Poetry Books

Book SynopsisRomania's comic genius Marin Sorescu was so popular during the worst of the Ceausescu years that his readings had to be held in football stadiums, and his books sold hundreds of thousands of copies. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the regime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he did not dare publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the riskier secret poems censored by the author.

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Book SynopsisCity Psalms was Benjamin Zephaniah's first collection from Bloodaxe back in 1992. It includes some of his best-known poems, including 'Dis Poetry', 'Money' and 'Us and Dem'. Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults – and his poetry with attitude for children – Zephaniah has his own rap/reggae band. He has produced numerous recordings, including Dub Ranting (1982), Rasta (1983), Us and Dem (1990), Back to Roots (1995), Belly of de Beast (1996) and Naked (2004). He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the President’s Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. His first book of poems, Pen Rhythm, was produced in 1980 by a small East London publishing cooperative, Page One Books. His second collection, The Dread Affair, was published by Hutchinson’s short-lived Arena imprint in 1985. He has since published three collections with Bloodaxe, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black Too Strong (2001), the latter including poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. To Do Wid Me, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), includes a full-length feature film on DVD with all the poems performed on the film included in the book.Table of Contents9 Foreword by Bob Mole 11 Man to Man 12 Dis Poetry 14 A Bomb 15 A bomb pusher writes 17 Overstanding 18 Speak 19 A writer rants 20 Money (rant) 24 No rights red an half dead 25 According to my mood 26 The Cold War 28 As a African 29 My God! Your God! 30 A Picture of a Sign 32 Yo Bowy 33 Tiananmen Square 34 Royals do it too 37 Black Whole 38 Rapid Rapping (rant) 41 Call it what yu like 44 Us & Dem 46 Cut de crap 47 Me green poem 51 Comrades an Frens 52 A modern slave song 53 U-Turn 54 How’s dat 55 She’s crying for many 57 Question 58 The SUN 60 Ringside 62 Black Politics of Today 64 The Old Truth

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Book SynopsisDeeply admired by poets far more familiar to us, from Lorca to William Carlos Williams, the poems of Miguel Hernandez (1910-42), written in the midst of the savage 20th century, beam with a gentleness of heart. Hernandez was a self-educated goatherd from the tiny Spanish town of Orihuela who tried hard to be accepted among his older contemporaries. Lorca wrote to the young poet in 1933, telling him to stop struggling to get along in a 'circle of literary pigs'. After fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Hernandez was imprisoned in several of Franco's jails, where he continued to write until his death from untreated tuberculosis on 28 March 1942: he was only 31. Miguel Hernandez is now one of the most revered poets in the Spanish-speaking world. From his early formalism, paying homage to Gongora and Quevedo, to the final poems, which are passionate and bittersweet, Hernandez' work is a dazzling reminder that force can never defeat spirit, and that courage is its own reward. Pablo Neruda called him 'a great master of language - a wonderful poet'.Trade Review'One is rarely excited by translation, but in Don Share's case there is a sense of shared elation between reader and translator that confirms the delight of exact sensation when the poem feels transmitted by that cautious and subtle alchemy that is the translator's skill. I have felt this with Don Share's versions of Miguel Hernandez: but this is also because he is a fine poet in his own right, one who surrenders his sensibilities to the task of transference' - Derek Walcott

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Book SynopsisFragmented and forgotten, the women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long been overlooked by translators and scholars. Yet to Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD, these were the 'earthly Muses' whose poetic skills rivalled those of their heavenly namesakes. Today only a fraction of their work survives - lyrical, witty, often innovative, and always moving - offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships through love affairs and marriage to motherhood and bereavement. Josephine Balmer's translations breathe new life into long-lost works by over a dozen poets from early Greece to the late Roman empire, including Sappho, Corinna, Erinna and Sulpicia, as well as inscriptions, folk-songs and even graffiti. Each poet is introduced by a brief bibliographical note, and where necessary her poems are annotated to guide readers through unfamiliar mythological or historical references. In an illuminating introduction, Josephine Balmer examines the nature of women's poetry in antiquity, as well as the problems (and pleasures) of translating such fragmentary works. Classical Women Poets is a complete collection for anyone interested in women's literature, the ancient world, and - above all - poetry. It is a companion volume to Josephine Balmer's edition Sappho: Poems and Fragments, also published by Bloodaxe.

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Book SynopsisBlood Wedding by Federico García Lorca is a classic of Spanish literature, the tragedy of a woman loved by two men. The man she has loved since childhood is hot-blooded Leonardo, but his family are hated by her own folk, and he marries someone else. Then, on her wedding-night, Leonardo carries her off on horseback, pursued by the men of the two shamed families. The two rivals meet in the moonlight in a ?ght to the death… Lorca said the only hope for happiness lies in 'living one's instinctual life to the full'. And: 'To burn with desire and to remain silent is the greatest punishment we can in?ict on ourselves.' Blood Wedding explores the tragic intensity of lived, instinctual passion. For Brendan Kennelly, this involves a return to the very origins of drama: 'The pure pulsing sense of the mysterious nature of life before we learn to explain things almost out of existence … Blood Wedding is a drama of agonised and bewildering revelation.' Lorca has a searing realisation of the power of desire. Brendan Kennelly rises to the challenge of how to convey this in an English translation. In language at once soaring and accurate, wild and precise, he does justice to Lorca's tragic vision of the nature and consequences of lived desire. His version of Blood Wedding reveals the mysterious, intricate, passionate and truly astonishing nature of Lorca’s masterpiece. Brendan Kennelly's versions of Euripides' The Trojan Women and Medea, and Sophocles' Antigone, are published by Bloodaxe Books in his drama trilogy When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies (2006). His version of Lorca's Blood Wedding was premièred by Northern Stage in Newcastle and Derby in autumn 1996. His Antigone and The Trojan Women were both first performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 1986 and 1993 respectively; Medea premièred in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1988, toured in England in 1989 and was broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

