A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
The 87 Press A True Account
Book Synopsis"Gorgeous and real poetry. This book is a bright spot in a bleak time." - Peter Gizzi A True Account collects works written between 2013 and 2020, published by a variety of small presses in the UK and the US. Here are variously refracted the student movement, austerity, general election, referendum, the crisis of 2020 or 2019 or any year you care to name; the Massacre of the Innocents, the housing question, the October Revolution in November; Sappho, Mingus, Storm Ophelia; Rukeyser, Rilke, Rodefer; the aesthetics of resistance, the insistence of history: luxury and voluptuousness, peace and pleasure, beauty and order, the questions that still remain unanswered and the problems that remain unsolved. "Wanting poetry to save my life, to shame my life, as LONG as the WORLD is WIDE, and as WIDE as the WORLD is LONG." For Fans Of: Sean Bonney, Amiri Baraka, Fred Moten, Peter Gizzi
£13.49
CB Editions Invasion of the Polyhedrons
Book SynopsisNew poetry collection and essays by the prize-winning author of Murmur
£10.44
Monitor Books Snagged on red thread
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£11.00
Flapjack Press The Man Who Launched a Thousand Poems, Volume One
Book SynopsisAt the start of the coronavirus lockdown, Paul Cookson set out to write a poem a day - and kept on going. Featuring his opening five hundred poems, Volume One is an authentic and poetic discourse on the mood of the nation, composed with compassion, humour, and adroit takes on the day to day of life throughout challenging times. Illustrated by Martin Chatterton.Trade Review"Trying times need poets. This book is a must." Michael Rosen ; "A book that future historians will want to read; it will tell them what it was like to live in turbulent times through a poet's eye." Ian McMillan ; "A modern take on Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. Brilliant." Paul Ross ; "Manages to season cogent observations with a dash of humour that makes you want to dip in again and again." Valerie Bloom MBE ; "A poet for all seasons and all occasions." Henry Normal ; "Pithy blinders, heartfelt and moving, marvellously inventive and original." Stewart Henderson
£18.00
Dalen Newydd Cyfrolau Cenedl 15. Kate Roberts Tair Drama
Book SynopsisKate Roberts is acknowledged as a leading short story writer and novelist, but she began her literary career as a playwright. Her name is linked to about 15 plays, as translator, co-author and as playwright in her own right. This volume sees, for the first time, the publication of three complete, original plays by Kate Roberts.
£999.99
Tube Theatre The Tree Trimmed into a Flagpole and other poems
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£14.20
Spring View Publications Musings
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£6.75
Out-Spoken Press apricot
Book SynopsisApricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK’s brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O’Pray’s is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.
£10.79
Out-Spoken Press State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian
Book SynopsisHow do we think of ourselves as poets? How does our race, our home(s), and our cultural heritage, shape our sense of belonging, our ways of seeing or experiencing the world? How can we learn from and offer support to each other? State of Play brings together conversations between an international line-up of poets, taking place over the course of a year, to offer rich insights into these questions and the ways a life lived in many places can invigorate one’s writing. With themes ranging from the sense of home and racialised expectations, to community and language, as well as the process of writing poetry, these creative discussions delve into the complexities and diversity of identity in the days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora.‘Multiple yet singular, the conversations here reveal the complexities of poetic language as a space of becoming rather than being, of identities sharply focusing under the weight of plurality, the forces of migration and the long tethers of home and empire. This book makes a critical intervention in the shaping of diasporic writing, turns us away from the outworn frameworks to demand bolder and more imaginative ways of reading. Let these conversations begin urgent ones elsewhere about how language is made and how it remakes us as global subjects speaking together.’ —Prof. Sandeep Parmar, Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Founder of Ledbury Critics of Colour.‘State of Play reminds us of the global reach of English-language poetry and poetics, whose production is not limited to the predominantly white Anglophone countries of the so-called West and reminds us of the ongoing legacies of British colonialism underlying even such seemingly neutral concepts as home, everyday life, and poetics.’ —Prof. Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry & convenor/co-founder of Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK)‘Giving voice to a diverse and multi-generational choir of distinctive voices, this anthology offers rare and intimate insights into the creative challenges of writing poetry now and the vital importance of dialogue as a free space for the play of ideas and critical thinking.’ —Prof. Susheila Nasta, Founder of Wasafiri, Magazine of International Contemporary Writing‘State of Play draws together a sparky and inspiring array of conversations between East and Southeast Asian poets situated across continents and borders. The different interactions are characterised by their commitment to exchange and reciprocity even where the poets meet for the first time only through the medium of these conversations. Editors Jennifer Wong and Eddie Tay have done a superb job of bringing together a rich spectrum of topics including nomadism, childhood, diaspora, race, belonging, the question of what it is to be creative, and all-important issues of language-choice and self-translation. I wager that no reader interested in poetry will not find excitement in this vibrant anthology.’ —Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford
£13.29
Out-Spoken Press G&T
Book SynopsisG&T is a pamphlet-length poem, exploring themes of queerness, sexuality and desire. Told through a series of anonymous encounters and relationships with older men, G&T moves between the anonymity of the early hours and the cold light of day. Taking us through drug and alcohol-fuelled nights with strangers, the poem questions the nature of desire, addiction and the sprawling and anonymous world of gay hookup culture, asking what we become when we agree to play roles for the benefit of other people.
