A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Arc Publications Indelible Miraculous
Book SynopsisThis collected edition commemorates the 10th anniversary of Julia Darling's death, and includes a substantial selection of unpublished work. Jackie Kay writes: "The poems are funny, irreverent, moving and never sentimental. You can recognise yourself in them, recognise your family. They are warm, full of compassion; [...] a shining bright light."
£10.44
Arc Publications The Marks on the Map
Book SynopsisBrian Johnstone’s third collection from Arc, to be published as the poet turns 70, is full of memories, from the poet’s own past and from the lives of the people he has encountered over the years. Family, friends, places, landscapes, photographs, events emerge from these pages with a clarity informed by a humanity and understanding as the poet looks back. This is a highly accessible book that will have a wide appeal, especially for newcomers to poetry.
£10.44
Arc Publications Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution
Book SynopsisThe poems in this collection move from memories of Libya before the revolution, to Libya engulfed in violent turmoil, to life in exile in the brooding landscape of Norway. Seen through the eyes of the refugee poet, the vibrant colours of the Libyan landscape, the horrors and ravages of revolution, and the strangeness of a new life within the Arctic Circle, come into sharp focus in this powerful book.
£10.79
Arc Publications House Arrest
Book SynopsisHouse Arrest, comprising poems selected from Alizadeh’s two collections, Diary of a House Arrest,1956-1967 (2003) and Blue Bicycle (2015), takes as its central theme the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, during an American and British-led coup in 1953. After being removed from power, Mosaddegh was forced to live in exile in Ahmadabad castle near Tehran, and in these poems, Alizadeh imagines himself in Mosaddegh’s place, in exile, and allows his imagination to take him wherever it pleases. In the dream-like atmosphere of his poems, times and places melt into each other like magma, blending Greco-Roman mythology, ancient Iranian folklore, the Christian New Testament, the Old Testament, European fairy tales and Persian Sufism. Yet his work is thoroughly modern; mythical figures live alongside contemporary humans, and classical forms are transformed into modernist experiments.Hasan Alizadeh was born in 1947 and embarked on a literary career, initially as a short story writer, but since the 1990s, he has focused mostly on poetry. His talent is widely recognized in Iran, as shown by his having won the Modern Iranian poetry Prize in 2002, but very little is known about him personally as he declines to give interviews or talk about himself.
£10.44
Arc Publications 30 Poems in 30 Days
Book SynopsisIn 2020, Amanda Dalton participated – for the second year running – in National Poetry Writing Month, a project that challenges the public to write a poem every day throughout the month of April. Each midnight, new instructions are posted informing participants what they should write about in the next 24 hours – anything from an ode to life’s small pleasures to a concrete poem, to a poem from the viewpoint of a figure in Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. This chapbook contains the unedited versions of the thirty poems that Amanda wrote. By turns witty (often very funny), clever, moving and erudite, this short collection represents an astonishing achievement by an outstanding writer.
£7.00
Arc Publications The Song Weigher
Book SynopsisEgill Skallagrimsson was the most original, imaginative and technically brilliant of the Old Norse skalds, poets whose orally composed and performed verses were as much revered in ninth- to thirteenth-century Scandinavia as heroism in battle. Egill's saga details his life-story as well as those of his immediate predecessors, from whom he inherited his massive build, his early baldness (Skalla in his name means 'bald') and his exceptional ugliness. An arch enemy of Erikr Bloodax, he was a notoriously difficult man and, as many of the poems demonstrate, was lethal when crossed. But he also made poems which show he was capable of concern for others, as well as romantic love. Physical, direct, inventive, even transformative, Egill's poetry conjures up a territory far beyond the normal scope of language, something that only the finest poets achieve.