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Book SynopsisThe Honey Gatherers takes its title from a phrase in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler, a poem which describes the need to be marked, and marked out, by love. The search, the sweetness, the sting and the death of love, are all to be found in this anthology. Wide-ranging in its inclusiveness, The Honey Gatherers celebrates the great passions of John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, Keats, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the beloved Anon, whilst con?rming the extraordinary gift to this headlong debate of 20th century poets. Pablo Neruda, Lorna Goodison, Brian Patten, Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Parker, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Sharon Olds are just some of those who meet in these pages. Here are poems about romantic love, the ideal of love, the hurt of love, lost or unrequited love and parting – all you might expect to ?nd in such a gathering – but here too are poems of friendship, surprise, celebration and consolation. This is a book which explores Raymond Carver’s big question ‘And what did you want?’ and offers some answers: ‘To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.’ – Raymond Carver: ‘Late Fragment’ Most love poetry anthologies only cover the classics. This one includes modern poets and erotic poetry as well.Table of ContentsMaura Dooley 15 Preface 1 ‘What the heart is like’ Thomas Middleton 18 Love Miroslav Holub 18 What the heart is like Robert Bridges 20 ‘So sweet love seemed that April morn’ Linda France 20 If Love Was Jazz Penelope Shuttle 21 Looking for Love Anne Sexton 23 Just Once Wendy Cope 23 Flowers Wislawa Szymborska 24 Family Album 2 ‘What is to be given’ James Fenton 26 In Paris with You W.B. Yeats 27 A Drinking Song William Wordsworth 27 ‘She was a Phantom of delight’ Hilaire Belloc 28 Juliet Anonymous 28 When Molly Smiles James S. Martinez 29 My Little Lize Louis MacNeice 30 Meeting Point Sir John Suckling 31 Song Sappho 33 ‘It seems to me that man is equal to the gods’ Thomas Hardy 34 Faintheart in a Railway Train Edwin Denby 34 The Subway Victor Tapner 35 Coffee Shop Delmore Schwartz 36 What is to be Given Fernando Pessoa 36 The Leaves’ Audible Smile William Blake 37 Song Adrienne Rich 37 The Loser Austin Clarke 39 The Planter’s Daughter Patrick Kavanagh 39 On Raglan Road Hugo Williams 40 The Water Bearer Oodgeroo 41 Gifts Brian Patten 41 A Blade of Grass Liz Lochhead 42 I Wouldn’t Thank You for a Valentine Emily Dickinson 43 ‘The Way I read a Letter’ Federico García Lorca 44 The Poet speaks to the loved one Robert Frost 44 The Telephone Jackie Kay 45 Lovesick C.K. Williams 46 Love: Beginnings Selima Hill 47 Dewpond and Black Drain-pipes Ted Hughes 48 Snow and Snow 3 ‘What are all these kissings worth’ Stevie Smith 50 Conviction IV Coventry Patmore 50 The Kiss Sara Teasdale 50 The Look Percy Bysshe Shelley 51 Love’s Philosophy Anne Haverty 52 In the Country Anonymous 52 A Love-Song Ruth Padel 52 Being Late to Meet You at the Station Leigh Hunt 53 Jenny Kissed Me Catullus 53 ‘Time to live and let love, Lesbia’ Naomi Mitchison 54 Old Love and New Tracy Ryan 54 Bite Stevie Smith 55 The Frog Prince Judith Wright 57 ‘Dove-Love’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe 57 The Amorous Cannibal Jo Shapcott 58 Muse 4 ‘Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone’ Simon Armitage 60 Night Shift Christopher Reid 60 At the Wrong Door Carol Ann Duffy 61 Steam D.H. Lawrence 62 Gloire de Dijon Sujata Bhatt 62 Love in a Bathtub Edward Thomas 63 Like the Touch of Rain John Montague 63 All Legendary Obstacles Richard Wilbur 64 Love Calls Us to the Things of This World Anne Haverty 66 Do Anonymous 67 Scarborough Fair Anonymous 68 The Shirt of a Lad Rita Dove 68 His Shirt Nigel Jenkins 70 Shirts Pete Morgan 71 The Shirt of a Lad Henry Nutter 72 The Girl in the Calico Dress Michael Longley 73 The Linen Industry Yehuda Amichai 74 It was Summer, or the End of Summer 5 ‘And our mouths run over with luscious smiles’ Rita Ann Higgins 76 It’s Platonic Ben Jonson 76 Song: to Celia John Agard 77 Get Down Ye Angels Omar Khayyam 77 from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Thomas Moore 78 The Young May Moon Edmund Waller 78 Song Andrew Marvell 79 To His Coy Mistress Christopher Marlowe 80 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love Sir Walter Ralegh 81 The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd Langston Hughes 82 When Sue Wears Red King James Bible 83 from The Song of Solomon Michael Ondaatje 84 Women Like You Helen Dunmore 86 Wild strawberries Thomas Lynch 87 A Note on the Rapture to His true Love Grace Nichols 88 The Way Your Sleeping Hand Edith Södergran 88 Revelation David Constantine 89 Mistress Dave Smith 90 Walking Under a Spruce with My Love Frank O’Hara 92 Having a Coke with You James Fenton 92 I’ll Explain Robert Herrick 92 Her Bed 6 ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights!’ Petronius 94 ‘Good God, what a night that was’ Emily Dickinson 94 ‘Wild Nights’ Billy Collins 95 Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes Sonia Sanchez 96 Blues Selima Hill 97 The Ram Fleur Adcock 98 Coupling Cole Porter 98 Night and Day James McAuley 99 Aubade Kenneth Rexroth 100 Marichiko: ‘Making love with you’ Grace Nichols 100 Configurations Judith Wright 101 Woman to Man Michael Donaghy 102 Pentecost Penelope Shuttle 103 Act of Love John Donne 105 The Good Morrow Anonymous 106 Plucking the Rushes King James Bible 106 from The Song of Solomon André Breton 107 Freedom of Love Elizabeth Smart 109 from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept Ted Hughes 109 Lovesong John Donne 111 The Ecstasy Michael Ondaatje 113 The Cinnamon Peeler Deborah Randall 115 Ballygrand Widow Francis Stuart 116 Homecoming Sarah Maguire 116 Spilt Milk A.D. Hope 117 The Wandering Islands John Berryman 118 Dream Songs, 142 C.K. Williams 119 The Lover William Shakespeare 119 ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ Jo Shapcott 120 Vegetable Love Anonymous 121 John Anderson, My Jo James Berry 123 Flame and Water James Berry 124 Earth and Air Alan Brownjohn 125 At the Time Yehuda Amichai 125 A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention Michael Longley 126 Swans Mating 7 ‘How do I love thee?’ Omar Khayyam 128 from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Adrian Mitchell 128 Celia Celia Anonymous 129 Alisoun Anonymous 130 The Lovely Étan Ian Duhig 130 From the Irish John Wain 130 Apology for Understatement Elizabeth Barrett Browning 131 ‘How do I love thee?’ John Dowland 132 ‘Fine knacks for ladies’ William Shakespeare 133 ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ W.B. Yeats 133 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven Paul Durcan 134 Cleaning Ashtrays Deryn Rees-Jones 135 Calcium Primo Levi 136 11 February 1946 Nessie Dunsmuir 137 The White Word W.S. Graham 137 I Leave This at Your Ear Elizabeth Bishop 138 Late Air Anonymous 138 I Will Give My Love an Apple Robin Robertson 139 Static Padraic Colum 140 She Moved Through the Fair ‘Ephelia’ 141 To one that asked me why I lov’d J.G. Shane Leslie 141 Bog Love William Shakespeare 142 ‘My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ Edmund Blunden 142 Lonely Love Samuel Daniel 143 ‘When men shall find thy flower’ William Shakespeare 144 ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’ Pierre de Ronsard 144 ‘Since she’s all winter’ Sir John Betjeman 145 In a Bath Teashop Adrian Mitchell 145 Giving Potatoes E.E. Cummings 146 ‘somewhere i have never travelled’ Li Po 147 The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter W.H. Auden 148 Lullaby Christopher Logue 150 Air for the Witness of a Departure Dorothy Parker 151 Love Song Rainer Maria Rilke 152 ‘You who never arrived’ 8 ‘I will love thee until my death’ Delmore Schwartz 154 The Beautiful American Word, Sure John Keats 154 ‘Bright star, would I were as stedfast as thou art’ Alice Oswald 155 Ballad of a Shadow John Donne 156 A Valediction: forbidding Mourning Edna St Vincent Millay 157 Modern Declaration William Shakespeare 158 ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ Leo Marks 158 Code Poem Samuel Taylor Coleridge 159 Answer to a Child’s Question Sir John Suckling 159 Song Christopher Brennan 160 It is so long ago! Sir Thomas Wyatt 160 ‘Forget not yet the tried intent’ Gwen Harwood 161 Meditation on Wyatt II James McAuley 162 One Thing at Least John Gower 162 ‘O thou my sorwe and my gladnesse’ Richard Lovelace 163 To Althea, From Prison Elizabeth Barrett Browning 164 ‘If thou must love me’ 9 ‘If ever two were one, then surely we’ Philip Larkin 166 Wedding-Wind Alice Oswald 166 Wedding George Meredith 167 ‘By this he knew she wept with waking eyes’ Richard Crashaw 168 An Epitaph upon Husband and Wife who died and were buried together Stevie Smith 168 Marriage I Think Una Marson 169 To Wed or Not to Wed Katherine Philips 170 An Answer to another perswading a Lady to Marriage Edna St Vincent Millay 171 Sonnet Kate Clanchy 172 For a Wedding Anne Bradstreet 172 To My Dear and Loving Husband Sir Philip Sidney 173 A Ditty Rainer Maria Rilke 173 Love Song Conrad Aiken 174 The Quarrel Robert Creeley 175 Love Comes Quietly Sharon Olds 175 True Love David Campbell 176 We Took the Storms to Bed Jonathan Davidson 177 Happy Together E.B. White 177 Natural History Kit Wright 178 From Cheshire Henry Treece 178 The Heart’s Wild Geese Carol Ann Duffy 179 Anne Hathaway Robert Crawford 180 Home William Stafford 181 Passing Remark Seamus Heaney 181 The Underground Lavinia Greenlaw 182 Underworld Edward Lear 182 The Owl and the Pussy-Cat Gillian Allnutt 182 Ode Michael Laskey 185 Bike Paul Muldoon 186 Long Finish W.S. Graham 189 To My Wife at Midnight Thom Gunn 191 The Hug Fleur Adcock 192 Kissing Robert Lowell 193 Elizabeth Jackie Kay 193 Snap Judith Herzberg 194 Old Age Philip Larkin 194 Talking in Bed Solveig von Schoultz 195 Conversation Pierre de Ronsard 195 ‘When you are old’ W.B. Yeats 196 When You Are Old Jonathan Swift 196 Stella’s Birthday Esther Johnson 197 To Dr Swift on his Birthday Theodore Roethke 198 I Knew a Woman Maurice Riordan 199 The Table Andrew Motion 200 On the Table Michael Laskey 200 The Knife Christina Rossetti 201 Autumn Violets Tess Gallagher 202 Black Violets Charlotte Mew 203 Rooms Edward Thomas 203 And You, Helen U.A. Fanthorpe 204 Atlas 10 ‘I am no good at love’ Dorothy Parker 206 Comment Isobel Campbell 206 A Learned Mistress Marina Tsvetaeva 207 I’ve dissolved for you Eleanor Brown 208 Bitcherel Geoffrey Chaucer 209 from The Wife of Bath’s Tale Lesbia Harford 209 The Folk I Love Alicia Stubbersfield 210 Unsuitable Shoes William Shakespeare 211 ‘Sigh no more, Ladies’ A.E. Housman 211 from A Shropshire Lad W.B. Yeats 212 The Pity of Love Marvin Bell 212 Being in Love William Shakespeare 213 ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’ Francis Ledwidge 214 The Sorrow of Love Hugo Williams 214 The Ribbon Sir Philip Sidney 215 ‘With how sad steps, O Moon’ Vicki Feaver 216 The Crack Kamau Brathwaite 217 Schooner Thomas Hardy 218 At Castle Boterel Dermot Healy 219 O Woman H.D. 220 ‘Never more will the wind’ Catullus 221 Odi et amo Adrienne Rich 221 The Parting: II Walter de la Mare 222 When Love Flies Sir Philip Sidney 222 from Astrophil and Stella Thomas Campion 223 ‘Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air’ Amy Levy 223 To Lallie (Outside the British Museum) Kamau Brathwaite 225 Blues W.B. Yeats 226 Down by the Salley Gardens James Fenton 227 I Know What I’m Missing Anne Sexton 228 That Day Thomas Hardy 229 The Voice Bhartrhari 230 ‘She who is always in my thoughts’ Robert Herrick 230 Impossibilities to his Friend A.E. Housman 231 ‘He would not stay for me’ Wendy Cope 231 Another Unfortunate Choice Noel Coward 231 I Am No Good at Love Robert Graves 232 Love without Hope Carol Ann Duffy 232 Warming Her Pearls Charlotte Mew 233 The Farmer’s Bride Freda Downie 235 A Plain Girl Roger McGough 236 Vinegar Sir Thomas Wyatt 236 ‘Whoso list to hunt’ Elizabeth Jennings 237 Delay Gjertrud Schnackenberg 237 Snow Melting Vikram Seth 238 Across Lorna Goodison 238 Lepidopterist Paul Muldoon 239 The Train Peter Sansom 240 K563 Bob Dylan 241 Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right W.B. Yeats 242 No Second Troy 11 ‘The end of love ’ Lord Byron 244 ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’ Bob Dylan 244 I Threw It All Away Matthew Arnold 245 Separation Sir Thomas Wyatt 246 Farewell John Keats 247 La Belle Dame sans Merci Nina Cassian 248 Of No Use Samuel Beckett 249 ‘I would like my love to die’ Sir Thomas Wyatt 249 ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ Geoffrey Chaucer (?) 250 Merciles Beaute Sophie Hannah 251 The End of Love Michael Drayton 252 ‘Since there’s no help’ James K. Baxter 252 I have cut from my heart C.K. Williams 253 Love: The Dance Elizabeth Smart 253 from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept Xu Zhi Mo 254 Don’t Pinch Me, Hurts Federico García Lorca 255 Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint Sheila Wingfield 255 Winter Peter Dale 256 Retrospect James Fenton 257 Out of Danger James Wright 258 A Breath of Air 12 ‘What will survive of us is love’ Traditional 260 She’s Like the Swallow Anonymous 260 Frankie and Johnny Anonymous 263 Donal Og W.H. Auden 264 Funeral Blues Mark Doty 265 Where you are Peter Jolliffe 266 Lacuna Vikram Seth 267 All You Who Sleep Tonight Frances Cornford 267 She Warns Him Frances Cornford 268 All Soul’s Night Percy Bysshe Shelley 268 Music, When Soft Voices Die Edmund Spenser 269 One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand John Clare 269 Love lives beyond the Tomb J.M. Synge 270 A Question R.S. Thomas 271 Madrigal Charles Baudelaire 271 I Dreamt that you were not Dead Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill 272 The Lament for Arthur O’Leary Christina Rossetti 283 Remember Pablo Neruda 284 Dead Woman Langston Hughes 285 Song for a Dark Girl Robert Graves 286 Lost Love Oscar Wilde 286 Requiescat Dora Sigerson 287 I want to talk to thee Theodore Roethke 288 The Apparition John Dowland 289 Me, Me, and None But Me Louis MacNeice 289 The Sunlight on the Garden Robert Penn Warren 290 In Moonlight, Somewhere, They Are Singing Elizabeth Barrett Browning 291 ‘Belovèd, my Belovèd’ Raymond Carver 292 Late Fragment Philip Larkin 292 An Arundel Tomb 296 Acknowledgements 301 Index of poets and translators 304 Index of titles and first lines

