Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA collection of anthologies, resource and reference books, including titles from Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Alex Madina, Jo Phillips and Adrian Barlow.

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Book SynopsisA father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet.The poet's art is revealed in stages in this making-of book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem Must We Mean What We Say, a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets of poems she receives in letters from a stranger. Who made up whom? Chiasson, an acclaimed poetry critic, has invented a remarkable structure where the reader and a poet speak to one another, across the void of silence and mystery. He is also the father of teenaged sons, and this volume continues the autobiographical arc of his prior, celebrated volumes. One long section is about the age of thirteen and the dawning of desire, while the title poem looks at the crucial age of fifteen and the existential threat of climate change and gu

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Book SynopsisIn these marvelous pages, the award-winning poet turns a searching gaze toward the shared habitat and intertwined fates of man and animal. He looks back and forward in time, down at the soil, up at the stars, and deeply into his personal relationships.Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores regions and forces that seem past endurance. Taking stock of threats against human survival, our own recklessness chief among them, these poems seek among visionaries and despots,

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Book SynopsisThe timeless and timely intersect in poems about our unique historical moment, from the prizewinning poet.In Zoom Rooms, Mary Jo Salter considers the strangeness of our recent existence, together with the enduring constants in our lives. The title poem, a series of sonnet-sized Zoom meetings—a classroom, a memorial service, an encounter with a new baby in the family—finds humor and pathos in our age of social distancing and technology-induced proximity. Salter shows too how imagination collapses time and space: in “Island Diaries,” the pragmatist Robinson Crusoe meets on the beach a shipwrecked dreamer from an earlier century, Shakespeare’s Prospero. Poems that meditate on objects—a silk blouse, a hot water bottle—address the human need to heal and console. Our paradoxically solitary but communal experiences find expression, too, in poems about art, from a Walker Evans photograph to a gilded Giotto altarpiece.

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Book SynopsisA collection of profound and piercing poems from a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize about navigating the modern world in search of beauty that will endureFever of Unknown Origin opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: “the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . .” What follows is an urgent tour of landscapes—environmental, political, and personal—that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the reader into “An empire of rags and photons” where we must look to the past to clarify our futures.With sublime wit and a Whitmanian eye, McGrath delivers a stunning collection of warnings, love letters, and praise songs for all that manages to weather the perennial pressures of time: frog ponds, stadium rubble, and the endless cycle of seasons, which usher us deeper into an era we cannot yet know.

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Book SynopsisA 4-part poetry collection that explores women’s roles in familial dynamics, immigration, and El Salvador’s civil war while reflecting on the death of the poet’s fatherA National Poetry Series winner, selected by the celebrated poet Reginald Dwayne BettsWhen COVID-19 broke and the United States closed the border to travel, Alexandra Lytton Regalado was separated from family back in El Salvador. She wrote Relinquenda entirely during lockdown as a meditation on cancer, the passing of her father, and the renewed significance of community.The central part of the collection focuses on her father during his 6-year struggle with cancer and considers how his stoicism, alcoholism, and hermitage might serve as mirror and warning. In contrast, she dedicates other poems to what it means for daughters, mothers, and wives to care for another as reflected in her relationships with the men in her life.Situated in the tropical lands

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Book Synopsis25 years of writing from one of our most gifted Latinx poets, featuring work from early explorations of machismo to new meditations on life as a single father, immigrant detention, and spiritual inquirySome of the Light gathers the first 25 years of Hernandez’s award-winning poetry, offering 28 new poems and a glimpse at the trajectory of a rising contemplative American author.At its core, Some of the Light contains collected poems of love, told through the lens of a single father raising two children alone in the borderlands. They are at times intimate and confessional, ranging from personal relationships to spiritual inquiry, from human rights to the environment, while between the cracks of the poems are poetic contemplations, chronicling the passing days of the pandemic.This latest work by Hernandez reveals a writer whom former US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera calls “a titan—unafraid to take to the road, get h

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Book SynopsisNominated for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for PoetryRecommended Reading from EmergeAn epic poem on kin estranged, the death of a brother from AIDS, and the possibility of reconciliation and love in the face of loss.

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Book SynopsisFrom a poet who teaches us the beauty and magic of the natural world comes a reminder that this world includes the creatures, with their / thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their / infallible sense of what their lives / are meant to be.In The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Mary Oliver brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of her classic poems, and two essays, all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved and disobedient little dog, Percy, who appears and even speaks in thirteen poems, the closing section of this volume.As Renée Loth has observed in the Boston Globe, Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention.Tell me, what is

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Book SynopsisNational Poetry Series Winner A collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences.   In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author’s East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with

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Book SynopsisA captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and form

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Book SynopsisAn “extraordinary” (Laurie Halse Anderson) young poet traces the lives of her foremothers in West Tennessee, from those enslaved centuries ago to her grandmother, her mother, and finally herself, in this stunning debut celebrating Black girlhood and womanhood throughout American history.“A masterpiece that beautifully captures the heartbreak that accompanies coming of age for Black girls becoming Black women.”—Evette Dionne, author of Lifting as We Climb, longlisted for the National Book AwardONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Ms. Magazine, Kirkus ReviewsWalking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors, from the unnamed women forgotten by the historical record but brought to life through Young’s imagination; to Amy, the first of Young’s foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave, unlike the white man who enslaved her and fath

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Book SynopsisFriendship, love, and the potential energy of change animate these poems of walking through New York City."I love the vibrant cinematic hunger of this book, its urbanity, yours and mine too.” —Eileen Myles Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz''s path through these poems. From Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouses downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as "Ivanka Skirting" and "This Beautiful Bubble" we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts--through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection, we enter Katz''s world, both public and private, and experience poetry as a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.

