A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Cinnamon Press Life’s Stink and Honey
Book SynopsisLynn Valentine is a distinctive new voice in Scottish poetry. With hints of fairytale and gothic, she writes precise and poignant poems embracing what is often overlooked or peripheral – a father who drives the snowplough, a childless woman seeking consolation from a Sheela-na-gig. This collection is alive with horses, crows, deer, and as the title suggests, bees; all points north. — Jay Whittaker Enhanced by her apt and confident use of Scots, which glimmers like gold leaf throughout, Lynn Valentine’s poems weave the ethereal with the everyday, and reveal to us a glimpse of the natural and unnatural world we stride and stumble through. From council workers to prophetic aunts, Mills and Boon to the winter solstice, the poems here are full of making do and doing without, of childhood and childlessness, of the grief of loss and the grief of absence. This is a special collection, and a wonderful debut. — Aoife Lyall Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on — bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.— John GlendayTrade ReviewLynn Valentine is a distinctive new voice in Scottish poetry. With hints of fairytale and gothic, she writes precise and poignant poems embracing what is often overlooked or peripheral – a father who drives the snowplough, a childless woman seeking consolation from a Sheela-na-gig. This collection is alive with horses, crows, deer, and as the title suggests, bees; all points north. — Jay Whittaker; Enhanced by her apt and confident use of Scots, which glimmers like gold leaf throughout, Lynn Valentine’s poems weave the ethereal with the everyday, and reveal to us a glimpse of the natural and unnatural world we stride and stumble through. From council workers to prophetic aunts, Mills and Boon to the winter solstice, the poems here are full of making do and doing without, of childhood and childlessness, of the grief of loss and the grief of absence. This is a special collection, and a wonderful debut. — Aoife Lyall; Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on — bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world. — John Glenday
£999.99
Cinnamon Press Again Behold the Stars
Book SynopsisIt’s winter, 1553. A small Italian hill town is under siege… In this narrative of uncommon endurance Alex Josephy inhabits place and people with lively precision. Told in the voices of women, including a chorus, a nearby mountain and the fortress herself, the uniting voice of the pamphlet is a ‘girl’, through whose eyes we see the minute details of life under immense stress and feel the nuances of loss, hunger and uncertainty. Again Behold the Stars is an intense immersion into a lockdown that challenges all the senses, one utterly different from the modern experience of lockdown during the Covid pandemic, yet also hauntingly resonant with it. Most vitally, the empathy evoked reaches us across almost five centuries, making us care in the present.Trade ReviewIt is in their timelessness that Josephy’s glimpses—scorci—through the arrow slits of lives under siege are given their timeliness. The narrative of these exquisitely crafted poems, with their echoes of sonnets and madrigals, is both meditative and outraged; poems that exist of themselves and yet cohere. At its heart, however, Again Behold the Stars is an anthem of hope and endurance, is a celebration of the complexity and strength of community and womanhood in hard times. —Claire Dyer
£6.23
Cinnamon Press Vital Signs
Book SynopsisVital Signs draws on the inspiration of the medical vital signs in three parts-'Body', 'Pulse' and 'Breath'-each with nine poems that explore romantic love, death and the experiences of grief and loss in a poetry that is as embodied, pulsing with life and rhythmically breathing.
£9.49
Cinnamon Press Aubrac
Book SynopsisRooted in the land he dwells on, attuned to the ancestral lines of place and body and the resonances between the two, in Aubrac David Batten records our at-oneness with the nature that humanity too often attempts to fragment. Lucid, deeply effective and intelligent, these poems take us into a landscape where the past speaks loudly to the present and to the future, letting us know that we are not alone, not apart. In a year in which the poet himself moves through cycles of chemotherapy, along with the randomness of death, life and renewal re-assert themselves with the movement of the seasons. As he observes nature with a keenness of vision and attention that is present in every line, nature returns the gaze. A collection that bears witness to the human and more than human.
