A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Tara Books I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail
Book SynopsisThis well-known folk poem from the 17th century is a form of trick verse. Included in classic anthologies of children's poetry, the verse appears nonsensical at first sight, but given a break in the middle of each line, begins to make perfect sense. At the simplest level, it is a lesson on grammar and punctuation. Even the youngest of readers will delight in the overturning of logic that nonsense entails, and the 'trick' with which meaning can be made to return. But as with most folklore, this poem is not just for children, it is meant for all ages. Adults will marvel at the ways it teases out the paths of meaning. Is the difference between fantasy and reality largely grammatical? Or are these inversions the very essence of poetry - by turns meaningless and profound - which overturn our habitual ways of perception? In this pioneering visual exploration of I Saw a Peacock, Gond tribal artist Ramsingh Urveti and book designer Jonathan Yamakami add a further layer of imagery and play to the poem's enigmas, reflecting and complicating its meanings in delicious ways.
£10.44
Samuel French Ltd James and the Giant Peach
Book SynopsisCharacters: 4 male, 2 female plus children''s chorus (optional)Scenery: Various setsWizzpopping wonder and fruit filled fun abound in this stage adaption of Roald Dahl''s greatest adventure story. James is a lonely young boy who is forced to work like a slave for the most revolting aunts in England. One day a mystical old man gives him a bag of magic. When he accidently spills it near the old peach tree, the most incredible things happen! Pure fun for the whole family. A remarkable theatrical feat!- Northampton Chronicle Move heaven and earth to see this wonderful adaptation!- Sunday Mercury A first class show. If I were a child I''d scream for a ticket.- Birmingham Post
£13.49
Josef Weinberger Plays Arsenic and Old Lace
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Penned in the Margins The Sun is Open
Book SynopsisWinner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson 'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson Poetry book of the month - the Observer A TLS book of the yearTrade Review'To sit with the unspeakable, to spell it out in alphabet spaghetti, using only the letters given to you that day; to spell death using the adverts in the cash and carry; to spell life using the names on sweet wrappers, is extraordinary work. The Sun is Open is a work of extraordinary emotion, written with extraordinary control. It is also - perhaps extraordinarily - a work of joy.'-Joanna Walsh, 'The Sun is Open is like fragments of a broken window reassembled into startling new form and meaning. The fragments include the Bible, press reports, personal memories and the archives of William McConnell, Deputy Governor of the Maze prison and the poet's father, who was murdered by the IRA in 1984. The reassembling - usually into squares and boxes of type with fragments of sources - presents us with the jagged memorial of a broken time.'- George Szirtes, 'The Sun is Open brings us 109 pages closer to knowing that raging absence in the wake of violence, in the wake of love; the wakefulness that persists. The poem is history as postmodern text - all middle, no endpapers, no polite intermission or lapses of memory. This book's freedom of thought is not taken lightly, but gloriously, celebratorily. Gail McConnell is a force.'- Caoilinn Hughes
£9.49
Samuel French Ltd Everybodys Talking about Jamie Vocal Selections
Book SynopsisJamie New is 16 and lives on a council estate in Sheffield. Jamie doesn?t quite fit in. Jamie is terrified about the future. Jamie is going to be a sensation. Supported by his brilliant, loving mum and surrounded by his friends, Jamie overcomes prejudice, beats the bullies, and steps out of the darkness into the spotlight. Sixteen: the edge of possibility. Time to make your dreams come true. Song List includes: And You Don?t Even Know It, The Wall In My Head, Spotlight, The Legend of Loco Chanelle, If I Met Myself Again, Everybody?s Talking About Jamie, It Means Beautiful, Ugly In This Ugly World, He?s My Boy, and Out of the Darkness
£999.99
Andrews McMeel Publishing Golden
Book SynopsisJust as basking in the glow of the warm evening sun does, this radiant collection of poetry and art from bestselling poet Wilder, will leave you filled with hope, love, and peace.Accompanying Wilder’s first book of poetry Nocturnal, Golden is another collection of celestial-themed poems and art by poet Wilder Poetry. Differing from its sister book, this collection is divided into four parts––“Magic Hour,” “Soul,” “Oracle,” and “Sanctuary” ––and focuses on the brightest star in our solar system: the Sun. Much like the celestial body that inspired its name, Golden explores the brighter, sunnier emotions life has to offer. Readers are guided down a sunlit path to happiness and learn that once the heart is open, opportunities for love never cease.
