A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Nick Hern Books The Incident Room
Book SynopsisIt's 1975. The Millgarth Incident Room in Leeds is the epicentre of the biggest manhunt in British history, for one of the most notorious serial killers: the Yorkshire Ripper. With public and political pressure mounting, hundreds of officers must work around the clock and resort to increasingly audacious attempts to end one man's campaign of terror. Olivia Hirst and David Byrne's 'beautifully crafted' (Guardian) play goes behind the scenes to investigate the case that nearly broke the British police force. The Incident Room was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, transferring to New Diorama Theatre, London, in 2020, ahead of an Off-Broadway run.Trade Review'The ingenuity of this piece is that it gives you a pacey, clock-ticking sense of what things were like' * Telegraph *'An utterly compelling, imaginative portrayal of failure and guilt... takes the expectations of the police drama and the true crime genre, and reveals far deeper, more uncomfortable truths within' * The Reviews Hub *'Tense and chilling' * Daily Mail *'A finely tuned script... an engrossing piece of theatre' * British Theatre Guide *'Completely compelling to watch… intelligent, imaginative and, most of all, damn interesting' * The Stage *'An absorbing and emotive play with real heart, and plenty of unexpected humour' * Everything Theatre *'Has the quick, zingy dialogue that you'd expect from a cop show… accentuates the people and the personalities within the police force and the victims' * Broadway World *'A superbly researched play… a fine example of docu-drama' * BritishTheatre.com *
£12.34
Nick Hern Books Faustus: That Damned Woman
Book SynopsisAward winning playwright Chris Bush reimagines the Faust myth to explore what we must sacrifice to achieve greatness, and the legacy that we leave behind. Faustus: That Damned Woman is a radical new work in which the iconic character of Faustus becomes a woman who makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to traverse centuries and change the course of history. It is premiered at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in January 2020, in a co production with Headlong and Birmingham Repertory Theatre, prior to a UK tour. An epic, ambitious, gothic, baroque fever dream of a piece that takes a well known classic and inverts it to say something truthful about the contemporary female experience.Trade Review'Original, ambitious and fantastically revisionist' * Guardian *'With a ruggedly lyrical style, the writing echoes and counterpoints Marlowe's original play but Bush takes the story in exciting new directions... lively and engaging, peppered with humour... an entertaining, lucid piece of storytelling which bursts with ideas and speculation' * BritishTheatre.com *'A re-examination of the most famous pact in world literature from a female slant… rich with ideas... Bush's writing abounds with flair and rhythm' * Daily Telegraph *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books 15 Heroines: 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid
Book SynopsisTwo thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid gave voice to a group of inspirational women – queens, sorcerers, pioneers, poets and politicians – in a series of fictional letters called The Heroines. They were the women left in the wake of those swaggering heroes of classical mythology: Theseus, Hercules, Ulysses, Jason, Achilles… Now, drawing inspiration from Ovid, fifteen leading female and non-binary British playwrights dramatise the lives of these fifteen heroines in a series of new monologues for the twenty-first century. 15 Heroines was commissioned by Jermyn Street Theatre, London, and first performed – online and in three parts – in November 2020, presented in partnership with Digital Theatre. This edition of all fifteen monologues is introduced by directors – Adjoa Andoh, Tom Littler and Cat Robey – and writer, broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes. The War tells the untold stories of the Trojan War: Oenone, Hermione, Laodamia, Briseis and Penelope, written by Lettie Precious, Sabrina Mahfouz, Charlotte Jones, Abi Zakarian and Hannah Khalil. The Desert is about women going their own way: Deianaria, Canace, Hypermestra, Dido and Sappho, written by April De Angelis, Isley Lynn, Chinonyerem Odimba, Stella Duffy and Lorna French. The Labyrinth is about the women who encountered Jason and Theseus: Ariadne, Phaedra, Phyllis, Hypsipyle and Medea, written by Bryony Lavery, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Samantha Ellis, Natalie Haynes and Juliet Gilkes Romero.Trade Review'A triumphant re-voicing of famous tales' * Observer *'Compelling... sometimes funny, often moving, this is a phenomenal collection of monologues' * BritishTheatre.com *'Urgent, engaging and beautifully written... it works as individual segments, as themed collections, or as one full project' * Broadway World *'What stands out above all else is the quality of the writing' * Guardian *'Brilliant and hilarious... these heroines are resurrected with wit, imagination and verve' * The Stage *'Revisionist and unapologetic, this new appraisal of Ovid’s work is very timely... it is the psychological insight that makes this so watchable. By taking ownership of their stories, these women speak for themselves' * The Reviews Hub *'Ambitious and artfully entertaining, 15 Heroines refuses to allow these women to be relegated to the footnotes... the pleasure is that we have so seldom heard these versions before' * Lyn Gardner, Stagedoor *
£12.59
Nick Hern Books Harm (NHB Modern Plays)
Book SynopsisWhen an unhappy estate agent sells a house to Alice, a charismatic social media influencer, the two strike up an unlikely friendship. But as her obsession with Alice's seemingly perfect world intensifies, the lines between online and reality become dangerously blurred. A thrilling, twisted and razor-sharp comedy on the corrosive effects of social media and isolation, Phoebe Eclair-Powell's play Harm premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in May 2021.Trade Review'An edgy psychological drama... shines a light on aspects of what is becoming an increasingly virtual society, especially for those in their 20s and 30s, obsessed with image and success beyond the point of reason' * British Theatre Guide *'Phoebe Eclair-Powell's razor-sharp monologue about social media toxicity and trolling... Tense, heady and full of savage laughter, it is intoxicating from beginning to end. Eclair-Powell's script glints and her barbed wit stings... Harm might be small in scale but it is magnificent in effect' * Guardian *'A devastatingly acute picture both of the loneliness of the narrator's existence – "Sometimes I don't brush my teeth before bed" – and of the glossiness of an online world where events such as cooking, or home decorating, aren't activities but opportunities to create content for an avid group of followers' * Whatsonstage *'This cracking new piece by rising talent Phoebe Eclair-Powell [is] just as effective at summoning entire worlds as any epic musical or drama' * Telegraph *'An arresting, soul-searching monologue' * The Times *'Eclair-Powell tells this terrifying tale with a beautiful blend of sharp observation and knowing humour... wonderfully original in its quirkiness... a smart and sassy study of loneliness and obsession' * Arts Desk *
£10.44
Gomer Press Cyfres Clasuron: Dail Pren
Book SynopsisA new edition of the poems of Waldo Williams, with an introduction by Mererid Hopwood. Originally published in 1956. ISBN of previous edition: 9780863837111.
£10.24
Shearsman Books Collected Poems
Book SynopsisThe first substantial collection of Claudio Rodriguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (also responsible for the Shearsman editions of Becquer, Vallejo and Rosalia de Castro) and Luis Ingelmo (who worked on the Becquer edition with Michael Smith), this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, yet major literary figure. Perhaps the most important poet of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodriguez's work deserves to be much better-known in the anglophone world.
£999.99
Shearsman Books Still - Life
Book SynopsisIn this generous assembling of work fromthe past ten years, the Anglo-American poet Robert Vas Dias explores meanings and resonances inherent in art and the suggestive implications of objects which both make up the quotidian and help to define us. This is a poetry of 'domestic tranquillity' as well as chaos, of the absurd and the numinous, of the serious and comedic. Vas Dias is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, and has edited or co-edited four literary journals-two in the USA and two in the UK. His poetry and criticism have appeared in about 100 magazines and journals, as well as in a dozen anthologies. His most recent collection was Leaping Down to Earth, 2008, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick. He is a tutor with The Poetry School in London and editor-publisher of Permanent Press.