£9.49
Cinnamon Press Devils Piece
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£999.99
Acair Doras Gun Chlaimhean: Murchadh MacPharlain, Bard
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£18.00
Intellect Books Lightwork: Texts on and from Collaborative
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and ‘non-text’, were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker’s or spectator’s point of view. This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields – for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).Table of ContentsStarting points On Lightwork and twenty-first-century theatre Alex Mermikides On texts and collaborations Andy Lavender Blavatsky On writing live Clare Bayley TEXT: Blavatsky (1999) London/My Lover On technical operation Alex Mermikides TEXT: London/My Lover schematic (2002) On documentation Sarah Gorman Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day On writing and not writing plays Dan Rebellato TEXT: Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day (2004/2006) On experimenting David Annen You Kill Me TEXT: Once I was Dead (2006) TEXT: Back at You (2007) Sarajevo Story On sound Gregg Fisher TEXT: Sarajevo Story (2008) On scenography Jo Parker MyLife On movement direction Ayse Tashkiran TEXT: MyLife running orders (2008) The Tempest On intermediality Aneta Mancewicz TEXT: The Tempest (edited version 2009) The Good Actor On acting Bella Merlin TEXT: The Good Actor various (2010/2011) The Shift On process Clare Bayley TEXT: The Shift (1997) Contributors Bibliography
£72.00
Arcturus Publishing Ltd The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe
Book SynopsisA collection of verse from one of America''s greatest writers, the undisputed master of Gothic horror, and a true literary pioneer.In this anthology, readers will find a full range of Poe''s poetry and prose poems. The mysterious and lyrical ''The Raven'' is Poe''s best-known poem and immediately became a sensation when it was first published. ''The Bells'' presents Poe''s enjoyment of and mastery over language, ''Sonnet to Science'' his reflections on rationalism, while ''The City in the Sea'' and ''The Haunted Palace'' will leave you thrilled and filled with fantastic terrors never felt before.ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Great Poets Library brings together moving and inspiring verse from some of the greatest poets in history, presented with beautiful new cover designs with graphic motifs.
£6.99
The Choir Press City Sonnets
Book SynopsisCity Sonnets presents a poet's view of modern city life in all its variety. Thirty-six sonnets written in traditional form explore the dark and the light, the rich and the poor, the ugly and the beautiful. There are poems about a beggar, cathedrals, van drivers and concert halls, cats and rats and many other topics. Each one has a colour illustration that complements the vivid evocation of urban existence in the verse. The writing explores what it means to be a human being living among many others, with all the tensions, anxieties, pleasures and joys that they experience. The sonnet form, with its fourteen lines, regular metre and rhyming scheme, brings a sharp focus on the practicalities and dreams of city living.Table of ContentsPreface; City Bard; Addict; Beggar; Book Group; Carnival; Cathedrals; Cats; Cinema; Citizens; City Farm; Commuter Train; Concert Hall; Corner Shop; Councillor; Delivery Driver; Demonstrator; Dog-walker; Escaping From a Pre-computer Office; Friday Night; From a Distance; Ideal Estate; Massage Parlour; Monday; Pandemic Ward; Parks; Rats; Refuse; Rough Sleeper; Rule by Bells; Service Area; Stock Exchange; Sandwich-eaters; Traffic Joy; Under a Spell of Shyness; Urban Cyclist; Vegan Restaurant; Acknowledgements;
£12.56
Independently Published From a Wild Woman: Love & healing poems - Poèmes
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£27.74
Lulu.com Poetic Law: The Temple of the Poet
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£15.31
Xlibris Us Sweet and Sour Candy
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£16.46
Xlibris Us Yellow Elder
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£11.01
Xlibris Us Tangled Thoughts
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£15.15
Xlibris Us The Flight of the Ex-Worm and Other Poems
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£18.95
Xlibris Us Mr. Nobody the Man with a Broken Dreams
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£18.95
Xlibris Us Unique V-Turnal: Book 2
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£13.25
Xlibris Us Prelude to a Groovy Road Trip: A Collection of
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£24.65
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Life Is Strange But Keep Kindness In Range
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£6.99
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Life is full of Moments
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£7.59
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Webs and Irises
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£6.99
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers Flowers for the Dying Moon
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£8.54
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Book SynopsisJohn Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness mark every page.