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Book SynopsisAn anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Postcards from god was her first book from Bloodaxe. It combines two collections published separately in India, Purdah (1989) and Postcards from god (1994). In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. Postcards from god meditates upon disquietudes in the poet's chosen society: its sudden acts of violence, its feuds and insanities, forcing her into a permanent wakefulness that fits her eyes with glass lids. If the poems collected in Purdah are windows shuttered upon a private world, those gathered into Postcards from god are doorways leading out into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of the tender grace of attention.Trade Review'The poems are amplified by powerful black and white drawings by the author. The line is Imtiaz Dharker's sole weapon in a zone of assault which stretches over the Indian subcontinent's bloody history, the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and the torment of an individual caught between two cultures, divergent world-views' - Ranjit Hoskote, The Times of India ‘Hers is a strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more effectively for their coolness of treatment’ – Alan Ross, London Magazine. ‘Here is no glib internationalism or modish multiculturalism …Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices. There is an exultant celebration of a self that strips off layers of superfluous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that it has not diminished, but grown larger, generous, more inclusive’ – Arundhathi Subramaniam, Poetry International. 'Were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate' – Carol Ann Duffy.

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Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s – most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether – Yang Lian has gone on to forge a mature and complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. His poems can be disturbing and strange, haunted as they are by the eerie ordinariness of life and death. But in the end it is a triumphant poetry, wholly engaged with the struggle to be alert to life, wholly engaged in the daily renewal, the search for that ‘shore / where we see ourselves set sail’. All the poems are presented in English and Chinese. Brian Holton also includes a fascinating memoir on translating Yang Lian as well as one sequence translated into Scots. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

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Book SynopsisBasil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'. As well as Briggflatts, this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great Sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realised 'Overdrafts' (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). Like the earlier Oxford edition, it presents in its entirety Bunting's own Collected Poems, with addition of the posthumous Uncollected Poems; but this centenary edition from Bloodaxe also has a new introduction by the late Richard Caddel. Bunting wrote that 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard.' His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. The new separate Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts (2009) includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. Bloodaxe has sublicensed a critical edition of Bunting’s complete poetry, The Poems, edited by Don Share (2016), to Faber & Faber. This has three poems not included in the Bloodaxe edition, together with a number of variants, anomalies, fragments and "false starts": apart from those additions, Bloodaxe's Complete Poems is complete (but has no critical apparatus).Trade Review'Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it' - Thom Gunn. 'His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land' - Hugh MacDiarmid.

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Book SynopsisImtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. In I Speak for the Devil, the woman’s body is a territory, a thing that is possessed, owned by herself or by another. Her sequence They’ll say, 'She must be from another country' traces a journey, starting with a striptease where the claims of nationality, religion and gender are cast off, to allow an exploration of new territories, the spaces between countries, cultures and religions. The title-sequence speaks for the devil in acknowledging that in many societies women are respected, or listened to, only when they are carrying someone else inside their bodies – a child; a devil. For some, to be "possessed" is to be set free.Trade Review'Hers is a strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more effectively for their coolness of treatment' – Alan Ross, London Magazine. 'Beautiful ambivalence…realistic details take on a surrealistic menace in another context…These poems deal very powerfully with social, religious, racial and above all sexual entrapment’ – Christopher Levenson, Toronto South Asian Review. ‘Here is no glib internationalism or modish multiculturalism …Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices. There is an exultant celebration of a self that strips off layers of superfluous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that it has not diminished, but grown larger, generous, more inclusive’ – Arundhathi Subramaniam, Poetry International 'Were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate' – Carol Ann Duffy.

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Book SynopsisKathleen Jamie is one of Britain's leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a selection from her early collections, from times of change and travel. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the 'difficult questions' of identity posed in her much celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba, which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a seminal volume in modern Scottish poetry. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes most of her poems from Black Spiders (1982), A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Way We Live (1987), The Autonomous Region (1993) and The Queen of Sheba (1994).Trade Review'Genius is no stranger to the work of Kathleen Jamie. With each successive theme to which Jamie turns her vision she brings the gift of insight and mystery - poetry of stunning clarity and musicality' - The Scotsman. 'With The Queen of Sheba Kathleen Jamie has produced the best individual collection of poems by a woman living in 20th century Scotland. The book establishes her eminence among Scottish poets of her generation. The precision and resource of her language have never been combined more impressively than here' - Robert Crawford, The Scotsman. 'This fierce, blanched, singing verse is exquisitely gathered by a fine ear: here is a poet who knows when to break her lines, how to warm her syntax, how to repeat and exhort, how to tilt and dangle' - James Wood, London Review of Books.

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem – with its clinching line ‘His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip’ – and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as ‘in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.’ But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda’s memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘Voronezh’ describes her visit there in 1936, when ‘in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn’. With an introduction by Victor Krivulin, this edition combines the two previous separate editions of The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks published by Bloodaxe.

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Book SynopsisChoman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan just before her family fled to Iran. She returned home at the age of five, but when she was 14 the Kurds were attacked with chemical weapons, and her family were forced back into exile. Her poems chart lives of displacement and terror, repression and the subjugation of women, family love, flight and survival. Life for Us is a book of great warmth and passion, which explores both the struggle of a people not represented on the world map and the pains of exile. It shows the human spirit triumphing over adversity. Intertwining political and personal struggle in a quirky, sometimes humorous way, Choman Hardi’s poems draw upon dual memories – like fireworks and gunfire – as well as different realities for different sexes: the father’s political struggle and loss of books, the mother’s silent labour and weeping for others. Life for Us (2004) was Choman Hardi’s ?rst English collection, and was followed by Considering the Women (2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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Book SynopsisSensual, salacious and above all scandalous, the erotic verse of the Roman poet Catullus has delighted - and shocked - readers for centuries. Charting the lives and loves of a group of smart young men about Rome during the late Republic, Catullus' urbane poetry is renowned for its emotional range and psychological insight, not to mention its often startling obscenity. Josephine Balmer's new translation of the complete shorter poems highlights both the intense lyricism and scabrous wit of the original, bringing Catullus' vivid cast of characters back to life for a new audience.

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Book SynopsisR.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of our time, as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales’s greatest poet. This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his powers right through his 70s and 80s. It begins with his autobiographical sequence The Echoes Return Slow, which has been unavailable for many years, and goes up to Residues, written immediately before his death at the age of 87. These powerful poems – about time and history, the self, love, the machine, the Cross and prayer – cover all of his major areas of questioning. This is R.S. Thomas in a winter light, his fury concentrated on the inhumanity of man and modern technology, his gaze absorbed by the God he felt in Nature, but finding nourishment in 'waste places'. At the same time he writes with resigned feeling and immense insight, as well as grim humour and playful irony, of isolation, ageing, marriage and 'love’s shining greenhouses'. For Thomas, 'Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.' Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 is the sequel to R.S. Thomas’s Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 1995), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). It reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas’s last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe’s Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was followed in 2013 by Uncollected Poems and in 2016 by Too Brave to Dream.Trade Review'Like Yeats, Thomas has produced his most powerful work in his old age - reminds me of Beethoven's last quartets in its fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death - He is the first great poet since the Metaphysicals of the 17th century to draw his images from the science of his day.' - Denis Healey