£13.19
Shearsman Books It Looks Like an Island but Sails Away
Book Synopsis"Ralph Hawkins' poems minimise the gap of 'constructive effort' between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the "mediated" pleasure of the poem. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of "direct experiences" from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. [...] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps." -Andrew Duncan
£12.30
Shearsman Books Fragmented Waters
Book SynopsisBorn in 1973, Ron Winkler is one of the leading poets of his generation in Germany. "In his poetry he demonstrates in a sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling way how an ever greater part of what in the previous century we used to call 'reality' for the sake of convenience, has been expanded and shrunk to a virtual universe in which the tactile and audible are constantly zapped, sampled, filtered and twittered. The consequence is that "on a word level, our thought collapses into fragmented, labyrinthine and ridiculously large-scale concepts". -Ard Posthuma
£9.95
Shearsman Books Home Farm
Book SynopsisIn her fourth collection Janet Sutherland explores the farm where she grew up; a 90-acre dairy farm in Wiltshire, rented by her parents, where they milked 50 cows and reared heifers on the nearby water meadows. The collection examines the farm as home from early beginnings to the farm auction at the end of their working lives. It is a poetry of landscape and water, of birds, beasts and other creatures, of life lived cheek by jowl with death, of memory and forgetfulness; all of it rooted in place. There’s an engaging inventiveness of form: a disused water mill reveals poems in its old bricks, the drowner revels in his craft, the work of the farm is observed with rigour and lyricism, investigating the uses of memory and landscape as routes to understanding. The final sections zoom outwards, challenging us to look at earth itself as a home farm. "a snowy field with silent rooks and seagulls as in our awkwardness as in endurance There is no consolation in this work but the courage it requires of you to read on to the end and, when you have, the place of quiet repose it leaves you in. There is a tact, a tender truthfulness, that leaves language alone and lets everything touched on speak for itself. In `Pepys and a nightingale’ her father takes her out to hear the nightingale: `It’s plain, he said, `plain brown, just listen’. Years later his daughter returns the compliment in `Measures of distance’, her account of his death, so delicately done you hold your breath as you read. Though generously inclusive in its referencing and recycling of a wide variety of texts from `the real world’ – family letters, a coroner’s report, a bill of sale of all the stock and tackle of a dairy farm, even a literature search conducted by an AI – in the end this is a poetry from which `all the shadows the reflections / the deceits have passed’. I cannot offer it higher praise than that." —Gillian Allnutt
£9.95
Shearsman Books Epic Series
Book SynopsisEpic Series brings together three long poems by Eléna Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. Gathered here are Wale; or The Corse, Unknowne Land and The Wait; for Homer’s Penelope. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where place is continually shifting, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories— histories of conflict, translocation and injustice. “Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape—a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of history quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera’s writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched . . . . We are given a contemporary Dantesque work of unique elements held together by spiritual accident and intention—its paradox explored and revealed through the book’s architectural underpinnings and entirely unexpected vision.” —Kathleen Fraser, judge of The Frances Jaffer Book Award “. . . this is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in Unknowne Land are only the most literal manifestation of this tension.” —Elizabeth Willis, The Poetry Project Newsletter “Quotation or paraphrase are inadequate to the range of emotional reference in Rivera’s book, in part because the emotion accumulates bit by bit—or element by element—as the pain becomes more pronounced (“To reduce the impact, I curl / my body forward”). By allowing that ‘each piece has to be stitched together,’ Rivera advocates a careful reading of the work in its entirety; in this way, her emotional argument gains force and momentum.” —Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Chicago Review “‘Who bears a record of the world?’ Rivera asks as the beginning of the text’s first section ‘Fire,’ and we hear immediately not only the impossibility of a project of such breadth being ‘borne,’ but also the impossible weight of such a responsibility, given the horror of that record. . . . Hers is a language rich with elegiac illumination, ever testing the edges of the illusory. Rivera questions the possibility for any meaning to adhere, even as she entrances us with the ‘rhythm of the pencil’ in her attempts.” —Rusty Morrison, Poetry Flash
£9.71
Shearsman Books Shearsman 127 & 128
Book SynopsisThe first double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2021. Poetry by Charlotte Baldwin, Linda Black, Melissa Buckheit , Charlotte Baldwin, Susan Connolly, Harriet Cooper-Smithson, Claire Crowther, Amy Crutchfield, Jane Frank, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Christopher Gutkind, Mandy Haggith, Jeremy Hooker, David Johnson, Norman Jope, L Kiew, Peter Larkin, Mary Leader, Carola Luther , Robin Fulton Macpherson, Olivia McCannon, Peter Robinson, David Rushmer, Maurice Scully, Aidan Semmens, Lucy Sheerman, Hannah Cooper Smithson, Agnieszka Studzińska, Scott Thurston, Anannya Uberoi, John Welch, Petra White, Tamar Yoseloff & translations of Marta Agudo (by Lawrence Schimel), Kjell Espmark (by Robin Fulton Macpherson), Kinga Tóth (by Annie Rutherford) & Virgil (by David Hadbawnik). With this issue, Shearsman magazine marks 40 years of publication.
£999.99
Shearsman Books A Cloud of Witnesses
Book SynopsisKjell Espmark (b.1930) was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University from 1978 to 1995 and has been a member of The Swedish Academy since 1981, serving as Chairman of The Nobel Committee from 1988 to 2004. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, ten novels, and over a dozen volumes of literary criticism. His many awards include The Bellman Prize, The Tranströmer Prize, Il Premio Capri and Il Premio Internazionale Camaiore. He is an officer of L'ordre de Mérite. He has been translated into over twenty languages. Of the Spanish version of his latest book of poetry, Martin Lopez-Vega wrote in El Mundo: "The Creation confirms that we are faced with one of the most important poets of our time." Many of Espmark's poems are dramatic monologues in which the dead, some famous, some anonymous, speak to us, hoping for our attention. Another consistent feature of his poetry, and one which we can see extending over six decades, is the coherence we find within each volume, echoes and cross-references linking poems not only within a single collection but from book to book.
£10.95
Shearsman Books Night Window
Book Synopsis"I go to Ian Seed's poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There's a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live 'joyously and seriously' against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops — it deserves legions of readers." —Luke Kennard "Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafés, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding 'obsession', 'unspeakable desire', erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity's transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, 'I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story' and reminds us, 'It takes a stranger to see the beauty'. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a 'poet soul'. A translator of Jacob's poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet's soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." —Cassandra Atherton
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Smalltown
Book SynopsisSomething has been put in the water. Things are about to get a whole lot crazy. And you decide how it ends... Smalltown is the new dynamic comedy written by leading Scots writers Douglas Maxwell, D.C. Jackson and Johnny McKnight. It tells the unexpected tales of what happens when a polluted water supply causes extraordinary events to happen to ordinary people - from Zombies in the frozen food aisle, to oversexed teenagers releasing the animal within, to a dangerous game of Russian Roulette on Girvan beach. The show has three possible endings. You, the audience, vote on which ending you want, making for a truly memorable evening of entertainment. Smalltown - expect the unexpected! A thrilling and downright hilarious rollercoaster of a show from the company that brought you the five-star Promises Promises and the Little Johnny trilogy.Trade Reviewa deliriously funny two-hander everyone went home with the kind of daft grin you get from eating too many sweets.”The Guardian a blast of saucy seaside postcard humour, a romp through Ayrshire dialect and a sideways swipe at the classic zombie movie The humour is bawdy, and the cast shift roles with aplomb. Random Accomplice demonstrate their versatility and their clear connection to the west coast, creating a cheerful chase through Ayrshire’s hidden treasures.”The Stage "Three of Scotland’s best contemporary playwrights It’s all the most preposterous nonsense and the lightest if thistledown Great fun all round." Robert Dawson Scott, The Times "A riot of willfully outrageous nonsense a rip-roaring excuse for an anarchically OTT compendium of bawdily madcap, genitally obsessed postmodern fun."Neil Cooper, The Herald "An often hilarious and uproarious evening of stage comedy. A right rollicking night out."Mark Brown, Sunday Herald "An affectionate parody of the portmanteau horror films popularised by Amicus in the 1960s the off-the-wall humour and bawdy set pieces mean it’s never less than great fun."Allan Radcliffe, List“a deliriously funny two-hander… everyone went home with the kind of daft grin you get from eating too many sweets.”—The Guardian “a blast of saucy seaside postcard humour, a romp through Ayrshire dialect and a sideways swipe at the classic zombie movie… The humour is bawdy, and the cast shift roles with aplomb. Random Accomplice demonstrate their versatility and their clear connection to the west coast, creating a cheerful chase through Ayrshire’s hidden treasures.”—The Stage "Three of Scotland’s best contemporary playwrights… It’s all the most preposterous nonsense and the lightest if thistledown… Great fun all round." –Robert Dawson Scott, The Times "A riot of willfully outrageous nonsense… a rip-roaring excuse for an anarchically OTT compendium of bawdily madcap, genitally obsessed postmodern fun."–Neil Cooper, The Herald "An often hilarious and uproarious evening of stage comedy. A right rollicking night out."–Mark Brown, Sunday Herald "An affectionate parody of the portmanteau horror films popularised by Amicus in the 1960s… the off-the-wall humour and bawdy set pieces mean it’s never less than great fun."–Allan Radcliffe, List
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Firework Makers Daughter
Book SynopsisFun for all the family, and fizzing with drama and magic.