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Book SynopsisA gorgeous selection of the humane and moving poetry of David Young, a celebrated poet of the midwestern landscape and the people who live in it, with an expanded section featuring sixteen new poems exclusive to the paperback edition. A newly expanded career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language, and new poems that reflect a continued artistic interest in these subjects. Young’s settings are at once local and universal—an adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm. Here are poems on Osip Mandelstam and Chairman Mao, the meaning of boxcars on the track, the beautiful names of the months, and a fox at the field’s edge, charged in each case by Young’s fierce intelligence and candor in the face of grief and loss.“We float through space. Days pass,” Young writes in “The Portable Earth-Lamp.” “Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal / where light is sorted and stored.” His metaphysical reach, balancing remarkable humility with penetrating vision, is one of the great gifts of this exemplary career in poetry.

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Book SynopsisThis is the inaugural volume of a new series of literary hardcovers from North Atlantic Books. This series will collect the important work of writers who have served as major influences upon and contributors to the cultural and psychic milieu from which North Atlantic evolved.A distinguished figure of American letters, whose work and spirit have bridged five decades of creativity, Gerrit Lansing provides a perfect launch for the series with this collected edition of his poetry, which astonishes by the variety of its poetic forms and concerns, lyrical and cosmological. It cannot easily be fitted into niches currently fashionable. Like a 'seed growing secretly' (to quote a favorite poet of his, Henry Vaughan), it has influenced the American cultural underground since the late 1950s. Lansing was a friend and associate of generations of creative minds as diverse as the poet Charles Olson and the legendary filmmaker Harry Smith. Poet Robert Kelly notes that 'he is the most learned among us, and the most fun.'Lansing has patiently fashioned a body of work that ranges from short poems such as 'The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward' and 'In Northern Earth,' from which this collection takes its title, to longer cycles like the alchemical serial poem 'The Soluble Forest.' With themes at once personal and social, erotic and esoteric, Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth manifests the creative spirit of one of the important unheralded masters of modern poetry.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin AwardA 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in PoetryA blistering exploration of America?s legacy of anti-Black violence from an indispensable poet of our timeAmerican history got you down? Are you feeling alienated? Join poet James Cagney in his blistering second collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness, as he journeys through time, space, and memory with caustic, satirical beauty. Recall American history through its spent shell casings! Turn familial ghosts into art valuable for generations! In these fully charged poems, James Cagney storms through American fields blooming with artillery and anger on his thirsty quest for love, peace, and acceptance in the smallest, most precious gestures.

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Book SynopsisThe New Life is the masterpiece of Dante’s youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the soul’s crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, The New Life is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love.  The New Life is published here in the beautiful translation by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an inspired poetic re-creation comparable to Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a classic in its own right.

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Book SynopsisA new collection from one of the most exciting voices in American poetry.For many years, Melissa Monroe has been assembling one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, drawing on all different kinds of writing, from technical manuals to books of spells to dictionaries of slang, to explore the many ways—poetry is, after all, one of them—in which we human beings seek to know and control the elusive realities of the world around and within us. Her subject is both the strangeness of things and the strangeness of the things we think, and she has an unsurpassed eye for the wilderness between them that we inhabit. The poems collected in Medusa Beach include “Planetogenesis,” recording the life of an imaginary planet; “Whiz Mob,” a sequence of haikus composed in the criminal argot of 1940s America; “Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography”; and the title poem, which interweaves an account of the life and thought of the great German philosopher and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel with a meditation on the many historical and natural historical avatars of the figure of Medusa. As formally adventurous as they are rigorous, disconcertingly comic, and deeply strange, the poems in Medusa Beach are the work of a true American original.

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Book SynopsisA bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master.For more than four decades Claire Malroux has blazed a unique path in contemporary French poetry. She is influenced by such French poets as Mallarmé and Yves Bonnefoy, but her work also bears the mark, and this is unusual in France, of Anglophone poets like Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A prominent translator of poetry from English into French, Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by a day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux’s oeuvre, from her early lyric poems to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun—a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II—to new and uncollected poems, including an elegiac sequence written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Silvain.

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Book SynopsisA new translation of work by one of the Netherland''s most innovative, exhilarating poets, a poet who draws on everything from economics to parables to world history. The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has  appeared in English translation. This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies—hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, “Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.”