£7.60
Sharmay Mitchell be the Uplifter: Positive Poems
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£8.99
Ginninderra Press Bloom
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£13.30
Ginninderra Press Soldier Boy and the Rural Fundamentalists
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£11.88
Michael Walmer Winter Solstice
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£16.10
Playwrights Canada Press,Canada Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
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£21.24
Playwrights Canada Press,Canada The Virgin Trial
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£19.54
Mosaic Press God Damned Avalon: Flash Fiction
Book SynopsisA debut collection of flash fiction from one of the most prominent young Canadian writers of this genre.Trade Review"Paul Edward Costa writes towards the future, his creativity acting as a barometer to coming trends. God Damned Avalon serves as a testament to his command of Flash Fiction and his comfort in the radically changing medium of written words." Brandon Pitts, Author of Tender in the Age of Fury and In the Company of Crows"...an exciting collection of Flash Fiction. Through unusual plots, weird characters, and unexpected shifts, he creates a surreal atmosphere rearranging our concept of time and space." Professor Laurence Hutchman, author and poet"Using paradox, imagery, and symbolism, Paul Edward Costa invites us into what may seem otherworldly at first, but the universe that he so cleverly conjures up in God Damned Avalon couldn't be any closer to the human condition and our unrelenting fate as earthlings. The duality of beauty and pain, of life and death, or hope and despair, is hidden masterfully in the stories of this collection." Efetobore Mike-Ifeta, Poet and organizer of The talent Next Door and the MAKE Open Mic
£13.56
Guernica Editions,Canada math for couples
Book SynopsisIn math for couples, we re-visit the past to discover our place in the contemporary world. A long-dead father watches his daughter work on her Mac, a woman converses with a photo of her young self. Adele Graf leads us on a journey that is rich and hopeful, evoking powerful nostalgia even if we've never been to the places described. When these poems release us back to our current lives, we feel restored to savour the warmth in a "glad red hat" and the love that arrives "still summer lush."
£13.46
Guernica Editions,Canada Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There
Book SynopsisLove Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is divided into 7 sections. The first 5 sections focalize particular geographical regions: Southern Ontario in "The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour," North York in "The Northern Edge of Everything," New York in "Cynic's Guidebook," New Brunswick in "Vanishing Beach," and Antarctica in "Signs in the Southern Hemisphere." Though each section tells a story of people moving through these places, the poems ultimately subvert the expected conventions of travel narrative, directing critical attention to the personae and roles of travellers and to the systems of power at work in each locale. This is a book deeply concerned with psychogeography, the ways that individuals and environments mutually shape one another. Psychgeography comes to the fore particularly in the final two sections of the book, "Animals in Strange Houses" and "Genius Loci." In "Animals in Strange Houses," animals, both human and not, must literally and figuratively reconstruct homes after being displaced by urbanization and ecological destruction. In the final section, "Genius Loci," poems function as both portraits and place studies and reveal the deep intimacy between examinations of persons and places.