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Book SynopsisIn this sparkling debut, Matthew Hollis immerses us in the undercurrents of our lives. Love and loss are buoyed by a house full of milk, an orchard underwater, the laws of walking on water. Rainwater, floodwater, flux – the liquid landscapes which shift relentlessly in Ground Water – threaten and comfort by turns. Matthew Hollis's poems are brimming with courage in adversity as well as the promise of renewal, culminating in a powerful sequence about a father's struggle with terminal illness. Ground Water is a startling first collection from a remarkable new poet. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award (the first time for a poetry book), Whitbread Poetry Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewAn impressive debut…the metaphorical language is finely judged, touching both the landscapes and the people crawling its surface with a shrewd but never less than sympathetic gaze. -- D.J.Taylor * Guardian *Matthew Hollis shows an impressive confidence in the promptings of the imagination and no desire at all to ingratiate himself. Craft, not attitude, is what counts. Poems are sometimes called “quiet” when really they’re inaudible. His are genuinely quiet, drawing in the ear to enjoy, for example, his artful rendering in slowed folk-song rhythm of the terror and excitement of floods. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisBecause he was a radical poet, Jack Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by the dictator Hastings Banda of Malawi for nearly four years. The themes of his poetry range from the search for a sense of dignity and integrity under a repressive regime, incarceration, release from prison, exile and return to Africa, and reconciliation with torturers, to the writer in Africa and the continuing African liberation struggle in a hostile world. While often deadly serious, Mapanje's poems are lifted by the generosity of spirit and irrepressible humour which helped sustain him through his prison ordeal.Trade Review"'Jack Mapanje's early poems, written under Banda's dictatorship, had to be cryptic. Poems written in prison and published after his release were, necessarily, very angry. His latest work is mellower and more mordant in tone. But the conscience, the wit and the craftsmanship which it displays have characterised his work from the beginning. His wholly original, unsubdued voice is still unlike that of any other poet writing in English, from Africa or anywhere' - Angus Calder; 'The poems have a raging clarity; the chameleon has become the chattering wagtail...Don't read this because Mapanje was detained, another human rights victim. Read it because he made poetry out of the experience - sardonic, inventive, lyrical testimonies to a generous and enduring spirit' - Landeg White, Stand; 'Given the regime, Mapanje's satire can seem strangely generous, impressively blending the memory of terror with a sense almost of farce when he considers his captors' - Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times; 'An African talent whose poetry effectively overthrew the dictator' - David Rubadiri, Vice-Chancellor, University of Malawi"

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Book SynopsisAlmanacs: a mythic scrapbook, bag of cats, a one-man band...Jen Hadfield's Almanacs is concerned with lists, rules and archetypes and what they don't account for. It takes as its subjects the Tarot, the lore of Full Moons, weather myths and travellers' tales. The book's central sequence, Lorelei's Lore, is a road movie in poems, set in the north of Scotland: Ultima Thule, hijacked by elusive sirens and Harrier jets. There's the ruthless Lorelei, gorgeous Ghosty who's given up on everything except the Road, and Skerryman, patron saint of bad weather and absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder. It's obsessed with yearning, like the two seas separated by the tip of Shetland 'metres apart/and desperate for each other.' Lorelei's Lore wonders 'what's beautiful?' (tarmac? sheep carcasses? sunburn?) and 'where's your native home?'Trade ReviewA quick mind abroad alone in the ever-changing natural landscape. The language country-rooted, specific, of clear observation: a sophisticated, refreshing country brew. There are many memorable images in the described coquettish dance of nature's primal forces. This is an excellent collection - Jen Hadfield is a whole and committed poet. -- Tom LeonardA zestful poet of the road, a beat poet of the upper latitudes, Jen Hadfield conjures poems and prose-poems of great spirit and imaginative daring from the northern landscapes. Lively, youthful and full of the joy of language, Almanacs is the most refreshing debut for ages. -- Kathleen Jamie

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Book Synopsis'This book of poems is for all of us who go through illness, deal with doctors, hospitals, and experiences such as bereavement and ageing, and who struggle to find language to describe the suffering we have to go through. Medical language baffles and alienates us. It's a harsh, unforgiving vocabulary that often seems to bear no relationship to our own emotional predicament. In this uplifting anthology we see how poetry can give us metaphors and images to help us understand our feelings and communicate them to people around us. This is a book that should be in every waiting-room, and should be by the bed of every GP and consultant. It may inspire you to write poetry, and also help you to find order in the chaos of ill health. By giving us words, poetry can help cure us.' – Julia Darling & Cynthia FullerTrade ReviewWhen we're ill we're forced to recognise that we've become another person - unfamiliar, frail and mortal. The adjustment is painful and it's well-nigh impossible to find the words to describe how alien our sick self seems. These poems magically supply the images and emotions that help us to accept our inexpressible vulnerability. -- Dr Miriam Stoppard

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Book SynopsisThe Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-97) was one of the foremost Caribbean writers of the 20th century. Twice imprisoned by the colonial government of British Guiana during the Emergency in the 1950s, he became a minister in Guyana’s first independent government during the 60s, representing his country at the United Nations, but resigned in disillusionment after three years to live ‘simply as a poet, remaining with the people’. He was one of the first Caribbean poets to write about slavery, Amerindian history and Indian Indentureship in relation to contemporary concerns. Wise, angry and hopeful, Carter’s poetry voices a life lived in times of public and private crisis. Gemma Robinson’s helpfully annotated edition is the first Collected Poems of Martin Carter. The selected prose includes key essays on race, colonialism, political action and the role of the poet in a postcolonial society.Trade ReviewThe work in University of Hunger ranges from lyrics to arguments to riddles. Carter’s poetry, known by heart by his fellow Guyanese, deserves to live deep in global memory. Responsive to the white dust and red flowers of his homeland, for Carter the political is personal. Jailed for his part in the independence struggle, he foxed surveillance photographers by displaying poems on his home. Whether in tenderness for ‘green, green love’ or in furious search of a ‘comrade stargazer’, he desires a freedom that would write a "happier alphabet". -- Vahni Capildeo * Reader's Digest *His impulse was always lyrical, he was a great reciter, he had a great voice, he had a great joy in the sound of the poem…the example of his work was phenomenal…West Indian literature even in English is totally underestimated, totally. The literature is astonishing, the quality is astonishingly high. And Martin’s position in all this is special. -- Derek WalcottA major contribution to Guyanese scholarship. This sets the standard for editions of Caribbean poetry. -- David DabydeenCarter has a stature in the collective consciousness of Guyana that is quite unique among writers in the English-speaking Caribbean…he will remain one of the greatest writers of that period…Carter will stand in the very first ranks of the writers of the Americas. -- George Lamming

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Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective "Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems" in 2004. "After" was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is an extended investigation into incarnation, transience and interconnection. These alert, incisive and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgement and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, meanings in overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. Often elegies - some overt, others implicit - these poems resound with a bass-note awareness of time, its inexorable subtractions but also its exuberant gifts.Trade Review'Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart' - Wislawa Szymborska 'A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings... It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield...In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness' - Czeslaw Milosz, Prze Kroj (Poland) 'Her poetry is a rich and assured gift...an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction...The poems' realised ambition is wisdom' - Alison Brackenbury, Agenda 'Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human' - The Scotsman

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Book SynopsisMiroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. Mixing myth, history and folktale with science and philosophy, his plainly written, sceptical poems are surreal mini-dramas often pivoting on paradoxes. Poems Before & After covers thirty years of his poetry. Before are his poems from the fifties and sixties, poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: first published in English in his Penguin Selected Poems (1967) and in Bloodaxe's The Fly (1987), with some additional poems. After are translations of his later poetry, all written after 1968, including not only those from his two Bloodaxe editions, On the Contrary (1984) and Supposed to Fly (1996), but also the entire texts of two late collections published by Faber, Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) and The Rampage (1997). With additional translations by David Young, Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub. 'A laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art' – Seamus Heaney 'Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere' – Ted Hughes 'One of the sanest voices of our time' – A. Alvarez 'He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise again and again' – Tom PaulinTrade Review"A laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art." -- Seamus Heaney

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Book SynopsisKapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian émigré poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. Her well-travelled poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments of history, but they always speak of the many ways to be lost and disoriented: in a place, in the past, in fear, in love, in the very quickness of life. The voices speaking here – from a Roman housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ – are the voices of the heart-sick, the culturally jet-lagged, people from photographs, the “tenants” of lives, cities and destinies. This is what we all are, have been, or will be.Trade ReviewIn the suitcase that she has mentally lived out of since she was a little girl, Kapka Kassabova has brought the turbulent memories of 20th century European history with her to New Zealand, where she recollects bad dreams in comparative tranquillity, and always with the phrasing of a born musician. If her finely pitched lyricism is the first thing that strikes you, the second is the richness of sympathy that lies behind it. As if she owed her gifts and blessings to them, she speaks for the generations before her whose lives were ruined. The result is a truly international picture of what it means to be young and sensitive in the modern world. In a short life, she has already established a unique literary identity. -- Clive JamesSomeone else’s life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th century and the first of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this book – skeptical, riveting, passionate – suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us. -- Mark Strand

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Book SynopsisHumour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay's part of the equation. "Darling" brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, "The Adoption Papers", "Other Lovers", "Off Colour" and "Life Mask", as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay's poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, "Why Don't You Stop Talking", could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.Trade Review'Kay's Darling locates her alongside Ted Hughes - even T.S. Eliot - in that elite group whose children's writing, rather than gainsaying their primary poetic project, informs and enriches it - One of Kay's greatest strengths is the way she locates individual experience in the collective. As befits an adoptive daughter of peace marchers, Kay is a writer for whom the personal is indeed political - Even such a public poet as Kay, though, writes verse shaped above all by human cadence. She has an immaculate ear for speech patterns, using accent and dialect, in particular, to lift and characterise' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'Darling is proof of her place as one of the most deft, most airy, most unencumbered, most fearless and most humane of poets. It culminates in a set of poems whose rhetorical ease and lack of pretension are like a clear starry sky on a good frosty night' - Ali Smith, The Guardian (Books of the Year)