£13.93
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Hound of the Baskervilles
Book SynopsisA bloodcurdling howl is heard across a cold, moonlit moor; the spectral hound has claimed another victim. Sherlock Holmes, the world famous detective of Baker Street, and the ever-reliable Watson are called upon to investigate the legendary plague of Baskerville Manor. This modern adaptation of the hound on the moor was commissioned by Nottingham and Salisbury Playhouses and Clive worked alongside Tim Bird (who created an ingenious projection design) and the director Richard Baron. Subsequent to this initial production, this adaptation has just completed its third UK tour in seven years.Trade ReviewGripping theatricality * Sunday Express *Excellent...highly enjoyable * Daily Telegraph *
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Oberon Book of Modern Monologues for Men:
Book SynopsisMonologues are an essential part of every actor’s toolkit. Actors are required to perform monologues regularly throughout their career: preparing for drama school entry, showcasing skills for agents or auditioning for a role. Following on from the bestselling first volume (2008), this book showcases selected monologues from some of the finest modern plays by some of today’s leading contemporary playwrights. These monologues contain a diverse range of quirky and memorable characters that cross cultural and historical boundaries. The pieces are helpfully organised into age-specific groups: ‘Teens’, ‘Twenties’, ‘Thirties’ and ‘Forties plus’.Trade Review'Anyone applying to train, preparing a showcase or auditioning for a job needs a fund of good sparky monologues, and they can be quite difficult to find. So I think many people are going to be grateful to voice coach Catherine Weate who has assembled and edited two further books of modern monologues' The Stage ' - there is sufficient scope here for anyone in search of the piece to impress - I'd highly recommend these books.' Teaching Drama, Summer Term issue 2010 on Modern Monologues for Women and Modern Monologues for Men Volume 1 'The whole of Life's experiences are crafted into these scenes. They give actors an incredible choice of texts... a unique and useful resource.' Word Matters: The Journal of the Society of Teachers of Speech and DramaTable of ContentsPART ONE: TEENS BOY Shadowmouth (Meredith Oakes) 17 TIM The Loss of All Things (Chris Goode) from Sixty-Six Books: 21st-Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible 20 SOLDIER BOY Desert Boy (Mojisola Adebayo) from Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One 23 JAY Mrs Reynolds and The Ruffian (Gary Owen) 26 JORDAN Fit (Rikki Beadle-Blair) 29 MARK DNA (Dennis Kelly) 32 JAKEY Blackberry Trout Face (Laurence Wilson) 35 MOHAMMED What Fatima Did - (Atiha Sen Gupta) 39 JOE Shraddha (Natasha Langridge) 41 PART TWO: TWENTIES ALISTAIR Posh (Laura Wade) 46 DANIEL Spur of the Moment (Anya Reiss) 50 JAMES DEAN JAMES DEAN IS DEAD! (Long Live James Dean) (Jackie Skarvellis) from Hollywood Legends: 'Live' on Stage 52 SID Kurt and Sid (Roy Smiles) 54 FRANCIS One Man, Two Guvnors (Richard Bean) 56 X Untitled (Inua Ellams) 59 RYSIEK Our Class (Tadeusz Slobodzianek / Ryan Craig) 62 1 2 IKE Shalom Baby (Rikki Beadle-Blair) 65 RAY Bea (Mick Gordon) 67 E-Z Lower Ninth (Beau Willimon) 70 SCOTT Love Steals Us From Loneliness (Gary Owen) 73 DANIEL The Dark Things (Ursula Rani Sarma) 76 SAM Beardy (Tom Wells) from Sixty-Six Books: 21st-Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible 79 PART THREE: THIRTIES MECHANIC Middletown (Will Eno) 84 ANDREW In the Pipeline (Gary Owen) 87 Paul Deep Heat (Robin Soans) 90 MAX Chekhov in Hell (Dan Rebellato) 93 CURTIS We're Gonna Make You Whole (Yasmine Van Wilt) 97 DEMISSIE Zero (Chris O'Connell) 100 CHRISTOPHER Up on Roof (Richard Bean) from Bean: Plays Three 104 MICHAEL I Heart Maths (James Ley) from The Ego Plays 109 OZZY The Miracle Man (Douglas Maxwell) 112 THE OTHER I Am the Wind (Jon Fosse / Simon Stephens) 115 POZDYNYSHEV The Kreutzer Sonata (Leo Tolstoy / Nancy Harris) 121 THE COACH Behold the Coach, in a Blazer, Uninsured from Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions (Will Eno) 124 1 3 PART FOUR: FORTIES PLUS PATRICK This Other City (Daragh Carville) 128 SONGWRITER Blue Heart Afternoon (Nigel Gearing) 131 ALI Deep Heat (Robin Soans) 134 MOHAMED HAMMOUDAN The Riots (Gillian Slovo) 137 METWALI The Prophet (Hassan Abdulrazzak) 140 SANCHO Sancho: An Act of Remembrance (Paterson Joseph) 143 SEB Dandy in the Underworld (Tim Fountain) 146 PHILIP Deep Heat (Robin Soans) 149 COLONEL BARCLAY Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks / Rachel Wagstaff) 152 DR MINOR Lullabies of Broadmoor: Wilderness (Steve Hennessy) 154 ALEC Colder Than Here (Laura Wade) 157 ROTHKO Red (John Logan) 161 TONY Muswell Hill (Torben Betts) 164 COLM The Gods Weep (Dennis Kelly) 166 MALVOLIO I, Shakespeare (Tim Crouch) 169 ORSON WELLES Obediently Yours, Orson Welles (Richard France) from Hollywood Legends: 'Live' on Stage 173 GENERAL KALASHNIKOV Kalashnikov: In the Woods by the Lake (Fraser Grace) 177
£13.10
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Marvellous Year for Plums
Book SynopsisBritain in 1956: the Suez Crisis. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, described by a colleague as ‘half mad baronet and half beautiful woman’, is faced with the terrible possibility of leading his country into war. His health is collapsing. His friends, colleagues and opponents, among them Hugh Gaitskell and Ian Fleming and his wife Ann, are facing crises of their own, crises of conscience and crises of the heart. Hugh Whitemore’s new play is a true epic: a suspenseful thriller, an achingly romantic love story and a fascinating examination of a flashpoint in our history which still resonates today. What is the cost of an ‘illegal’ war?Trade ReviewThis intelligent, well-ordered play stirred some bitter memories * Guardian *[A] sophisticated political thriller * Southern Daily Echo *Whitemore's concentration on the human follies and affections makes a play that will last. * Libby Purves, The Times *
£8.99
Batsford Ltd Such a Sweet Singing: Poetry to Empower Every
Book SynopsisA beautiful collection of poems to nourish, inspire and change the women who read them.This transformative collection of poems by female poets through the ages sing to us across the centuries. These poems span the worlds of desire, love and friendship, of responsibility, hardship and care, of family and friends and lovers. Their words empower us with strength and courage, fill us with verve and spirit, and inspire creativity and imagination.Contemporary voices of Fiona Benson and Jane Yeh join the evocative imagery of Christina Rossetti, Anna Akhmatova and Emily Dickinson. Even the haunting voices of ancient Sappho, Venmaniputti and Li Qingzhao touch today's generation. Here are poems written by women, with women's lives in mind. As Gertrude Stein writes, 'such a sweet singing' is in the poetry that comes to us clear and lovely from out of the dark. Read these poems aloud. Remember them. Share them.Trade Review‘Lavishly and strikingly illustrated, this book of poems holds at least eight times its weight in thirst-slaking nourishment.’ Northwords Now
£11.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me: 100 classic
Book SynopsisThe Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me is the ultimate reader’s companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from ?ve centuries with lively “companion” commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem. The heavy bear can be many things which go with the bearer: another self or alter ego, the burden of poetry or art, what weighs us down and makes us do what we don’t really want to do as well as what pulls us back to our selves, the animal side which makes us bearable or human. The editors’ selection ranges from Wyatt, Ralegh and Shakespeare in the 16th century, to Donne, Milton and Marvell in the 17th, to Swift, Pope and Johnson in the 18th. It embraces the Romantic visions of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, as well as the later, darker outlook of Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and seeks enlightenment in the shadowlands of Emily Dickinson, Wilde and Yeats. As well as journeying with the reader through some of the greatest poems in the English language, The Heavy Bear encounters many modern poets, not least Delmore Schwartz, whose sense of con?ict between self and society gave birth to this anthology’s title-poem, ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’. Others include some of the major figures in Irish poetry Brendan Kennelly knew personally as well as wrote about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland. The poems keep each other company in this highly original compilation, questioning each other in a continuing thematic, imagistic debate which the editors seek to explore in their responses, trying at all times to de?ne their sense and vision of poetry as disturbing, questioning, enlightening companionship for the reader. Both editors are renowned communicators of poetry: Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) as one of Ireland’s best-loved poets, as Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a popular cultural commentator on Irish television; Neil Astley as founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and editor of the Staying Alive anthology series.Trade ReviewWe have chosen the title of Delmore Schwartz's poem as the anthology’s title, The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me, for several reasons. Poems are written because of various kinds of "withness"; the sense of mortality, failure in love, the challenge of history, the nature of consciousness, dreams, loneliness, prejudice, inexplicable hatreds, the urge to make sense of confusion, the seething need to protest against forms of injustice, to talk to somebody about things only partly grasped or understood, or not grasped or understood at all but hurtful and pressing, violating sleep, miscolouring daylight’s encounters and images, the sense of suffering an appetite that can never really be fed… Every poem is an act of faith in that imaginative momentum; every poem longs to connect with that energy whether it be pressingly immediate or blatently ignored. This is the connecting power that enables Schwartz, for example, to bring the heavy bear lumbering into our lives. Our dialogue with the gross, barging presence follows that moment of admission. Our hope, as editors, is that we have provided an anthology of poems marked by dialogue and connection, although these poems may be, usually are, born of the awareness of mortality, failure, inadequacy, loss, absurd or gross caricatures or perversions of what we take to be reality. Why not have it out, once and for all, with the heavy bear who goes with us? -- Brendan KennellyTable of ContentsNeil Astley 11 Preface: The Making of the Heavy Bear Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) 19 Introduction: The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) 25 ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547) 27 'Wyatt resteth here' Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) 30 ‘Thou blind man’s mark’ Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) 32 ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’ Chidiock Tichborne (1558–1586) 34 Elegy for Himself Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) 36 Elegia VI Sir Walter Ralegh (1552–1618) 40 The Lie Robert Southwell (?1561–1595) 44 The Burning Babe Michael Drayton (1563–1631) 46 Since There’s No Help William Shakespeare (1564–1616) 48 Sonnet 73: ‘That time of year…’ Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) 50 ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’ Thomas Campion (1567–1620) 53 What if a Day John Donne (1572–1631) 55 The Flea Ben Jonson (1572–1637) 58 On My First Son Robert Herrick (1591–1674) 60 Gather Ye Rosebuds Henry King (1592–1669) 62 Exequy upon His Wife George Herbert (1593–1633) 67 Love III Edmund Waller (1606–1687) 69 Go, Lovely Rose Richard Crashaw (1612/3–1649) 71 The Flaming Heart Richard Lovelace (1618–1658) 74 To Althea from Prison Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) 76 A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) 79 They Are All Gone into the World of Light! Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) 82 To His Coy Mistress John Milton (1608–1674) 86 from Paradise Lost Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) 89 Dreams John Dryden (1631–1700) 93 from Absalom and Achitophel John Oldham (1653–1683) 95 from The Third Satire of Juvenal, imitated Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) 101 A Description of a City Shower Alexander Pope (1688–1744) 104 Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) 107 from London: A Poem Thomas Gray (1716–1771) 114 An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard Christopher Smart (1722–1771) 120 from Jubilate Agno Oliver Goldsmith (c.1730–1774) 125 from The Deserted Village William Cowper (1731–1800) 129 The Poplar-Field William Blake (1757–1827) 131 The Tyger Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) 134 Kubla Khan William Wordsworth (1770–1850) 138 Upon Westminster Bridge Lord Byron (1788–1824) 140 Darkness Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) 146 Ode to the West Wind John Keats (1795–1821) 152 Ode to a Nightingale Thomas Hood (1799–1845) 158 I Remember, I Remember Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) 160 Tithonus John Clare (1793–1864) 163 I Am Robert Browning (1812–1889) 165 My Last Duchess Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) 169 How do I love thee? Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) 171 Stanzas (attr.) Emily Brontë (1818–1848) 173 Remembrance Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) 176 Dover Beach Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) 180 Remember Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1892) 182 Sudden Light Walt Whitman (1819–1892) 184 Native Moments Emily Dickinson (1822–1888) 186 Because I could not Stop for Death Alice Meynell (1847–1922) 188 Renouncement Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899) 190 The Windhover George Meredith (1828–1909) 200 Lucifer in Starlight Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) 202 Luke Havergal Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) 205 from The Ballad of Reading Gaol A.E. Housman (1859–1936) 215 Good creatures do you love your lives Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) 217 The Voice Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) 219 Madeleine in Church Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) 227 The Listeners Robert Frost (1874–1963) 229 The Road Not Taken Edward Thomas (1878–1918) 232 Adlestrop Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) 234 Break of Day in the Trenches Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) 236 Base Details Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) 238 Strange Meeting W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) 241 The Second Coming] 242 Leda and the Swan Hart Crane (1899–1932) 247 My Grandmother’s Love Letters D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) 249 Snake Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950) 253 Sonnet: What my lips have kissed Langston Hughes (1902–1967) 255 The Negro Speaks of Rivers Marianne Moore (1887–1972) 257 A Grave Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) 259 The Snowman Elinor Wylie (1885–1928) 261 Full Moon E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) 262 ‘next to of course god america i’ Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) 264 Ars Poetica T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 267 The Journey of the Magi Patrick Kavanagh (1905–1967) 270 Shancoduff 270 Epic 276 Brendan Kennelly: ‘A Man I Knew’ Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) 277 The Coffin Worm Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977) 279 ‘Anger lay by me all night long’ Sheila Wingfield (1906–1992) 281 from Beat Drum, Beat Heart W.H. Auden (1907–1973) 286 In Memory of W.B. Yeats Keith Douglas (1920–1944) 289 How to Kill Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) 291 Prayer Before Birth Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) 295 Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight Stevie Smith (1902–1971) 297 The River God Ted Hughes (1930–1998) 299 The Thought-Fox 300 from The Burnt Fox Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) 302 Morning Song Denise Levertov (1923–1997) 304 Living Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) 305 September Song Austin Clarke (1894–1974) 307 The Redemptorist W.S. Graham (1918–1986) 310 The Beast in the Space Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) 312 Diving into the Wreck Michael Longley (born 1939) 316 Wounds Derek Mahon (1941–2020) 319 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) 324 One Art Derek Walcott (1930–2017) 326 Love after Love Philip Larkin (1922–1985) 327 Aubade Anne Stevenson (1933–2020) 330 Poem for a Daughter Ken Smith (1938–2003) 332 Being the third song of Urias Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) 334 from Sweeney Astray Eavan Boland (1944–2020) 340 The Journey 348 References 352 Acknowledgements
£13.49
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Eliza's Babes: Four Centuries of Women Poets
Book SynopsisThis comprehensive anthology celebrates four centuries of women’s poetry, covering over 100 poets from a wide range of social backgrounds across the English-speaking world. Familiar names – Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti – appear alongside other writers from America, Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand as well as the UK. The poets range from queens and ladies of the court to a religious martyr, a spy, a young slave, a milkmaid, labourers, servants, activists, invalids, émigrées and pioneers, a daring actor, and the daughter of a Native American chief. Whether writing out of injustice, religious or sexual passion, humour, or to celebrate their sex, their different cultures, environments, personal beliefs and relationships, these women have strong, independent spirits and voices we cannot ignore. In 1652, speaking of the poems she had published as her ‘babes’, a woman we know only as ‘Eliza’, answered ‘a Lady that bragged of her children’: Thine at their birth did pain thee bring, When mine are born, I sit and sing. Robyn Bolam’s helpfully annotated selection is illustrated with informative biographies. The texts are based on early editions or manuscripts but with modern spelling.
