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Poetry Books
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Border Zone
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. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents. His border territory ranges from Love in a Sceptred Isle, a novella-like narrative poem of a romance between Barbados-born photographer, Victor, and Welsh librarian, Rhiannon, told with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to Casanova the Philosopher, a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosophically observing 18th-century English ways in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue. This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegiac rub shoulders alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put – with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener – as well as calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry puts on his hat as ‘poetsonian’, a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a crucial strand of Agard’s varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.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 Magazine *John Agard's first book since he finally won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is typically cosmopolitan, with one eye on the past and the other on the present...readers – especially schoolteachers and their pupils – tend to love his work… This thought-provoking, puckish, tender book will not disappoint them. -- Rory Waterman * Times Literary Supplement, on Travel Light Travel Dark *In the year when we learnt of the damage and cruelty that the UK’s hostile-environment policies inflicted on the Windrush generation, John Agard strikes back with these cleverly crafted parables of an outsider. The little green man’s encounters and observations, his mix of wonder and wise caution, are given a voice that manages to be both naïve and incisive. -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times (Poetry Books of the Year 2018), on The Coming of the Little Green Man *Table of ContentsLove in a Sceptred Isle 11 Love in a Sceptred Isle Navigating Continents 35 Flag Speaks 39 Windrush Postscript 40 A Citizen’s Tale 41 Doing My Bit for Pomp and Pageantry 42 Gents of the Gentry 43 With the Accent on Accent 46 The Discharge of the Un-light Brigade 48 How Delroy Dee Lost His Job at English Heritage House 51 Wall Speaks 52 Diversity in de Market 53 Potato Speaks 55 Biscuit Speaks 56 Meeting Old Father Thames 59 Pythias the Greek in Britannia 62 The Migration of Coconut Water 66 We Mosquitoes 68 Devon Jamboy Frederiksted, de Last of de Danish West Indians 71 Ice Speaks 72 The Murmur of the Forest in an Adjective 74 Saluting Derek 76 Walt 78 Dear Michael 80 A Farewell to Poet James Berry’s Hat 81 Gone But Still Spring Cleaning 83 Three Siblings of the Word 85 The Creature Known as Michael Rosen 87 Namaste Mr Lear 89 My Little Guy, Says Edith Fawkes 90 Monsieur Voltaire Commits a Faux Pas in 18th-century England 93 Glorious Uncertainty in de Bedroom 96 Bards in White Flannels 97 Bowdlerising the Bard 98 Viagra in Me Cocoa 100 Erasmus in England, 1499 103 The Fool’s Yule 104 In Your Hands The Plants Are Staying Put 109 This Thing Called Gardening 115 Weeds 117 The Plants Are Staying Put 118 Lewes to London Post-lockdown Casanova the Philosopher 123 Casanova the Philosopher
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Crooked love: Grá fiar
Book SynopsisLouis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, following his selected poems, Rogha Dánta (2012), voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium. This new dual-language selection is mainly drawn from two other collections, Cúpla Siamach an Ama/The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar/Crooked Love, with translations made by Louis de Paor with Kevin Anderson and Biddy Jenkinson. It shows a paring back of language and a greater flexibility of form in his poetry, as well as a preoccupation with the passage of time and its implications for both familial and sexual love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence 'Lá dá raibh/One day', which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, collide. This was adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021.Trade ReviewThere is a great deal of narrative play and wit. The imagery is taken from common life as observed at first hand mostly, but transformed by a delight in resemblance and transformation… there is a Chagallian inclusiveness and generosity in the poems that is more than its incidents. The poetry can turn to darkness and the public world as well as to the intimate village or street. -- George Szirtes * Poetry Ireland Review, on The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue *While poetry should always be romantic (there never is a practical reason for the stuff) he always avoided the romanticism of the mushy line and the soft tone and the fuzzy diction. There was always something wire-taut about his work. No floss here. -- Alan Titley * The Irish Times *De Paor has for long been a master of the short lyric in which the literal and the figurative combine in a tight nexus of images that distil the character of a particular individual, relationship or encounter. The highly sensuous poems from the early collections set the scene for a body of work where sight and touch and smell are often invoked and where intense moments or intimate states are exposed by flashes of light or by dramatic physical contrast. The collection Rogha Dánta is a rich representation of the work of a poet who is now in his prime and still producing fresh and challenging poems that speak to and across different generations. It is a mark of major achievement and a sign that there is much more to come. -- Máirín Nic EoinTable of ContentsClár |Contents I Don gcéad ghlúin a mhairfidh tréis 8 | For the first generation to survive bhás na Gaeilge the death of Irish Caora finiúna 12 | Grapes Fuarán 16 | Fountain Iascaire is ea m’athair le ceart 20 | My father is a fisherman by right Cloigíní 24 | Bells Luascáin 28 | Swings II Multi-tasking 34 | Multi-tasking Hataí 38 | Hats off Bóithre 42 | Chaos theory Matamaitic 46 | Mathematics Lánúintí 48 | Couples Bratacha 52 | Flags Iníon Deichtine 54 | Deichtine’s daughter III Lá dá raibh… 56 | One day… IV Luck 102 | Luck Ar Oileán Bruny 108 | On Bruny Island Garbhach, Inis Cara 112 | Garbhach, Inis Cara Aesthetics 118 | Aesthetics Mise agus an leabhar i gCafé na Beatha 126 | The Book and I in Café de la Vie V Macalla 134 | Echoes Pluaiseanna 136 | Caverns Ar cuairt 142 | Visiting Rósanna 146 | Roses Téada 150 | Strings Paidir Ameiriceánach 154 | American prayer Nótaí 157 | Notes
£11.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Citizen: and the making of 'City'