£9.49
Arc Publications Your Nearness
Book Synopsis"Forrest Gander knows that the poet''s first duty is ''to see what''s there and not already patterned by familiarity'' - and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the fi nest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today." - JOHN BURNSIDE "There''s a deep personal feeling found in Forrest Gander''s desperately beautiful ''Librettos for Eros'' [in which] feeling masters the poems, and it is feeling about self, desperate, squandered, willful, all but out of control - and ultimately uncivilized...." - THOM GUNN
£11.69
Stewed Rhubarb Press The World May Be The Same
Book Synopsis
£5.40
University of Chester Press Humankind: Writing from the Cheshire Prize for
Book Synopsis
£8.24
Tangerine Press Bent For The Job
Book Synopsis
£10.80
P2D Books Limited Fourteen poems: Issue 2
Book Synopsis
£9.37
Vintage Publishing O Westport In The Light Of Asia Minor
Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDO Westport in the Light of Asia Minor was first published in a tiny edition in Dublin in 1975. It was Paul Durcan's first fully-fledged collection, and already displays an astonishingly mature, visionary power, shot through with the surrealism and heart-breaking comedy that have since become his hallmark. It won him the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Now Durcan's readers can discover what they have been missing. The poems are printed in the order he originally intended, and the volume concluded with six poems from his very first collaborative collection, Endsville (1967), with Brian Lynch.Trade ReviewPaul Durcan... is one of the country's leading living poets... His strange, mesmerising voice wraps itself around every syllable and texture of his poems, wrapping the audience into its very spell, into the very grain of the text -- Michael Cunningham * Irish Times *The voice speaks clearly on the page in poems of harrowing intimacy, politics and love. He holds a mirror up to himself: but we can see ourselves over his shoulder, whoever we are -- Carol Ann Duffy * Guardian *This is the real thing. One can't say more, or less than that -- David Wright * Cyphers *
£10.99
Vintage Publishing Interference Pattern
Book SynopsisAt first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.Trade ReviewEliot comes repeatedly to mind in reading Interference Pattern because, in its tragic grandeur and sophistication, it is a poem that could come to be for the twenty-first century what The Waste Land was to the twentieth. -- David Collard * Times Literary Supplement *This collection carries you, unnerves and stimulates. It absolutely meets TS Eliot’s requirement that poetry be “genuine”… It is vividly miscellaneous poetry…bracing, original. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *Interference Pattern teases us at every turn, inviting us to try to unlock its secrets while keeping the keys just out of sight… The multifarious voices in the book mostly speak over each other but occasionally to each other, creating an intricate web of echoes and half-echoes. -- Roger Cox * Scotland on Sunday *
£9.50
Fircone Books Ltd Walking Gloucestershire with Ivor Gurney: Poetry
Book Synopsis
£15.19
Scotland Street Press HAIRAN
Book SynopsisSepideh Jodeyriis an award-winning Iranian poet and translator living in Washington DC, USA. She is the author of 11 books.Sepideh Kouti is an Iranian poet, author, translator, and editor. She began her literary career in 2000, authoring entries for the Encyclopedia of Persian Literature. Previous works include On the Heights of Despair (translation) and The Creeping Shadow of Objects.Anna Krasnowolskais a Professor and esteemed specialist in Persian literature and Iranian culture. She was Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies (1999-2002), and Head of the Department of Iranian Studies (2000-17) at Jagiellonian University.Anahita Rezaeiis an award-winning Iranian writer and literary critic living in Tehran, Iran. Previous works include
£10.44
PCCS Books We Are the Change-Makers: poems supporting Drop