£10.79
University of California Press Greek Poems to the Gods
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A gem of a book. . . . Powell, who wears his learning as lightly as seersucker . . . is always sensitive to the Greek, and brings it across into clear, natural English, at the pitch-perfect register for the solemn or the ludic hymn." * Spectator *"An impressive volume that we think lovers of poetry and of classical antiquity will appreciate." * Coffee with the Poets *"This is a useful volume for the study of ancient Greek culture and, with its wealth of mythological and geographical lore, could be an illuminating companion to a tour of Greek sites and museums." * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Maps Introduction Meter and Performance Annotation; the Spelling of Ancient Names and Places; Greek Texts The Homeric Hymns The Hymns of Callimachus The Orphic Hymns The Hymns of Proclus 1. Zeus Homeric Hymn 23: To Zeus Callimachus Hymn 1: To Zeus Orphic Hymn 15: To Zeus Orphic Hymn 19: To Zeus the Thunderbolt Orphic Hymn 20: To Astrapaios Zeus 2. Hera Homeric Hymn 12: To Hera Orphic Hymn 16: To Hera 3. Poseidon Homeric Hymn 22: To Poseidon Orphic Hymn 17: To Poseidon 4. Athena Homeric Hymn 11: To Athena Homeric Hymn 28: To Athena Callimachus Hymn 5: To Athena; On the Baths of Pallas Orphic Hymn 32: To Athena Proclus Hymn 7: To Wise Athena 5. Demeter, Persephone, and Hades Homeric Hymn 2: To Demeter Homeric Hymn 13: To Demeter Callimachus Hymn 6: To Demeter Orphic Hymn 40: To Eleusinian Demeter Orphic Hymn 41: To Mother Antaia Orphic Hymn 29: To Persephone Orphic Hymn 18: To Plouton 6. Aphrodite Homeric Hymn 5: To Aphrodite Homeric Hymn 6: To Aphrodite Homeric Hymn 10: To Aphrodite Orphic Hymn 55: To Aphrodite Proclus Hymn 2: To Aphrodite Proclus Hymn 5: To the Lycian Aphrodite 7. Hephaistos Homeric Hymn 20: To Hephaistos Orphic Hymn 66: To Hephaistos 8. Apollo and the Muses Homeric Hymn 3: To Apollo Homeric Hymn 21: To Apollo Homeric Hymn 25: To The Muses and Apollo Callimachus Hymn 2: To Apollo Callimachus Hymn 4: To Delos Orphic Hymn 34: To Apollo Orphic Hymn 35: To Leto Orphic Hymn 76: To the Muses Proclus Hymn 3: To the Muses 9. Artemis Homeric Hymn 9: To Artemis Homeric Hymn 27: To Artemis Callimachus Hymn 3: To Artemis Orphic Hymn 36: To Artemis 10. Hermes and Pan Homeric Hymn 4: To Hermes Homeric Hymn 18: To Hermes Orphic Hymn 28: To Hermes Orphic Hymn 57: To Chthonic Hermes Homeric Hymn 19: To Pan Orphic Hymn 11: To Pan 11. Dionysos Homeric Hymn 1: To Dionysos Homeric Hymn 7: To Dionysos Homeric Hymn 26: To Dionysos Orphic Hymn 30: To Dionysos Orphic Hymn 45: To Dionysos Bassareus and Triennial Orphic Hymn 46: To Dionysos Liknites Orphic Hymn 47: To Dionysos Perikonios Orphic Hymn 50: To Dionysos Lysios Lenaios Orphic Hymn 52: To Dionysos, God of the Triennial Feasts Orphic Hymn 53: To Dionysos, God of Annual Feasts Orphic Hymn 44: To Semelê 12. Ares Homeric Hymn 8: To Ares Orphic Hymn 65: To Ares 13. Hestia Homeric Hymn 24: To Hestia Homeric Hymn 29: To Hestia Orphic Hymn 84: To Hestia 14. Sun, Moon, Earth, Hekatê, and All the Gods Homeric Hymns 31 and 32: To the Sun and the Moon Orphic Hymn 8: To the Sun Orphic Hymn 9: To the Moon Proclus Hymn 1: To Helios Homeric Hymn 30: To Earth Mother of All Orphic Hymn 26: To Earth Orphic Hymn 1: To Hekatê Proclus Hymn 6: To the Mother of the Gods, Hekatê, and Janus/Zeus Proclus Hymn 4: To All the Gods Bibliography Glossary/Index
£15.29
The New York Review of Books, Inc Envy
Book SynopsisA NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALOne of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha''s novella Envy brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn''t mean he''s grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha''s anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.Marian Schwartz''s new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha''s masterpiece.
£14.24
Nick Hern Books Bully Boy
Book SynopsisA ferociously gripping play that tackles the challenging moral issues of contemporary military occupation and its effect on the mental health of serving soldiers with startling insight. Falklands War veteran Major Oscar Hadley is sent to a combat zone to probe allegations of severe misconduct by Eddie Clark, a young squaddie from Burnley and part of a self-styled ‘Bully Boy’ unit of the British Army. As the interrogation develops, Oscar begins to discover that ‘truth’ in a modern insurgency can be a point of view rather than a fact. Written with startling insight by author and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, Bully Boy was first performed at Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, in 2011.Trade Review'Fine, absorbing and remarkably accomplished… delves, with sensitivity, into an issue of burning relevance' * Telegraph *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books Beauty and the Beast
Book SynopsisLucy Kirkwood's delightful version of the classic fairytale, first seen in a production devised and directed by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre for Christmas 2010. ‘I expect you have been told fairytales before. But you have never really heard a fairytale until you have heard it told by a real fairy.’ The theft of a single rose has monstrous consequences for Beauty and her father. Because this is no ordinary rose...and this is no ordinary fairytale. Narrated by a pair of mischievous fairies, a very helpful Rabbit, and a Thoughtsnatcher machine, this timeless story is sure to surprise, delight and enchant. A wild and twisted tale, full of exciting and intriguing challenges for drama groups wishing to stage their own production. Lucy Kirkwood's Beauty and the Beast was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in December 2010.Trade Review'Chock-full of clever ideas' * Whatsonstage.com *'Clever, fast and endearing, with grand insults and proper jeopardy.' * The Times *'The story is beautifully and touchingly told... a continuously inventive delight' * Telegraph *'This new devised version is blessed with a sassy script by Lucy Kirkwood... Beauty-fully done' * Evening Standard *
£11.39
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Cailleach: The Hag of Beara