Book SynopsisWhen Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.Trade ReviewCity's subject matter is urban, the technique a blend of the surreal, expressionist, realist and cubist, the whole thing almost cinematic in its abrupt transitions and dislocations… Most of the lineaments of Fisher's mature work are present in City…a remarkable achievement for a writer in his twenties. He sets out to write about an actual city but to "dissolve" its particulars and make them strange, until it becomes as much an inner perceptual field as a post-industrial Midlands wasteland… 'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more. -- August KleinzahlerFisher stands outside, or alongside, whatever else is happening, an English late modernist whose experiments tend to come off. He is a poet of the city – his native Birmingham, which he describes as "what I think with". He is a redeemer of the ordinary, often a great artist of the visible… His range is large: he suits both extreme brevity and book-length exploration; his seeming improvisations have a way of turning into architecture. The best place to start is The Long and the Short of It. It might look and sound like nothing on earth at first, but then it becomes indispensable. -- Sean O'Brien * The Guardian *Roy Fisher's The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010 should be read by anyone with a serious interest in post-war English poetry. -- William Wootten * Times Literary Supplement *I was proud to be able to choose his Selected Poems, The Long and the Short of It... as my book on Desert Island Discs, and I know that I'll be returning to that book over and over again in the next few weeks and months, now that one of the most important inhabitants of the island has gone. -- Ian McMillan * paying tribute to Roy Fisher *Table of ContentsIntroduction Note on texts The Citizen (1959) From a Citizen notebook (1960) Five city poems: The Fog at Birmingham Midlanders Sea Monster in Hospital Shed Where We Are Lost, Now City (1961) ‘CITY by Roy Fisher’ City (1969) Notes Roy Fisher’s published comments on City Secondary bibliography
£13.49
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Fairoz
Book SynopsisFairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. The book’s fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz’s thoughts, and pieces of dialogue. A folkloric representation of God and the devil acts as a wry counterpoint, touching on questions of morality. Fairoz is a powerful portrayal of human vulnerability.Trade ReviewShe is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday, so that we accept the miraculous as something we need… the overriding impression is of a deft, restrained language carrying ideas with a metaphysical wit and seriousness. -- Leonie Rushforth * London Magazine *One of the few British Poets whose work could currently be described as essential reading, not least as we try to grasp what fractures of cultural difference might have contributed to the July 7 bombings. -- Tim Robertson * Magma *Europa made the most difference to me as a writer. It showed me one way of writing about trauma and violence, how to circle around a central concern and explore it from different angles […] when I came to write my own poetry about violence I returned to this collection many times to study how it had been done before. -- Kim Moore * The North *Table of Contents11 Driving the devil away 12 In the present tense 14 Indoors 16 Hair 17 What do you do with a heap of stones? 18 ‘It was a house of female habitation’ 20 Questions in the wood 21 The Devil and the gleams 22 The Devil’s soup 23 The white cat 24 Not enchantment 25 In the morning 26 Home 27 Fairoz and Annat 29 As summer 30 School lunchtimes 31 Listening to Fairoz and Tahir 33 Pilgrims 35 Does the Devil know what he is? 36 The notice 37 When they meet 39 A story of God and the Devil 40 Ripe 41 Wolves-of-the-woods 42 What runs under her skin 43 She pictures Jannah 44 Absent and present 47 Her absences 49 ‘where the swarm is thickest’ 51 The dark patch 52 The plants 53 It was long ago 54 A conversation 56 A punch 58 Ice age 59 He’s ‘v v sorry’ 60 The short long story 61 The loping wolf 62 A tale reduced to a sliver 64 God’s eyelids 65 This woman will speak to you, he says 67 The bride 68 Gone 69 A task 71 The viewing 71 He was 72 The contest 73 A change 75 Classroom scorpions 77 Cherry stones 78 Who’s there? 79 DANGER 81 The eye 82 She’s heard nothing from Tahir 83 Call him three times 84 What’s real? 85 The Devil’s news 87 Witnesses 89 In the snow 90 Her whole life 91 Urgent question 92 Like a mark on her kameez 93 What she’d like to say 94 The room in her mind’s eye 95 The woods 96 Cold song 97 Her future 98 ‘Over every soul there is a watcher’ 99 My imagined Fairoz 102 Notes and acknowledgements
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Selected Poems
Book SynopsisFederico García Lorca, Spain’s greatest modern poet and dramatist, was murdered by Fascist partisans in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was by then an immensely popular figure, celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and at the height of his creative powers. After his death, with his work suppressed, he became a potent symbol of the martyrdom of Spain. The manuscript of Lorca’s last poems, his tormented Sonnets of Dark Love, disappeared during the Civil War. For fifty years the poems lived only in the words of the poets who had heard Lorca read them, like Neruda and Aleixandre, who remembered them as ‘a pure and ardent monument to love in which the prime material is now the poet’s flesh, his heart, his soul wide open to his own destruction’. Lorca’s lost sonnets were re-discovered in Spain during the 1980s, and this was the first book to include English translations of these brooding poems. Merryn Williams’ edition draws on the full range of Lorca’s poetry, from the early poems and the gypsy ballads to the agitated Poet in New York sequence and the Arab-influenced gacelas and casidas which followed his American exile. It includes the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorca’s great elegy for his bullfighter friend, as well as the full text of his famous lecture on the duende, the daemon of Spanish music, song, dance, poetry and art. In these remarkable translations, Lorca’s elemental poems are reborn in English, with their stark images of blood and moon, of water and earth; of bulls, horses and fish; olives, sun and oranges; knives and snow; darkness and death.Table of ContentsIntroduction 9 EARLY POEMS (1919-1925) Sueño 24 Dream Baladilla de los tres ríos 26 Little Ballad of the Three Rivers Paisaje 28 Landscape La guitarra 30 The Guitar Pueblo 32 Village Saeta 32 Saeta Camino 34 Journey Malagueña 34 Malagueña Nocturnos de la ventana (4) 36 Nocturnes of the Window (4) Arco de lunas 36 Arc of Moons Canción de jinete (1860) 38 Song of the Rider (1860) Canción de jinete 40 Song of the Rider La luna asoma 42 The Moon Comes Out Murió al amanecer 42 He Died at Dawn La soltera en misa 44 The Spinster at Mass