A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Nick Hern Books The Shoemakers' Holiday
Book SynopsisDrama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A rumbustious Elizabethan comedy featuring identity fraud, love triangles and a marriage proposal disguised as a shoe fitting. Thomas Dekker's play The Shoemaker's Holiday was first staged in London in 1599. This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Peter J. Smith.
£6.23
Nick Hern Books Bombshells
Book SynopsisSix funny and perceptive monologues about the stresses of modern female life. Meryl Davenport – A mother who tells the story of her non-stop day in a rapid-fire internal monologue. Tiggy Entwhistle – A cactus lover bravely attempting to rise above her relationship crisis. Mary O'Donnell – A feisty teenage schoolgirl competing in a talent quest. Theresa McTerry – An increasingly disillusioned bride on her wedding day. Winsome Webster – A widow with an appetite for the unexpected. Zoe Struthers – An American cabaret singer who's had her fair share of personal problems. Joanna Murray-Smith's play Bombshells was first performed by Caroline O'Connor at the Fairfax Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia, in December 2001. It was revived at the same venue in 2004, transferring to the York Theatre in Sydney in April 2004. A reduced version consisting of four monologues was performed by Caroline O'Connor as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, in 2004. This production – now consisting of all six monologues – transferred to the Arts Theatre in the West End in September 2004.Trade Review'Jaw-droppingly good' * Sunday Times *'A rare combination of comedy, truth and rapture' * Guardian *'Little gems, as observant as anything in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads... Beautifully judged in their mixture of comedy and depression' * Guardian *
£11.39
Nick Hern Books The Lottie Project
Book SynopsisAn adaptation for the stage of this modern children's classic by the best-selling author and 2005 Children's Laureate. For her history project, Charlie hits on the idea of writing the diary of Lottie, a young Victorian serving girl. When Charlie's mother loses her job as a shop manageress and starts work as a cleaner, Charlie's previously happy and comfortable lifestyle is threatened, and she finds her own hardships and struggles are not so different from Lottie's. First staged at the Polka Children's Theatre in 1999, this adaptation is suitable for young actors as well as young audiences. The adapter, Vicky Ireland, has provided production notes to indicate how the play can be staged even with minimal resources - plus a lot of ingenuity! 'Vicky has adapted a handful of my books for the stage. I hope she works her magic on many more to come!' - Jacqueline WilsonTrade Review'Both thought provoking and very funny, while giving a young audience a real sense of what it feels like to be a Victorian' * Evening Standard *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books Kensuke's Kingdom
Book SynopsisThe story of a young boy's fantastic adventure after being washed up on a Pacific island – adapted for the stage by acclaimed dramatist Stuart Paterson from the best-selling novel by Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo. Michael embarks on a round-the-world sailing voyage with his parents, only for their dream to become a nightmare when Michael falls overboard. Washed up on an island in the Pacific populated with orang-utans, Michael soon makes a startling discovery: the island is already home to one extraordinary man, and this is Kensuke's Kingdom... Stuart Paterson's stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom was first staged by Birmingham Stage Company in 2005.Trade Review'A brilliant touring production... I was still on a high days later' * Times Educational Supplement *'One to treasure... In this adaptation by Stuart Paterson, the story is beautifully told... I've never heard such cheering as there was at the start of the second act' * Birmingham Post *'Paterson is a quite unrivalled talent within the theatre' * Herald *
£10.44
Everyman Rossetti Poems
Book SynopsisAn exciting addition to Everyman's Library: a new series of small, handsome hardcover volumes devoted to the world's classic poets. Our books will have twice as many pages as Bloomsbury Classics' 128pp and will cost 7. 99 against Bloomsbury's 9. 99. The binding, paper and production will be visibly superior in every way to that of Bloomsbury
£10.80
Carcanet Press Ltd Five in One
Book SynopsisThe themes of the previous volume of poetry define the tasks of the next for Louise Gluck. This collection shows the poet in this evolution. It includes: Firstborn (1968); The House on Marshland (1975); Descending Figure (1980); The Triumph of Achilles (1985); and Ararat (1990).