Book SynopsisAn Cailleach Bhearra, or the Hag of Beara, is a wise woman figure embedded in the physical and mental landscape of western Ireland and Scotland, particularly in the Beara Peninsula in West Cork where Leanne O'Sullivan comes from. The Cailleach's roots lie in pre-Christian Ireland, and stories of her relationship with that rugged landscape and culture still abound. Central to these narratives is the story of her love affair with a sea god. A large stone rests on the ridge overlooking Bally crovane Harbour, and it is said to be the petrified body of the Cailleach; she has had several lives, beginning each life with a birth from her stony form - and returning to stone at the end.The supernatural and superhuman feature strongly in traditional stories of the Cailleach (pronounced Ca-lockor Cay-luck) - feats such as her creating mountains or leaping vast distances that place the tales firmly into the world of myth. While still recognising the Cailleach as a figure of extraordinary power and influence, Leanne O'Sullivan's poems explore the human origins from which the legend grew. She still forms the landscape, yet at the same time is intrinsically part of it, close to it, rather than gigantically above it; and her husband is not the sea god of legend, but a fisherman. And for all her strength, she is vulnerable.Trade ReviewLeanne O’Sullivan’s first collection, Waiting for My Clothes, was published when she was just 21 and was justifiably acclaimed for the extraordinary power of its language and the maturity of vision. It was also an intensely confessional work; it is therefore not surprising that O’Sullivan should eschew further revelations in Cailleach: The Hag of Beara, her second collection, and plough, instead, the furrows of Irish mythology in her exploration of the eternal feminine... O’Sullivan’s vision continues to be deeply romantic in its trust that nature is a panacea for human suffering; these poems catch one’s breath with their exquisite rendering of the Irish landscape... O’Sullivan’s imagery is always precise, yet utterly dazzling in its originality... she is reclaiming her landscape, as all poets must, and she does so with the steadiness and gravity of a writer who has already found her way home. -- Nessa O'Mahony * Irish Times *
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Homesick for the Earth
Book SynopsisJules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterised as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment. Moniza Alvi writes: ‘I have been making versions of Supervielle’s poems for several years, strongly drawn to his style of writing, while also finding coincidental parallels with my own life, such as his birth “elsewhere” on another continent. My aim has been to retain the spirit of the French poems, and as many of their implications as I can, while making a poem that has a life in English. I thought he was an enchanting, inspiring poet who deserved to be so much better known in this country.’Trade ReviewIn her striking versions of poems by the French poet Jules Supervielle, written against the backdrop of wartime France, Moniza Alvi has found a soul-mate, a poet companion. -- Penelope Shuttle * Poetry London *
£11.53
Carcanet Press Ltd There is an Anger That Moves
Book Synopsis"There is an Anger That Moves" is written by a poet from the Caribbean.
£9.45
Nick Hern Books Pentecost
Book SynopsisA valuable fresco is discovered in a church in war-torn Eastern Europe. As international and local art historians argue over who should claim ownership, the fate of the painting becomes a metaphor for the future of the emergent nations of Eastern Europe. David Edgar's play Pentecost was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in October 1994. The production transferred to the Young Vic, London, with performances from 31 May 1995. It went on to win the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Play. Pentecost is part of David Edgar's trilogy of plays about post-Communist Eastern Europe, which also includes The Prisoner's Dilemma and The Shape of the Table.Trade Review'One of those rare works that makes you want to climb on to roof tops to shout about its merits' * Daily Telegraph *'Dazzlingly ambitious' * Observer *'Edgar's superb play about language, people, art and culture... a richly enjoyable script' * Daily Telegraph *'Plenty to get your teeth into... fascinating' * The Times *
£10.44
University of California Press Collected Poems of Mallarme
Book SynopsisStephane Mallarme (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valery, W B Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. This title presents the oeuvre of this European master.Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION POESIES FIRST POEMS / PREMIERS POEMES FROM THE SATIRICAL PARNASSUS / DU PARNASSE SATYRIQUE FROM THE CONTEMPORARY PARNASSUS / DU PARNASSE CONTEMPORAIN OTHER POEMS / AUTRES POEMES ALBUM LEAVES / FEUILLETS D'ALBUM STREET SONGS / CHANSONS BAS SEVERAL SONNETS / PLUSIEURS SONNETS HOMAGES AND TOMBS / HOMMAGES ET TOMBEAUX OTHER POEMS AND SONNETS / AUTRES POEMES ET SONNETS POEMES EN PROSE UN COUP DE DES COMMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
£23.40
Harvard University Press Silvae
Book SynopsisStatius’s Silvae, thirty-two occasional poems, were written probably between AD 89 and 96. The verse is light in touch, with a distinct pictorial quality. D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s edition, which replaced the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by J. H. Mozley, is now reissued with corrections by Christopher A. Parrott.
£23.70
Faber & Faber Of Mutability
Book SynopsisJo Shapcott''s award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the to the smallest of encounters.
£9.49
Samuel French Ltd Royal Hunt of the Sun
Book SynopsisThis is the story of the conquest of Peru, the defeat by 167 men of a highly organised, communistic empire of over ten million people. It is also the story of two men, Francisco Pizarro, the embittered, defiant commander of the invading Spanish forces, and Atahuallpa, the young king, Sun god-upon-earth, ruler of a vast empire. Between the two, both illegitimate usurpers, there grows a deep and understanding friendship.