£21.25
Carcanet Press Ltd Deer on the High Hills: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisGrowing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry. His divided perspective sharply delineates the tyranny of history and religion, of the cramped life of small communities; it gives him a tender eye for the struggle of women and men in a world defined by denials. Deer on the High Hills: Selected Poems includes forty years' work and proves that big themes - love, history, power, submission, death - can be addressed without the foil of irony and acquire resonance when given a local habitation and a voice that risks pure, impassioned speech. Editor John Greening provides indexes, a preface and an essay on the life and work of this important poet.Trade Review'Over the years [his] poetry has increased in strangeness and beauty.' - TLS
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Forty Names
Book SynopsisA New Statesman Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. In this remarkable first collection, Parwana Fayyaz evokes events in the lives of Afghan women, past and present - their endurance and achievements, told from their points of view. John McAuliffe writes of the 'remarkable litanies, which haunt her poems' occasions' and the title poem, with which she won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, is such a litany, conjuring and commemorating. The poems are not judgmental: they witness. The reader infers the contexts. As well as the human stories there is a spectacular landscape, unfamiliar villages and cities, and a rich history which the Western press in reporting contemporary news foreshortens and diminishes. 'Storytelling has a long tradition in Afghan culture. Stories are passed down orally. Every woman even or especially those who are illiterate knows and has memorized a few important stories - to share [...] I grew up among women who never went to school - my grandmothers, my mother, my aunts.' As the poet grew away from that tradition, in which patience was the chief virtue, she lost patience and began her resistance, their resistance, in her poems which hover between cultures and languages, thinking in one and understanding in another. Each language has its history and value systems: 'it was learning English that gave me my voice as a poet, enabling me to distance myself as well as to comprehend the connection with the tradition I was brought up in.'Trade Review'reminded us of the profound act of witness that poetry can be' - Shahida Bari, Forward Prize Judge on 'Forty Names'
£10.44
Carcanet Press Ltd Continuous Creation: Last Poems
Book SynopsisAustralia's greatest and best-loved poet, Les Murray (1938–2019) was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at the nomination of Ted Hughes (1999) and won the T.S. Eliot Award among many other distinctions. He is a poet of deep environmental commitment: born and raised on the land, he died at his farm in Bunyah in New South Wales. Continuous Creation is his last major offering, compiled in his final years at Bunyah and found there after his death. 'There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational,' wrote Derek Walcott in the New Republic. This last book, like his earlier collections, is many-toned: he is a comic writer, a satirist, elegist and hymnodist. He is a celebrator. He is a rainbow.Trade Review'Murray is one of the very few poets with whose best work you feel that having read it you won't, can't be quite the same again' - London Review of Books
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd Brotherton Poetry Prize Anthology II
Book SynopsisThe University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets. Many of them were members of staff (for instance, Geoffrey Hill), some were students (Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Jeffrey Wainwright, Ian Duhig), others creative writing fellows (James Kirkup, John Heath-Stubbs, Thomas Blackburn, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, David Wright, Pearse Hutchinson and Wole Soyinka among them). The poetry archives in the Brotherton Library are extensive and valuable. The Academy of Cultural Fellows has included Helen Mort, Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo, Zaffar Kunial and Matt Howard. Its long association with the magazine Stand continues. The Brotherton Poetry Prize is the University's latest expression of commitment to poetry as a living art.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Here on Earth