£17.06
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: John Ashbery
Book SynopsisDuring his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish and tackle fundamentals. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of "Some Trees" and the disjunctive, experimentalism of "The Tennis Court Oath", to the powerful mediations on subjectivity of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave", this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Book SynopsisThomas Kinsella stands apart in modern Irish poetry. His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social commentary, from love and the enabling feminine to metaphysical speculation in a variety of earthly settings. Kinsella is a city poet. Born in Dublin in 1928, he attended University College, and entered the Irish Civil Service, but resigned from the Department of Finance in 1965 for a career in poetry in the United States. He published from the beginning with the Dolmen Press, later co-publishing his poetry and translations with Oxford University Press. His translations from the Irish include the Iron-Age prose epic "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900". He is editor of the "New Oxford Book of Irish Verse".
£21.25
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poetry
Book SynopsisThis selection explores the diversity of Hugh MacDiarmid's work, from delicate lyrics derived from the Scots ballad tradition to fierce polemic. "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" and "On a Raised Beach--"with a full glossary of its technical terms--are included, as are glossed Scots words at the foot of each page and an illuminating memoir by MacDiarmid's son.Trade Review'Hugh MacDiarmid has shown what can be achieved when all the risks are taken.' - EDWIN MORGAN 'There is very little written, acted, composed or surmised in Scotland which does not in some strand descend from the new beginning he made.' - THE SCOTSMAN
£14.20
Carcanet Press Ltd Soul Keeping Company: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisLucie Brock-Broido's poetry conjures what is half-known, at the limits of experience, in language fierce with a living glitter. The familiar world becomes richly disquieting, edged with danger: mute conjoined twins creating a violent secret world; Emily Dickinson's enigmatic letters to her 'Master'; a self-portrait of the poet 'with Her Hair on Fire'. "Soul Keeping Company" introduces Brock-Broido's poetry to British readers with generous selections from her three acclaimed collections: "A Hunger", "The Master Letters and Trouble in Mind".Trade ReviewBrock-Broido's talismanic words open into a magical territory of 'Domestic Mysticism'... Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon... The poems leap off the page. Helen Vendler, THE NEW YORKER This is a poet who cultivates elegant nerviness and a riveting poetic clairvoyance... In Trouble in Mind we witness the imagination's virtuosity... distilled in the alembic of the poet's radical, brilliantly inventive diction. LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Vernon Watkins: New Selected Poems
Book SynopsisBrought back into print in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Vernon Watkins' death. Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: 'the greatest lyric poet of my generation.' Dylan Thomas referred to him as: 'the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English', or, in a letter, as 'the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today.' Philip Larkin wrote: 'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.' All Watkins's poetry was published by Faber & Faber in his lifetime, and he was friends with such widely differing poets as: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Kathleen Raine. When he died, in 1967, he was being considered for poet laureate, after the death of John Masefield. Since that time, however, although a few have continued to praise his poetry very highly, public awareness of it has ceased almost completely, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th Century poetry.100 years after Watkins's birth (June 27th, 1906), "New Selected Poems of Vernon Watkins" offers the first widely available selection of his poetry since his death, with a new introduction and notes, outlining the literary and biographical context of his work, and a foreword by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a rare joy thus to be reintroducing the work of a major poet to a new generation of readers.Trade Review'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.' - Philip Larkin.
£999.99
Crescent Moon Publishing Poems of 1820
Book Synopsis
£10.68
Crescent Moon Publishing Rampoli: Poems From Mainly German
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Auckland University Press Husk: paperback
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£12.83
Auckland University Press Sing-song: paperback
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£13.46
Auckland University Press Beauties of the Octagonal Pool
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£20.96
Auckland University Press Darling North: paperback
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden: Paperback
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£14.41
Auckland University Press The Blue Coat
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£14.36
Auckland University Press How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press Lost and Gone Away: Paperback
Book SynopsisBetween 2010 and 2014 Lynn Jenner made several related emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the record of these: a fascinating hybrid text of nonfiction, prose poems and poetry.The book traverses the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake; samples and sifts through the lost and recovered detritus of the ancient world; radiates its attention out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin; and quietly, devastatingly, explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away. “More than a year ago a friend, who speaks five languages and reads several more, told me it would not be possible to write about the Holocaust from New Zealand. There’s so little to say here, she said. You should go to Europe. But this is where I am, I said. That is the problem. This is where I am from, this is who I am, and this is where I am.”