£14.42
Smokestack Books A Blade of Grass
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript BL
Book SynopsisDescribed by Colin Burrow as 'the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th-century women,' the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492) is a verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s, including some 194 items including complete poems, verse fragments and excerpts from longer works, anagrams, and other ephemeral jottings attributed to Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Lady Margaret Douglas, Richard Hattfield, Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Thomas Howard, Edmund Knyvett, Anthony Lee, and Henry Stewart, as well transcriptions of the work of others or original works by prominent court figures such as Mary Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, Lord Thomas Howard, and, possibly, Anne Boleyn. This edition publishes the contents of the manuscript in their entirety, documenting well the manuscript's place as the earliest sustained example in English of men and women writing together in a community.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The First Sustained Example of Men and Women Writing Together in the English Tradition 1Sigla of Manuscripts & Early Printed Books Associated with the Devonshire Manuscript 35Poems 79Bibliography 458First-Line Index 513
£999.99
Hodder & Stoughton Bedtime Stories for Stressed Out Adults
Book SynopsisTHE PERFECT NIGHTTIME READ - DESIGNED TO CALM YOUR MIND FOR A GOOD NIGHT''S SLEEP*Introduced by Lucy Mangan* Recommended by RED magazine *''Dreamy'' STYLIST''Calm and restore an anxious mind before sleep... the most beautiful book that will, without a doubt, put you in the mood for some ZZZZs.'' THE SUNTales to soothe tired souls. A nighttime companion for frazzled adults, including calming stories and poems for a good night''s sleep. This cheering book of best loved short tales, extracts and poems will calm and restore an anxious mind.Sleep is essential for our well being and our health, but in our busy lives it is often poor and overlooked. Now is the time to put down your smartphone, stop a while and find consolation and wonder in other worlds where all is well and sleep just a page or two away. From classic stories by Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant and Katherine Mansfield
£17.09
Cambridge University Press Much Ado about Nothing
Book SynopsisThis new edition of Much Ado about Nothing is supplemented by an updated introduction which analyses recent stage, television, film and critical interpretations of the play, and considers the play's special interest in language, bodies and gender.Table of ContentsIntroduction; The play; Supplementary notes; Textual analysis; Appendixes: 1. The time-scheme of Much Ado about Nothing, 2. Lewis Carroll's letter to Ellen Terry, 3. Benedick's song, 5.2.18-22; Reading list.
£12.29
Johns Hopkins University Press Hesiod
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionList of AbbreviationsThe TheogonyTheogonyNotesThe Works and DaysWorks and DaysNotesThe ShieldShieldNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
£21.60
Milkweed Editions Human Resources: Poems
Book SynopsisWinner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” who her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams “about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints.” With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”Trade ReviewPraise for Human Resources“Ryann Stevenson’s debut collection Human Resources captures the eerie, ‘Black Mirror’ feeling that we’ve already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . Stevenson has a deadpan human to counteract the surreality: ‘Last night was a first: I screamed out loud / when trying to scream in a dream.’ . . . We get the dialogue backward, as in Martin Amis’s novel ‘Time’s Arrow,’ in which a Nazi lives his life again from death to birth. Both a nightmare and a fantasy, this undoing. ‘I want to go back and change my answer,’ Stevenson writes—too late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us.”—Elisa Gabbert, New York Times“In Human Resources, the speaker is often isolated, even as she’s building technology that’s supposed to help connect people. Much of this isolation, the poet conveys, came from [Stevenson] being a woman in a male-dominated industry . . . By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the woman’s role in a male-dominated space, she joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation.”—NPR’s Morning Edition"Here is the past without robot screens, and here is the future that we cannot but try to anticipate through them. It is memorable then, while anticipating, that the person who designs AI throughout Human Resources does not always look at her own screens but, more often, through other windows, with the 'neighbor’s TV / flashing silently, / as if he were still awake.’”—Ploughshares“Stevenson’s darkly comic and unsettling poems reveal the sexism and isolation of Big Tech. But Human Resources explores how our humanity asserts itself – even as we attempt to mimic it in a more perfect replica.”—NPR, “Books We Love”"The lyric explorations in Stevenson's beautifully discriminating book—of self and soul, femininity and society, the peculiarities and intricacies of 'design' within nature and culture—are stunned, fine-minded testimonies. In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability."—Sandra Lim“The controlled anxiety of the present is captured brilliantly by this wary, lucid book. We live in an era when our humanness is worn down—by virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and lead—so we must practice mindfulness to keep from losing track of who we are. This brave, tough book suggests that flowering maples, yoga, orcas, and the hands of our mothers might help us preserve our innocence. Human Resources is a lyric transcript of what it is to be a citizen at a punishing time.”—Henri ColeTable of ContentsCONTENTSI. INTERIOR LIFE BEAUTY MASK WORK FROM HOME GROCERY SHOPPING LISTENING MODE CLEANING THE POOL FLOWER DECISION TREE YOGA REVOLUTION II.THE NEW MIDWEST EXPOSURE THERAPY MOBILE TROUBLE AREAS HOST VACATION DINNER ATTRACTION ANTICIPATORY DESIGN DEAR ABDUCTOR REPLICA SHEEP III.DEEP LEARNING HUMAN RESOURCES WELLNESS BIOLOGICAL CLOCK INTELLIGENT OVEN THE VALLEY FATIGUE HOUSE CALL LISTENING MODE HERE NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
£12.79
Harvard University Press Biblical and Pastoral Poetry
Book SynopsisBiblical and Pastoral Poetry was written by Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Vienne, in the late fifth or early sixth century. This volume presents new English translations alongside the Latin texts of the Spiritual History, his most famous work which narrates biblical stories, and verses addressed to his sister, In Consolatory Praise of Chastity.
£26.96
Milkweed Editions Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems
Book SynopsisAn exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic. In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach. “I call the finding of certain things loss.” Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word body and the world body—and between languages, with a polyglot’s hyperresonant sensibility. In “Sagittal Views,” the book’s middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that “runs deeper than speech.” Generous in its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.