Book SynopsisThis is a unique collection of poems written by and for people who have survived our mental health system and the diagnostic process that is used to categorise and treat mental and emotional distress. In October 2016, Jo Watson launched A Disorder for Everyone (AD4E) – an international campaign to challenge the culture of psychiatric diagnosis and the labelling of expressions of emotional distress as medical disorders. Since then hundreds of people have attended AD4E events all over the UK, and thousands have joined the campaign Facebook group ‘Drop the Disorder!’ What began as a shout of protest has become an international roar. Poetry has long been used to give voice to resistance and to drive change in all kinds of social movements, and it is a central aspect of this campaign as well. It has been at the heart of every AD4E event and, more recently, several online poetry events have brought together poets and poetry-lovers from across the globe under the Drop the Disorder! banner. We Are the Change-Makers is a collection of these and other poems that seek to describe the otherwise inexpressible and challenge the power of psychiatry that misrepresents and medicates what it does not understand.Trade Review'What a rollercoaster of emotions! These are poems of truth, pain and power reclaimed. I salute the poets for their courage.' Deborah Alma, Emergency Poet and founder of the Poetry Pharmacy; 'These are the voices of the rebel souls, the truth tellers, the defiant and the righteous...This book is rich, full and will take you on a journey with no turning back. You will be transformed forever.' Akima Thomas, OBE, founder and clinical director, Women and Girls Network. / ‘What a rollercoaster of emotions! These are poems of truth, pain and power reclaimed. I salute the poets for their courage.’ Deborah Alma, Emergency Poet and founder of the Poetry Pharmacy.Table of ContentsIntroduction by Jo Watson, Decolonising distress - Sanah Ahsan, Fuck the DSM - Jyl Anais, Burgundy - Jasmine Gardosi, I work within the crisis team - Amanda Bueno de Mesquita, Nocebo effect - Dr Julie Carter, Tilt - Ruth E. Dixon, More and less all of this - Lydia Daisy, Self-discovery - Mica Gray, Drop the disorder! - Jo Watson, Act of war - Jyl Anais, On the Inside - Martha Enticott, Open the can of worms - Tracey Farrell, The Killing of Susan Kelly - Dorothy Dundas, Crazier than me - Ruth E. Dixon, Everyday magic - Dr Julie Carter, I mistook myself for a scientific label - Dr Peter Gordon, Dis-ease - Kathleen Halley Angus, No apology in pathology - Sally Fox, Six verses - Viv Gordon, A penny dropped - Ruth E. Dixon, When daisies talk - Mica Gray, Jump start - Jyl Anais, I remember - Wendy Badger, They think - Toni Hurford, All of this disorder stuff - Jo Watson, Look into my eyes - Sue Irwin, Smart move - Jackie Hagan, It could have been me - Jen Yates, Drop the disorder haiku - Amanda Bueno de Mesquita, I can see you (but you are so very far away) - Ruth Jackson, Let's stop pretending - Brian E. Levitt, I'm gonna run - Viv Gordon, In this moment - Mitzy Sky, Empire - Jo McFarlane, Your chemical embrace - James Moore, The object of my hate - Anonymous, Battle weary - Sally Fox, Dignity cannot be taken four times a day - Dolly Sen, Don't blame the canaries - Matthew Morris, A million conversations about 'ECT' - Jo Watson, Other than personality disorder, what term could you use to describe these people? - Clare Shaw, Labels - Jacky Power, Text book - Dr Peter Gordon, Manipulation - Jo McFarlane, I am a storm - Erin Stevens, What if psychiatry has got it all wrong? - Dr Jessica Taylor, Revenge of the crazy wimmin - Leah Harris, Watching the sun rise from her chair - Ruth E. Dixon, Everything you have ever lost - Joelle Taylor, Trauma-reducing not trauma-inducing - Dr Karen Treisman, Unlabelled - Jo McFarlane, I do not believe in silence - Clare Shaw, Fuck you - T.O. Walker, I'm with her - Jo Watson.
£17.23
Greenwich Exchange Ltd Green Tobacco
Book Synopsis
£10.19
Nine Arches Press #Afterhours
Book SynopsisIn 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries' rare books collection, and through his own life’s story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18.In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the Poetry Library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams’ meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry’s great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.
£9.49
Nine Arches Press Rope
Book SynopsisKhairani Barokka’s first full poetry collection, Rope, is a spellbinding and impressive debut, kaleidoscopic in detail and richly compelling. With a meticulous artist’s instinct, these finely-tuned poems ask urgent questions about our impact upon the environment, and examine carefully the fragile ties that bind our lives and our fate to our planet, our ecosystems and to our fellow humans. Sensual and ecologically attentive, Rope draws on issues of climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire and the body. Lush with detail, alert to its own distinct sounds, this is poetry in urgent and vivacious action - intent on finding vivid joy and hope amidst the destruction and dangers of the Anthropocene era.
£9.49
Nine Arches Press The Healing Next Time
Book SynopsisRoy McFarlane’s second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane’s intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.