£26.21
Auckland University Press This Paper Boat
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press He's So MASC
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Auckland University Press Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the
Book SynopsisThrough fun and gore, love and monsters, Sugar Magnolia Wilson's riveting first collection takes readers inside a world where past and present, fiction and fact, author and subject collide. Playful and yet not so sunny, these poems invite you in with extravagant and surprising imagery, only to reveal the uneasy, Frankenstein world within. `Sugar Magnolia Wilson's work punches holes into a parallel universe which explains ourselves back to us. Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean uncovers deep secrets within the reader through Wilson's intelligence, craft and close observation of being. It's an exceptional and uplifting collection which is a joy to read.' - Pip Adam `These poems are clever, intriguing, resistant, arresting, strange, funny and pleasingly unusual. Humorously self-conscious and with a wonderful facility with imagery, the overwhelming evidence in this collection is that Wilson is a significant new writer with a distinctive voice of her own.' - Mark Williams
£18.71
Auckland University Press Under Glass
Book Synopsis`The things that are really big and really close are too big and too close to be seen.’ A colossal jungle. Two suns. The sea on fire. If the mind were a place, what might it look like? Under Glass is an ambitious new collection by one of the most exciting young poets writing today. Gregory Kan’s second book is a dialogue between a series of prose poems, following a protagonist through a mysterious and threatening landscape, and a series of verse poems, driven by the speaker’s compulsive hunger to make sense of things. Kan’s explorations of the outer and inner landscapes frequently cross paths but leave the reader in doubt – this is a collection full of maps and trapdoors, labyrinths and fragmented traces. Under Glass opens up new ways of telling stories – while questioning the value of storytelling itself. Beautifully crystalline and emotionally powerful, this poetry collection takes readers on a journey that is frightening yet tender, imperfect but triumphant.
£18.71
Auckland University Press Moth Hour
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press How to Live
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£999.99
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 6
Book SynopsisRelaunched under the editorship of Anna Jackson in 2019, AUP New Poets 6 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart. We move from Kemp's slow-paced attentive readings of place and people, in a selection moving between Japan and New Zealand, to the velocity of Vanessa Crofskey's fierce, funny, intimate and political poetry, which takes the form of shopping lists, Post-it Notes, graphs, erasures, a passenger arrival card and even *poetry*, and finally to Chris Stewart's visceral take on the domestic, the nights cut to pieces by teething, the gravity of love and the churn of time. AUP New Poets 6 is an arresting introduction to the rich diversity of contemporary New Zealand poetry.Trade ReviewIt is said that we are in the middle of a poetry revolution in New Zealand: there is certainly a lot of production, an eager climate of reception, and a sense that new cultural confidences and anxieties are finding new expression. It is a pleasure, then, to find a carefully chosen selection of new poets and new poems that show the rich diversity of the contemporary scene: from Ben Kemp entering 'the arteries of Tokyo . . . with ears open', to Vanessa Crofskey's barbed attention to the deceptions and oddities of our try-hard but not really multicultural society, to Chris Stewart's patient observations of family and childbirth. - Mark Williams
£22.46
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 7
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Auckland University Press My Honest Poem
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+
Book SynopsisWe became teenagers in the nineties when New Zealand felt a lot less cool about queerness and gender felt much more rigid. We knew instinctively that hiding was the safest strategy. But how to find your community if you're hidden? Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldn't know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and much much more. From established names to electrifying newcomers, the cacophony of voices brought together in Out Here sing out loud and proud, ensuring that future generations of queers are afforded the space to tell their stories and be themselves without fear of retribution or harm.