£9.86
Bloodaxe Books Ltd This Life, This Life: Selected Poems 1970-2006
Book SynopsisWhat are the contours of a life? For Andrew Greig: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left, late love...they're all here in these wildly diverse, affirmative, open-hearted poems. As a poet and latterly as a novelist, Andrew Greig is one of Scotland's most esteemed writers. Each of his poetry books has been distinctively different, from the early and late poems rooted in the natural world, to the game-playing extended narratives of exultation and risk, from human love to the mountaineering poems. But this selection covering 35 years of his poetry shows how the thrust of all his work is the re-enchantment of this life.Trade Review'Andrew Greig is a Scottish poet of sensitivity and resilience. He deals with high-risk situations - from mountaineering to love - and is particularly good at presenting the gamut of feelings involved in rites of passage: high endeavour, commitment, holding back, drift, release' - Edwin Morgan. 'When I first read the poems, I started writing down the ones I was really impressed by, but I gave that up after I'd written down 4 of the first 5. I doubt if there is a weak one in the collection. They interest me for their subject-matter and use of it - very subtle, often very unexpected, always on a nicely serious level, not without wit' - Norman MacCaig 'It is now a commonplace to say that most exciting new writing comes from north of the Border. If further proof were needed, Greig provides it' - Erica Wagner, The Times. 'A lyric poet of rare gusto' - Peter Porter, Observer 'I regret to say my students prefer your Western Swing to Gunslinger' - Ed Dorn.
£13.49
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Egg of Zero
Book SynopsisThe zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing - not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable zero that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching new collection that addresses both the mind and heart. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind.Trade Review'Nature, people, the obscurities of one's self, yield up their otherness in those epiphanic moments when Gross' peripheral eyesight catches them off guard. His is a voice that is mordant, obsessive, compelling - but nonetheless grateful for the rewards of living' - "PBS Bulletin". 'Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate...he touches an alien, intractable dimension...Gross's poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers' - Terry Eagleton, "Independent on Sunday". 'He should be recognised as one of England's very best poets, not only for the exuberance of his imagination, but because of what he is writing about' - John Greening, "Times Literary Supplement". 'Many of the poems convey a deep awareness of this fragility and downright improbability that forms the core of our lives...[enabling] us better to treasure our "ordinary" moments - the taken-for granted, charted ground' - Kate Keogan, "Acumen".
£7.55
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected
Book SynopsisC.D. Wright’s work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Long admired for the honed ferocity of her vision, she wrote with a distinctive Southern accent and a cinematic eye, cut with a secular wit that only slightly tempers her exigency. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that offer what she called ‘a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning’. Like Something Flying Backwards was the first UK edition of her work, and presents a wide range of her lyrics, narratives, prose poems and odes. Based on Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2003), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, its selection was expanded to include more later work as well as new poems not then published in book form in the US, and the complete text of her book-length poem, Deepstep Come Shining.Trade Review'Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence' - The New Yorker 'One of the most complex, fascinating and ultimately rewarding American poets writing today... For her, it seems a natural step from Southern down-home dialect (at least as her writer's ear perceived it) to the experiments with nonsyntactical language that put her in the forefront of experimental poetry. Not only do her poems explore uncharted ground in both subject and form, each new volume seems to take new risks' - Library Journal
£11.40
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Storms Will Tell
Book SynopsisJanet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand."Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".Trade Review'She has shown, so quietly, a mastery of the English language which dazzles one beyond ordinary praise' - Naomi Mitchison'There is a range of forms...There is even greater richness of content and image. Like the compass she writes of, Frame's is a sensibility which seeks to taste "every drop of distance". It would be hard to find a more fecund sense of the natural world in any recent writer' - Bill Manhire'Everything she presents is illuminated and thrown into sharp focus by the limpid clarity of a highly individual vision; she can be detached and passionate at the same time' - Fleur Adcock
£11.40
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Clever Backbone
Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables. In "Clever Backbone", the Guyanese-born word magician plays havoc with biology and makes a monkey out of Darwinian evolution - on the occasion of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his "Origin of Species". His "Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems" (with DVD) is published at the same time.Trade Review'John Agard's poetry is a wonderful affirmation of life, in a language that is as vital and joyous as we are able to craft it in the Caribbean, in spite of our history of distress' - David Dabydeen 'His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political - often managing to be all these things at once' - Maura Dooley 'The new poems create multiple entertaining voices, but they are also urgent fables for our time' - Paula Burnett, Times Literary Supplement 'A specialist in word trickery - Agard is one of our most consistent, culture-crossing spokesmen' - Graeme Wright, Poetry Review 'One of the most eloquent contemporary poets - rich in literary and cultural allusion, yet as direct as a voice in the bus queue' - Helen Dunmore, Observer
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Phantom Noise
Book SynopsisBrian Turner's first book of poems, Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq War by a soldier-poet. In Phantom Noise he pumps up the volume as he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war. Flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California, at the same time sending Turner's imagination reeling back to Iraq. If he thought he had written all he could of his Iraq experiences in "Here, Bullet", he was mistaken, for what he saw and felt there affected him so profoundly that more poems had to be written, years later, from a place of apparent safety. Brian Turner writes a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Like Keith Douglas's poems from the North African desert in the Second World War, Turner's testament from the war in Iraq offers unflinchingly accurate description but no moral judgement, leaving the reader to draw any conclusions. Repetitive media reports show little of people's daily experience of the war and occupation. In "Phantom Noise", as in "Here, Bullet", we see and feel the devastatingly surreal reality of everyday life and death for soldiers and civilians through the eyes of an eloquent writer who served in the US Army for seven years, with a year's tour of duty in Iraq as an infantry team leader. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.Trade Review'With courage and an uncommon willingness to see the world as it actually is, Brian Turner returns in Phantom Noise with a bullet-borne language in which helicopters hover like spiders over a film of water. His poem Al-A'imma Bridge alone proves his mastery, and joins him to the tradition of Wilfred Owen and David Jones, for he is their descendant, his poetic gifts detonated into a spray of lyric force that will mark what is possible in poetry for years to come, a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de coeur to the republic of conscience' - Carolyn Forche. 'The poems in Here, Bullet are steeped in pity for the occupants of Iraq, while at the same time remaining on full alert to the likely moment "when a twelve-year-old / rolls a grenade into the room"...The most effective instrument in Turner's kit is his detachment - the particulars are so shocking that they need no sentimental boost - which is deployed in combination with complex feeling...There are poems in Here, Bullet good enough to hold a place in any anthology of war poetry' - The Guardian ("In the line of fire: James Campbell asks where are the war poets of today")
£10.47