Book SynopsisWe are still here on earth. With a troubled sense of wonder, Jeffrey Wainwright's new book witnesses to that earth's ordinariness, profusion and mystery. The collection begins with his beginning, a poem that evokes his own birth: 'Here I Come'. He concludes inevitably with 'Here I Go'. In between are poems that describe and contemplate on the variety of life, ranging from a fleeing mouse to geology and gravity. History features, as so often in his poetry, with the earth's transition from inanimate matter to the fearsome and various place we know. There is a sequence on contemporary Manchester, another on the domestic and wider presence of coal, and a series on the iniquities of the British Empire – histories that connect and contend with one another. Describing this last sequence, Shirley Chew notes the poet's 'preoccupation with words and history', his 'self-reflexive wit' and the 'wry look' he takes at the poet's art itself. He is a master of tones of voice, of registers, of patterns and rhythms, and his characteristic inventiveness is everywhere to be found in this book which touches on so many timely and timeless concerns Here on Earth.Trade Review'Jeffrey Wainwright's work is among the most interesting of any poet now writing' - The Guardian
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd The Recycling
Book SynopsisA The Telegraph Book of the Year. Joey Connolly's funny and feverish second collection, The Recycling, considers dissolution and aftermath. Poems experiment with forms and histories, grieving for estrangement and heartbreak, haunted by climate anxiety. Connolly is always taking risks, recycling traditional poetics into a scrapheap of repurposed pages, rusted fastenings and glittering fragments. Ecopoetry has never looked quite like this before.Trade Review'Connolly is one of our finest poets of the multitude, he is endlessly fascinated by all that swims through his vast universe, and his big-hearted verse is exhilarating, accepting and forgiving, as it is intelligent, warm and witty.' - Daljit Nagra; 'A kaleidoscopically varied, endlessly ambitious collection... Connolly's innovative, surprising language walks the high wire between joy, terror and collapse. This is a thrilling, tender, extraordinary book.' - Rebecca Tamas; 'The Recycling is an act of brazen deferral, of repetition and self-plagiarism. It borrows wildly, testing the line between allusion and parody, while inventing its own "bric-a-brac idiolect". Strangely ersatz stories collapse into one another, time warping and distending, always about to expose a molten core of heartbreak... The result is a silly, sad and beautiful book.' - Will Harris
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Before We Go Any Further
Book SynopsisIn Tristram Fane Saunders' first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are 'trying to tilt toward love', but 'can't help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest’. They discover wry humour in that struggle.Trade Review'Tristram Fane Saunders is a joyfully idiosyncratic new voice in contemporary poetry; cultured, wry, formally adept, and adroitly musical. But what I love most is the deep compassion beneath the play. Many of these poems seek remedy for their suffering beloveds, only to be openly frustrated by their own limitations. These moments of radical kindness and vulnerability completely floored me, and make this a collection to cherish.' - Fiona Benson; 'Before We Go Any Further would be a striking debut on the strength of its formal confidence and original phrasemaking alone; but what separates it from the competition is its shamelessly bold return to a poetry of the imagination, to poetry's old tradition of making it new. These poems see it as their business to make connections, shed light and extend their empathies into the world; that they do so with such originality and flair makes for one of the most purely enjoyable and invigorating first collections I've read in a long time.' - Don Paterson
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Something, I Forget
Book Synopsiswhile news love meant to keep forever is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper. 'Another Lighthouse' Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves. Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Hell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems
Book SynopsisHell, I Love Everybody: 52 Poems by James Tate re-introduces the poet, providing a poem for every week of the year, every mood and season. It includes work from his first publication, The Lost Pilot, a Yale Younger Poets selection (1967) and all his subsequent books. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming, absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. All Tate's poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate was described as a surrealist. If he is, that surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by candour. John Ashbery wrote of 'his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting'.