Despedida 44 Farewell Suicidio 46 Suicide Granada y 1850 48 Granada and 1850 Dos marinos en la orilla 48 Two Sailors on the Beach Canción del naranjo seco 50 Song of the Barren Orange Tree Oda a Salvador Dalí 52 Ode to Salvador Dalí ROMANCERO GITANO / GYPSY BALLADS (1924-1927) Romance de la luna, luna 66 Ballad of the Moon, Moon Preciosa y el aire 68 Preciosa and the Wind Reyerta 70 The Fight Romance sonámbulo 74 Somnambular Ballad La monja gitana 78 The Gypsy Nun La casada infiel 80 The Faithless Wife Romance de la pena negra 84 Ballad of the Black Sorrow San Miguel (Granada) 86 St Michael (Granada) San Rafael (Córdoba) 90 St Raphael (Córdoba) San Gabriel (Sevilla) 92 St Gabriel (Sevilla) Prendimiento de Antoñito el Camborio en el camino de Sevilla 96 The Arrest of Tony Camborio on the Road to Sevilla Muerte de Antoñito el Camborio 100 The Death of Tony Camborio Romance del emplazado 102 Ballad of the Doomed Man Romance de la Guardia Civil española 106 Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard Thamar y Amnón 114 Thamar and Amnón POETA EN NUERVO YORK / POET IN NEW YORK (1929-30) Vuelta de paseo 126 Back from a Walk 1910 126 1910 El rey de Harlem 128 The King of Harlem Iglesia abandonada 136 Abandoned Church Danza de la muerte 138 Dance of Death Asesinato 142 Murder La aurora, New York 144 Daybreak, New York (oficina y denuncia) 146 (office and denunciation) Grito hacia Roma 150 Cry to Rome Oda a Walt Whitman 154 Ode to Walt Whitman Adán 162 Adam Son de negros en Cuba 164 Song of the Negroes in Cuba DIVÁN DEL TAMARIT (1936) Gacela del amor imprevisto 170 Gacela of Unforeseen Love Gacela de la terrible presencia 170 Gacela of the Terrible Presence Gacela del amor desesperado 172 Gacela of Desperate Love Gacela del niño muerto 174 Gacela of the Dead Child Gacela de la muerte oscura 174 Gacela of the Dark Death Gacela de la huída 176 Gacela of the Flight Casida del herido por el agua 178 Casida of One Wounded by the Water Casida del llanto 178 Casida of the Weeping Casida de la mujer tendida 180 Casida of the Reclining Woman Casida de la rosa 180 Casida of the Rose Casida de las palomas oscuras 182 Casida of the Dark Doves LLANTO POR IGNACIO SÁNCHEZ MEJÍAS / LAMENT FOR IGNACIO SÁNCHEZ MEJÍAS (1935) 1. La cogida y la muerte 188 The Tossing and the Death 2. La sangre derramada 190 The Spilled Blood 3. Cuerpo presente 196 The Body Laid Out 4. Alma ausente 198 Absent Soul SONETAS DEL AMOR OSCURO / SONNETS OF DARK LOVE (1935-1936) Soneto de la guirnalda de rosas 206 Sonnet of the Garland of Roses Soneto de la dulce queja 206 Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint Llagas de amor 208 The Wounds of Love Soneto de la carta 208 Sonnet of the Letter El poeta dice la verdad 210 The Poet Tells the Truth El poeta habla por teléfono con el amor 210 The Poet speaks to the loved one by telephone El poeta pregunta a su amor por la «Ciudad Encantada» de Cuenca 212 The Poet questions his lover on the ‘enchanted city’ of Cuenca Soneto gongorino en que el poeta manda a su amor una paloma 212 Gongorine sonnet in which the poet sends his loved one a pigeon ¡Ay voz secreta del amor oscuro! 214 ‘Ah, secret voice of dark love’ El amor duerme en el pecho del poeta 214 The loved one sleeps on the poet’s breast Noche del amor insomne 216 Night of Sleepless Love Juega y teoría del duende 221 Theory and Function of the Duende (1933) 232 Index of English titles and first lines 236 Index of Spanish titles and first lines
£11.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Broadlands
Book SynopsisThe poems of Matt Howard's Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present.
£10.80
Benediction Classics George MacDonald - Christian Writings (complete
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Poetry Wales Press Judas
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press The Lovely Disciplines
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press A Watchful Astronomy
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£9.49
Poetry Wales Press The Shaking City
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£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Karaoke King
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£9.49
Poetry Wales Press 163 Days
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Sanctuary
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning
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£10.44
Poetry Wales Press Hôtel Amour
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£12.34
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Oberon Book of Monologues for Black Actors:
Book SynopsisForeword by Kwame Kwei-Armah How many Black British plays can you name? Inspired by both classical and contemporary plays, The Oberon Book of Monologues for Black Actors gives readers an insight into some of the best cutting-edge plays written by black British playwrights, over the last sixty years. This collection features over twenty speeches by Britain’s most prominent black dramatists. The monologues represent a wide-range of themes, characters, dialects and styles. Suitable for young people and adults, each selection includes production information, a synopsis of the play, a biography of the playwright and a scene summary. The aim of this collection is that actors will enjoy working on these speeches, using them to help strengthen their craft, and by doing so, help to ensure these plays are always remembered.Table of ContentsCONTENTS CLASSICAL MONOLOGUES EPHRAIM Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Errol John) CRAGGE Skyvers (Barry Reckord) RINGO Smile Orange (Trevor Rhone) MAN Nice (Mustapha Matura) TONY Sweet Talk (Michael Abbensetts) GEORGE 11 Josephine House (Alfred Fagon) JACKSON Pantomime (Derek Walcott) CONTEMPORARY MONOLOGUES GERRY A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death (Fred D'Aguiar) AJ Two Step (Rhashan Stone) LEMN SISSAY Something Dark (Lemn Sissay) DONOVAN Boy With Beer (Paul Boakye) BROWN Blackta (Nathaniel Martello-White) PURPLE Brother to Brother (Michael McMillan) ANDRE The Westbridge (Rachel De-lahay) JUNIOR Statement of Regret (Kwame Kwei-Armah) KEHINDE Little Baby Jesus (Arinze Kene) CHUKS Fixer (Lydia Adetunji) KKK Bashment (Rikki Beadle-Blair) BANZA Two Horsemen ('Biyi Bandele-Thomas) PRIN OSUN Pandora's Box (Ade Solanke) UNNAMED Black T-Shirt Collection (Inua Ellams) BEN B is for Black (Courttia Newland) YINKA The Estate (Oladipo Agboluaje) JOE Joe Guy (Roy Williams) SIMON Pure Gold (Michael Bhim)
£13.37
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Dead Dogs
Book SynopsisA young man lives alone with his mother and his beloved dog in a house in a small village overlooking the fjord. The dog has run off and gone missing. This has never happened before... In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the direction of their future. Fosse’s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters’ relationships.