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisHarry Martinson (1904-78) sailed the oceans from 1920 to 1927 as an escape from an unhappy childhood in rural southwest Sweden. Returning to his native tracts, he devoted himself to writing and eventually became one of the best-known authors of his time, his books appealing widely both to academics and to the general reader. His election to the Swedish Academy in 1949 was seen as a gesture towards a generation of more or less self-educated working-class writers, and he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature with novelist Eyvind Johnson. Sections of the Swedish press responded with such vehemence to the way Academicians had rewarded two of their own that Martinson vowed never to publish again, and his last years were darkened by despair and depression as his view of the world became bleaker. His books reflect his upbringing, his travels and his interest in science and social questions. His poetry has many strands but the one most often admired is that which combines close scrutiny of the small events of the natural world with an intense awareness of cosmic distances in time and space. While his prose books have reached a wide readership in several languages, Martinson's poems have appeared only sporadically in English. Robin Fulton's translations provide the first substantial selection of Harry Martinson's poetry for English-language readers. His edition has an introductory essay by Staffan Soderblom, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and won him the Bernard Shaw Prize for Swedish Translation.Trade ReviewHis inimitable voice, his 'life's language' retained its measured intensity to the very end. For the first time in English, thanks to Robin Fulton's chiseled translations, we can now read this important poet at length. * World Literature Today *Martinson's writings mirror many of the great issues of the 20th century. These are social injustices and dictatorships, war and peace, commercial culture and the culture of the automobile, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction. Motifs from modern science find their way into his poetry. Martinson's realm of ideas is enriched by scientific theories, and the language of science is evident in his poetry. In this respect, he is an innovator, even in an international perspective. -- Ulf Larsson * Catching the Dewdrop, Reflecting the Cosmos *
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Jade Ladder
Book SynopsisThis anthology is the record of a revolution in Chinese poetry. As the Cultural Revolution gave way to the post-Mao era - years of political turmoil, economic boom and the return of Hong Kong - the present period has been one of extraordinary and deeply problematic growth. Chinese poets, driven by alienation, trauma and exile, have responded with one of the most thorough and exciting experiments in world poetry. Jade Ladder shows authoritatively for the first time in English the diversity of Chinese poetry as it renegotiates its relationship with Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, and re-engages with its Classical heritage. Misty, post-Misty, Fourth Generation; publication in samizdat, publication in exile, publication on the internet - in a nation of billions, it sometimes seems that there are a million ways to write poetry. This selection provides a concise series of perspectives on a proliferating scene. It focusses on key figures and key poems. It moves beyond the lyric to showcase an astonishing diversity of genres including narrative poetry, neo-Classical writing, the sequence, experimental poetry and the long poem. Through detailed introductions, it examines how contemporary poetry grew from both the fertile Classical tradition and the stony ground of the Communist period, only to rewrite that tradition, and resist that regime. Jade Ladder is the most comprehensive single volume guide to what has been happening and what is happening now in a culture of undeniably global significance. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the future not just of China, but of poetry.Trade ReviewThe jade ladder itself is an image of the link between heaven and earth, translatable as the imagination. The atmosphere given off by the anthology is a heartening one, despite the grimness of some of the material, since what we read and hear testifies to the necessities of the imaginative life as embodied in poetry, whatever the political and economic climate. -- Sean O'Brien * The Guardian *This fascinating gathering of new and old voices is sure to please not only fans of Chinese culture but all who appreciate great poetry. * World Literature Today *
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Electric Shadow
Book SynopsisHeidi Williamson’s first collection is peopled with vibrant and disturbing shadows. The Northern Lights reach down beneath the London skyline, James Dean learns the craft of distance, Darwin staggers across a heaving ship, Coleridge slumbers on to another dream, and The Travelling Salesman turns a calculator on us. Fuelled by a residency at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, Williamson’s fascination with science leads her to explore less usual territories for poetry, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer programming, as well as space travel, electricity, and evolution. As she investigates the limits of personal and factual knowledge with ‘eyes wide open’, the driving force throughout is a desire to understand the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’ in the world around and inside us. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, it was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.Trade Review"Heidi Williamson's poems are about contact with the haunted world. She understands uncertainty and loss, as well as the trace loss leaves behind as memory, memory that acts like a Blitz incendiary waiting to ignite later in life. The sensuousness of language is asserted - through tender explorations of our haunted fabric" - George Szirtes. "Williamson knows that poetry is a means of investigation, rigorous and disciplined; her poems often begin with a thought that a lesser poet would be content to end with. This approach is evident in the beautiful precision of her language, the way form itself becomes a means of discovery" - Esther Morgan. "I am a great admirer of Heidi's poetry and find her fascination with science very exciting. There isn't enough high quality poetry that is empathetic to science around and the value of her approach extends well beyond poetry" - Professor Anne Osbourn of The Osbourn Lab, John Innes Centre (international research centre for plant science and microbiology).
£10.44
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Ireland Is Changing Mother
Book SynopsisIreland Is Changing Mother is Rita Ann Higgins at her edgy best: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the lives of the Irish dispossessed, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger. This was her first new collection after her retrospective, Throw in the Vowels, and was followed by Tongulish.Trade ReviewIt shouldn't be unusual to hear a smart, sassy, unabashed, female working-class voice in Irish writing. But it is. Higgins's achievement doesn't depend on that rarity value, but it is certainly amplified by it. Higgins is, quite consciously, an artistic outsider - a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other. She doesn't congratulate herself for her sympathy with those who are (in this case literally) outside the world of art. She simply sees and writes. Her humour and playfulness keep sentimentality and self-righteousness resolutely at bay - She has made what is still the most direct and powerful statement of the class divide in Irish society - The boom years had no great effect on Higgins's voice, on her point of view or on her style. She had a manic linguistic energy long before the hysteria of the Tiger era quickened the pulse of the culture as a whole: Higgins could be regarded, in one of her guises, as Ireland's first rapper. - Her political satire hasn't lost its edge, but it no longer reads as a cry in the wilderness - Now the bubble's burst, we're left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them. -- Fintan O'Toole * The Irish Times *A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues. Her poems are a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective, with wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate direct speech. -- Ruth Padel * Independent on Sunday *
£9.45
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Collected Poems
Book SynopsisFrances Horovitz's poems have the clarity of ballad and the power of myth. Her finely honed lyrics 'strike to areas of the soul as old as humanity itself'. Many were inspired by the remote Cotswold valley where she lived for ten years; others by the border country of Cumbria and the Welsh Marches. Her Collected Poems (1985) was one of the landmark volumes of postwar British poetry. She was one of the finest ever readers of poetry, and this new edition includes an audio CD of her reading a selection of her poems, along with an interview.Trade Review'She has perfect rhythm, great delicacy and a rather Chinese yet very locally British sense of landscape - her poetry does seem to me to approach greatness' - Peter Levi. 'Frances Horovitz inherits the mantle of Kathleen Raine and of Frances Bellerby. It is an honour to be able to say that her voice is not that of the "age" but of the earth' - Anne Stevenson. 'The Collected Poems are, after all, what we are left with when all the symposia and elegies have withered. One is reminded, gratefully, of John Updike's appreciation of Wallace Stevens: "What a good use of life, to leave behind one beautiful book".' - James Wood, The Times.