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Book SynopsisThe poems in "New Wings" focus on many different kinds of beginnings. Drawn both from new poems as well as from two earlier collections, the book gives a fresh airing to the poetry of a talented writer whose work has been unavailable for many years. The 'new wings' in this wide-ranging selection can be the pages of a comic in a child's eureka moment of learning to read or those of a woman transforming herself into flames to leap across the hemispheres like a forest fire. These are poems of living through and coming to terms with changes - sometimes momentous or traumatic - and moving on into the future. In them, the reader travels from Scotland to Stockholm, the Californian desert, New York, rural Pennsylvania, Venice, Constanta, the Blue Mountains, Sydney and Tyneside.Trade Review'Compelling and accomplished...a poet of unusual talent' - Bernard O'Donoghue, The Times Literary Supplement 'Neither old-fashioned nor new-fangled, but abiding and spiritual' - Peter Porter, Observer 'She displays a range of emotion and characterisation with both versatility and understanding...These are poems I will gladly return to again and again without fear of disappointment' - Richard Jones, Poetry Wales 'All credit to Bloodaxe for bringing this quiet, reclusive talent out into the light' - Stephen Knight, London Magazine 'A focussed and stylish collection by a writer confident in the universal appeal of her message...This was my favourite...because it seemed to have been written by the poet most at ease with herself and least self-conscious about her art' - Alison Combes, Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisJeet Thayil's definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century - the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s - but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.Thayil's starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for "verticality" rather than chronology, Thayil's anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of 'chutnified' (Salman Rushdie's word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. It explains why Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri have said that Indian poetry in English has a longer, more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English. The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala, Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hongkong, Montreal, Melbourne, Calcutta, Connecticut, Cuttack and various other global corridors. While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.Trade Review'The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, is a labour of love that gathers the Indian poets writing in English from the past and the present, from within India, from outside. While there may not be a firm geographical location to the experience of being an Indian poet, there is certainly a firm emotional one' – Kiran Desai, Guardian Books of the Year

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Book SynopsisSelima Hill's poetry has been called wanton, wildly imaginative, tender, intelligent, dangerous, defiant, subversive and startling. All these qualities are strongly present throughout "Gloria", a comprehensive selection drawn from ten formally diverse and thematically unified collections, each offering wild variations on her abiding themes: women's identities, love and loss, repression and abuse, family conflict and mental illness, men, animals and human civilisation. "Gloria" covers all Selima Hill's books from "Saying Hello at the Station" (1984) to "Red Roses" (2006), and was published at the same time as a separate, new collection, "The Hat" (2008).Trade Review'Wayward, funny, terrifying. Her writing scintillates with hatred, love and absurd insights.'- Gillian Beer, Financial Times 'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine - Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets 'Every page reveals her unique ability to invert the world and shake it, until it reveals its truth.' - Kathleen Jamie & Maurice Riordan, PBS Bulletin 'Brilliant mischief' - Independent 'She is truly gifted. She invests mundane things with visionary, delirious brilliance.' - Graham Swift, Sunday Times 'Hill is a unique voice in British poetry, handling central subjects with wit, great metaphorical beauty, and deep clarity. Her two most characteristic features, the off-the- wall images and no-holds-barred straight talk, work flawlessly together.' - Ruth Padel & Sean O'Brien, PBS Bulletin

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Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. "Alternative Anthem" is a live album of poems from books published over three decades, including "John Agard Live!", a DVD of filmed highlights from recent performances made by filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce. It includes poetry from "We Brits" in which the Guyanese-born word magician gives an outsider-insider view of British life in poems which both challenge and cherish our peculiar culture and hallowed institutions; "Weblines" that contains three powerful Caribbean myths of transformation: the steeldrum, the limbo dancer, and Anansi, the spider trickster god; and, "From the Devil's Pulpit" that is a Devil's eye view of the world, sweeping from Genesis across time; and, other collections including "Mangoes and Bullets" and "Lovelines for a Goat-Born Lady", as well his children's books, featuring some of Agard's best-known poems - "Listen Mr Oxford don", "Palm Tree King", "Half-Caste", and "English Girl Eats Her First Mango".Trade Review'John Agard's poetry is a wonderful affirmation of life, in a language that is as vital and joyous as we are able to craft it in the Caribbean, in spite of our history of distress' - David Dabydeen 'His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political - often managing to be all these things at once' - Maura Dooley 'One of the most eloquent contemporary poets - rich in literary and cultural allusion, yet as direct as a voice in the bus queue' - Helen Dunmore, Observer

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Book SynopsisBasil Bunting was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain – in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’. Bunting called Briggflatts his ‘autobiography’. It is a complex work, drawing on many elements of his life, experience and knowledge, and features the saint Cuthbert and the warrior king Eric Bloodaxe as two opposing aspects of the Northumbrian – and his – character. Its structural models include the sonata form (and Scarlatti’s music in particular) and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels, while thematically it recalls Wordsworth’s Prelude. Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This new edition includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem (and a posthumously published additional Note), the new edition includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966), and other background material. All his poetry is available in Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2000). ‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it’ – Thom Gunn. ‘His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’ – Hugh MacDiarmid.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.Trade Review'A book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence' - Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.

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Book SynopsisArun Kolatkar (1931-2004) was one of India's greatest modern poets. He wrote prolifically, in both Marathi and English, publishing in magazines and anthologies from 1955, but did not bring out a book of poems until he was 44. "Jejuri" (1976) won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His third Marathi publication, Bhijki Vahi, won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004. Always hesitant about publishing his work, Kolatkar waited until 2004, when he knew he was dying from cancer, before bringing out two further books, "Kala Ghoda Poems" and "Sarpa Satra". A posthumous selection, "The Boatride and Other Poems" (2008), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, contained his previous uncollected English poems as well as translations of his Marathi poems; among the book's surprises were his translations of bhakti poetry, song lyrics, and a long love poem, the only one he wrote, cleverly disguised as light verse. This first Collected Poems in English brings together work from all those volumes. "Jejuri" offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion, discovering the divine trace in a degenerate world. Salman Rushdie called it 'sprightly, clear-sighted, deeply felt - a modern classic'. For Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, it was 'among the finest single poems written in India in the last forty years - it surprises by revealing the familiar, the hidden that is always before us'. Jeet Thayil attributed its popularity in India to 'the Kolatkarean voice: unhurried, lit with whimsy, unpretentious even when making learned literary or mythological allusions. And whatever the poet's eye alights on - particularly the odd, the misshapen, and the famished - receives the gift of close attention.'Trade Review'He had a magical gift for translating the familiar into the wonderful, by focussing on details or tweaking our programmed approaches to objects, people and relationships. In his poems, wry irony underpins the miracle of things seen and touched, people met and sized up...Kolatkar's poetry orchestrates a play of scales: the epic alternates with the intimate, the Self weaves through the Other. In Sarpa Satra, he assumed the alternately elegiac and excoriating voice of a private self beset by public terrors, tempted into cynicism but mandated to bear witness to history - Kolatkar addressed mythic themes that still resonate in India's public life - ecological devastation, the military occupation of farflung provinces, and the staging of pogroms' - Ranjit Hoskote, The Hindu. 'Kolatkar was a poet of world class with a very individual way of looking at the world. In his writing every cliche is transformed into something new and unexpected, a transformation by imagination, language, and tone - Bruce King, Modern Poetry in English. 'Moving deftly from street life in Bombay to Hindu myths, these last poems confirm his cult reputation as the greatest Indian poet of his generation' - Pankaj Mishra, Times Literary Supplement.

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Book SynopsisMiriam Gamble's poetry is cleverly self-conscious about the doubleness of language: as resistant, resisting medium, and as the lightly worn currency of the everyday. Remarkable for its imaginings of both the animal world and the human, her first full-length collection The Squirrels Are Dead encompasses an urgent sense of social engagement as well as a profound sense of mystery, in which language is journeyed through as an almost-familiar landscape. Gamble is a mistress-manipulator of tradition - with sonnet, villanelle and sestina some of the forms on display - who forces new rhythms into tried and tested forms, yet is ever vigilant to the fact that poets do not replace, they update, and that tradition comes to fresh life in the retelling. "The Squirrels Are Dead" is a striking and assured debut from a distinctive new talent in Irish poetry.Trade Review'Among her positive qualities I would single out abundant vocabulary, ambitious syntax, humour (not all that common), a sense of rhythm, an ability to write memorable lines, and an original slant on the world. She looks like the real thing all right' - Michael Longley. 'Alert to the possibilities of alien consciousness and aware, simultaneously, of our human presumption, the poems...explore, dissect, muse on, re-imagine and punctuate "the disparities of life as we know it" with fleet intelligence and consummate skill' - Sinead Morrissey.

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Book SynopsisTony Hoagland's zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge. Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty was his first new collection after What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). The poems – and title – try to make sense of the situation of the individual in our time, and in America in particular – Hoagland's obsessive main subject. They worry over how to preserve a sense of self and values, connectedness and cohesiveness, in an era of market-driven culture, dazzling but toxic entertainment, and degraded and degrading idiocies cultivated by mass culture. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade Review"I too am made of joists and stanchions, of plasterboard and temperamental steel, mortgage payments and severed index fingers, ex-girlfriends and secret Kool-Aid-flavored dawns. "--from "Demolition" "It's hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn't make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland or a word in common or formal usage he would shy away from. He is a poet of risk: he risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score. The framework of his writing is immense, almost as large as the tarnished nation he wandered into under the star of poetry." --Jackson Poetry Prize judges' citation

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Book SynopsisR.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales's greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive - poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems - published to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth - brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas's career - from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the Dublin Magazine, to poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. R.S. Thomas's Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work access to much new and fascinating material. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included in Uncollected Poems.Trade Review'Gathered in from far and wide, and chronicling sixty years of austere devotion to language, these poems remind us that brevity was for R.S. Thomas ever the soul of passion, and unnerving honesty his guarantor of truth. Bitter elegies for the "botched land" of Wales and baffled encounters with "the incorrigibly human" here keep company with jeremiads for his civilisation and the sound of one hand clapping for his God. But, most touchingly for this laureate of loneliness, there are also occasional gentle, shy poems of love, even in old age: "Come to me a moment, stand,/ Ageing yet lovely still,/ At my side...' - Professor M. Wynn Thomas. 'Like Yeats, Thomas has produced his most powerful work in his old age - reminds me of Beethoven's last quartets in its fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death - He is the first great poet since the Metaphysicals of the 17th century to draw his images from the science of his day' - Denis Healey. 'Reading R.S. Thomas's poems has become like reading the prophet Jeremiah - we find the same tenacity of theme and purpose; the ability to look without blinking into the misuse of the raw material of humanity' - David Scott.