£9.49
Nine Arches Press In Search of Equilibrium
Book SynopsisTheresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself - finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. “Theresa Lola’s poems never fail to surprise with her breath-taking ability to create unexpected imagery; they never fail to move as she laments the last years of a loved one; and they never fail to delight with the transformative and healing power of poetry to create beauty.” - Bernardine Evaristo
£9.49
Nine Arches Press Zebra
Book SynopsisZebra is the debut collection from Hebden Bridge-based Ian Humphreys. These acutely-observed and joyful poems explore mixed identities, otherness, and coming-of-age as a gay man in 1980s Manchester. Humphreys is a fellow of The Complete Works programme (which aims to promote diversity and quality in British poetry) and was highly commended for his work at this year’s Forward Prizes.
£9.49
Nine Arches Press A Man's House Catches Fire
Book SynopsisWhat to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up A Man’s House Catches Fire, Tom Sastry’s debut collection of poetry, with all its elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, mis-enchantments and magic for dark times.Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastry’s wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask us: why do “the great marquees of England” stand empty? How old is your heart? Why aren’t we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Man’s House Catches Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all.“Tom Sastry is a magician of deadpan. He’s kind of like if the Atlantic Ocean had a laugh track. Terrifying and hypnotic, but also desperately funny. This collection is generous in both its clarity and mystery." — Hera Lindsay Bird“Tom Sastry’s poems stare down the ridiculousness of the world we live in, and offer us ways to carry on in spite of it. These are poems of bright wit and astonishing vulnerability, with one eye always on the future. A Man’s House Catches Fire gives us the simultaneous pain and joy of being a human being; reminds us it is marvellous / that it still hurts.” – Suzannah Evans
£9.49
Nine Arches Press Letters Home
Book SynopsisLetters Home, Jennifer Wong’s remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language.“There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature.” – Hannah Lowe"Jennifer Wong’s voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss
£9.49
Nine Arches Press Magnolia
Book Synopsis"why don’t you write about yourself ever people used to ask / and I didn’t know why / either in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark / then back into it / in a single breath" Magnolia is the debut poetry collection by poet, essayist and non-fiction writer Nina Mingya Powles, one of contemporary poetry's most exciting new international voices and the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. These vivid, luscious poems move between journal and biography, place and belonging, all the time exploring the multitudinous facets of language and culture that make up our identity, from the sense of longing that a delicious bowl of food conjures up to the inviting glow of paper lanterns that illuminate memory and travel. Formally rich, these unique poems skilfully broaden the perspective of all a poem can hold can contain through their daring, joyful and expansive approach.
£9.49
Enitharmon Press Still
Book SynopsisSimon Armitage - poet, playwright, broadcaster and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University - has been commissioned by 14-18 Now to write a sequence of poems in response to photographs (aerial, oblique and panoramic) of areas associated with the Battle of the Somme, which took place on the Western Front between July to November 1916.
£24.00
Tilted Axis Press Again I Hear These Waters
Book SynopsisMiyah poetry is a literary movement of protest poetry by Bengali-Muslims living in the chars (low-lying islands prone to floods and erosion) of Assam. 20+ poets document stories of love, loss, and injustice, celebrating contemporary lives beyond mere victimisation.
£10.44
UEA Publishing Project Click And Collect
Book SynopsisCLICK & COLLECT is a sequence of poems that explores the shape and shaping of consumerism, internet culture, queerness and emotion. How do we brand the world around us and how does it brand us? Across lyrics and half-story-poems, CLICK & COLLECT gives advice on how to frighten your friends, weighs up the pros and cons of cream jeans, questions the efficacy of algae as a face mask, gives dental hygiene tips and ideas for floral arrangements. There’s even a poem from the perspective of the crocodile on Lacoste-branded clothing. If click & collect is the new cause & effect, how can realignments of brands-as-objects and objects-as-brands create queer spaces for new orientations and arrangements?
£10.44
UEA Publishing Project Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines
Book Synopsisof sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear.While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Nat Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.