£11.39
Graphic Arts Books The Song Of Hiawatha
Book SynopsisThe Song of Hiawatha (1855) is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A master of poetic tradition and form, Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha in trochaic tetrameter, the meter of such classical epics as the Finnish Kalevala. Inspired by stories from Ojibwe oral tradition, for which he consulted Ojibwe chief Kahge-ga-gah-bowh and other indigenous sources, Longfellow composed his American epic, a story of romance and perseverance steeped in legend and beloved by generations to come. Along the shores of Lake Superior, an Ojibwe leader prophesies the arrival of Hiawatha, a great and noble hero. Before he can be born, however, Mudjekeewis must father the Four Winds by killing the Great Bear. His sons grow to be wild, fearless warriors, defending their land and feuding endlessly with one another. Although Nokomis, a woman who fell from the moon, warns her daughter not to fall for the West Wind, Wenonah is seduced by him, bringing about the birth of Hiawatha. Powerful and adventurous from a young age, Hiawatha grows into a legendary figure responsible for the discovery of corn and the invention of a written language for his people. When he meets the beautiful Minnehaha, a young Dakota woman, he struggles to balance his responsibilities as a leader and protector with a love that overwhelms him. The Song of Hiawatha is a romance of epic proportions that pays tribute to the stories of America’s first peoples. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
£10.44
BOA Editions, Limited How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille
Book SynopsisHow to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected. These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.
£999.99
Harvard University Press Clouds. Wasps. Peace
Book SynopsisAristophanes has been admired since antiquity for his wit, fantasy, language, and satire. Socrates’s “Thinkery” is at the center of Clouds, which spoofs untraditional techniques for educating young men. Wasps satirizes Athenian enthusiasm for jury service. Peace is a rollicking attack on war-makers.Trade ReviewJeffrey Henderson, who may fairly be considered the leading Aristophanic scholar in North America, has…provided us with both a useful text and idiomatic…translation. It is certainly a work that scholars may use with confidence and may recommend to their students for consultation and, yes, for help with translation… [I] found it more accurate for translation purposes than Henderson’s Focus translation or Sommerstein’s Penguin… I found Henderson’s notes uniformly admirable, alerting us with all sorts of necessary information… Henderson has done a very great service in bringing both the text and the antique translations of Rogers up to date. This second volume in the Loeb lives up to the high standards of its predecessor, and we look forward to those to come. -- Richard Hamilton * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
£23.70
Harvard University Press Carmina Burana Volume II
Book SynopsisCarmina Burana, the largest surviving collection of secular Medieval Latin verse, features poems on subjects ranging from sex and gambling to crusades and corruption. This new, two-volume presentation of the medieval classic makes the anthology accessible in its entirety to Latin lovers and English readers alike.Trade Review[Traill] brings to this ambitious project deep knowledge of medieval Latin poetry and the Carmina Burana manuscript…These are, indeed, translations worth having…The DOML Carmina Burana is a wonderful resource. -- Thomas C. Moser, Jr. * Speculum *
£26.96
Wave Books Giant Moth Perishes
Book SynopsisWith exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. The poems in Giant Moth Perishes teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.Trade ReviewFor years now, Nutter has been quietly writing some of the most beautiful poems in America. —John Ebersole, Kenyon ReviewThank goodness for Geoffrey Nutter, whose poetry seems to be powered equally by sunlight, virtue, wonder, and humility. —Nate Pritts, Rain Taxi
£12.34
Nick Hern Books Out of Love
Book SynopsisA tale of friendship, love and rivalry over thirty years from award-winning playwright Elinor Cook. Lorna and Grace do everything together. They share crisps, cigarettes and crushes. That's what happens when you're best friends forever. But when Lorna gets a place at university, and Grace gets pregnant, they suddenly find themselves in starkly different worlds. Can anything bridge the gap between them? Elinor Cook's play Out of Love was first produced in 2017 by Paines Plough in their pop-up theatre, Roundabout, in a co-production with Theatr Clywd and the Orange Tree Theatre. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.Trade Review'An emotional rollercoaster, at times very funny, sometimes devastatingly moving... a beautiful, poignant play about female friendship and the ties that run deep' * British Theatre Guide *'Wickedly vibrant, a gloriously ribald sum of its intimately explored private parts, Out of Love combines shamelessly kitsch and tell kitchen-sink comedy with heart pumping pathos' * The Reviews Hub *'A stinging portrait of intense, mutually dependent female friendship in all its messy, maddening, loving glory' * WhatsOnStage *'A fiery, tender story of female friendship... Elinor Cook's sharp new play about the intensities of bonds forged in childhood is neatly constructed... It's also very good about sex, but not in a giggly, coy way... This may look like a small play, but it is big in scope. It confirms Cook's willingness to write about women's lives with unruly honesty' * Guardian *
£11.69
University of Minnesota Press This Wound Is a World