£13.93
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Future Show
Book SynopsisThe Future Show is a piece that tells the story of Deborah’s future, starting from the end of the performance and going until the end of her life, that is consistently re-written to be both site and time specific. It is a Sisyphean task of a show, examining the mundane, the uncertain, and the fragility of our futures. The Future Show toured internationally for two years, with a new script written for every iteration. It has been performed in the USA, Canada, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Ireland and throughout the UK. With an Introduction by Tim Etchells, Founder of Forced Entertainment The Future Show was developed with a grant from Arts Council England and with support-in-kind from BAC, Amhurst Republic and MAKE in Ireland.Trade ReviewA testament to Pearson's astonishing skill as a writer. -- Andrew Haydon * What's on Stage *
£14.21
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Gary Owen: Collected Plays: Violence and Son; Iphigenia in Splott; Blackthorn; In the Pipeline; Mrs Reynolds and the Ruffian; Love Steals Us From Loneliness; Mum & Dad
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£20.89
Granta Books Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Refractive Africa is a set of three poems ruminating on diasporic witness, colonialism, invasion, and political resistance. This 'pas de trois' of poems begins paying homage to Amos Tutuola, innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author, and ends with a speech towards modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. The collection turns around the long middle poem, using the geographical site of the Congo river as a lens for considering the pillaging and dislocation of societies through history, honing-in on the specific colonial and post-colonial histories of the area. He welds these to contemporary instances of ecological damage through mining for tin and cobalt. Fierce, compelling, and full of astrological reckoning, this book is a 'savage enunciation': 'this is the Congo vertiginous with derangement with its foul & delimited hygiene with its "weaver bird nests" with its sprawling grasslands with its "ghostly voltage" as flares from old oil rigs thus our intelligence forcibly blunted our thought stream injured as culpable integument within this compound negation terror persists snaking its way through interior suppression'Trade ReviewWill Alexander's Refractive Africa is a diasporic invocation of world-historical and cosmological dimensions. Lumumba. Tutuola. Rabearivelo. Each long poem swelters, pulling a dense constellation of national heroes, ruptured worlds, hauntings, and sensory frequencies into its orbit. Through a glissade of luminous dexterity and precision, Alexander maps out a lexical cartography of Africas, real and imagined, lost and recovered. -- Momtaza MehriSince the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. Here, three long poems evoke colonial Africa * New York Times *Will Alexander's Refractive Africa crackles with the assurance of a worldview that eschews the studs of "foreign domination'. Referencing African icons, ideologies and injuries, Alexander draws us into a feast of definition and redefinition, with a revelry in language, "alive with ferocious embellishment" -- Nii Ayikwei ParkesThere is likely no poetry more propulsive, visually kinetic, and intricately layered than that composed by Will Alexander... an imaginative realm that is entirely unlike any other, one in which we are immersed in sheer, coruscating energy -- Albert Mobilio * Hyperallergic *This visionary act of "transpersonal witness" to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants... An incantation against "Eurocentric stultification", Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation * Guardian *...powerful and visionary...The collection sings from the page; it celebrates, it prophecises, and it revels in the great spirits of Africa's national heroes and literary giants. Alexander's writing is awash with innovation, ably straddling a world which is all too familiar, and a sparkling one of imagination... Refractive Africa is a bold and dazzling culmination of his contemporary thinking, and is an astonishing leap into the UK market * The Skinny *A powerful meditation on the colonial ravagings of the continent and the modern quest for resources that continues to tax its wilderness... An electrifying display of narrative power through chiselled poetic lines. * Happy Mag *Alexander's diegesis is one of chimerical fission and transformation... Everything is volatile and alchemical here ... Displaying great lexical elasticity and riverine agility, he choreographs a masterful 'ballet of the forgotten' ('The Congo'), revealing a lexical cartography of incorruptible reclamation * Poetry Review *
£10.44
Carcanet Press Ltd To Fold the Evening Star: New & Selected Poems
Book SynopsisIan McMillan is among Britain's most treasured living poets. His books of poems, stories and non-fiction have delighted audiences for almost forty years. To Fold the Evening Star gathers work from eight key collections, distilling an essence of McMillan's diversiform poetry and short prose. Hilarity and tenderness, gravity and light, are interwoven into a bountiful poetic fibre. Brought up to date by a series of new and previously unpublished work, To Fold the Evening Star will satisy both the curious newcomer and the familiar reader alike, providing an ample, lively assortment of the work.Trade Review'A force of nature.' Guardian. 'Inching towards the status of a National Treasure.' Andy Kershaw. 'World-class - one of today's greatest poetry performers.' Carol Ann Duffy. 'It's impossible not to like McMillan. If they made him Poet Laureate on Friday, a lot more people would be reading poetry by Monday.' Guardian. 'An inspiring figure, an encouraging & democratic spirit, a strong & popular poet and one of the funniest people in Britain.' Poetry News. 'The verbal gymnastics of a north country Spike Milligan coupled with the comic timing of Eric Morecambe.' Frome Festival. 'The John Peel of poetry.' Alec Finlay
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Zoology
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose `heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us `in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. `Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, `where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb `birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby `in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. `Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that `flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: `a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.Trade Review'Gillian Clarke is one of the most widely respected and deeply loved poets in the world' - Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate; 'Gillian Clarke's [poems] ring with lucidity and power... Clarke's work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' - Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems: 1991-2000
Book SynopsisAfter his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.Trade Review'Praised as a magical genius, cursed as an obscure joker, John Ashbery writes poetry like no one else' The Independent
£17.00
Carcanet Press Ltd The Multiverse
Book SynopsisThe Multiverse, Andrew Wynn Owen’s first book of poems, sings of science, philosophy, and religion, testing the emotional valences of each. It sings in a variety of strictly observed metres and with rhyme. The poems find their way into memory as sense and sound. The Multiverse celebrates human curiosity. The poet is an enthusiast – for the visible world, for scientific and philosophical excursions.Trade Review`To enter Andrew Wynn Owen’s The Multiverse is to enter a world ringing with harmonic patterning, where past and close future are active simultaneously, where rhyme gathers and spins off the edges of intricate thought, where observation and meditation fire together with striking formal ease and precision. Hard to believe this is really a first full collection.’ - Jane Draycott; `Andrew Wynn Owen’s impressive debut collection has the crafted confidence of a poet who has inherited the stylistic techniques of Auden, Hardy, Herbert and all those forebears who placed their trust in poetry’s lyrical birthright. The shapes and structures of intricately patterned verse feel like a natural form of expression for Wynn Owen, prompting and provoking a flexibility of language and a fluidity of thought appropriate to the bewildering and beguiling multiplicities of our contemporary world. Within those controlled outlines he showcases an extraordinary versatility of tone and feeling.’ - Simon Armitage; `Never once forbidding, the poems in The Multiverse still add up to something overwhelming. […] Wynn Owen’s effortless superabundance, in imagery, style, and formal invention, concentrates rather than diffuses an undaunted, hyper-alert and profound sense of the world’s weight.’ - Peter McDonald; `Andrew Wynn Owen’s virtuosic exploration of the variable resources of stanza form is a timely reminder (in a period of relative non-thinking in poetry) of all the ways in which the mind can engage with metrical language. These exhilarating poems bob, weave and dazzle in ways that we are used to in the best intellectual poets of the 17th century. And while Wynn Owen is unafraid to probe complex questions thrown up by science and philosophy, at the heart of his poetry is a redeeming and infectious love of life: above all, the poems in this big important book are lucid, eloquent and joyful.’ - John Fuller
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Swimming Chenango Lake: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisWilliam Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: `He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’ Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw `the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.’ Tomlinson’s take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of `sensuous cerebration’ as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.Trade Review`Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. His quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come.’ - Edward Hirsch
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Discipline
Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation. In Discipline, her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn’t and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art, with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist. The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. They bristle with striking details and observations. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: `Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt’.