£13.56
Biblioasis My Shoes Are Killing Me
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for Poetry Winner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry In My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous ...treasurehouse" that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets. Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous collections. Ten of her poems have appeared on The Writer's Almanac, and her work has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001).Trade ReviewPraise for My Shoes are Killing Me "So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience."--Eric Ormsby "The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart ... Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent."--Montreal Gazette "The vigour gets into Sarah's rhythms and rhymes, as always, but they play here against a melancholic sense, as in blues music."--Canadian Literature "Her precise descriptive siftings...promote a vision of abundance as composed of luminous bits and pieces that never take up more room than they need."--Arc Poetry Magazine "[Robyn Sarah's] concerns haven't changed. But her eye on "the beginning of dwindle"--an already oft-quoted mantra from her title poem--has her probing them here with a new urgency, even a kind of abandon. The 'nine movements' that make up "My Feet Are Killing Me" rally defiantly and almost joyfully against that dwindling"--Anita Lahey, The Fiddlehead "[Sarah's] biggest gift is her ability to weave a number of complex themes into a seemingly straightforward yarn ... She can take a perfectly ordinary event and transform it into something magical. Again and again."--New Canadian Magazine "Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collections from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets."--49th Shelf "As [Wallace] Stevens writes in The Plain Sense of Things, 'The absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined.' Robyn Sarah is one of our poet's in Canada who has attended most readily and vigorously to this hard work, and we are forever indebted to her for it."--Jeweller's EyeTable of ContentsIn a Slant Light A Box of Old Family Photos Reading Marianne Moore on a Train Between Cobourg and Kingston My Shoes are Killing Me Gleanings at Year's End In the Dream It Made Sense Impasse Seed Lacunae Variations on an Untold Story [...]
£11.04
Biblioasis Best Canadian Poetry 2021
Book Synopsis“This is a book,” writes guest editor Souvankham Thammavongsa, “about what I saw and read and loved, and want you to see and read and love.” Selected from work published by Canadian poets in magazines and journals in 2020, Best Canadian Poetry 2021 gathers the poems Thammavongsa loved most over a year’s worth of reading, and draws together voices that “got in and out quickly, that said unusual things, that were clear, spare, and plain, that made [her] laugh out loud … the voices that barely ever survive to make it onto the page.” From new work by Canadian icons to thrilling emerging talents, this year’s anthology offers fifty poems for you to fall in love with as well. Featuring: Margaret Atwood Ken Babstock Manahil Bandukwala Courtney Bates-Hardy Roxanna Bennett Ronna Bloom Louise Carson Kate Cayley Kitty Cheung Dani Couture Kayla Czaga Šari Dale Unnati Desai Tina Do Andrew DuBois Paola Ferrante Beth Goobie Nina Philomena Honorat Liz Howard Maureen Hynes George K Ilsley Eve Joseph Ian Keteku Judith Krause M Travis Lane Mary Dean Lee Canisia Lubrin Randy Lundy David Ly Yohani Mendis Pamela Mosher Susan Musgrave Téa Mutonji Barbara Nickel Ottavia Paluch Kirsten Pendreigh Emily Pohl-Weary David Romanda Matthew Rooney Zoe Imani Sharpe Sue Sinclair John Steffler Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang Arielle Twist David Ezra Wang Phoebe Wang Hayden Ward Elana Wolff Eugenia Zuroski Jan Zwicky Trade ReviewPraise for the Best Canadian Poetry Series “[These] books are must-haves for libraries, schools, and intellectually well-intentioned bedside nightstands across the country.”—Quill & Quire “The wide range of writers, forms and themes represented here make it a great jumping-off point for readers who might be interested in Canadian poetry but are unsure about where to start.”—Globe and Mail “Buy it, or borrow it, but do read it.”—Arc Poetry Magazine “A magnet, I think, for the many people who would like to know contemporary poetry.”—A.F. Moritz, Griffin Poetry Prize winner “An eclectic and diverse collection of Canadian poetry . . . a wonderful addition to anyone’s bookshelf.”—Toronto Quarterly
£12.34
Biblioasis Best Canadian Poetry 2026
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£15.08
Talon Books,Canada Fado: The Saddest Music in the World
Book SynopsisAcclaimed Portuguese Canadian playwright Elaine Ávila's new play, Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, is a tale of love and ghosts set in the back alleys and brothels of old Lisbon. Part concert, part theatre, the story of a young woman confronting her country's fascist past and her own identity is interwoven with the heartbreaking national music of Portugal known as fado, which means fate. Playing sold-out crowds in Vancouver and Victoria in 2018 and 2019, Fado was honoured on the Playwrights Guild of Canada's Sure Fire List (the Top Twenty-Three Most Producible Plays in Canada by Women) and selected as one of the Top Unproduced Latinx Plays in the U.S. by Fifty Playwrights. Fado won the Award for Favourite Musical in Victoria with B.C.'s own beloved Sara Marreiros playing the ghost of Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado.
£12.34
Talon Books,Canada its th sailors life / still in treetment:
Book SynopsisA pioneer of sound, visual, and performance poetry, bill bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently since the 1960s worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry. bissett's latest collection since the monumental breth (Talonbooks, 2019), its th sailors life / still in treatment is, using the poet's own words, an epik poetik novel uv langwage n speech confronting thos controlling effekts on us and about acceptans uv loss greef separaysyuns charaktrs in serch uv self liberaysyun n societal equalitee n all th forces against that path. Eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (proper nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling, bissett's expressive assemblages in this collection are like walking thru sum fne lines. The poems in this collection are coupled with stunning illustrations by the author.