£11.39
The Waywiser Press LATE MONTALE: POEMS WRITTEN IN HIS FINAL YEARS
Book Synopsis
£16.19
The Waywiser Press To Wildness
Book SynopsisIn recipes, spells, odes and elegies, To Wildness conjures what has been lost and what remains. These are poems of the body. They rub up against one another and knock elbows. Plum Jam calls preserving fruit as spiritual labor: To be elbow deep in a barrel/arms gloved crimson. In this collection, the dead reside alongside the living. Ancestors roost in trees, having forgotten language, their coats inside out. Others sulk in the eaves, their ears clogged with clover. The past made vivid renders an extravagant present and offers a balm to the isolation of the contemporary world.
£15.83
Unicorn Publishing Group Tristan/Yseult
Book SynopsisA duel on an empty island sets the course for one of the greatest romances ever told. As the lovers of legend meet, something new is born, and something eternal is revealed. Their names will forever be spoken as one. This modern retelling of Tristan and Yseult sheds a stark light on the beauty of the Celtic tale.Trade Review‘Bonelle’s authentically original reimagining is vibrantly alive through his extraordinary use of language. I was entirely drawn in to his inventiveness and immersed in each moment of his vision. He takes you on a journey of sound, light and emotional punch. Truly a new voice to be celebrated!’ -- Armen Gregory‘In this reimagining of the Tristan and Yseult myth, Harry Bonelle uses taut and timeless language and strong imagery to craft an atmospheric and challenging poem, that melds the lyrical and the violent to powerful and memorable effect. Innovative and haunting by turns, it is full of surprise and originality.’ -- Angus Graham-CampbellA beautiful, jagged fragment from the legend in grainy, percussive verse, Tristan/Yseult is intensely romantic, yet grounded in the concrete particulars of its sea-washed world. It feels both ancient and brand new. A bewitching, exhilarating read.’ -- Simon Dormandy'Harry Bonelle’s new version taps into the dark and furious energy of the old saga, surging and juddering with life. Bonelle’s actor’s training has encouraged him to liberate the performance piece that its original author must have intended. Thrilling on the page, but even more so spoken loud.’ -- Simon Callow
£13.50
Arc Publications Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology
Book SynopsisThis powerful, unique collection contains poems written not only by members of Jewish communities in Europe (representing the largest group persecuted by the Nazis), but also poems by people who were targeted on other grounds. Some belonged to political or religious groups who openly opposed the Third Reich, or they were homosexual, or members of communities such as Sinti and Roma, or they were perceived by the Nazis as disabled. The work in this anthology originates from across Europe, and has been translated from many different languages. Most translations are specifically for the anthology, or have not appeared elsewhere. This wide-ranging volume gives a sense of the variety of Holocaust victims, and their poetic responses to the Holocaust; from the haunting to the primal. It covers the Holocaust in three distinct time periods; At the Beginning; Life in, Ghettos, Camps, Prisons and the Outside World; Life Afterwards.
£13.49
Arc Publications Columns
Book SynopsisWhen Columns, a slim volume of poems written by an unknown young Russian poet named Nikolai Zabolotsky, appeared in 1929, it took the literary world of Leningrad [St. Petersburg] by storm. Zabolotsky was not part of the city's artistic elite, having arrived in Leningrad from the provinces only eight years earlier, but the privations and confusion he found in the city following the 1917 Revolution and ensuing civil war stimulated his poetic imagination. Zabolotsky's translator Dmitri Manin describes his poetry as portraying "a worldview with no oppositions, no differences between the living and dead, abstract and concrete, naive and sophisticated, artful and artless, meaningful and meaningless, high and low, important and trivial, funny and sad. It's all mixed inseparably..." "The early poems of Nikolai Zabolotsky present to us images of such stark and surprising vividness that they continue to stun nearly a century after their publication. Dmitri Manin's translations retain the freshness of Zabolotsky's vision - that of an imaginative outsider thrust into a world torn apart and remade, haphazardly, by a bloody revolution and civil war - as well as the solemn music that effectively counterpoints the poet's cavalcade of novel images. This book will change the way you see the world around you." - Boris Dralyuk
£10.79
Arc Publications Travellers of the North
Book SynopsisThe tenth-century Saint Sunnivamade a miraculous voyage fromIreland to the Western Norwegianisland of Selja, where she tookrefuge in a cave. In 1170, her incorruptrelics were translated from Seljato Bergen Cathedral. This is anattempt to liberate Sunnivafrom her story.
