ancient writing system called Linear B. Across different wartimes, Mandel adapts the typography and formatting of archived papers, their overlaps and errors and aporias, which compel readers to invest creatively in the very act of reading, learning new ways into language as they go. The leaps between past and present work in dialogue like a series of exhilarating stepping stones. This is a collection of what, though sometimes written as prose, turn out to be poems. From Ovid's bitter letters of exile to the prime minister's letters of instruction to nuclear submarine captains, The Grid tells a series of stories about four thousand years of apocalypse. Strange, humane, and deeply rooted in the ancient world, Mandel's first book surveys the ruins of the West with no nostalgia.

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Book SynopsisAnd deeper still than this, my eyes penetrate far into the earth as if it was an agate: foundations, dungeons, subterranean cities where thwarted joyance wages its atrocities... (from 'Dusk: An Antique Song') Ned Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says - in his essay on Hoelderlin - about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night," consist? In the fact that the gods have departed, and in the rootless, heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods' traces, and there are glimpses here "through a veil of names" of nature's saving radiance, of the indestructible delicacy of Claude's last landscape, of a "wild grin of insect glee" just beyond the confines of sleep. As Denny's adept voice 'throws' itself into and through other texts, forms, places, things and times - including works by Heine, classical Chinese poets, Pindar, Ronsard, Hoelderlin, Mallarme, Victor Hugo and Lorca - it becomes clear that the fathoming of our iron age is inseparable from the coming dawn.Trade Review'Ned Denny is a gifted troubadour who has crossed the ages.' - Bernard O'Donoghue

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