£17.09
Talon Books,Canada Witness Back at Me: mis-mothering &
Book SynopsisIn Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan?s poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the kaleidoscopic effect of interior thought. Witness Back at Me draws on the childhood loss of Chan?s mother to breast cancer, as a survival mechanism towards an aesthetics of accepted disembodiment, always haunted by a search for nurturing and surrender to some greater being. The poems in this book intertwine polyvocally, building into a liminal biographical metanarrative: the whole point of existence, the author believes, is to luxuriate in the greater being of not-knowing. To accept the historical underpinnings, the brokenness of the world, inside and outside the self, but be in constant communication of both worlds, towards understanding and healing, is the one true meaningful quest.
£11.89
Talon Books,Canada A Brief Celebration
Book SynopsisShort-listed for Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize 2024In this debut poetry collection, Samantha Nock redefines where and what home is. A Family of Dreamers delves into the complexities of growing up in rural northeast British Columbia and the love and grief that blooms there. In this debut collection, Samantha Nock weaves together threads of fat liberation, desirability politics, and heartbreak while working through her existence as a young Indigenous woman coming of age in the city. The result is a love song to northern cuzzins, dive bars, and growing up.
£12.34
Talon Books,Canada Revolutions
Book SynopsisRevolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum's artwork + and , Revolutions asks how young Arab women who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.
£999.99
Talon Books,Canada Crowd Source
Book SynopsisCrowd Source parallels the daily migration of the crows who, aside from fledgling season, fly across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. This durational study echoes their flight, occasionally touching down to reflect on human-crow interactions. Attentive to the great intelligence and perspectives of corvid and non-human communications, the poems in Crowd Source engage historical and strategic examples of how these songbirds gather and disperse. Continuing Nicholson's engagement with the contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned about practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities, caw.
£14.24
Rock's Mills Press The Ventriloquist: Poetic Narratives from the
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£27.00
Devoted Publishing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey Pope and Cowper
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£999.99
University of Calgary Press Dendrite Balconies
Book SynopsisText surrounds us. Text is everywhere, all the time, and the contemporary world is a codex to be deciphered and disassembled. In Dendrite Balconies, Sean Braune harvests the language that surrounds us-pieces and shards from other writers, conversations, and popular media-reassembling textual fragments into poetic sculptures. Blending together conceptual writing and lyric poetry, Braune locates beauty in the chaotic landscape of the urban environment and the digital era. Full of smart, funny, insightful moments, this is a poetic montage that collapses experimental traditions into the noise and clang of urban space, and out of the silent cries of canons and libraries.When the author dies, the reader is born. In Dendrite Balconies, the reader becomes a new author as Braune assembles frenetic, dissociative fragments of language into an aesthetic and sonic whole.
£16.10
Auckland University Press Transposium
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£20.21
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 11
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£11.87
Anonymity the Poet Black Print
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£10.06
Nosheen Rao Faasley
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£12.00
Invisible Publishing Cut Side Down
Book SynopsisCut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.
£14.36
Invisible Publishing Country Music
Book SynopsisCountry Music is both delicate and ferocious, tender and steely. [...] Spackled with violence, hilarity, grotesquerie, these poems are animated by Koss's profound listening and attentiveness and a kind of wild longing. These are poems as if exchanged among friends and family, as if generated around an archaic campfire, as if John Prine had spent his youth in the Kootenays, as if poetry were still a medium of common life: and suddenly we see with this book that it is.Maureen McLane, author of My PoetsZane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing extractivenessboth the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poeticsa country musicKoss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we're given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.