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Book Synopsis'When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorise Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 29, When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast stateA" for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude' - Garrison Keillor.Trade Review'If you've occasionally wished that the news from Lake Wobegon contained more erotic poetry - and really, who hasn't? - then you'll want to get your hands on Garrison Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets - Keillor's original poems of courtship, heartbreak and frank carnal desire, all of it well suited to the author's folksy, avuncular voice' - New York Times. 'The book proves that the sonnet is still alive and kicking. Keillor enlarges our sense of what the old 14-liner can do - After years as a poetry impresario, Garrison Keillor has blown his cover. It won't be possible to think of him anymore as only an engaging radio personality, a diverting humorist, an able novelist, essayist and political commentator, a friend of other people's verse, but as a poet of force and originality himself, a fresh and yet familiar voice to be reckoned with' - X.J. Kennedy, Contemporary Poetry Review.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize, this third collection by Esther Morgan is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and includes 'This Morning', winner of the 2010 Bridport Poetry Prize. What happens if, when the angel arrives with his message, no one's at home? In poems of lyric concentration, Grace examines our need for purpose, for the signs that might help us decide what to do with our lives. It's a desire that makes for restless spirits - like the woman who keeps shifting her furniture around or the invisible subjects of an early photograph, moving too fast to be captured. Other poems ask what happens when we reconcile ourselves to watching and waiting - whether the angle of the sun in a guest room or the colour of a bruised clementine is really 'enough to be going on with'. Haunted by a blue sky out of which something (or nothing) might come, these are poems of intensely felt moments. They create a vision both troubled and informed by doubt, where the ghost of a film star may be the closest we can come to grace.Trade Review'Poems of outstanding beauty and a decidedly celebratory wisdom that takes nothing for granted. This is poetry of the first order by a poet who really knows how to sing' - John Burnside. 'Esther Morgan's poems are full of hints and mysteries. They dance on sensuous feet while keeping a troubled eye on the music that keeps them dancing. But there are joys here as well as anxieties, and it is the two that amplify each other into such clear, poignant and resonant shapes' - George Szirtes. 'Morgan works like an archaeologist, creating imagined histories of lives by uncovering what was previously hidden' - Robyn Bolam, Magma.

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Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Following the publication of her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, Bloodaxe has published Jane Hirshfield's later collections in the UK: After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). Come, Thief centres on the beauty and fragility of our lives, touching on love, science, ageing and mortality, war and the political, the revelatory daily object, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each facet of our lives its transformative portrait, its particular memorable, singing and singular name.Trade Review'Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious - Wittily deductive and meta-physically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' - Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Come, Thief. 'Come Thief is a book of silences - a deep well full of strength and wisdom' - Dana Jennings, New York Times. 'Clear-eyed and often numinous poems - a deepening attention to every aspect of human experience, from the dailiness of our lives to the most ineffable moments' - Steven Ratiner, Washington Post. 'Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart' - Wislawa Szymborska. 'A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings - It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield - In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness' - Czeslaw Milosz, Prze Kroj (Poland). 'Her poetry is a rich and assured gift - an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction... The poems' realised ambition is wisdom' - Alison Brackenbury, Agenda. 'Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human' - The Scotsman.