£39.99
Auckland University Press I Am in Bed with You
Book SynopsisI am in bed with you. The room varies. But I'm always on the left. I am pulling the pieces of myself into myself. In the winter I left myself behind in the 90s. I'm coming back now. You can see the light touching me. I can see layers of tissue finally making a body. And once I have a body I have a head. And in my head are these thoughts. -From 'I am in bed with you' Playful and fluid but completely serious, Emma Barnes's surreal phantasmagoria I Am in Bed with You leads us through the very personal worlds of sex, gender and the body. Barnes cracks jokes, makes us uncomfortable, shows us a little tenderness, leaves a lot unsaid and does it all with language that provokes and confounds. 'I'm a mentally ill, / married, chronically ill, queer woman with two feet underground', the author reveals. 'I birth Sigourney Weaver's android baby', they tell us next. This collection is personal and fantastical, funny and excruciating. It's poetry in the process of unravelling most of what you thought you knew.Trade Review'I Am in Bed with You signals the arrival of an extraordinary talent. Not only does Emma Barnes have the brainpower to interrogate notions of personal identity and interconnection incisively as we enter the 2020s but the sense of humour to see the comedy in our conundra and the emotional range to grasp the heartbreak in our yearnings, conflicts and confusions. Packed with quotable bons mots, quirky observations, agony aunt tips, enigmas and apophthegms, this is a book that rewards frequent re-reading.' -- Iain Sharp; 'From the first line of 'This is a creation myth', this work is stubbornly brave. Barnes stomps with bright boots over the territory of motherhood, womanhood, gender, and - unquestionably and timelessly - Sigourney Weaver. Everything is new and a little bit disgusting.' -- Sophie van Waardenberg
£20.96
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 8
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Auckland University Press The Sea Walks into a Wall: 2021
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press Super Model Minority: 2022
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.71
Auckland University Press AUP New Poets 9
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Mica Press Cooking with Cancer
Book Synopsis
£8.07
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Crossfire
Book SynopsisWritten by French playwright Michael Azama and translated by British playwright Nigel Gearing, Crossfire is a heartstopping play about tumbling through the checkpoint of life and death warzones everywhere and at all times.
£11.99
Avalanche Books Of Love and Hope
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Otago University Press Playlunch: Five Short New Zealand Plays
Book SynopsisFirst published in 1996 and now updated, this book contains plays by established New Zealand writers that were written for lunchtime theatre. They are informal one-act plays, lasting less than an hour, requiring little in the way of stage equipment and props, and suitable for a wide range of audiences. Their condensed form gave their authors an opportunity to experiment with scripting and characterization. Together, they represent a variety of perspectives and performance styles. The plays offered small "adventures in theatre" for the writer, and continue to do so for directors, performers, audiences and readers.
£12.82
Silman-James Press,U.S. Naked Playwriting: The Art, the Craft & the Life
Book SynopsisThis is a complete playwriting course -- from developing a theme through plotting and structuring a play, developing characters, creating dialog, formatting the script, and applying methods that aid the actual writing and rewriting processes. The book also offers sound guidance on marketing and submitting play scripts for both contests and production, protecting one''s copyright, and working with directors and theatre companies. Well-written, comprehensive, and filled with illustrative examples, "Naked Playwriting" includes both innovative and tried-and-true writing techniques, sage advice from veteran writers, a short study of the major schools of dramatic thought, and writing anecdotes. This one-of-a-kind playwriting book, which covers both the basics of playwriting and the practical advice on getting a play published and produced, will help both novices and working writers discover and improve their playwriting skills and see their plays performed on a stage.