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Salvage At Twilight
Book SynopsisThe poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with 'Deposition', a harrowing elegy in five parts: the beloved endures 'her Nile of pain'; the lover attends as she is treated, the last scene postponed until the two selves are quite differently refined. His editor has written, 'Dan Burt's poetry, like his prose, explores themes unusual in contemporary literature, using a language that is precise, nuanced and mordant. And he risks traditional forms, his sonnets and quatrains mastered and masterful.'Trade Review'His language is terse to the point of brutality; the verbs ferocious, often monosyllabic; his core conviction, formed by the history of the twentieth century and a lifetime in a non-literary world, is of 'the curtain falling on the Enlightenment'.' - Elaine Feinstein; 'Full of hard-won wisdom and beautiful lines, it's testament to the transforming power of poetry.' - Suzy Feay, The Independent; 'The writing can hover and dance. It has genuine grace.' - George Szirtes
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Gaudent Angeli
Book SynopsisWhat is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate. Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.Trade Review'O'Malley is a true artist in sketching the beautiful, small details without which the essence of place, and the identity dependent on it, can be all too easily erased.' - Eavan Boland
£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd A Map Towards Fluency
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. A Map Towards Fluency, Lisa Kelly's first collection, considers words, the power they impart, the power their absence withholds. Forgetting, mis-hearing, mis-remembering all challenge the imagination to find ways round and ways through. `The idea of fluency interests me - and whether we can ever claim fluency in any language.' Her mother speaking Danish - which she cannot herself understand - is familiar and yet alienating: how Danish can she herself be when she cannot hear her mother's tongue with understanding? Her own attempts with British Sign Language are another challenge, a form of translation of sense in the absence of sound. `I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How ca form not matter?' The poems touch on these themes in various ways, not least in what they do with form.Trade Review'Lisa Kelly's poems are every bit attentive as they are inventive. Whether on hearing and deafness, or amongst oysters and aphids, she writes with an instinctive and joyful aplomb, which is unafraid of stretching the possibilities of language itself.' - Jane Commane; 'Lisa Kelly searchingly translates for us the intimate connections between language and the body, between symbol and experience.' - Jane Draycott
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Homunculus
Book SynopsisHomunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.Trade Review'On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.' - Sean O'Brien
£10.44
Y Lolfa Out at the Bright Edge - Poetry from the Land
Book SynopsisOut at the Bright Edge is a collection of poetry rooted in North Ceredigion. The poems in this collection describe and respond to the landscape and history of the area from the Dyfi to the Teifi. They deal with ideas through a focus on place, capturing memorable moments in specific locations and celebrating an area of outstanding natural beauty and its long history.
£6.64
Vintage Publishing Antiemetic for Homesickness
Book Synopsis*Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize 2021**Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2021: A 'tour-de-force'**An Irish Times and Poetry School Book of the Year 2020*'A day will come when you won't missthe country na nagluwal sa 'yo.'- 'Antiemetic for Homesickness'The poems in Romalyn Ante's luminous debut build a bridge between two worlds: journeying from the country 'na nagluwal sa 'yo' - that gave birth to you - to a new life in the United Kingdom. Steeped in the richness of Filipino folklore, and studded with Tagalog, these poems speak of the ache of assimilation and the complexities of belonging, telling the stories of generations of migrants who find exile through employment - through the voices of the mothers who leave and the children who are left behind. With dazzling formal dexterity and emotional resonance, this expansive debut offers a unique perspective on family, colonialism, homeland and heritage: from the countries we carry with us, to the places we call home.'Moving, witty and agile' Observer'By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart' Irish TimesTrade ReviewBy turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart -- Seán Hewitt * The Irish Times *Best Poetry Books of 2020* *Captivating...playful...moving, witty and agile...These poems have a tended quality, as though Ante's kindness as a nurse extended to them. She is an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude, not neglecting to see her situation within a wider cultural and historical context -- Kate Kelloway * Observer *Poetry Book of the Month* *A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience -- Tracy K. SmithRomalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with. A flower of both the Philippines and the Black Country, her vivid, sensual poems weave a fascinating and moving story of migration and loss, caring and tenderness -- Liz Berry[A] tour-de-force * Jhalak Prize *What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the “invisible…goddesses of caring and tending” in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our "dislocated world" with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with “the rhythm of a shockable heart.” -- R.A. VillanuevaAnte's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection -- Stephanie Sy-Quia * Times Literary Supplement *Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one's family, speaking a language not quite your own... This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year -- Maria Lewandowska * The Poetry School *Poetry Books of the Year* *Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one's life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems' polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers -- Holly Loveday * Wild Court *Romalyn Ante's debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone's mind of what it is to migrate from one's home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor -- Shaun Anto * Columbia Journal *Ante has an assured hand, with a mastery of form and freshness of vision... these are poems that pay testimony to Ante's deep sense of humanity, authenticity, and caring, together with a desire to make the best of what life brings -- Mary Mulholland * The Alchemy Spoon *The 35 poems in this collection document stories of yearning as well as pluck and hard love... I'm rewarded with the privilege of witnessing how the poet-speaker's attention and empathy for others in the world continues to generously unfold -- Luisa A. Igloria * RHINO *Ante is an adept artist who can seamlessly internalise the external and externalise the internal... This collection is also a treatise on mothering, un-mothering, and more significantly, remothering. The book is dedicated to Ante's mother, whose presence in many forms is palpable and penetrating -- Cuilin Sang * Poetry Birmingham *The collection shines a welcome light on a too-often overlooked community, whose hard work and dedication to keeping the NHS afloat -- both before the pandemic and more so now -- puts this country enormously in debt -- Stella Backhouse * Here Comes Everyone *
£11.67
Anthem Press Sexual Violence and Literary Art
Book SynopsisWritten by a practising poet and novelist who has close experience of the subject matter and has published creative work in the areas being examined, Sexual Violence and Literary Art is a wide-ranging study, covering carefully selected works from Ovid through Shakespeare to Pope, Richardson, Shelley, Hardy, Nabokov and beyond. It addresses the necessary complicity of any representation in what is represented, by examining ways in which canonical male writers have attempted to evoke and address representations of sexual violence in poetry, prose fiction, and poetic drama in light of women's philosophical, theoretical and critical responses to these works of literary art.