Book SynopsisThe new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States “i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.” Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.Trade Review"This Wound Is a World is a decolonial wildfire from which the acclaimed writer Billy-Ray Belcourt builds a new world and it’s the brilliant, radiant, f*cked up Indigenous world I want to live in. . . . [His book] redefines poetics as a refusal of colonial erasure, a radical celebration of Indigenous life and our beautiful, intimate rebellion. This is a breathtaking masterpiece."—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and musician"This book is a monument for the future of poetic possibility. It is rare to be able to call a book something so grand and full—and have it be utterly true. That's what This Wound Is a World affords us: myth and hyperbole pressed into a lived and realized life. A reckoning for and of the wreck—bravely buoyant, alive, and finally here."—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds"This Wound Is a World is a wonder. It is filled with humor, sadness, sadness about sadness, sex, profound and profane lyricism, and above all power. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s voice is uniquely plangent and self-aware. The book is a world with worlds inside it. It means to de-colonize any possible reader’s pre- or mis-conceptions about what it means to be alive and Indian today."—Tommy Orange, author of There There"This luminous collection’s formal experimentation arises from an urgent need to address the complexity of learning “how to love and be broken at the same time.” As the title suggests, woundedness is a resource for forging avenues toward a yet unimagined future."—Star Tribune"This collection is an answer to and a reckoning with story and with sadness itself: its ever-presence in the telling of the Indigenous body, the queer body, the body moving through stages of love and loss."—American Poets"Belcourt makes good on the promise of his title through poetry in which sadness, grief, and death are seamlessly entwined with love, sex, and cruising both within and across racial lines."—Native American and Indigenous Studies Table of Contents
£13.29
Focus Publishing/R Pullins & Co Poetics: with the Tractatus Coislinianus,
Book Synopsis
£13.29
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSelected Poems draws on Jenny Joseph's first four collections of poetry, The Unlooked-for Season (1960), Rose in the Afternoon (1974), The Thinking Heart (1978) and Beyond Descartes (1983). The poems explore the duality of existence, a track that runs through all her work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. Jenny Joseph's Selected Poems includes 'Warning', her much celebrated monologue in which a young woman talks of her fantasies of old age, voted Britain's favourite modern poem in a BBC poll in 2006.Trade ReviewJenny Joseph writes poems full of mist and reason, poems strange in what they say but plain in the way they say it, poems rooted in an English tradition of passionate but quiet exactness…careful craftsmanship, an honest exploration of the human heart, and statement after statement that nags at the memory. -- Robert Nye * The Times *She mixes mystery and plain statement in a wholly original way… Those who find modern poetry too thin to be nourishing should try Miss Joseph’s specially enriched dishes… Clear observation, bold aphorisms and sharp unhappiness are woven together in her poems. The end product feels like joy. -- Peter Porter * Observer *
£10.80
Andrews McMeel Publishing a fire like you
Book SynopsisA fierce and lyrical collection of poetry celebrating the moments of triumph and beauty in our lives, as well as the moments of despair—recasting them as opportunities for growth.In this never-before-published collection, poet Upile Chisala grapples with themes of love, loss, and desire. Throughout this third book, she explores her identity as a black Malawian woman, offering intimate reflections on her life and experiences, imparting a stirring, universal message of empowerment and self-love.
£10.79
Nick Hern Books Mojo
Book SynopsisA slick and violent black comedy set in the Soho clubland of the 1950s. The hit debut play from the author of Jerusalem. In the seedy gangster underworld of the rock'n'roll scene, club owners fight for control of Johnny Silver, the latest young sensation. First premiered at the Royal Court in 1995, Jez Butterworth's play Mojo won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and earned Butterworth the George Devine Award and Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. This edition of Mojo was published alongside the play's 2013 revival in London's West End.Trade Review'The Royal Court's most dazzling main-stage debut in years' * Guardian *'The verbal menance of Harold Pinter [meets] the physical violence of Quentin Tarantino' * The Times *'Mockingly male, highly comic and exhilartingly violent... explosive' * WhatsOnStage *'A fabulous play... original, vibrant, gloriously entertaining' * The Arts Desk *'A hell of a show... witty and claustrophobic' * Exeunt Magazine *'Bristles with masculine energy and menace... a confident, ballsy play which explodes its vision of the perils of hopeless, cocksure, violent, seedy criminality with volcanic power' * The Stage *'Beckett on speed, savagely funny, in fast forward, with no time to wait for Godot' * Observer *'Wickedly funny, incredibly dark... a combination of strong plotting and zinging dialogue [makes] this play addictive and disconcerting' * Telegraph *
£10.79
Nick Hern Books Ruined
Book SynopsisA passionate, heartfelt play about surviving in a time of civil war, by a leading American dramatist. Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A small mining town deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Mama Nadi's bar her rules apply. No arguments, no politics, no guns. When two new girls arrive, tainted with the stigma of their recent past, Mama is forced to reassess her business priorities and personal loyalties. As tales of local atrocities spread and tensions between rebels and government militia rise, the realities of life in civil war provide the ultimate test of the human spirit. Lynn Nottage's play Ruined was first performed at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in November 2008. It opened Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club in February 2009. The play received its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in April 2010. This edition includes lyrics and music from the original production.Trade Review'An exceptionally powerful piece of writing' * London Evening Standard *'Overwhelming... could not be more powerful' * Observer *'Essential viewing... horrifying, wondrous - and true' * Time Out *
£10.44
Wesleyan University Press Belly to the Brutal
Book SynopsisBelly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chorahumming, screaming, rhythmtransporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of motherfear, where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound. This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.