£13.49
New Generation Publishing FaithLove: Volume 1
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£27.54
Canelo The Border Wolves: A gripping novel of Ancient
Book SynopsisThe final thrilling tale of the House of Appius Julianus.A new and deadly threat has emerged at the outskirts of the Roman Empire on the Danube, one that threatens to throw the entire region into chaos.Correus, risen to prefect of a cavalry ala on the border, and Flavius, advisor to the emperor, have both attempted to warn the erratic Domitian of the seriousness of this foe, but to no avail.With trouble at home in the form of an irate senator, as well as the impending doom of a devastating military loss, the two brothers must use their accumulated experience, grit and trust in each other to ensure their family’s safety, once and for all.The final book in the epic Centurions series, and the first instalment for almost forty years, a moving and powerful adventure, and a must-read for all historical fiction fans, ideal for readers of Conn Iggulden, Rosemary Sutcliff and Simon Scarrow.Praise for Amanda Cockrell'A thrilling Roman adventure' Alex Gough, author of Emperor's Sword‘Amanda Cockrell has the finest sense of history, character, and narrative I've seen since Rosemary Sutcliff’ Delia Sherman, author of The Porcelain Dove'The novel is action-packed and descriptive at the same time, which lends to the successful scenes that the reader can enjoy' Historical Novel Society
£9.49
Troubador Publishing The Poetry of Mr Minevar
Book SynopsisThe Poetry of Mr Minevar is a collection of light reading poems laced with humour, all based on a wide range of subjects from Art, Literature to Science. An ideal birthday or Christmas gift!
£7.59
Independent Publishing Network Poems and Pictures of Light, Love and Life:
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£5.39
Olympia Publishers Tiny Passages to Pass the Time
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£7.59
Olympia Publishers Naked: Pieces from Beginnings
Book SynopsisThis book is a collection of poetry, which takes the reader on a journey through the many aspects of life. Love, loss, sacrifice, triumph, turmoil: these are just a few of the many emotions, which are penned within these pages. Each turn of the page, takes one down many roads. The scenery is vast- it can be beautiful, and dark. Simple, and complex. Each line, dives deeper into the mind, and swims amongst the complexities of the human experience. Each work stands alone, and creates its own mosaic. So, experience the journey. Take a ride through the cosmos, and skirt the very edges of our universe.
£999.99
Profile Books Ltd PLUS ULTRA
Book Synopsis'High-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich [...] What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct.' - Kayo Chingonyi In myth, the Pillars of Hercules near the Straits of Gibraltar mark the edge of what was then the known world, with the warning Ne plus ultra - No more beyond. Beyond power, beyond the sublime, beyond love, PLUS ULTRA begins where other poetry gives up. Sarah Fletcher's dazzling debut collection pushes at the world, reaching towards the 'beyond' of its title poem to explore questions of power, romance, pain and the sublime. These poems challenge, play and press, but also carry an anxiety around borders: what is 'beyond'? What happens when you reach the boundary and keep going? With a sharp, Plathian interrogative voice Fletcher's poems prowl the bars and night-haunts of Madrid and London, and in rich, mythic language plumb the below-places where discoveries are made, drowned, and left behind.Trade ReviewSarah Fletcher's poems are highly mobile, troubled, troubling, rich and fraught -- Chris Kraus, author * I Love Dick *'PLUS ULTRA is an alarming, accomplished and brilliant first collection. Fletcher's ambition, formal invention, erudition and technical precision offer a compelling scaffold for poems that fizz and flit between vulnerability, wit and a brutal willingness to confront the world, and others, with a dark honesty that is frequently refreshing and, occasionally, genuinely menacing. These are poems that demand the reader's full attention, but that also deliver.' * Ahren Warner *PLUS ULTRA is a wild, exciting, lyrical book, free-associative and narrative at the same time ... Fletcher is a poet of the future, and lucky for us, she's arrived just in time. * Matthew Dickman *Cool, sexy, dangerous and brilliant [...] PLUS ULTRA is essential reading. * Victoria Kennefick *The high-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich poems collected in PLUS ULTRA confirm my long-held suspicion that Sarah Fletcher is engaged in the life-long enterprise of mastering the various things a poetic line can do. What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct. * Kayo Chingonyi *
£10.45
Penguin Books Ltd The Book of Frank