£999.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Beyond the Drift: New & Selected Poems
Book Synopsis'David Scott belongs firmly to the long tradition of parson-poets that goes back at least as far as George Herbert... For all their reticence, there is a compassion in these poems and a sense of propriety' - Norman Nicholson. Springing from ordinary events, or a picture, or an aspect of the priestly life, David Scott's beautifully restrained poems work up the detail into a moment of significance. They are rooted in an English culture which is found not only in locality, but also in understatement, and the sideways look. But his poetry has wider reverberations, exploring spirituality and ways of praying as well as momentary glimpses of meaning caught in everyday life. David Scott won the National Poetry Competition in 1978, and this new retrospective draws on all the books he has published since then, from A Quiet Gathering (1984) and Playing for England (1989) to Selected Poems (1998) and Piecing Together (2005), with the addition of a whole collection of new poems.Trade Review'He is interested in the humble epiphanies associated with weathered objects and places: he seizes on the apparently insignificant but his sensual expansions are religious in tone. Quietly Scott's poems look out beyond themselves.' - George Szirtes, Critical Quarterly 'Immaculate poems - full of gentle, contemplative intelligence and a tenacious modesty - scrupulous, affectionate' - John Mole, Encounter. 'David Scott writes poems plain as pleasure: a pleasure in perception of the world, a pleasure in being human - There is one poem in this fine collection that really lets all the weather in, the epic and panoptic "Skelling Michael: A Pilgrimage" - the terrors of faith are made real and electric but, importantly, they are made human.' - David Morley, PN Review.
£13.49
Bloodaxe Books Ltd My Voice
Book SynopsisAs this gloriously diverse, revelatory selection of translations from the Poetry Translation Centre's first decade proves, nothing has invigorated poetry in English more than translation. Here you will find 111 brilliant poems translated from 27 different languages (ranging from Arabic to Zapotec: all the original scripts are included) by 45 of the world's leading poets. Arranged on a journey from exile to ecstasy, these powerful poems have been co-translated by some of the UK's best-loved poets including Jo Shapcott, Sean O'Brien, Lavinia Greenlaw, W.N. Herbert, Mimi Khalvati and Nick Laird. Founded by Sarah Maguire, the Poetry Translation Centre aims to transform English verse through engaging with the rich poetic traditions of the UK's recent immigrant communities for whom poetry is of overwhelming importance. Reading these Somali, Afghan, Sudanese and Kurdish poets (26 countries are represented), you will understand why their scintillating and heartbreaking poems inspire such devotion.Trade ReviewThis groundbreaking anthology extends the territory of English poetry through a series of generous translations that make welcome the magnificent poetic traditions of many communities now settled here. -- Carol Ann DuffyBrilliant translations, done by brilliant poets, working with brilliant scholars. -- Christina Patterson * The Independent *
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Beauty
Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, followed by After in 2006, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and then Come, Thief in 2011. Jane Hirshfield's latest collection, The Beauty, opens with a series of poems exploring both the profundities and the quirks of our shared human existence. She draws intimate meaning from multiple realms: science, culture, language itself, and above all the luminous materials and minutely particular emotions of daily life. In their robust negotiation with fate and justice, these clear and moving poems open a new and steepened understanding of our lives' full measure of losses, knowledge, and loves.Trade Review'Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious - Wittily deductive and meta-physically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' - Donna Seaman, Booklist. 'Clear-eyed and often numinous poems - a deepening attention to every aspect of human experience, from the dailiness of our lives to the most ineffable moments' - Steven Ratiner, Washington Post. 'Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart' - Wislawa Szymborska. 'A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings - It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield - In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness' - Czeslaw Milosz, Prze Kroj (Poland). 'Her poetry is a rich and assured gift - an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction - The poems' realised ambition is wisdom' - Alison Brackenbury, Agenda. 'Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human' - The Scotsman.
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd This changes things