£11.95
Oneworld Publications A Thing of Beauty
Book SynopsisA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2022 ‘Peter Fiennes’s road trip around Greece [is] engagingly described’ Mary Beard, TLS ‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide through Greece’ Observer ‘A wonderful… really profound meditation on what it means to hope… a gorgeous excursion into Greece and across the centuries on an environmental quest’ BBC Radio 4 Open Book Book of the Year choice by Anita Roy What do the Greek myths mean to us today? It’s now a golden age for these tales - they crop up in novels, films and popular culture. But what’s the modern relevance of Theseus, Hera and Pandora? Were these stories ever meant for children? And what’s to be seen now at the places where heroes fought and gods once quarrelled? Peter Fiennes travelTrade Review‘Peter Fiennes’s road trip around Greece – engagingly described in A Thing of Beauty – began with a visit to Lord Byron’s house… Fiennes’s tough talk and his down-to-earth refusal to put up with pretentious silliness contributes a lot to the pleasure of the book… [he] is well attuned to the ambivalence of hope.’ -- Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide… a must-read.’ -- Alex Preston, Observer‘This book is a lament for a poisoned planet… He goes in search of the numinous but relishes the bathos of modernity… not so much a travelogue as an excursion into the psyche of Anthropocene man.’ * Literary Review *‘A wonderful book by a wonderful writer.’ -- Tom Holland‘A wonderful… really profound meditation on what it means to hope… a gorgeous excursion into Greece and across the centuries on an environmental quest’ * BBC Radio 4 Open Book BOOK OF THE YEAR choice by Anita Roy *‘A Thing of Beauty is an immensely pleasurable read. It takes you on an adventure around Greece and the myths that the ancients told there. But what really stayed with me were the reflections on storytelling, joy, and hope. Essential reading for our pandemic and pollution ravaged times.’ -- Helen Morales, author of Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths‘Peter Fiennes has a way of making even the most serious of subjects enjoyable and riveting to the end, and A Thing of Beauty is certainly no exception, this is great travel writing that makes the reader a part of the adventure, and one of the most engaging and enjoyable books I’ve read this year.’ -- Pilgrim House‘A deeply humane travelogue, a beautifully written book of stories, A Thing of Beauty is a siren song for Greece and a generous and precious gift – a classical education for those of us who are bereft of one.’ -- Patrick Barkham, natural history writer and author of Wild Child‘Peter Fiennes… follows in the footsteps of Pausanias, Lord Byron and others to rediscover some of the most evocative landscapes and sites from classical myth.’ -- Argo‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide through Greece. He weaves the ancient world and the modern together with intelligence and elegance… There’s a wry Sebaldian humour at work here … A Thing of Beauty is a must-read for anyone visiting Greece.’ -- Alex Preston, Observer‘A Thing of Beauty is an entertaining, erudite travelogue through Greece, both ancient and modern.’ * Foreword Reviews *‘An evocative and informative book… It’s for anyone interested in the Greek Gods and their myths, the Greek countryside and wildlife, Greek politics and history, climate change and sustainable living, whether there’s any hope in the world today… and just how many Greek salads can one man eat? If you’re interested in more than one of those topics, it’s definitely the book for you.’ * Greece Travel Secrets *‘Fiennes sets out to explore the birthplace of Western civilization, Greece, in search of Hope… It’s a highly personal travelogue…with the historical and modern-day detail that late British travel writer Jan Morris might bring to the task.’ -- Booklist, starred review‘Passionate and lyrical’ * Publishers Weekly *‘An enjoyable journey through Greek myths and modernity in [Fiennes’s] search for hope, beauty and new understanding of our world.’ * Choice Magazine *‘In A Thing of Beauty, myths are not presented as dust-covered artefacts but vibrant, living, often frightening things that, like Greek gods, still affect and manipulate our lives. The quest that Peter Fiennes undertakes is of urgent relevance in this time of environmental change. Startling, informative and often very funny.’ -- Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish‘Fiennes is a talent and an important voice. His search for hope in the stories of the past feels vital for these times.’ -- Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground‘A Thing of Beauty is such a joy. Peter Fiennes invites us to travel with him to visit the ancient Oracle at Delphi as he searches for hope while the pre-vaccine pandemic is at its height and the wild fires rage. Self-deprecating, funny, deeply knowledgeable about Greek mythology, yet simultaneously confronting the challenges that face our world head-on, Fiennes is a most delightful travelling companion.’ -- Katharine Norbury, author of The Fish Ladder and editor of Women on Nature
£10.44
Red Hen Press Pacific Light
Book SynopsisDavid Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”Trade Review"A poet known for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller." —Siham Karami, Los Angeles Review of Books "Mason is a poet defined by place, if it is Southeast Asia on the Pacific Rim or Northwest America, his poems breathe life of the people around him as well as the nature he observes and partakes in." —g emil reutter, North of Oxford “With narrative clarity, . . . the poet manages to convey the tremulous geologic mystery of the whole world, and the smallness of our place within it. . . . Pacific Light is saturated with a lifetime’s worth of reflection, and mature and complex in its expression.”—Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters “Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal The sonic pleasures of David Mason’s Pacific Light carried me swiftly through this stunningly crafted collection. Each poem is at its best read aloud, the accomplished rhythms emerging as a lilt and ease, a physical pleasure of the human mouth and lungs. These stories, meditations, monologues, and love songs slowly develop an expansive vision of the natural world in which the speaker is observer and participant, a brushstroke in the painting, forever in relationship to memory, to history, and to the Earth. What emerges across these poems is a full life lived in communion; what emerges across these poems is wisdom. —Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight As a poet of America’s Pacific Northwest, David Mason has found its mirror reflection in Australia’s Southeast. Turned upside down by love, he has learned “to walk upright under the Southern Cross.” Generously, he extends his feeling of renewal to all of us and urges us “to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.” In Pacific Light, David Mason, one of our indispensable poets, shares his discovery of a new world—and amazingly, it turns out to be this one. —Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry In the last stanza of the last poem in David Mason’s startling and soulful new book of poems, Pacific Light, the poet writes: The effort of a life, the wasted hour,the kind word given to a stranger’s childare understood as kin and disappear.Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild. This stanza testifies to last things: the last journey, the last shape shifting, the last immigration in a book filled with such arrivals and departures. The formal rigor of the poems—handled with an easy and almost offhand poise—only accentuates the sense of almost constant movement, which is at the heart of the book. This book is the story of a life's deepening and reconfiguration. As such, it both inspires and challenges the reader in ways that only poetry can do. What a pleasure to read a book of poems by a poet at the height of his powers, a poet whose life has been transformed and whose poems are the embodiment of that transformation. —Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems "It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition." —Geoff Page, Australian Book Review David Mason wrote for LARB David Mason wrote for The Woven Table
£12.34
ERIS Songs of an Eastern Humanist
Book Synopsis
£16.14
Copper Canyon Press,U.S. The Glass Constellation