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Book SynopsisFrom Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight, Out of Bounds is a newly charted map of Britain as viewed by its black and Asian poets. It takes the reader on a riveting, sensory journey through Scotland, England and Wales, showing the whole country from a fresh perspective. This extensive and ground-breaking anthology – with its sudden forks in the road, and its roads not taken – stops off in the Highlands and Islands, skirts the North East coast from Whitley Bay to the sands of Bridlington, wanders lonely through the Lake District and Yorkshire, climbs the mountains of Wales before descending to the Black Country and Southern England. Along the way it takes in lochs and landmarks from Glasgow’s George Square and the Angel of the North to the London Eye and the Long Man of Wilmington. If alienation, unbelonging and dislocation remain key aspects of black and Asian experiences in Britain, what such terms simultaneously conceal are the rich and manifold attachments to place, region, city and landscape offered in Out of Bounds. The poems question the idea of an easy or singular identity, nimbly dealing with the triple bind of ethnic, geographical and poetic belonging. An alternative A to Z of the nation, a new poetic guide, the book enables us to look again at the UK’s local and regional landscapes and the poets who pass through them. Out of Bounds is a definitive anthology that brings together new and established black and Asian writers and places them firmly on the map of what is great and not so great about Britain. Includes: Shanta Acharya, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, James Berry, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Vahni Capildeo, Merle Collins, Fred D'Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Imtiaz Dharker, Bernardine Evaristo, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Tariq Latif, Sheree Mack, Jack Mapanje, E.A. Markham, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Seni Seneviratne, John Siddique, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Benjamin Zephaniah, and many others.Trade Review'This book really redraws the map of Britain: away with taxonomies of hurt - welcome cartographies of worth' - Fred D'AguiarTable of ContentsSCOTLAND Raman Mundair 28 Shetland Muse Raman Mundair 28 Stories fae da Shoormal Raman Mundair 31 Sheep Hill, Fair Isle Maya Chowdhry 31 Hurry Curry Sudesh Mishra 33 Suva; Skye Rizwan Akhtar 33 Aberdonian winter Jackie Kay 34 Granite Kukomo Rocks 35 Shopping Trip Tesco in Fife Roger Robinson 37 Sleep Roger Robinson 38 Conversion Maud Sulter 39 Scots Triptych John Agard 42 The Ascent of John Edmonstone Sudeep Sen 43 Over May Day Irfan Merchant 44 The World Is More Real Than It Is Imtiaz Dharker 45 Campsie Fells Tariq Latif 46 Western Ferry Leila Aboulela 47 When I First Came to Scotland… Maya Chowdhry 48 Four Corners Imtiaz Dharker 49 Being good in Glasgow Imtiaz Dharker 50 from Lascar Johnnie 1930: Lascar Jackie Kay 51 George Square Suhayl Saadi 51 from paradise gardens carpet Irfan Merchant 55 Address Tae Chicken Tikka Masala Gerry Singh 57 India Gate Gerry Singh 58 Ladhar Bheinn Vahni Capildeo 59 Shell Tariq Latif 60 After Lights over Girvan Bashabi Fraser 61 Do’ care Bashabi Fraser 62 Tartan & Turban George Murevesi 62 Pleas Grace Nichols 63 Queen of Sheba replies to Kathleen Jamie Shampa Ray 66 My India Tawona Sithole 67 climbing hills Maud Sulter 70 Flight Jackie Kay 71 In my country Irfan Merchant 71 The Indian Upon Scotland Imtiaz Dharker 72 How to Cut a Pomegranate NORTH Fred D’Aguiar 74 from Sonnets from Whitley Bay Sheree Mack 76 Bonny Baby Contest Kayo Chingonyi 77 Baltic Mill Grace Nichols 78 Angel of the North Cheryl Martin 78 Driving Back From Durham Kayo Chingonyi 80 Denouement Jack Mapanje 81 The Seashells Of Bridlington North Beach Grace Nichols 82 Outward from Hull Lorna Goodison 83 At the Keswick Museum Lorna Goodison 84 To Mr William Wordsworth, Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland Jackie Kay 86 Windows, Lakes E.A. Markham 87 Epilogue Anthony Kellman 88 Roofs of Yorkshire Seni Seneviratne 89 Frame Yourself Seni Seneviratne 89 Yorkshire Childhood Anita Sivakumaran 90 Ice and Ice Age R. Parthasarathy 91 A Northern City Jack Mapanje 92 After Celebrating Our Asylum Stories At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Khadijah Ibrahiim 93 from A Snapshot History of Leeds: Michelle Scally-Clarke 97 Granny Betty Scally Bates Seni Seneviratne 98 A Wider View Vahni Capildeo 99 from Winter: II. Harewood Estate Dreadlockalien 99 Fires burn in Bradford, Rockstone fling innah Oldham Linton Kwesi Johnson 100 It Dread Inna Inglan Tariq Mehmood 102 Mined Memories Tajinder Singh Hayer 103 Holy Man Tajinder Singh Hayer 104 A Seasonal Picture Merle Collins 105 Visiting Yorkshire – Again Daljit Nagra 107 Raju t’Wonder Dog! Merle Collins 108 For the Lumb Bank Group, December 1991 Merle Collins 109 The Lumb Bank Children John Lyons 110 Weather Vane John Agard 111 Caribbean Eye Over Yorkshire Daljit Nagra 112 Parade’s End Daljit Nagra 113 Darling & Me Marie Guise Williams 114 My Mother’s Porch #1: First Love at 15 E.A. Markham 115 A Politically-Correct Marriage E.A. Markham 116 To My Mother, the Art Critic Debjani Chatterjee 117 Reason for Coming John Lyons 118 Drinking up the Drizzle Jackie Kay 118 85th Birthday Poem for Dad Dorothea Smartt 119 Bringing It All Back Home Dorothea Smartt 120 A Few Words for Samboo Dorothea Smartt 121 Today on Sunderland Point SuAndi 121 Sambo’s Grave Bernardine Evaristo 121 from Soul Tourists Nabila Jameel 124 The Island in Preston Nabila Jameel 124 A Book Closer to Home Lemn Sissay 125 This Train SuAndi 125 Bolton Safari John Siddique 126 A Map of Rochdale John Siddique 127 Industrial Landscape Jeff Caffrey 127 A Brief History of Manny (2006) Romesh Gunesekera 128 Turning Point Lemn Sissay 130 Flags Lemn Sissay 131 Mill Town and Africa Raman Mundair 131 Name Journeys Segun Lee-French 132 So many undone Segun Lee-French 133 Rain Kei Miller 134 The only thing far away Shamshad Khan 135 pot Cheryl Martin 137 The Coffee Bearer Pete Kalu 138 Manchester Pete Kalu 138 The Poet’s Song Maya Chowdhry 139 My Eyes D.S. Marriott 140 The Day Ena Died Tariq Latif 141 MoonMen John Siddique 142 Jali Benjamin Zephaniah 143 Master Master Moniza Alvi 144 Arrival 1946 Bernardine Evaristo 145 from Lara: 1949: Taiwo Jack Mapanje 147 The First Train to Liverpool (Enfield: Liverpool 1, Stoke 0, 1972) Levi Tafari 148 Toxteth Where I Reside Imtiaz Dharker 149 Speech balloon Imtiaz Dharker 151 Mersey Crossing WALES Patience Agbabi 154 North(West)ern Patience Agbabi 154 Postmod: Eric Ngalle Charles 155 A Mountain and a Sea Tariq Latif 156 Trefor John Siddique 157 One New Year’s Eve Aimé Kongolo 158 Non-toxic trust Maggie Harris 158 Cwmpengraig, place of stones Maggie Harris 159 Llamas, Cwmpengraig Tinashe Mushakavanhu 160 The Green Man Festival Moniza Alvi 161 Spring on the Hillside Grace Nichols 161 Opening Your Book Moniza Alvi 162 Luckbir Leon Charles 163 ‘Tiger Bay’ Heart of Wales Marsden Falcon 164 ‘It’s a big ask…’ Tishani Doshi 165 Memory of Wales Maggie Harris 166 Montbretia, Wales Sadi Husain 167 Not in India Raman Mundair 168 Welsh Postcard Labi Siffre 169 from An Alien in Cymru: Derek Walcott 171 from Midsummer: XXXV MIDLANDS Kimberly Trusty 174 New Vic Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, ring bell for service Romesh Gunesekera 175 Frontliners D.S. Marriott 176 The Ghost of Averages Panya Banjoko 177 Arriving Michelle Hubbard 178 Take the girl out of Notts, but you can’t take Notts out of the girl! Sandeep Parmar 179 Archive for a Daughter Rommi Smith 182 Night River Hazel Malcolm 182 Blues in the Black Country Martin Glynn 183 Highfields Style Carol Leeming 185 Highfields Fantasia Carol Leeming 186 Valley Dreamers Roshan Doug 187 Flash of Independence Roshan Doug 188 Sound Bites Sue Brown 189 Birmingham Moqapi Selassie 190 Tellin de stori Roi Kwabena 192 From Location:Re Roy McFarlane 193 I found my father’s love letters Benjamin Zephaniah 194 The Big Bang Benjamin Zephaniah 196 Knowing Me Kimberly Trusty 198 Alcester Road, Moseley, 50 Bus Roshan Doug 199 Slow Motion Derek Walcott 200 from Tiepolo’s Hound Derek Walcott 202 from Midsummer: XXIII, XXXVI, L Mahendra Solanki 204 In a Jar David Dabydeen 205 Coolie Odyssey Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze 209 Mi Duck Benjamin Zephaniah 210 I Have a Scheme SOUTH Moniza Alvi 214 Rural Scene Judith Lal 214 Kestrel Judith Lal 215 Swallowtail Day Vahni Capildeo 216 Monolithicity Debjani Chatterjee 217 Visiting E.M. Forster Hannah Lowe 218 Sausages Moniza Alvi 219 Go Back to England Patience Agbabi 222 Weights and Measures and Finding a Rhyme for Orange Christian Campbell 223 Ballad of Oxfraud Vahni Capildeo 226 Night in the Gardens Vahni Capildeo 227 La Poetessa Saradha Soobrayen 228 On the water meadows Shanta Acharya 228 The Vulnerable Plot of Green Shanta Acharya 229 Aspects of Westonbirt Arboretum Fred D’Aguiar 230 At the Grave of the Unknown African Kwame Dawes 232 Bristol Ralph Hoyte 234 Chew Stoke Derek Walcott 234 from Midsummer: XXXIX Claude McKay 235 London Una Marson 236 from Spring in England George Lamming 236 Swans Wole Soyinka 238 Telephone Conversation Kamau Brathwaite 239 from The Emigrants Merle Collins 243 Soon Come Roger Robinson 245 Parallel Fred D’Aguiar 246 Home Fred D’Aguiar 247 Domestic Flight Gabriela Pearse 248 Grenada… Heathrow… London Rajat Kumar Biswas 249 Cambridge Zhana 250 Apartheid Britain 1985 (Or Kenwood Ladies Pond) Ashna Sarkar 251 99 Flakes and The End of Something Gopi Warrier 252 Cricket at Lords Daljit Nagra 253 Our Town with the Whole of India Daljit Nagra 254 University E.A. Markham 255 Ladbroke Grove, ’58 Andrew Salkey 256 Notting Hill Carnival, 1975 Benjamin Zephaniah 257 Call It What You Like! Creswell Durrant 259 Colours Nii Ayikwei Parkes 259 A Familiar Voice at the V&A Museum Nii Ayikwei Parkes 261 Common/wealth John Figueroa 261 Hartlands/Heartlands John Lyons 264 Home is Weyever Yuh Is Joy Russell 265 On the Tube Louise Bennett 268 De Victory Parade James Berry 270 Beginning in a City, 1948 James Berry 272 Wanting to Hear Big Ben James Berry 273 Roomseeker in London James Berry 273 Migrant in London Kwame Dawes 274 Umpire at the Portrait Gallery Kwame Dawes 276 Birthright Moniza Alvi 278 The Double City Anthony Joseph 279 Who passed on Haymarket, winter night? Anthony Joseph 280 Blues for Brother Curtis Claude McKay 281 La Paloma in London Kayo Chingonyi 282 Andrew’s Corner Kayo Chingonyi 283 Berwick Street Lorna Goodison 284 Bam Chi Chi La La: London, 1969 Mahmood Jamal 284 from Two Women Jay Bernard 285 F12 Pete Kalu 286 Old Radicals Siddhartha Bose 287 Sex and the City Siddhartha Bose 288 Swansong, Mile End Lizzy Dijeh 288 Stratford City Shamshad Khan 290 Isosceles Nick Makoha 291 Promise To My Unborn Son Fred D’Aguiar 292 I Buried My Father a Complete Stranger E.A. Markham 292 At the Redland Hotel, Stamford Hill John Agard 294 Toussaint L’Ouverture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture Patience Agbabi 295 The London Eye Malika Booker 295 Hungerford Bridge Mahmood Jamal 296 Apples and Mangoes John Agard 297 Listen Mr Oxford don Roger Robinson 299 The Wedding Picture Marsha Prescod 300 Community Policing Desmond Johnson 301 Mass Jobe Desmond Johnson 304 Ole Charlie Boy Linton Kwesi Johnson 307 Five Nights of Bleeding Linton Kwesi Johnson 309 Di Great Insohrekshan Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze 311 The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market Jacob Sam-La Rose 314 After Lazerdrome: McDonalds, Peckham Rye… Inua Ellams 315 GuerillaGardenWritingPoem Amryl Johnson 316 Circle of Thorns Kimberly Trusty 317 Fireworks, New Cross Road, 1981 John Agard 320 The Embodiment Maggie Harris 321 Timeline Whitstable Daljit Nagra 322 Look We Have Coming to Dover! Grace Nichols 323 Seven Sisters Grace Nichols 324 Hurricane Hits England Grace Nichols 325 Long Man Louisa Adjoa Parker 327 Forest-child

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Book SynopsisTess Gallagher is one of America's leading poets. In Midnight Lantern she collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes - for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her tough childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable 'seeing-into experience', Midnight Lantern is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power.Trade Review'Gallagher's poems resound with exquisite beauty and remind me once more how it is not subject but its rendering that redeems and uplifts' - Boston Globe 'Tess Gallagher's is perhaps the most deeply moving and spiritual and intensely intelligent poetry being written in America today' - William Heyen 'It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerising rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images' - Joyce Carol Oates 'She is outstanding among her contemporaries in the naturalness of her inflection, the fine excess of her spirit, and the energy of her dramatic imagination' - Stanley Kunitz

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Book SynopsisCome On Everybody brings together poems from a dozen collections published by Adrian Mitchell over five decades, from Poems (1964) to his final collection, Tell Me Lies (2008). His poetry's simplicity, clarity, passion and humour show his allegiance to a vital, popular tradition embracing William Blake as well as the ballads and the blues. His most nakedly political poems - about war, Vietnam, prisons and racism - became part of the folklore of the Left, sung and recited at demonstrations and mass rallies. His childlike questioning was a constant reminder from the 60s onwards that poetry is first and foremost an assertion of the human spirit. A pacifist prophet who remained true to his heartfelt beliefs, Mitchell reported back for over half a century from a world blighted by war, compromise, double-talk and pragmatism without losing his innocence, integrity and impish sense of humour. Angela Carter described him as a 'joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper determinedly singing us away from catastrophe'.Trade Review'He has the innocence of his own experience - real inner freedom and the courage of his own music. Among all the voices of the Court, a voice as welcome as Lear's fool - Humour that can stick deep and stay funny' - Ted Hughes. 'Nobody else writes like him. And it is becoming more and more evident that his achievement endures - Nobody has ever departed with such language for such a destination' - John Berger. 'This is Adrian Mitchell, the British Mayakovsky' - Kenneth Tynan.