Book SynopsisThis changes things was Claire Askew's first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland's flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet's privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem's political message and to that message's human subject. This changes things draws much of its strength from this exploration of inbetweenness. Claire Askew's purposeful deployment of objects, lighting effects and liminal spaces implicates her reader in the poem's argument, holds up a mirror and asks us to pay attention. The book's romantic relationships, depictions of frustrated travel or social mobility, are bound up in its awareness of the systems of power that permit no true state of innocence. Even the final poem, 'Hydra' - with its celebration of the body and its senses - cannot ultimately allow us off the hook. This changes things was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award 2016, Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection 2017 and Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017.Trade ReviewClaire Askew's voice is arrestingly and distinctively her own, imbued with a sense of caring and inducing, in her more intimate moments, a scarcely bearable poignancy.' - Stewart Conn. 'Askew's is a humane consciousness, with a genius for communicating how people tick... She writes with an agenda compellingly, harnessing flashes of imagist brilliance. -- Jen Hadfield
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Ten: poets of the new generation
Book SynopsisTen: poets of the new generation presents the work of ten exciting British poets from diverse backgrounds. It is the third anthology from The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, a national programme supporting exceptional black and Asian poets founded by the writer Bernardine Evaristo in 2007. Already making a big impact on the British poetry scene, poets from the series have included Sarah Howe, the 2016 winner of both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; Mona Arshi, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016; and Warsan Shire, who collaborated with Beyonce on her visual album, Lemonade in 2016, which featured many of Shire's poems. This latest anthology in the Ten series will not disappoint readers hoping to discover more exceptional talent. It includes poets with even more diverse backgrounds ranging from Somalia and Nigeria through to Jamaica and the multiculturalism of Macau, and features the first poet from Latin America. These are poets who interrogate race and explode any ideas of a page/stage divide. Fierce, unexpected, sometimes beautiful and always passionate, here are ten poets to savour and enjoy. The poets included are: Raymond Antrobus, Natacha Bryan, Leonardo Boix, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Will Harris, Ian Humphreys, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Momtaza Mehri, Yomi Sode and Degna Stone. The Complete Works III is directed by Dr Nathalie Teitler, with thanks to Arts Council England for their generous funding. Copublication with The Complete Works III.Trade ReviewAs well as being a literary endeavour, Ten: Poets of the New Generation is a form of activism and a show of solidarity in which established voices stand up for and celebrate lesser-known ones. The Complete Works project has changed the literary world measurably, letting in variety not just of race, sex and cultural identity but also of voice, form, attitude, outlook and experience... a wonderfully accessible showcase for thrilling new talent and, overall, a joy to read. -- Bidisha * The Poetry Review *
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Coming of the Little Green Man
Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In The Coming of the Little Green Man, his eighth Bloodaxe collection, we enter a world of play and parable – in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders – in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance. Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind? Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, he brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary. His Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009) was followed by Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016).Trade ReviewIf Agard had not already been forged in the roller-coaster aftermath of empire, there would be an urgent need for society to invent someone like him.’ – William Wallis, Financial Times
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Blackbird, Bye Bye
Book SynopsisMoniza Alvi's new book is unified by birds. Her creations 'Motherbird' and 'Fatherbird' are inspired by her parents, and by the loss of her father and by his emigration from Pakistan. Among the many bird-related poems are versions of the French poets Jules Supervielle and Saint-John Perse, and poems 'after' the paintings of the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo. Blackbird, Bye Bye is Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection At the Time of Partition, published in 2013.Trade Review'She has a metaphysical wit, both very economical and very wild; the power to create extraordinary concrete images with a lot of space around them; and an imagination so surreal that surreal is where we start. We only gradually realise that she is using the surreal as a lens through which her poems marvel at so-called real life. It is all presented so fluidly and naturally, with a smile and subtle humour, that you accept it instantly.' - Ruth Padel, The Poem and the Journey; 'At the Time of Partition is a truly extraordinary collection, a work which succeeds in being spare, compelling and timeless. Furthermore, for the subcontinental reader, it captures a moment of time, a memory, so visceral that it has an extraordinary power. This book should not be missed.' - Muneeza Shamsie, Dawn; 'These poems are about what is just out of reach, what cannot ever quite be captured but can be imagined with such delicacy that it becomes real.' - Helen Dunmore, Observer