£999.99
Biblioasis Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets
Book SynopsisIn 1910 Lawrence J. Burpee published an anthology of 100 Canadian Sonnets. Poet and critic Zachariah Wells figured it was high time for an update on that dusty tome. In Jailbreaks, Wells has gathered 99 of his favourite sonnets written by Canadians, from the 19th century to the present day.Trade Review"It's refreshing to see an editor so engaged with his material...the result is a collection that successfully showcases remarkable variety within its narrow room."—Good Reports "Richly endowed with sonnets whose wordplay is more ornate, featuring work from such inventive phrasemakers as Margaret Avison, Don McKay and George Elliott Clarke. The list goes on."—Toronto Star "What Wells offers is a thematic survey on formalist grounds, a sort of sleight of hand that makes the collection immediately familiar and intelligible but also, as his insightful notes on each poem show, rigorous in its aesthetic evaluations and thoughtful in its attention to details of prosody. As an editor and commentator, Wells is incredibly perceptive and mercifully concise."—The Walrus
£11.99
Arc Publications In the Temple of a Patient God
Book SynopsisIn the Temple of a Patient GodTranslated by Ruth Christie with an introduction by Maureen FreelyVisible Poets series no. 12, parallel-text edition"To read Bejan Matur is to walk into a windswept desert strewn with bones and broken bodies and stones stained red by absent gods. Nothing is whole; nothing explains itself; nothing lasts. Horsemen gallop out of the night only to fade into the mountains on the horizon. Gravestones line the roads. Ruined houses howl with wind while shepherds sing dirges about a shattered, scattered tribe left to wander in the dark. It is a haunted, desolate and fragmented landscape in which every stone glows with a grief beyond words...""[Matur's] poems are jagged shards that stand together only to expose history as a myth. But it is still possible to see them as children of her childhood (she comes from a Kurdish Alevi family and grew up in south-eastern Turkey at a time of virtual civil war). And it is possible, when reading her poems, to imagine what that might mean. It is evident in their very shape, for Matur carves away at her images until she's stripped them down to the anguish at their heart. She claims no literary ancestors, drawing instead upon the oral traditions of her childhood...""It is almost as if her words are themselves gods, animating everything they inhabit. And here we come to the central paradox of Matur's poetry. Matur does not write in Kurdish, the banned, and therefore private, language of her early childhood. She writes in Turkish, the language in which she was educated — one might almost say exiled... She talks on the one hand of her Turkish being stronger than her Kurdish. And then she talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages. Words never forget their spiritual histories... She speaks of cutting her poems back and back, shaving them down to the bone until she has found the old word inside the new word, the Turkish poem that owes its haunting power to Kurdish.""So she is chipping and carving for a reason. Her dedication to this cause is absolute, and it takes her far beyond the questions raised by her own history. And it's this that makes her a world poet of the highest order."- Maureen Freely (from her Introduction to In the Temple of an Ancient God)
£10.44
Omega Point Press Songs of a Seeker
Book Synopsis
£4.74
Two Rivers Press Recreation Ground
Book SynopsisTom Phillips’ first full-length collection navigates terrains which range from Eastern Europe, Australia and the Home Counties to his own back garden in Bristol. From the different perspectives these vantage points offer, it unearths connections between chance meetings and `big history’, family stories and the state we’re in. It also looks at poetry itself as a ground on which to recreate – and negotiate with – one thing that nobody can change: the past.Trade Review“In Tom Phillips’ work, the world is unsettlingly close, whether the poem is set in his home town or at the other end of Europe. Other times, too, are alongside in the present, and echoes of conflict or loss disturb the surfaces of life, which are nonetheless carefully, caringly observed in these intelligent and watchful poems.” Philip Gross“The landscape of Tom Phillips’ poetry is an ‘unexpected geography’ within the contours of which we are reawakened to recognition that meaning amid a world of war and confusion is to be discovered in the unchanging nature of small things.” Ian Brinton
£7.55
Smith|Doorstop Books Extra Maths
Book Synopsis
£5.03
Prospect Books Roman Food Poems
Book SynopsisAll the major poets of Rome can be represented by something they wrote about food. They tell us how we taste it, where to get it, how to serve it, how and with whom to eat it, what and how much to drink with it, and how to get or avoid invitations to meals. Their subjects include vegetarianism, food-snobs and mythology. They also considered the idea of forbidden food. After all, the main preoccupations of human beings in any age can be brought in on the same trays as the food and drink. Sex, death, slavery, gardening, religion and the family are included, one way or another, in the verses printed and translated here. Alistair Elliot has chosen widely from Latin literature, from humble graffiti to the most famous and most memorable; from the oldest (Ennius) to those writing at the high-point of Empire (Juvenal). The lover of poetry will admire the vigorous translations; the student of Latin will welcome the many styles and means of expression contained within a short compass.
£12.34
Wrecking Ball Press How To Be A Bomb
Book Synopsis
£6.71