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Book SynopsisFrom the direct trajectory of her first collection, Straight Ahead, Clare Shaw's second collection Head On turns an unflinching gaze into startling new territories. Structured by interweaving themes of political and personal conflict, the book begins and ends with the recurrent necessity of speaking out. And this is a book which speaks in equal measures, in precise and uncompromising language, about love and tenderness; violence and brutality. Clare Shaw writes to speak to the world. But first and foremost she speaks directly to the reader, through words which shock, engage, disturb and delight. This is a book which - in its content and its impact - sets out to establish and to challenge the limits of language. Exploring with unflinching focus and intent some of her darkest territory yet - but returning, as always, to the light - she offers us a furious but ultimately hopeful exploration of the world as she lives it.Trade Review'The energy and vivacity of Clare Shaw's writing, its colloquial power, frame of reference and sheer sound is enough to mark her out as one of the most talented young poets to appear in recent years. Hers is a natural gift that speaks as it sings. It confronts the world with knowledge, pity, melancholy, affection and a kind of sympathetic fury, as if the world were shards and fragments that could be gathered into the ear and sung from the heart. And the remarkable thing is that she does gather it and sing it, that she imbues it with the passion owing to it' - George Szirtes. 'Hold your breath when you read Clare Shaw's poems. Startling, searing, scorching, this is an emotional blast of a book' - Jackie Kay.

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Book SynopsisThe Essential Haiku brings together Robert Hass's beautifully fresh translations of the three great masters of the Japanese haiku tradition: Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker, and the haiku poet most familiar to English readers; Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, a painter renowned for his visually expressive poetry; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist, whose haiku are known for their poignant or ironic wit. Each haiku master's section of the book is prefaced with an eloquent and informative introduction by Robert Hass, followed by a selection of over 100 poems and then by other poetry or prose by the poet, including journals and nature writing. Opening with Hass's superb introductory essay on haiku, the book concludes with a section devoted to Basho's writings and conversations on poetry. The seventeen-syllable haiku form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Each haiku is a meditation, a centring, a crystalline moment of realisation. Reading them has a way of bringing about calm and peace within the reader. The symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind blend together in these poems to create an alchemy of reflection that is unsurpassed in literature. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as well as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of post-war America and Britain. Universal in its appeal, Robert Hass's The Essential Haiku is the definitive introduction to haiku and its greatest poets, and has been a bestseller in America for twenty years. 'I know that for years I didn't see how deeply personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavour - Basho might have said "the scent" - of particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective. I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Better to sink down through the level of these poems - their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the poems reflect, Basho's profound loneliness and sense of suffering, Buson's evenness of temper, his love for the materials of art and for the colour and shape of things, Issa's pathos and comedy and anger' - Robert Hass.Table of Contents9 Introduction I. BASHO 21 Matsuo Basho 27 Poems 65 ‘The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling’ (tr. Burton Watson) 69 The Saga Diary (prose tr. Etsuko Terasaki) II. BUSON 85 Yosa Buson 91 Poems 129 Long Poems 137 from New Flower Picking (tr. Yuki Sawa & Edith M. Shiffert) III. ISSA 145 Kobayashi Issa 149 Poems 185 from Journal of My Father’s Last Days (tr. Robert N. Huey) 205 from A Year of My Life (prose tr. Nobuyuki Yausa) IV. BASHO ON POETRY 219 Learn from the Pine 225 from Kyorai’s Conversations with Basho (tr.Jonathan Keene) 237 Notes 292 A Note on Haikai, Hokku, and Haiku 301 A Note on Translation 311 Further Reading 316 Acknowledgements 317 Copyright Acknowledgments 320 Biographical note

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Book SynopsisMaitreyabandhu's thematically varied debut collection includes poems of spiritual transcendence as well as meditations on love, memory and sexuality. Sometimes comic, often elegiac, the poems convey the pleasures and terrors of childhood as well as the mystical world of fable. Truthful, tender, and written with a kind of wonderment, the collection culminates in 'Stephen', an extended sequence of poems exploring a clandestine, and finally tragic, relationship between two boys. For Maitreyabandhu - a Buddhist teacher and member of the Triratna Buddhist Order for over twenty years - The Crumb Road is an image for the unreliability of memory, and for the vital thread of human value that connects us to the spiritual world.Trade Review'Maitreyabandhu's work beautifully, and seriously, contains the possibilities of what other traditions might call insight' - Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review. 'Maitreyabandhu's poetry opens vistas. Reading his work is an unusual pleasure. He is a poet of journeys great and small - and the reader is privileged to be his companion' - Carol Rumens.

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Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, Agard casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, Water Music of a Different Kind, the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic's middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel's Water Music. Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in 'Sugar Cane's Saga' and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering clerics of the Middle Ages.Trade Review'John Agard's poetry is a wonderful affirmation of life, in a language that is as vital and joyous as we are able to craft it in the Caribbean, in spite of our history of distress' - David Dabydeen. 'A unique and energetic force in contemporary British poetry, John Agard's poems combine acute social observation, puckish wit and a riotous imagination to thrilling effect' - Ben Wilkinson. 'His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political - often managing to be all these things at once - Maura Dooley. 'The new poems create multiple entertaining voices, but they are also urgent fables for our time' - Paula Burnett, Times Literary Supplement. 'A specialist in word trickery - Agard is one of our most consistent, culture-crossing spokesmen' - Graeme Wright, Poetry Review. 'One of the most eloquent contemporary poets - rich in literary and cultural allusion, yet as direct as a voice in the bus queue' - Helen Dunmore, Observer.

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Book SynopsisKaren Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, Pigeon, in 2010, and has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive and unsettling voices in Canadian poetry, a 'sublime singer of existential bewilderment'. Her poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, desire, and the eros of danger, constantly exposing the fragility of the basis of trust on which modern humanity relies. They are double-edged, tense and tender, an edgy blend of irony and guts, of snarl and praise, of sharp intelligence and quizzical ambiguity. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewEnormous credit goes to Bloodaxe for commissioning this exhilarating volume, Solie’s first book publication outside Canada...there is hardly a poem in The Living Option that I wouldn't cite with alacrity and delight. -- Michael Hofmann * London Review of Books *A fierce writing of quickness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance - with candour and a trenchant humour that's the cutting edge of intelligence. Not to mention sly skinny music, not to mention sheer metaphorical pounce, moves that accomplish themselves before you realise they're underway - Karen Solie's work reminds me that there is at the heart of metaphor a delicious amoral joy, that raw irrepressible humour often personified in the trickster which kicks in no matter how "painful" or "depressing" the subject. -- Don McKaySolie's language is blistered, contagious; a level-eyed, machine-age ecstasy, tempered by circumstance, where "Lions lie with lambs in the rusted box of a half-ton". At times trapped in a furious Now, at others gorgeously elegiac, Short Haul Engine is a truer music of consciousness for its shifts and confusions, a music wrenched from the what's-there, for the "overbuilt" and "jerry-rigged". Let the world revolve around the badlands awhile. -- Ken Babstock

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Book SynopsisPoet, novelist, and philosopher Lars Gustafsson (1936-2016) was one of Europe's leading literary figures. Much of his writing is concerned with the search for moral consciousness and the relationship between personal experience and self-awareness, imbued with a philosophically founded scepticism toward language. His poetry is renowned for relating the metaphysical to the mundane with a particular clarity and precision, illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events as he addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. His first book of poetry to be published in Britain has an introduction by Per Wåstberg. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2018 (for translation from Swedish).Trade ReviewI am amazed at his imaginativeness, empathy and extraordinary divining-rod... His poems, half violent movement, half fleeting shadow, are borne by the intention "to create out of experiences that have been made experiences that have not been made"... Lars Gustafsson's poetry is a song to what has been lost, to the faces that are glimpsed in train windows and never return. Cultures and epochs swirl round each other like leaves in an autumn gale and attain a balance, if not before then in the smithy of metaphors that the poet keeps heated. * Per Wåstberg *Table of ContentsFire and air machine Landscape with one asleep The balloonists After rain From a distant place A boat from Murmansk Episode Conversation between philosophers Happiness The conditions The dog Picture The bridges in Konigsberg A story from Russia (Metanovel) Snow Inscription on a stone The machines Discussions Draft of a fantastic zoology Bombus terrestris C's monologue Notes from the 1860s The Wright brothers visit Kitty Hawk Elegy The living and the dead Regarding the deepest sounds Till Eulenspiegel's merry pranks I Till Eulenspiegel's merry pranks II Darkness Concerning my relationship to music Description of the Norberg parish Warm rooms and cold Alba XI (Sestina) Sonnet XIV Sonnet XVII Sonnet XXIV Sonnet XXVII Sonnet XXVIII Ballad of the dogs Ballad on the paths in Vastmanland Elegy on a dead Labrador Song of the world's depths, the eye's depths, life's brevity The silence of the world before Bach The didapper Poems from Africa (4) The eel and the well Concerning everything that still hovers Placenta Winter in a Westphalian village Old master Austin, Texas Elegy on the old Mexican woman and her dead child Elegy on the outer boulevards Elegy on lost and forgotten objects Carl Fredrik Hill visits Lake Buchanan Sorby elegy When did people's mouths get wet? Zones Basilides' syllogism Clocks Audience with the muse The card Berth Aristotle and the crayfish 11 (Villanelle I) 16 (Villanelle II: An old barometer) The small roads All crazy small objects How the winters once were In-between days Fichte by the kerosene lamp Aunt Svea A men's choir The tired Of course Superman is Clark Kent Highly delayed, polemical attack Traces And die away Minor gods Letter from a joker Lost property Sleeping with a cat in the bed Libraries are a kind of subway Ramsberg's thumb The girl The hare Events on the periphery of a summer day On the richness of the inhabited worlds Life Roach The lamp All iron longs to become rust Varnish on an oar Mirrorings and folds From a plane's recollections The Christmas tree's visit The prime numbers Passing through dark regions Through the looking glass The meteorite at the Museum of Natural History To the knowing Trivial pieces of knowledge Spring's joyous choir of birds An early summer day at Bjorn Nilsson's grave In a cosmic August night Smoothness American typewriter Ramnas railway community seen from the north The logonaut

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