£11.40
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Not Finding Wittgenstein: Peter Lepus Poems
Book SynopsisThe poems in "Not Finding Wittgenstein" feature Peter Henry Lepus, a rabbit who searches the world for philosophers, conversing with Ludwig Wittgenstein in Antarctica, Bertrand Russell in Japan, and with A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin in Iraq before and after the invasion. J.S. Harry is one of Australia's leading poets, renowned for her cool wit and sharp intellect, and for her seemingly whimsical irony, which is unerringly accurate in piercing pretension. Peter's innocent but quizzical rabbit perspective is perfect for her questioning of the nature of perception and the limits of philosophical enquiry, of the ways in which language constructs our world, and of how poetry may reconstruct it again, in strange and surreal ways. But there's also a humble, human concern expressed through Peter's innocence and vulnerability, about the beauty of simple things and the delicacy of the natural order - and the ease with which both may be poisoned by pride, or politics, or war.Trade Review'The further Harry seems from taking horror and extremity seriously, the more the poem insists that, while language can never intercept an incoming missile, it can light up a moral scene as nothing else can - For me she is the most arresting poet working in Australia today' - Peter Porter. 'Written in a plain and direct language, the poems take their strength from an extraordinary complexity of tone - For all their involvement in the contemporary world, the poems keep this sense of folktales and children's books. Peter Henry Lepus maintains a generous curiosity. Even in war zones, he treats impossible, terrible and prosaic occurrences with the same unassuming interest. The sharp satirical work of the poems depends upon this gentle questioning, this practical innocence. At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophical, Wittgenstein warns: "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical." J.S. Harry's poems about Peter Henry Lepus work with that kind of suspension between teasing intimacy and absolute seriousness' - Lisa Gorton, The Age
£9.86
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Blue Den
Book Synopsis"The Blue Den" is a book of lyrical, sensuous poems which builds on the achievement of Stephanie Norgate's debut collection "Hidden River", which was shortlisted for both the Forward First Collection Prize and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In "The Blue Den", people travel along the edges of roads, landscapes and emotions. The poems give voice to a stream under ice, a flooded road, and an ant beneath the sky. Strongly visual and imaginative, these poems explore the edges of memory, the mutual dependency of man and nature. Stephanie Norgate's second collection celebrates the power of intense looking and making, whether meditating on refugees in an oarless boat or Giacometti working restlessly at the figure of a strange walker. These poems inhabit marginal, unsung and free experiences: plastic bags along a road or the return of children over a lake. The underside resonates with strange vivid beauty.Trade ReviewThe poems in The Blue Den possess a brooding, magnetism which draws us into a drowned ship, a slow-worm's narrow skull or the hand-clasp of an orang-utan. The beauty of imagery and rhythm is matched by the subtlety of the poet's thought. -- Helen DunmoreHidden River attempts to explore the barely perceptible and the fragile vicissitudes of human experience. In particular many of the poems draw on the liminal relation between the natural world and our own, combining craft and an unrehearsed sensibility to produce inventive, and often energetic, results - various, resourceful and often rewardingly delicate, Hidden River is an estimable debut. -- Ben Wilkinson * TLS *An absolutely stunning first collection, combining craft and passion. The poems encompass many subjects, from powerful and moving poems about grief and loss, to sensual love poems, poems about history and place, to poems that reach out into the worlds of art, literature and politics. They are united by a sense of something secret and undiscovered being revealed and by a very distinctive, lyrical voice. The precariousness of human experience is balanced by a precisely observed vision of the natural world. -- Vicki Feaver
£8.50
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Malarkey
Book SynopsisThe malarkey is over in the back of the car - As soon as you turn your back, time slips. The humdrum present has become the precious, irrecoverable past. The ways in which the present longs for the past, questions it, tries to get in touch with it and stretches the power of memory to its limits, are central to this collection by Helen Dunmore. Joseph Severn recalls Keats hurling a bad dinner out onto the steps of the Piazza di Spagna; the glamour of John Donne's portrait 'taken in shadows' seduces a new generation; the dead assert their right to walk through the imaginations of the living - These are poems and stories of loss and extraordinary rediscovery. The Malarkey was Helen Dunmore's last poetry book before her final collection Inside the Wave (2017). It brings together poems of great lyricism, feeling and artistry.Trade Review'An electrifying and original talent, a writer whose style is characterised by a lyrical, dreamy intensity' - Guardian 'One of this country's finest literary talents' - Daily Telegraph 'Dunmore gets a wonderful balance between delicate, exact, surprising language and very strong thought - which may be bitter, sardonic, or violent, tender, or wildly imaginative, but is always generous - A lovely poetic electricity runs through her poems' - Sean O'Brien & Ruth Padel, PBS Bulletin. 'This is a poet whose words can be savoured on the tongue' - Iain Crichton Smith, Glasgow Herald
£8.50
Bloodaxe Books Ltd To Do Wid Me: Benjamin Zephaniah Filmed Live &
Book SynopsisBenjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me is both a Selected Poems by Benjamin Zephaniah and a film portrait of Benjamin Zephaniah by Pamela Robertson-Pearce drawing on both live performances and informal interviews. The film shows him performing his poetry for different audiences and talking about his work, life, beliefs and much else. You see him live on stage at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Newcastle's Live Theatre, Hexham's Queen's Hall and Brunel University, and engaging with school children at Keats House in London, where he was writer-in-residence. As well as the main film, the DVD also has a bonus feature: music videos made by Zephaniah with the Beta Brothers. This is a new concept in poetry publishing: not a book with a DVD but a DVD-book. The book supplements the film and includes the texts of all the poems and songs from the film and videos. (But because the DVD is a free giveaway inside the book, it is classed as a book not a DVD so you don't have to pay VAT, hence the great price.) The DVD is PAL format compatible with DVD players in most countries apart from Canada, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Taiwan and the United States but playable on laptops produced for those countries.Trade ReviewAn exuberant experiment in poetry publishing, as it is not meant to be simply read but seen and heard. * World Literature Today *I loved it. I’d already known from watching her films on Vimeo that Pamela Robertson-Pearce is a good director who knows how to get out of the way and let the poems and the poet speak for themselves, and this talent is very much on display here. I watched the DVD in two long sittings and was entranced… The film is playful and serious by turns, just as Zephaniah’s poems are, and gave me a lot to think about, especially on the role of performance in poetry, the social responsibility of artists, and the various ways in which oral and literary traditions intersect… Brilliant performance poets like Zephaniah remind us that poetry is first and foremost an oral, embodied medium. Zephaniah’s example challenges us to take living more seriously, and to question whether our words and actions and politics are truly aligned as they should be. And needless to say, for a type of poetry that so emphasizes the physicality of language, film/video is the ideal medium. Neil Astley’s Foreword in the book offers a more comprehensive biography than any I’ve seen online, and people who already own some or all of Zephaniah’s earlier books with Bloodaxe and Penguin will want this one, too, since it includes different versions of many poems, updated to reflect how they have evolved as he continues to perform them on stage. -- Dave Bonta * movingpoems.com *The two-hour DVD tucked into the back cover of To Do Wid Me encapsulates four years of filming by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. The footage of 18 poems from five live performances is intercut with interviews at his home and with his eloquent mother Valerie. Every word of the poems on the DVD is printed in the book... In 2009 a BBC poll voted Zephaniah Britain's third favourite poet of all time after T. S. Eliot and John Donne. While he is in his way as musical as Eliot and as witty as Donne, To Do Wid Me reinforces my sense that he is permanently atop an alternative galaxy where other superstars...include Bob Marley and William Blake. -- Michael Horovitz * The Times *Table of ContentsBenjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce (poems in film and book listed in order with locations) 12 Naked (Brunel University) 16 Man to Man (Brunel University) 17 I Love Me Mother (Birmingham) 18 Drivosaurus Rex (Keats House) 19 Who’s Who (Keats House) 20 No Problem (Keats House) 21 I Have a Scheme (Ledbury) 24 Dis policeman is kicking me to death (Brunel University) 27 What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us (Lincolnshire) 29 Dis Poetry (Live Theatre, Newcastle) 31 Wake Up (Lincolnshire) 34 Meditate and Communicate (Brunel University) 36 Rong Radio (Beta Brothers music video, London) 39 Football Mad (Keats House) 41 Money (Live Theatre, Newcastle) 45 Talking Turkeys (Keats House) 47 To Do Wid Me (Birmingham) 51 Nu Run Away (Birmingham) Bonus: Benjamin Zephaniah music videos by The Beta Brothers & Mango Island 54 Us & Dem (Mango Island) 57 Touch (Beta Brothers) 60 Responsible (Beta Brothers) 62 Genetics (Beta Brothers)
£10.80
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010
Book SynopsisThis new expanded edition of "The Long and the Short of It" covers 55 years of Roy Fisher's poetry. Playing the language, pleasuring the imagination and teasing the senses, Fisher's witty, inventive and anarchic poetry has given lasting delight to his many dedicated readers for over half a century. Choosing this book on "Desert Island Discs", Ian McMillan praised Fisher as "Britain's greatest living poet". "The Long and the Short of It" draws on the entire range of Fisher's work, from its fraught beginnings in the 1950s through major texts of the 1960s and 1970s as "City", "The Ship's Orchestra" and 'Wonders of Obligation' to "A Furnace", his 1980s masterpiece, and and then the later work set in the scarred and beautiful North Midlands landscape where he has lived for the past 30 years, notably the Costa-shortlisted "Standard Midland" (2010), which has been added to this expanded edition.Trade Review'Fisher 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, Guardian. 'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more' - August Kleinzahler. 'Anyone who doubts that contemporary poetry can be intellectually and formally daring without being strictly for lecturers and fanatics should read this book' - William Wootten, Guardian.
£21.25
Bloodaxe Books Ltd At the Time of Partition
Book SynopsisThis book-length poem is set at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 when thousands of people were killed in civil unrest and millions displaced, with families later split between the two countries. Inspired by family history, Moniza Alvi weaves a deeply personal story of fortitude and courage, as well as of tragic loss, in this powerful work in 20 parts. At the Time of Partition was Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book after her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection Europa, published in 2008 at the same time as Split World: Poems 1990-2005. It was also a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.Trade Review'She 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 metaphysical wit and seriousness' - Leonie Rushforth, London Magazine. 'Much of Alvi's work engages with a surreal or fantastical world of fractured and partially recovered identity, working through sequences in her most recent poetry' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets. 'Moniza Alvi's world is a place of wild energy...Alvi's voice has achieved a relaxed naturalness, a fluidity which allows her to present these delicious, extraordinary poems as though it were easy' - Kathleen Jamie & Hugo Williams, PBS Bulletin. '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 7 July bombings.' - Tim Robertson, Magma.