£80.00
Jessica Kingsley Publishers Using Poetry to Promote Talking and Healing
Book SynopsisPoetry can prove a great way into difficult conversations in therapeutic, classroom or family settings. This book is a clear and practical guide to the use of poetry as a therapeutic tool to help explore issues surrounding mental health and emotional wellbeing.The first part of the book provides guidance on different methods of using poetry to open up discussion. The second part consists of a collection of over 100 poems written by the author, on topics such as bullying, anxiety, bereavement, depression and eating disorders, with a range of therapeutic activities that can be used alongside each poem. The third part focuses on ways to support and encourage clients to write their own poetry and includes 50 poem writing prompts and examples.A complete resource for anyone considering using poetry to explore difficult issues, and a creative way of exploring important mental health issues in PSHE lessons, this book will be of interest to youth, school and adult counsellors, therapists, psychologists, pastoral care teams, PSHE co-ordinators and life coaches, as well as parents.Trade ReviewPoetry's many attributes include the capacity to absorb secrets and express pain too deep to talk about. Its ability to be a creative and healing tool for poets of all life stages and ages is as limitless as your imagination. Pooky's timely, easy-to-read and user-friendly book explores how the writing and reading of poetry can be a valuable resource for communicating with the self and others. -- June Alexander, mental health advocate and author of Using Writing as a Therapy for Eating DisordersAt last! A book that values and uses poetry as a therapeutic tool, as a way of helping us make sense of ourselves. Unlike so many stereotypes about poetry, this book is practical, unpretentious and heartfelt, with applications for helping people - young and old - way beyond mental health settings. Pooky Knightsmith has opened a very creative box for us to use. -- Nick Luxmoore, school counsellor and author of Horny and Hormonal, Feeling Like Crap and Working with Anger and Young PeopleIf you are "poetry-impaired" like me, Dr. Knightsmith's book is a revelation. Poetry is a language many of my depressed and suicidal adolescent clients speak fluently, but one I have never had much confidence using in my therapy. This beautiful, honest, and instructive book has given me another tool to use in my work. -- Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Loyola University, Chicago School of Social Work and coauthor of Suicide in Schools: A Practitioner's Guide to Multi-level Prevention, Assessment, Intervention, and PostventionWhoever you are, whatever you do, here is a profoundly personal and moving insight into the world of emotional and mental ill-health. But this book is much more than that. Whilst many will identify with the dark depths of emotion within her poems, Dr Knightsmith's greatest achievement is in offering teachers, carers and friends not only a valuable resource to enable empathy, but also a starting point to aid and encourage recovery. -- Dick Moore, Retired Head Teacher and Trainer for the Charlie Waller Memorial TrustThis is a remarkable and original book. Pooky's poems, born out of her own experience and that of those she has worked with, offer us real insight into the complexities of living with and recovering from mental ill-health. The careful structure of the book encourages exploration of relevant themes and is a welcome addition to supporting recovery, when used within a therapeutic setting. -- Jessica Streeting MA, School Nurse and Advisor to Public Health England (www.schoolhealthstreet.co.uk)In this informative and powerful text, Pooky shows us how we can find our voice within the poetic words of others and in the creation of our own poetry. Poetry offers a medium of self-expression that captures so much more than words and rationale. As such, poetry offers an ideal place to find empathy, meaning and solace. To believe that "someone else understands, and someone else is listening." -- Dr Helen Street, applied social psychologist and educator, The Positive Schools InitiativeThis is a remarkable resource not only for therapists but also for teachers of English, creative writing and drama. The prompts for discussion are very varied and raise issues of technique and the impact of a writer's choices as well as subject matter. The sections defining poetic forms and providing ways in to writing are brilliant for the classroom, and then there is the astonishing anthology ... -- Jane Bunclark, Head of Academic Drama, West Buckland School, DevonThis is an incredibly impressive and valuable book. Given its powerful and personal insight, it will in my view be perfect for use with professional therapists working one-to-one with clients. While the book is rightly intended for use in a one-to-one setting and not in the classroom, I have learnt much from reading it which will influence my work with the PSHE Association. -- Jenny Barksfield, Deputy CEO and Senior Subject Specialist, PSHE AssociationUsing Poetry to Promote Talking and Healing is a humble guide for both professionals of mental health and the public in general. By providing a heart-warming insight of a very personal experience, Pooky Knightsmith allows the reader to identify himself with the ordinary struggles of human existence in an effortless manner. An undeniable prolific written testimony of ascendancy and bravery, this book is a major trigger to personal change. The reader - and artist-to-be of its own piece of life story - is invited to set himself free of inner criticism and follow its instincts. The book offers an unexpected myriad of creative tools able to facilitate the expression of feelings. A specially worthwhile reading for any mental health professional eager to introduce creative possibilities in the therapeutic context. These tools might well work as the preface of a joint story written between therapist and client. -- Sofia Correia Alegria * SENcology blog *Table of ContentsForeword. Part 1. Using poetry as a way in: Ideas, strategies and techniques. I. Using poetry as a therapeutic tool. II. Poetry as a vehicle to discuss our feelings less directly. III. Poetry as a means for reflection. IV. Poetry as a means of exploring what we could do next. V. Poetry as a way to show someone how we're feeling. VI. Poetry as a reassurance that we are not alone in how we feel. VII. Writing poetry as part of recovery. Part 2. An anthology of discussion starting poems. I. Abuse and Bullying. Same Lyrics, Different Song. Cyberbullied. Iron Gaze. The End, Maybe. Abused. Frozen Out. Walking Away. Betrayed. II. Anxiety and Panic. Anxiety. Feelings of Anxiety. Panic Rising. Stage Fright. Panic Attack. Scared. Sleepless Nights. Ruled by Anxiety. III. Loss and Bereavemment. A New Hand to Hold. Before and After. Healing Hand. Leftover Love. Life Unbidden. But You Died. Nana's Wishes. Last Week's Flowers. Is It Better to have Loved and Lost. Scars. IV. Depression. the Tree Who Couldn't. The Shadow. Dark. Head Fight. Numb. Creeping Ivy. Rose Tinted. Matter over Mind. And So She Drank. Highs and Lows. Peaks and Ditches. Good Days, Bad Days. Don't Step into the Darkness. Outwardly Smiling. Other Worlds. The Same but Different. Always Falling. V. Eating Disorders and Body Image. Please Eat. A Father's View. Conversation with an Anorexic. Boy Anorexic. Recovery. FAT. Anorexia. Grandmaster or Life?. Hollows. The Girl and the Mirror. Scales. If You Could See What I See. Shopping for Magic. VI. Obsessions, Compulsions and Intrusive Thoughts. Intrusive Thoughts. The Voice of Hate. Recoevring Fate. Imaginary Friends. Invasive Thoughts. VII. Self-Harm. Fading Scars. Again. Conversation with a Self-Harmer. Finding Ways to Belong. Fresh Blood. VIII. Suicide. By His Own Hand. That Day. Beautiful Nature. Late. Do Not Fall. IX. Recovery. The Crest of a Wave. Kintsugi (Beauty in Broken). Marble in Jar. Thinking Forwards. X. Supporting and Listening. Helping Hand. Calmer Waters. A Disappointing Visit. Self-Esteem. Listening Ear. You Didn't Ask. How Are You?. Cuddles: The Best Medicine. It's Not Easy Being Friends Sometimes. Depression. Help Me to be a Better Friend. Trying to Help. Kind Words are Not Always Heard. Hidden Scars. Healing Hold. Part 3. Encouraging and Enablling Therapeutic Poetry Writing. I've never written a poem before. I'd rather write prose. I don't know anything about poetry.What I write will be rubbish. I don't know what to write. I don't have time. I'm too embarrassed to show anyone. Enjoy the process!. I. Poetic Forms. Form 1: Haiku. Form 2: Sonnet. Form 3: Acrostic. Form 4: Golden Shovel. Form 5: Terza Rima. Form 6: Rubáiyát. Form 7: Anaphora. Form 8: Pyramid. II. Poetry Prompts. Prompt 1: Dear me...Prompt 2: Something that scares you. Prompt 3: Confusing figure of speech. Prompt 4: A Haiku from your window. Prompt 5 - The last line changes everything. Prompt 6 - An unlikely thank you. Prompt 7 - An antidote to nightmares. Prompt 8 - First phrase, last phrase. Prompt 9 - Open with a question. Prompt 10 - The street where you grew up. Prompt 11 - Light and dark. Prompt 12 - No punctuation. Prompt 13 - Describe a smell. Prompt 14 - The meaning of life. Prompt 15 - School days. Prompt 16 - A set of instructions. Prompt 17 - Admiration acrostic. Prompt 18 - Rhyme and reason. Prompt 19 - How we met. Prompt 20 - Strip tease. Prompt 21 - Love is...Prompt - 22 - One word title. Prompt 23 - Fragile friendships. Prompt 24 - Extended metaphor. Prompt 25 - Your 100th birthday. Prompt 26 - Time difference. Prompt 27 - Screensaver. Prompt 28 - Apology. Prompt 29 - Simple pleasures. Prompt 30 - Twelve lines long. Prompt 31 - Doors. Prompt 32 - Favorite color. Prompt 33 - Good news. Prompt 34 - Life lesson. Prompt 35 - New beginning. Prompt 36 - Reprimand. Prompt 37 - Pyramid. Prompt 38 - Forwards backwards. Prompt 39 - Climbing. Prompt 40 - Heirloom. Prompt 41 - The wrong response. Prompt 42 - Loss of sense. Prompt 43 - Stigma. Prompt 44 - Harm and Hope. Prompt 45 - Controversial. Prompt 46 - Happy sad. Prompt 47 - Unlikely Haiku. Prompt 48 - Twenty nine. Prompt 49 - Holding hands. Prompt 50 - Random word.Final Thoughts from Pooky.