Book SynopsisA visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetryBeguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.Trade ReviewI've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power -- Maggie Nelson, author of THE ARGONAUTSThis is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears -- Anne Boyer, author of THE UNDYINGCAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead -- Thurston MooreI can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book? -- Bernadette Mayer, author of MEMORY
£10.44
Liverpool University Press Nocturne
Book SynopsisLonglisted for Laurel Prize 2023. Set in a technicolour world of dreams, ghosts, classical music, and Key West storms, Jodie Hollander’s compelling second collection charts the emotional journey of the daughter of a professional classical pianist. These bold and arresting poems, rich with musicality, and fierce in their emotional honesty, chart the complicated repercussions of family dysfunction and musical obsession while traversing the landscape of the human condition and exploring the need for refuge in the natural world.Trade Review‘In Jodie Hollander’s poems, it is always monsoon season. Things come crashing down from the sky - pianos, coconuts, kangaroos, telephone receivers - into a fragile world, and the poems look up from the debris, changed.’ Caroline Bird‘Jodie Hollander, who may be one of the best poets at work right now, follows up her brilliant My Dark Horses with Nocturne, which continues her hard exploration of generational trauma and familial abuse… Something I found especially moving is the awareness and channelling of her rage, which floored me throughout.’ Juliano Zaffino‘Nocturne, Jodie Hollander’s second collection following her stunning 2017 debut, My Dark Horses, is certainly of the night – these poems chant and sing the scales of human experience against a backdrop of unknowable wildness. Her poems chime with the music of the spheres collaborating in a symphony that is both an aural feast and a reminder of the interconnectedness of all things. Nocturne makes truly beautiful music.’ Victoria Kennefick
£13.26
Seagull Books London Ltd Fury
Book SynopsisA new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective. In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries. With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.Table of ContentsIntroductionFury
£14.24
Seagull Books London Ltd The Poems
Book SynopsisThe first complete publication of Robert Walser’s poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I am not here to write,” Walser said, “but to be mad.” This first collection of Walser’s poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career––as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. Table of ContentsEARLY POEMS (1897–1912)Poems (Gedichte, 1909)String and Desire (Saite und Sehnsucht)Further SelectionsPOEMS WRITTEN IN BIEL (1919–1920)POEMS WRITTEN IN BERNE (1924–1933)Can It Wish Me Anything Other than HappinessThe Child PondersWomenLiteratureSelf-ReflectionWho May Say He Knows Existence!DELETED EARLY POEMSDELETED LATE POEMSAFTERWORDREFERENCESINDEX OF TITLES
£24.69
Seagull Books London Ltd Porcelain – Poem on the Downfall of My City
Book SynopsisA book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth” of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections, and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory. Trade Review"Grünbein’s polyphonic collection Porcelain addresses Dresden’s thorny history through the leitmotif of porcelain, the “white gold” of Meissen whose discovery catapulted Saxony and its capital to considerable prestige in the 18th century — although much of it suffered considerable damage in the Allied bombing. The 50 poems that make up the cycle probe deeply the history of Dresden, adopting then discarding allusive threads to explore the ruin of the city. . . . Here, porcelain represents the fragility of past glory; it also offers Grünbein a model for the presence of the past, and for his collection itself. In light of this multivalent symbol, the poems can be read as shards of language, splinters of speech; each evokes a whole that it will never reconstruct." * Los Angeles Review of Books *"The forty-nine (plus one) poems that comprise Porcelain explore the complex layers of loss, meaning and memory and together form a rich meditation on war, destruction and the question of who owns suffering. It is not a dirge but a human reckoning. The presentation of this anniversary edition is both handsome and sombre, while Karen Leeder’s translation gives the poetry an immediate, grounded feel and the detailed glossary and notes provide context, as required, to enhance the reading experience." * Rough Ghosts *
£13.99
Seagull Books London Ltd At No Time – Scenes and Dialogues