£9.45
Jessica Kingsley Publishers Using Voice and Movement in Therapy: The
Book SynopsisUsing Voice and Movement in Therapy is a practical and imaginative guide to the way in which physical movement and the expressive use of the voice can facilitate therapy. Paul Newham examines how massage, manipulation and dance, combined with vocal expression, can alleviate certain emotional, psychosomatic and psychological symptoms. His book provides practical support for non-clinical professionals, working as group leaders and facilitators, who aim to incorporate singing and vocal expression into their working method as a means to initiate social interaction and self-empowerment.The author draws on his own professional experience to describe therapeutic techniques and exercises which he has found to be effective, illustrating these with case studies. In particular, he focuses on the benefits of voicework for use with some of the most frequently occurring emotional, psychological and psychosomatic difficulties experienced by people in expressive therapy.This is the first of three volumes which will rectify the dearth of practical information on the therapeutic use of vocal expression within psychotherapy, arts therapies and group process. The three books will form an exploration of how singing and vocal sound-making can contribute to an artistically orientated psychotherapeutic process, and will be a source of inspiration for practitioners.Trade ReviewBoth books certainly provide a wealth of interesting concepts, structured theoretical frameworks for considering movement and voicework, detailed descriptions of practical exercises and techniques and clear case studies. Readers need to be aware that Newham uses an eclectic mixture of physiological, psychological, mythological and artististic approaches in his work. Personally, I find this blend of scientific and artistic approaches to be innovative, erudite, stimulating and reassuring. Newham is a sincere and enormously able practitioner who has a unique abiliy to connect deeply linked aspects of personality and voice. Newham's books are of value to therapists already interested in the emotional release aspects of voice work with clients, and those beginning to investigate the whole field of psychotherapeutic literature. They fulfill his own goal "to be both theoretically informative and practically inspiring - there are parts of the voice movement methodology which theorists from other orientations can borrow from, adapt and utilise." -- BulletinOver the past 15 years, P. Newham has been developing a systematic methodology for using singing and vocalisation as a theraputic modality. Here he examines how massage, manipulation and dance, combined with vocal expression, can alleviate certain emotional, psychomatic and psychological symptoms. He describes therapeutic techniques and exercises which he has found to be effective, illustrating these with case studies. It's the first of a series of three volumes which concern the practical application of voice movement therapy. -- International Theatre InformationTable of ContentsIntroduction. Voice Movement Therapy - Towards an Integrated Model of Expressive Arts Therapy. 1. Spherical Space, Spherical Sound: Investigating the Environment of Inner and Outer Experience. 2. Convex and Concave: The Architecture and Acoustics of Motion and Emotion. 3. The Voice Tube: The Elementary Physical Principles of the Vocal Instrument. 4. Cycles of Sound and Movement: Structured Voice and Movement Techniques for Exploring the Self Beyond Words. 5. Pedestrian Movement, Pedestrian Sound: The Artistic Qualities Inherent in Natural Patterns of Sound and Movement. 6. The Language of the Breath: The Mechanics of Breathing and their Influence on Mind and Body. 7. Voicing the Troubled Mind: Catharsis, Creativity and Recovery. Notes. Appendix 1. The Voice Movement Therapy System of Vocal Analysis. Appendix 2. Further Information.
£999.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Pushkin: Queen of Spades
Book SynopsisPikovaia dama (The Queen of Spades) has continued to fascinate readers since its first publication in 1834, and has been successfully adapted to both operatic stage and screen. The most generally admired of Pushkin’s stories, it has earned a high place amongst his works as a whole and in many ways is the embodiment of ‘essential’ Pushkin. With its play on both psychology and the fantastic, its tersely precise language and its openness to multiple readings, it continues to mesmerise critics, teachers and students alike. This book contains the complete text in Russian of The Queen of Spades, with an introduction to Pushkin's life and work. The text is also supplemented with extensive notes in English and a complete vocabulary.Table of ContentsIntroduction Text Vocabulary
£22.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Four Greek Plays
Book SynopsisThese translations of "Oedipus the King", "Antigone", "Acharnians" and "Peace", are here reissued in paperback. They are written to be accessible for use in schools and for performance, and contain no Greek text.
£19.49
Poetry Wales Press Ingrid's Husband
Book SynopsisA volume of poems on a variety of themes, using fine imagery and power. They are at once comic, moving, magical and compassionate. The author''s work has been widely published in magazines and journals. He is also a singer/songwriter.
£7.59
Nick Hern Books Sweeney Todd
Book SynopsisThe gruesomely fascinating musical about the 'Demon Barber of Fleet Street', one of Sondheim's greatest hits. From the writing partnership behind A Little Night Music. Victim of a gross injustice that robbed him of his wife and child, Sweeney Todd sets about exacting a terrible revenge on society: slitting the throats of the customers who visit his barbershop. But things are getting complicated – a romance has developed with Mrs Lovett, the lady who runs the pie shop next door, and the disappearances are starting to cause concern. With the bodies piling up, Sweeney Todd hits upon a novel idea, and starts passing on his 'patrons' to his homely neighbour... Meat pie, anyone? Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical Sweeney Todd opened on Broadway in 1979 and in the West End in 1980. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Olivier Award for Best New Musical. It has since had numerous revivals as well as a film adaptation.Trade Review'A masterpiece, perhaps the last truly great American musical. This is, in short, a blood-drenched love letter you are unlikely to forget in a hurry' * Daily Telegraph *'Sondheim has been inching closer and closer to pure opera, and Sweeney Todd is the closest he's come yet' * Newsweek *
£11.69
Nick Hern Books The Oresteia
Book SynopsisDrama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Aeschylus' great trilogy of Greek tragedies about the end of the curse on the House of Atreus, The Oresteia comprises Agamemnon, Choephori (Libation-Bearers) and Eumenides (The Furies). A fourth play, Proteus, originally formed part of a tetralogy, but has not survived. The trilogy was first performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BC, where it won first prize. This English version of The Oresteia, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton.
£5.62
Nick Hern Books After the Dance
Book SynopsisTerence Rattigan’s After the Dance is a brilliant attack on the hedonistic lifestyle of the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s and 30s. David is a high-living, hard-drinking, successful writer involved with two women: his wife Joan and an earnest-minded younger woman, Helen. When Joan commits suicide, David considers following her, but instead returns to a life of parties and drinking. After the Dance was first produced at the St James’s Theatre, London, in June l939. It signalled a more serious direction in Rattigan's writing after the relative frivolity of the hugely successful French Without Tears. It opened to euphoric reviews, but only a month later the European crisis was darkening the national mood and audiences began to dwindle. The play was pulled in August after only sixty performances. This edition includes an authoritative introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.Trade Review'One of the supreme dramatists of the 20th century' * Guardian *'A harrowing critique of a period of heedless frivolity and a dazzling reminder of the strengths of Rattigan’s writing' * Evening Standard *'A great and wonderful revelation... combines superb social comedy with shafts of powerful emotion' * Telegraph *
£12.34
Nick Hern Books Widows
Book SynopsisA smouldering political allegory about a political protest in a country ruled by a military junta. From the author of Death and the Maiden, written in collaboration with Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America. In a war-torn village the men have disappeared. The women – their mothers, wives, daughters – wait by the river, hope and mourn. Their anguish is unspoken until bruised and broken bodies begin being washed up on the banks and the women defy the military in the only form of protest left to them. Ariel Dorfman’s play Widows is based on his 1983 novel of the same name. The play was first presented by the Traverse Theatre Company at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in March 1997. (An earlier version of the play was first performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in July 1991).Trade Review'A remarkable attempt to dramatise in a semi-mythical way the consequences of the recent appalling abuses of human rights' * Independent on Sunday *
£11.69
Nick Hern Books The School for Scandal
Book SynopsisDrama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic comedy of manners, ridiculing affectation and pretentiousness. Joseph Surface is apparently a model citizen; his brother Charles is a dissolute wastrel. But when the schemings of the scandalmongers go awry, the reverse is shown to be true. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The School for Scandal was first performed in London at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Colin Counsell.
£6.23