£7.60
Arc Publications Arboretum for the Hunted
Book SynopsisThere has always been an intense physicality to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for geographic groundedness and a biographical perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest writers of his generation. What is most striking about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of the relentless violence to which we have all become far too inured. There is hardly a Black British writer working today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable debt, whether they know it or not.
£7.60
Arc Publications Boy Thing
Book Synopsis“Boy Thing is a thing of wonder. These are poems that negotiate anew the tender, hurt territory of a boy abruptly unfathered with every fresh reading; and that travel into the wonderment of becoming a father of boys. We are given a boy’s-eye-view of 1970s Cornwall with a music and detail so meticulous that we yearn with Clarke for its lost territories. But these are not just poems of archive or archaeology; they are revelatory, dynamic and raw. Clarke is crucially attuned to the secret messages received in boyhood – its preoccupations and awakenings, epiphanies and abuses, and its shames. This book is unmissable: human and humane, grimy and sublime.” - Fiona Benson “Boy Thing is a beautiful book – sensual, atmospheric, full of nature and ritual. These poems while formally precise, possess a rawness that is startling and utterly compelling.” - Ella Frears
£7.60
Arc Publications If I Only Knew
Book SynopsisKnown as a poet who spoke of the history and suffering of the Jewish people, Nelly Sachs was, at the time she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, highly regarded in her native Germany, frequently being described as a poet of reconciliation and healing, although whether she was is open to debate.Because of the complexity of her later poetry, she is often regarded as a difficult poet, but her work is not difficult to understand if it is read against the backdrop of the events that gave rise to it, and in the context of her own development as a poet. Jean Boase-Beier’s striking translations focus on what she sees as Sachs’ very particular voice, one of outrage, despair, and grief, but also of enquiry, of irony, and often of straightforward anger.This chapbook, by presenting a small number of poems from throughout the poet’s main writing years and providing some general background together with short contextual explanations to individual poems, gives new readers a reason to read Nelly Sachs.
£7.60
Arc Publications To the Outermost Stars
Book SynopsisStein Mehren, Norwegian poet and playwright, writes in the language of the heart, weaving his themes and imagery into a kind of baroque music, in poems that swell and fall like symphonies. Writing about love and desire, and the despair that often attends them, he weaves together classical love stories and intimate expressions of love in daily life to create a tapestry of the strongest human emotions.
£10.44
Arc Publications Bigger Than the Facts
Book SynopsisJan Baeke, the award-winning Dutch poet, has, in Greater than the Facts (Groter dan de feiten, 2007), created an intriguing filmic world in which tensions are rife and nothing is quite as it seems. It is a world whose elements keep recurring, coalescing little by little into dreamlike leitmotifs – a bus journey, a hotel room, dogs, cigarettes, fire, a blind man, a canary, a man and a woman in love. And love, however fragile it may be, is a major theme of this collection, for “where there’s fire, there’s warmth for two”. Antoinette Fawcett’s poetically sensitive translation gives a clear sense of Baeke’s style and poetic drive, and enables the English-speaking reader to explore in full this key collection in Baeke’s œuvre.
£8.24
Arc Publications Eternal Traffic
Book Synopsis Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one’s own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother’s childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world?Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugova’s poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.
£10.44
Arc Publications The Atlas of Lost Beliefs
Book SynopsisCommenting on Hoskote's poetry on the Poetry International website, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote's metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaced experience."