£23.07
Canterbury Press Norwich The Vanishing Song
Book SynopsisIn The Vanishing Song, trans Christian poet Jay Hulme goes in search of what is all but lost in contemporary faith, the ‘beautiful and holy and wild’ way of the saints, and the alluring, perplexing mystery of the places they chose for themselves – forests, caves, rocky outcrops in the sea. Revelling in the untamed nature of creation and the holiness that is to be found there, these poems celebrate and summon the spirit of those who did unhinged things for God, in order that we might recover a sense of uncontrollable wonder and the danger of the divine as well as its beauty. The Vanishing Song is a call of the wild to faith that is adventurous and unafraid.Trade Review‘Some things can only be expressed in poetry. Jay Hulme’s poems offer otherwise inexpressible truth. My head is bursting with their beauty as they awaken in their reader that of which they speak.' -- Claire Gilbert, author of I Julian'An astonishing collection, at the same time humorous and tender, joyous and sensitive, exploring aspects of the divine from a deeply human perspective.’ -- Joanne Harris‘These shatteringly beautiful poems testify that life, death and resurrection are always tightly entangled, and that God will persist after all the stones and bones have crumbled.’ -- Professor Susannah Cornwall‘Jay makes the numinous real.’ -- Dr Nicolete Burbach
£10.44
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Blow Off
Book Synopsis"I’m not going to tell you her hair colour. Her skin colour. Her name. All you need to know, right now, is that she is a person.” An explosive new piece of guerilla-gig-theatre from Julia Taudevin (‘one of the most exciting forces in Scottish theatre’ Scotsman) and Kim Moore with Susan Bear and Julie Eisenstein from Glasgow's hottest indie-pop duo Tuff Love. This fierce and playful feminist work explores the psychology of extremism with haunting melodies and progressive punk riffs.
£8.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Seanmhair
Book SynopsisSeanmhair (feminine: Scots Gaelic) Grandmother A chance meeting between two children on the streets of Edinburgh leads to a terrible reckoning, leaving Jenny and Tommy forever bound together by blood and fate. Brutal and beautiful, Hywel John's remarkable new play glimmers and cuts like a jewel, fusing raw epic romance with guttural urban poetry to tell the story of a secret generational legacy of love, violence and fury.Trade Reviewthis isn't a gentle, reflective play about a mundane relationship. It's a cable downed in a hurricane, thrashing and sparking in the wet and windy street... there's little to fault here. Seanmhair is an exciting, volatile new play deserving of wider audiences.' Fest Mag ???? 'A striking new work that suddenly shifts from domestic memoir into thriller territory. The Stage ????
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Devil with the Blue Dress
Book SynopsisExhuming the little blue dress that launched the biggest media circus of a generation, this barbed spin on a political drama conjures the five women who collided in what became known as The Lewinsky Scandal. Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky find themselves centre stage in a theatrical feat that takes us through the corridors of power and behind the closed doors where the abuse of that power took place. Devil with the Blue Dress grapples with one of the most challenging questions in American political history: How do we respond to women seeking power, and the men who abuse it?
£13.93
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Kind of People
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£12.28
Liverpool University Press Minor Greek Tragedians, Volume 1: The Fifth
Book SynopsisFor the modern world Greek tragedy is represented almost entirely by those plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides whose texts have been preserved since they were first produced in the fifth century BC. From that period and the next two hundred years more than eighty other tragic poets are known from biographical and production data, play-titles, mythical subject-matter, and remnants of their works quoted by other ancient writers or rediscovered in papyrus texts. This edition includes all the remnants of tragedies that can be identified with these other poets, with English translations, related historical information, detailed explanatory notes and bibliographies. Volume 1 includes some twenty 5th-century poets, notably Phrynichus, Aristarchus, Ion, Achaeus, Sophocles’ son Iophon, Agathon and the doubtful cases of Neophron (author of a Medea supposedly imitated by Euripides) and Critias (possibly author of three other tragedies attributed to Euripides). Volume 2 will include the 4th- and 3rd-century tragedians and some anonymous material derived from ancient sources or rediscovered papyrus texts.Remnants of these poets’ satyr-plays are included in a separate Aris & Phillips Classical Texts volume, Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (2013).Trade Review‘The most valuable element of the volume is the introductory discussions for each author and for each title, as well as the commentary notes to the testimonies and fragments.' Felice Stama, Bryn Mawr Classical Review ‘Our general opinion on Cropp's work is highly positive: well documented, scientifically up-to-date and rigorous, but at the same time easy to consult.’ Paolo B. Cipolla, Exemplaria Classica (translated from Italian).‘The clear translations, appropriately designed commentaries, and especially the excellent introductions to the individual poets and plays, in which Cropp includes both older and recent interpretations, while frequently adding his own thought-provoking suggestions, will find a grateful readership.’ Hauke Schneider, Gymnasium (translated from German)Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionTragedy in the fifth century: a sketchSourcesThis editionTexts, Translations and NotesThespis (TrGF 1) Choerilus (TrGF 2) Phrynichus (TrGF 3) Pratinas (TrGF 4) Polyphrasmon (TrGF 7) Aristias (TrGF 9) Euphorion, Euaeon (TrGF 12, 13) Aristarchus (TrGF 14) Neophron (TrGF 15) Euripides I, II (TrGF 16, 17) Ion (TrGF 19) Achaeus (TrGF 20) Iophon (TrGF 22)Philocles I (TrGF 24) Xenocles I (TrGF 33) Agathon (TrGF 39) Critias? (TrGF 43) Diogenes of Athens (TrGF 45) Abbreviations and references Indexes (Poets; Titles; Sources; General)
£104.02
Liverpool University Press The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes
Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Summer Choice, Recommended Translation 2019. In The Cancer Journals Audre Lorde wrote, ‘I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilise into yet another silence, not to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined.’ Founded on this same principle, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes was written in the three months following Dutch writer Lieke Marsman’s cancer diagnosis. A series of short poems anchored by an essay that speaks directly to Lorde’s journal entries and personal reflections on cancer, Marsman considers, among other things, the state of contemporary Dutch politics and – via Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor – the rhetoric surrounding her disease. A work of poetry, social criticism and autobiography, The Following Scan is an honest and dryly comic account of a period in the author’s life that elides pretension in search of autonomy and self-knowledge. Beautifully translated by the poet Sophie Collins, the book also includes a translator’s note in the form of a letter to her author and friend.Trade ReviewFor previous work: 'Lieke Marsman is one to watch – and not only in poetry.' De VolkskrantFor previous work: 'Lieke Marsman is without doubt an enormous talent.' De Groene AmsterdammerFor previous edition: 'The intrigue in Marsman’s work can be found in the way she peers through the layers of culture and everyday gestures.' Vrij Nederland'This is the work of two remarkable poets in collaboration and conversation. Lieke Marsman has evolved a stringent poetics of limit and capacity, of body and language and self. The scan is a metaphor for Marsman’s particular quality of attention - committed and complete.' Lavinia GreenlawFor previous edition: ‘Ten poems and an essay about cancer, for which Marsman was treated. But it is also about so much more: about loneliness, being on benefits, economic sensationalism and freedom of expression.’ NRC Handelsblad‘What this [essay] section adds to the book is something that is rarely present in translated works – the relationship between a writer and their translator…and the final book is ultimately a genuine collaboration.’ Platon Poulas, Pendora Magazine‘Between them these two authors have produced a remarkable hybrid sort of book, grown from the astonishingly rich soil of empathetic response to others, expressive of a range of human intimacies as well as a variety of angers at the way individuals – and society – too easily succumb to blinkered self-interest and self-immuration.’ Martyn Crucefix‘The poems speak plainly and think plainly and that is their power as translated by Collins, but their effect is to offer a multi-dimensional set of reports, contemplations and intense but underplayed tensions. It isn’t a normal book of poetry, but it is certainly poetry and despite its plainness and nakedness there is little like it.’George Szirtes, Poetry Book Society‘Marsman’s and Collins’ collaboration packs a punch, and is mightily worthy of its Poetry Book Society Recommendation.’ Afric McGlinchey, Orbis ‘Lieke Marsman and Sophie Collins have written a work that embodies a deep affection and attentiveness to the lives they have led, and the world we live in is better for it.’ Kyle Lovell, Stride‘Beyond the poems themselves – which are an achievement – and their sparkling social criticism, this is the book’s greatest gift: a model of how to how to read, write, and speak with one another, despite our different languages, in the face of ‘the loneliest experience there is’.’ Theophilus Kwek, Modern Poetry in Translation‘This is a treasure of a book, uplifting and courageous, with many of the qualities of a trusted companion; honesty, humour and empathy.’ Jane Swanson, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Marsman’s poems crackle with dry insight, discerning yet anxious, flirting with that well-timed moment whenever the joke must end; her unflinching rhetoric neither sentimentalises death nor shies away from the accessible comforts of life. [...] The satirical wit and self-reflexivity in Marsman’s persuasive poems jabs its fingers right into a certain faddish Western class-anxiety but the narrator never lets us forget. [...]Through letters written to Marsman, Collins tackles issues including shame and autonomy, as well as criticising the mechanical and patriarchal language of contemporary review culture. These cerebral disclosures become valuable spaces allowing us to encounter, through a one-sided conversation, a translation process no longer hidden; the amount of space given to Collins feels powerful, made more so by the absence of Marsman’s (presumed, but never seen) responses. Although Collins writes about self-doubt and anxiety, there is an absolute certitude in her beliefs about how the field of translation can become more conscientious; through her work Collins has undoubtedly lifted herself from a “neutral entity” into an active participant in the most crucial dialogues surrounding Anglophone poetry translation today. [...]These are timely books adamant about candidly highlighting their own assemblies. [...] Instead they offer rewarding new ways of seeing translations as poetic sites of engagement with the subversive. The visibility of their translators places everybody involved on a level that resists traditional hierarchies, gender roles and capitalist understanding: they revolt against fluency and, in doing so, tap into a pocket of structural-societal questioning that refuses to be minimised or made invisible.'Jay G. Ying, The Poetry Society
£13.49
Tonya Baldwin Freedom (A Southern Girl's Truth)
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£13.99
CompletelyNovel.com Impressions of an English Woodland
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£9.99
Vintage Publishing Nobody
Book Synopsis**WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019**'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water - fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.one person has the character of dustanother has an arrow for a soulbut their sto ries all endsomewherein the sea 'An invigorating book-length poem' Sara WheelerTrade ReviewAlice Oswald is at the height of her powers in…this electrifying new work… It is out of this world – and in it. It is mythical and realistic, ancient and modern. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *Sometimes the rush of unexpected language is thrilling… It is a wonderfully skilful tarantella of syllables and images… Nobody is Oswald’s most formally freehand work, a fragmentary gathering of murmurings searching for the excitement of new meaning. -- Jeremy Noel-Todd * Sunday Times *[Oswald is] a revolutionary, an eco-poet whose ideas are alive with sensory experience. Her new book, Nobody, is a kind of verse novel which refuses even the conventions of storytelling. * Guardian *[Nobody] is a paean to water, to the fluidity of language and the porousness between beings and stories… Both form and language echo the ceaseless drift, flitting movement and translucence of their uncontainable body…and, as with any memorable trip, the effects of reading Nobody linger in and around the mind long after the experience has passed. * Financial Times *The text (and characters) ebb and flow as mesmerically as the sea, a fluid abstraction that speaks to the power of the ocean. * i *
£999.99
Olympia Publishers Fifty Poems
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£9.49
Cinnamon Press The Care Line
Book SynopsisPoetry pamphlet on the theme of Parkinson's Disease
£999.99
Cinnamon Press All the Different Darknesses
Book SynopsisAll the Different Darknesses explores our sense of what lies within or beyond the everyday, taking inspiration from the lives of objects, as well as familial memories and disturbances emerging from '... the different darknesses'.
£999.99