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Baldwin's Catholic Geese
Book SynopsisKeith Hutson’s debut collection, Baldwin’s Catholic Geese, looks at the delight and heartbreak of being human through the lens of beloved music hall and variety stars like Hylda Baker and Frankie Howerd, as well as less celebrated, now long-forgotten acts of the past: The Bryn Pugh Sponge Dancers, Macauley’s Leaping Infants, Willy Netta’s Singing Jockeys, and many more. Hutson’s vividly realised portraits bring back to life a whole cast of the extraordinary characters who have entertained us for over two centuries. Comedy is brought into sharp relief by hardship. His Baldwin’s Catholic Geese is a social history chronicle in poems, focusing on what it means for all of us who have to make the most of our luck – the good, the bad, and the bizarre.Trade ReviewThese poems illuminate something timeless about ambition and the human spirit. Keith Hutson is a wonderful talent – his hardworking, technically-assured poems arrive all of a piece centre-stage. -- Carol Ann DuffyKnowing, funny, sad, virtuoso, these compelling sonnets bring theatrefuls of yesteryear vividly to life. Keith Hutson explores art as artfulness, performance as a way of coping, or seeming to. His ad-libs are perfectly timed and if we laugh out loud at his routines, we flinch too at the “imaginary hot fat” of the risks his characters take by being centre-stage. -- Peter Sansom * on Routines *Table of Contents11 The Opener 12 Juvenile 13 Coming On Strong 14 Revival 15 The Fish Fryer 16 No Contest 17 Lady Be Good 18 Hylda 20 Heart 21 Glasgow Empire 22 Bad Impresario 23 Accept No Imitations 24 Family Business 25 My Old Man 26 The Call of the Wild 28 Raising Steam 29 And They’re Off! 30 Night Class 31 The World’s Greatest Whistler 32 Morton Fraser’s Harmaniacs 33 The Man with the Xylophone Skull 34 The Ray Conniff Singers 36 Tiddly Om Pom Pom 37 Slave Song 38 Straight Man 39 Frontiersman 40 The Reluctant Sitter 42 Anthony Howell and His Disenchanted Sow 43 Largesse 44 The Art of Hunger 45 Praise Poem 46 Zazel, The Shooting Star! 47 Without a Net 48 Dr Zhivago 49 Power Sharing 50 The Dancing Quakers 51 Inextricable 52 The Audience 54 Exotica 55 Widow Twankey 56 Burlington Bertie 57 Out from Under 58 Mary Poppins 59 Self Help 60 Saddled 61 Better Out Than In 62 Beyond Belief 63 Crowd Control 64 Engagement 65 Controlled Explosion 66 Le Pétomane 67 Castrato 68 Tragedian 69 Nightmare Scenario 70 Lo! Hear the Gentle Lark 71 Foreign Exchange 72 Counter Culture 73 Brass Band 74 Pleasure Craft 75 Response 76 Bad Rap 77 Roughage 78 Three Sightings of Batman 80 The Hard Stuff 81 Little Wonder 82 Go Gentle 83 Street Cred 84 The Man Who Killed Houdini 85 Here’s Looking at You 86 Lament 87 Buccaneer 88 Double Act 89 Scandal 90 Vintage 91 Clever Bugger 92 Civic Theatre 93 Hostess Trolley 94 Dumbing Up 95 Town Crier 96 Light Brigade 97 Speech Coach 98 A Funny Thing Happened… 99 Dun Roamin’ 100 Confidence Trick 101 Caretaker 102 Immense 103 Above All 104 Vera 105 Eleven, Plus 106 Stepping Out 107 The Belly Dancers of Burnage 108 Crossing the Floor 109 The Highland Live-Wire 110 Hostilities 112 I’m Here All Week! 113 All the Rage 114 Chanteur 116 Memory Man 117 Soul Mates 118 That’s Your Lot 119 Notes 127 Bibliography
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Bloodaxe Books Ltd Poems & Fragments
Book SynopsisThis second, expanded edition of Josephine Balmer's classic translation of the Greek poet Sappho has new, recently-discovered fragments, including the Brothers Poem, the Kypris Song and the Cologne Fragment. In a new essay on these additions she discusses the issues raised in the translating – and in some cases retranslating – of these fragmentary and ever-shifting texts. Poems & Fragments is now the only complete, readily-available translation in English of Sappho's surviving work. Sappho was one of the greatest poets in classical literature. Her lyric poetry is among the finest ever written, and although little of her work has survived and little is known about her, she is regarded not just as one of the greatest women poets, but often as the greatest woman poet in world literature. She lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC, and even in her lifetime, her work was widely known and admired in the Greek world. Plato called her 'the tenth muse', and she was a major influence on other poets, from Horace and Catullus to more recent lyric poets. Yet in later centuries, speculation about her sexuality has tended to diminish her poetic reputation. One medieval pope considered her so subversive that her poems were burned. Some of her poems were written for the women she loved, but her circle of women friends and admirers was not unlike Socrates' circle of followers. She may have been a lesbian in the modern sense, or she may not, but to call her a lesbian poet is an over-simplification. What remains is her poetry, or the fragments which have survived of it, and her intense, sensuous, highly accomplished love poems are among the finest in any language. First published in 1984 and revised in 1992, Josephine Balmer's edition brings together all the extant poems and fragments of Sappho. In a comprehensive introduction, she discusses Sappho's poetry, its historical background and critical reputation, as well as aspects of contemporary Greek society, sexuality and women.Trade ReviewBalmer’s translations are the best I have read to date. She gives me the trace of a spirited, deed-minded, direct, guileless soul, and she modestly fulfils Boris Pasternak’s demand that “ideally translation too will be a work of art; sharing a common text, it will stand alongside the original, unrepeatable in its own right”. -- Christopher Logue * Literary Review *