£10.79
Arc Publications I Am a Rohingya
Book Synopsis“The Rohingya poets gathered here for the first time in English hold a mirror to the light for the rest of humanity, flashing their poems of misery and warning from the genocidal zone and refugee camp of Cox’s Bazaar. Their songs are more accurate than news reports for word of the plight of the most oppressed. These are poems that begin with the fragrance on the bird’s handkerchief and end by walking among the mass graves. They write from a dire present to a possible future, wondering in their peril if the world outside was too quiet to hear them. Let the world not be quiet, let the world listen to these poems.” Carolyn Forché“I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These poems have no alternative but to speak out, they are from a crisis that must be addressed. There is brilliance in here!”John Kinsella
£9.49
Arc Publications Hope is Lonely
Book SynopsisThis selection of Kim Seung-hee’s most recent poems is drawn half from her ninth collection, Hope is Lonely, and half from her tenth collection, Croaker on a Chopping Board. Focusing on humanity’s utter fragility through, among others, the themes of death, hope, depression and love, often seen through the lens of sorrowful womanhood, these poems, be they modernist or romantic in idiom, also comment on political and social issues, and Korean society and culture in general. Brother Anthony’s deeply sensitive translation, and his informative preface, make the work of this major Korean poet available for the first time in the UK.
£10.79
The Conrad Press Five Plays
Book SynopsisWhere are all those movements you made, those passions, those sighs, those sentences, those monologues? They're still here somewhere, in this air, in this space. Things like that don't just vanish. (from Shades of Babel) Goran Stefanovski (1952-2018) was an internationally recognised ex-Yugoslav playwright. Four of his five plays published here have never been available in English before. They all illustrate Stefanovski’s characteristic use of source material, particularly folk tales and myth, to present a striking vision of the human condition, especially in the extreme circumstances of war, exile and political insecurity. Except for the elegiac Sarajevo, these plays are written in the playwright’s favourite genre of tragi-comedy. The short scenes and robust dialogue mark them out as the work of a connoisseur of the language of theatre. The Black Hole, the first play in this collection, is considered by the Italian theatre director Paolo Magelli to be the best European play of the 1980s and is still regularly performed in theatres worldwide. The Conrad Press is proud to be publishing this remarkable, highly engaging, intensely dramatic collection of plays by a master playwright.Table of ContentsThe Black Hole Shades of Babel Sarajevo Odysseus Figurae Veneris Historiae
£9.49
Burning Eye Books Stop Trying to be Fantastic
Book SynopsisMolly Naylor is a poet, scriptwriter, performer and director. She is the co-writer of Sky One comedy After Hours. Theatre work includes Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You (writer/performer), My Robot Heart (writer/performer) and LIGHTS! PLANETS! PEOPLE! (writer/director). She has written for a range of organisations including BBC Radio 4, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Film Institute. Her first poetry collection Badminton was also published by Burning Eye Books. She is the co-director of True Stories Live. Stop Trying to be Fantastic is her second poetry collection.Trade Review'Molly makes me laugh and her poetry makes my heart grow plumper and more confident. I love her words and her honesty.' Sara Pascoe
£9.49
Burning Eye Books re: desire
Book SynopsisAfshan D'souza-Lodhi's debut poetry collection 're: desire' explores the yearning to love, be loved and belong from a desi (South Asian) perspective. Her work sits on the intersections of flash fiction, poetry and script, echoing the hybridity of the worlds that many young British desis find themselves occupying. Drawing on the poetry of many different languages and cultures - Urdu, English, Konkani, Islamic and Christian - this collection explores how we access our traditions from a distance. 're: desire' is a collection of poetry that draws upon literary traditions and cultural references to flip the male gaze common in mushairas on its head. Common themes for mushairas are love, God and being drunk or intoxicated by love and God - but is usually seen from a male perspective. The pieces in re: desire are mainly told from a female perspective, and question the gender given to particular acts, objects and ideas.Trade Review'A beautiful and poignant collection that speaks to the internal lives of British people of colour.' - Nikesh Shukla (author of The Good Immigrant and The One Who Wrote Destiny)
£9.49
Burning Eye Books Alternate Endings
Book SynopsisAlternate Endings is a collection of poems made of worry and hope. With wit and warmth, Erin looks for the beginnings in endings as she confides her stories of living, loving, feeling and fretting. These are poems with big hearts and wry smiles. They are hugs for the days when it's all a bit much and energy for the days that you can change the world.
£9.49