Book Synopsis**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award** An affordable paperback edition of Arthur Sze''s Collected Works—which includes many new poems—by one of the most astonishing poets writing today. The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems, from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions―employing startling juxtapositions that are always
£999.99
Milkweed Editions Meltwater: Poems
Book SynopsisA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.Trade ReviewPraise for Meltwater "Wahmanholm delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review“Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting… Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planet’s forecast”—Racket“Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva“Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is ‘a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.’”—Allison Flory, Arkansas International“Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.”—Monica Youn“In Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s ecology, and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything that is ‘us’: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that ‘you are grass,’ I know it.”—Éireann LorsungPraise for Redmouth“Claire Wahmanholm’s book, Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she ‘can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.’ There’s simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where ‘mountains have unraveled into sand’ to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang“Redmouth is singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: ‘I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me.’ This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.”—Shane McCrae“Redmouth is a book of lush privacies, of ‘lamb-lioned’ promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). ‘The doe [is] a torch in the garden,’ she writes at one point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.”—G.C. Waldrep“‘Let all / Headlong fall from this / song,’ Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems, Redmouth, which blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s absence, which ‘clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides.’ There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven ‘to the edge of a cliff’ and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, ‘crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws.’ But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: ‘If of sunflowers.’”—Nomi StonePraise for Wilder “Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going. And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making. As the speaker of one poem says, ‘We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.’ And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.”—Rick Barot“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”—MAYDAY Magazine “Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell “Wilder is a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journey—continuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.”—Sun Yung Shin“Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.” —Maggie SmithTable of ContentsO HungerYou Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill YouGlacierMeltwaterMIn a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I DiedMeltwaterMetamorphosis with Milk and SugarIn a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an AutotomistPoem That Cries WolfGlacierMeltwaterStarlingMore RabbitsPrimerThe Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the TreeMeltwaterThe New HorticultureGlacierApotropaeiIn A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting ItThe Sun, the ShipMeltwaterAt the End We Turn Into TreesGlossary of What I’ll MissThe New FearThe New LanguageGlacierMeltwaterPDeathbed Dream with Extinction ListIf Anyone AsksIn Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth ChildrenPoem With No Children In itMeltwaterThe FutureMeltwater:The Empty UniverseXYZ NotesAcknowledgments
£11.39
Milkweed Editions Ballard Spahr Prize 2023 Winner
Book SynopsisSelected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tas
£11.39
Nick Hern Books An Enemy of the People
Book SynopsisIbsen's provocative play about truth in a society driven by power and money, given a startling contemporary spin in Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer's acclaimed version, here in an English translation by Duncan Macmillan.
£10.44
Seagull Books London Ltd Come, Take a Gentle Stab – Selected Poems
Book SynopsisIntroduces renowned Kurdish-Syrian writer Salim Barkat to an English audience for the first time, with translated selections from his most acclaimed works of poetry. Although Salim Barakat is one of the most renowned and respected contemporary writers in Arabic letters, he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. This first collection of his poetry in English, representing every stage of his career, remedies that startling omission. Come, Take a Gentle Stab features selections from his most acclaimed works of poetry, including excerpts from his book-length poems, rendered into an English that captures the exultation of language for which he is famous. A Kurdish-Syrian man, Barakat chose to write in Arabic, the language of cultural and political hegemony that has marginalized his people. Like Paul Celan, he mastered the language of the oppressor to such an extent that the course of the language itself has been compelled to bend to his will. Barakat pushes Arabic to a point just beyond its linguistic limits, stretching those limits. He resists coherence, but never destroys it, pulling back before the final blow. What results is a figurative abstraction of struggle, as alive as the struggle itself. And always beneath the surface of this roiling water one can glimpse the deep currents of ancient Kurdish culture.Trade Review"Kurdish, reclusive, demanding, inventive to the point of miracle, prolific to the point of cataracts—in the republic of Arabic letters, Salim Barakat stands apart." * 4Columns *“Barakat’s exceedingly resistant and exhilaratingly strange verse—paradoxically written by someone who seems absolutely rooted to the depths of the earth while yet able to see humanity as if through the mind of some other being, perhaps language itself—is finally available to English readers. One can only hope that Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen’s resounding translation summons greater interest in the work of this astonishing modern master.” -- Ammiel Alcalay, poet, scholar, critic, and translatorTable of ContentsEvery Insider Shall Hail Me and Every Outsider Too (1973)Dinoka Breva, Come, Take a Gentle Stab (excerpt)Union of LineagesPike (1980)Dylana and Diram (excerpt)With the Same Traps, with the Foxes that Ride the Winds (1982)Fog Composed like a GentlemanRevengeThe Recklessness of Sapphire (1996)Ledgers of Plunder (excerpt)Digression in an Abridged ContextConfrontations, Pacts, Troughs, and Others … (1997)Plastics (excerpt)Ran’s Farm From Syria (2015)From All the Doors (2017)Lineages of Animal (2019)DogTurtleFleaFishHomo Erectus
£13.99
Bodleian Library The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio
Book SynopsisIn late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery to his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul’s a book that had been long in the making. Master William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies was the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, appearing some seven years after their author’s death in 1616. There was no fanfare at the book’s arrival. There was nothing of the marketing that marks an important new publication in our own period: no advertising campaign, no reviews, interviews, endorsements or literary prizes. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural and commercial moment. Generously illustrated in colour with key pages from the publication and comparative works, this new edition combines the recent discovery of a hitherto unknown edition of the First Folio at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute with the human, artistic, economic and technical stories of the birth of this landmark publication – and the birth of Shakespeare’s towering reputation.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements vii Prologue viii Introduction 1 Chapter one: The Plays & their Presentation 7 Chapter two: Shakespeare’s Reputation 77 Chapter three: Team Shakespeare: The Backers 114 Chapter four: Printing & Publishing 187 Chapter five: Becoming ‘The First Folio’ 215 Notes 242 Further reading 249 Picture credits 252 Index 254
£25.50