£11.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Where Now Begins
Book SynopsisThese poems bear witness to the cycles of growth and decay that make up our lives. They are the work of a poet writing with an awareness of the seasonal circle closing, for the year and for herself. They are at once fearful, fragile and fearless in announcing ‘For now, we have October…/ October, lined with gold.’ They are also homages to the dead and the dying, and a reaching beyond the veil of the ‘now’ to a place where there is ‘nothing but nothing’. At times they are deeply personal, while still existing within the mythic and the impersonal, as when the recall of a room reflects the ‘casual, artless grouping of all longing’.Trade ReviewHardie’s skills as a lyric poet are second to none, and the meeting of that ability with the need to break new ground is productive of exceptional writing, reminiscent but by no means derivative of Elizabeth Bishop, in its combination of attention to detail and startling, subtly-worked-towards insight. -- Miriam Gamble * Poetry Ireland [on The Zebra Stood in the Night] *Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing. Hardie’s later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once… The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach. -- John McAuliffe * The Irish Times *A dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. -- Claire Askew * on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree *Table of Contents11 It’s a small tree, 12 Letters from the Dead 13 Now 14 Inishmaan 15 How She Disposes of Fear 16 Inhabitants 17 Into Light 18 Last Swim 19 Too Late for Sorry Now 20 Talking to My Stepson 21 Shasta Daisies 22 Voyeur 23 Losing It 24 Piseog 25 Taking the Weight 26 He talks to me about field trials 27 Time Passing 28 Real Estate 29 Day Lilies 30 Poem in a Circle 32 July Drought 33 Hymn 34 Rhyme for a Rhino 35 Blasted 36 The Inadequacy of Letters of Condolence 37 Mondrian Dream, Somewhere in Russia 38 On Reading Michael Longley’s Snow Water 39 Bolt the Shutter 40 Shopping 41 American Pastoral 42 April 43 Civil War Aftermath 44 ‘Peace is the root of all wars’ 45 Derry 46 Permission 48 Tide-turn on the Brittany Coast 49 The Stone at the Heart of a Pear 50 There’s More Than One of Us in Here 53 Depression 54 Escapology 55 On Revisiting Gallarus Oratory 56 ...what I call god 57 Sky Station, Skellig Michael 58 Crow-light 59 All Saints 60 All Soul’s Day, November the 2nd 61 Winter Solstice 62 Salt, Flame 63 Bird Talk 64 ‘and all shall be well’ 65 Eel-speak 67 The Emigrant’s Letter 68 Coats 70 Notes
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Resurrectionists
Book SynopsisThe living and the dead are working side by side in John Challis’s dramatic debut collection, The Resurrectionists. Whether in London’s veg and meat markets, far below the Dartford Crossing, or on the edge of the Western world, these poems journey into a buried and sometimes violent landscape to locate the traces of ourselves that remain. Amidst the political disquiet rising from the groundwater, or the unearthing of the class divide at the gravesides of plague victims, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest when a child is born, and something close to hope for the future is resurrected.Trade ReviewIn John Challis’s superb first collection, the past has not finished with us. It pursues and provokes and questions what we’re about. Entire vanished or vanishing worlds of work – on the East End docks, at Smithfield, in the pre-Murdoch print, at the wheel of a black cab – reveal vivid traffic between the living and the dead. In rich, urgent combinations of the dramatic and the lyric, Challis adds new energy to the poetry of history, in the tradition of Harrison, Smith, Dunn and Wainwright. In its embrace of both the political and the metaphysical, and in its tender regard for ordinary life the book is both timely and necessary.’ -- Sean O'BrienThese poems throw a great arc of light out of the city’s storeyed past into the present, place, trades, family, vulnerable fatherhood. Here, balanced at the very edge, where 'light will fall out of our language', John Challis shines his words into the workings of the heart and of nature, with all their unpredictable transformations. -- Imtiaz DharkerTable of Contents11 The Love 12 in my heart 13 To a Coal-fired Power Station 15 Plague Ground 17 Advertising 18 Preservation in Situ 19 This is the market 20 The Knowledge 22 Horses in Upton Park 24 Hansard 25 The Last Good Market 27 The District Line 28 Inside Time 29 Deadman’s Walk 32 Thames 33 The Origin of Coal 35 There may be thawing damage 36 Gift of the Gab 37 In Praise of the Flood 38 Things can only get better 39 Entrenched 40 B Road Lay-by 42 Where the devil gets in 43 All graves flung open 44 Ballad Night at Sgt Peppers 45 Sold at the roadside in hell 46 Resurrectionists 48 Into the Maze 50 The moth collector 52 Naming the Light 53 How to disable the alarm on a Saab 9000 54 North Cascades 56 Single Litre Engine 57 Driving home from hospital after the hottest day of the year 59 There’s been talk 60 Sleeping on the top floor of a Travelodge while below another night begins 61 Shade 62 Night Change 63 Hail! 65 The clear and present day 66 Prayer at the Edge of the West 69 Acknowledgements
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