Book SynopsisDramatic sketches full of surprising, unpredictable twists and turns from a major twentieth-century German-language author. A member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II, Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) achieved great acclaim as a writer of fiction, poetry, prose, and radio drama. The vignettes in At No Time each begin in recognizable situations, often set in Vienna or other Austrian cities, but immediately swerve into bizarre encounters, supernatural or fantastical situations. Precisely drawn yet disturbingly skewed, they are both naturalistic and disjointed, like the finest surrealist paintings. Created to be experienced on the page or on the radio rather than the stage, they echo the magic realism of her short stories. Even though they frequently take a dark turn, they remain full of humor, agility, and poetic freedom. Table of Contents1.French Embassy2.At no time3.Gulls4.Fleeting guest5.In the voice of the old lady6.Belvedere7.A losing battle8.Algebra9.First semester10.Heavy water11.The Auction12.Good sea13.Return14.Through the fresh greenery15.Sunday shift16.Doves and wolves17.Vantage point18.The new song19.Crossing the mountain pass 20.Nowhere near Milan21.White chrysanthemums22.Chrigina23.Alms24.The untired sleepers
£999.99
Seagull Books London Ltd Bending into the Light
Book SynopsisA beautiful and timely collection of poems written during the pandemic. The poems in Alice Attie’s new volume, Bending into the Light, are poised on an ever-shifting threshold where words “up and down, side to side” appear as “figures in the distance approaching, each a declaration, each persisting”. Beings, things, ideas, present or vanishing, flow through the vessel of language wherein each exudes “its own aura, its own being, its own disappearance.” Attie’s voice is intricate and intimate, shaping and reshaping the space of being and the space of non-being. These contemplative poems, interspersed with a few haunting photographs and artworks, extol, and mourn, melding the quotidian with the philosophical where we are formed and transformed in the profound knowledge that “the voice has no center.”
£13.99
Seagull Books London Ltd Performing Captivity, Performing Escape –
Book SynopsisA meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during the Holocaust. The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve theatrical texts—cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play—written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust. Trade Review“Performing Captivity, Performing Escape is a fascinating, heartbreaking, frequently witty collection that has been translated with love and care, and that brings to light art that has heretofore been hidden. When you add the essays, thorough biographical notes, and beautiful, evocative artwork, you end up with a powerful portrait of a tragic era in Central European history and of the power of art to ameliorate suffering.”—Austrian Studies Newsmagazine “Performing Captivity, Performing Escape is a fascinating, heartbreaking, frequently witty collection that has been translated with love and care, and that brings to light art that has heretofore been hidden. When you add the essays, thorough biographical notes, and beautiful, evocative artwork, you end up with a powerful portrait of a tragic era in Central European history and of the power of art to ameliorate suffering.” * Austrian Studies Newsmagazine *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsPronunciation GuideEdition Notes and ConventionsIntroductionPrologue:?Terezín Theater by Ivan KlimaPart 1:?Czech-Language Texts1.Radio Show2.Looking for a Specter3.Songs from the Revue Prince Bettliegend4.The Smoke of Home 5.Laugh with Us6.The Second Czech CabaretPart 2:?German-Language Texts1.From the Strauss Cabarets2.The Treasure3.A Puppet Play in Ten Acts4.Purimspiel5.The Death of Orpheus6.The Insult—But Unintended; 7.or, The Man with the Defective Memory 8.A Theresienstadt Courtroom Scene9.From the Hofer Cabarets10.Epilogue: New Year’s Eve in the Oederan Slave-Labor CampGlossaryBibliography
£31.34
Seagull Books London Ltd Biography – A Game
Book SynopsisA reissue of a comic and tragic play that asks just how much of our life we could—or would—change if we got another chance. In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane—He could save his marriage, become politically active, take better care of his health, or even change the color of his living room furniture. Despite his intention to apply the wisdom he has acquired with age, Kürmann finds himself inexorably trapped in the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kürmann’s life game interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play’s central idea—that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities—is brilliantly captured in Biography’s dramaturgical form, setting up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the endless possibilities and variables of the game of life. Frisch’s own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in all its potential and limitations as it showcases both comic and tragic outcomes that define all our lives. Table of ContentsDramatis Personae:Hannes KürmannAntoinette SteinDirectorFemale AssistantMale Assistant
£13.99