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Book SynopsisCarol Harvey Steski''s tenacious and unapologetic debut, rump + flank, explores the body in nature''s many incarnations: human, animal, plant, microbe, even chemical. The result is a fantastical poetic work that sheds light on what bodies-especially female ones-endure, probing the full range of experiences from pleasure and hope to deep loss and trauma.These poems are piercingly humorous, sexy, and peppered with startling absurdities, but are grounded by an undercurrent of nostalgia (and a soupçon of feminist rage): mercury reproduces like funhouse mirrors, oysters are whole notes dropped into eternal song, cancer is a surly character taking and discarding lovers, a domestic chore turns dark as a mother channels her inner Lady Macbeth. Lush imagery melds with organic rhythms to spawn a visceral experience, a tendon-and-muscle-driven engine that readers can feel racing within their own bodies.

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Book SynopsisR.F. Langley is known for his meticulous observation of the natural world and his highly original voice. This volume brings together his two previous Carcanet collections, Collected Poems (2000) and The Face of It (2007), along with his celebrated but uncollected late poems, including 'To a Nightingale', which won the 2011 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The book includes a biographical introduction and a rare note by the poet on his own compositional practice. Langley kept a careful record of the reading and writing which inspired his poems; this edition is fully annotated with these sources, making it an invaluable guide for readers wanting to explore the visionary imagination of this master craftsman.

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Book SynopsisFor over three decades Harry Gilonis's poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time. Gilonis's work has a light, lucid beauty underpinned by formal and procedural invention, with lyrics written from love and landscape as well as poems made from the innards of language. There is collaged bird-song, experimental versioning from the ancient Chinese and text written by a `bot'. Borders between `original' and `translation' are straddled, or blurred, in intriguing and innovative ways. Objectivist after the fact, party without nostalgia to the British Poetry Revival, cognisant of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Gilonis's poems are aware of their shape on the page and the sound they make as they go past the ear. They insist on being themselves as fully and openly as possible. The versatility and range of Rough Breathing, its use of processes, transparent or opaque, make it - besides being a fine collection - a radical pattern-book to challenge teachers and students alike. An Introduction by Philip Terry offers biographical and critical context. `What becomes increasingly clear as one reads,' Terry writes, `is that this is a body of work of the highest ambition, and highest order.'

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Book Synopsis`I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in `Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity. Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. `We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight’, he writes in the selection’s central sequence `Breach’. Nolens’ poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.Trade Review`a monumental figure in Flemish literature’ - Poetry International Web

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. A Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendation. Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories. Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria gathers numerous stories and perspectives, such as the fragmented narrative of an Austrian woman who married a British soldier after the Second World War, and the voices of schoolchildren and immigrants. Strange discoveries are made: a grave for two dead goats; a lantern procession on the night of Epiphany; a baby abandoned by a river; a homemade frog-puppet. The poems are a collage of stories and histories, set in a variety of forms and registers. They are attentive to local detail, rich in the names of people and places - Marija, Omegepta, Eck 4 and the Loser Mountain. Mixing poetry and prose, image and narrative, German and English, Power's poems are a celebration of creativity in unlikely places. Against a disquieting backdrop of mild winters and memories of snow, they invite us to question what it means to feel at once a stranger and at home.Trade Review'It is rare for me to read a collection aloud, to feel that it must be voiced. It is a testament to the quality of Power's work that not only did I do this once, but several times, and what's more, relish each repeated reading' - Sabotage Reviews; `Phoebe Power, in this accomplished, formally restless debut collection, yokes together some very surprising things: political musings, quasi-comic consumerist dilemmas, fascinated and bemused observations of Austrian custom, transcribed vocal fragments, family history, even - at one point - a murder mystery. You feel there is nothing her acute poetic eye cannot absorb. All this incorrigible plurality is united by an intelligence at once satirical and scrupulous, probing and tender. Hers is surely one of the freshest new voices to emerge in years.' - Caitriona O'Reilly

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Book SynopsisC.H. Sisson called John Heath-Stubbs `a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability’ – a reference to the poet’s blindness. This selection of an abundant poet restores him to a new readership with the work on which his popularity was based. His ground-breaking early poetry is given its due, especially the major long poem Wounded Thammuz, printed here in its entirety. Heath-Stubbs was at the centre of the New Romantic school. The Second World War left him as almost the sole representative of one stream of English poetry. He remains crucial to the 1940s and ’50s, and was a popular presence into the 1980s, composing his later poems in his head and reciting from memory. Too long he has been sidelined by shifts of critical fashion. Selected Poems includes a critical preface by John Clegg who essentialises and celebrates the work. Three of Heath-Stubbs’ translations of Leopardi – revered by subsequent translators, and long out of print – are included.Trade Review`His range of subject matter is panoramic, and his control of emotion and intention the best of his generation.’ - Poetry Review; `His poetry is formidable, amiable, hugely intelligent and sacramental.’ - Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisChosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work. He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.Trade Review'at once dizzying and uplifting' - Mark Ford, TLS; 'This is such anticipatory, massively omniscient edging work.' - Eileen Myles; 'Crase looks at the city and the landscape with the amused, disabused eye of a lover.' - John Ashbery

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A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. 'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.' Her poems have always found voices for the voiceless and shown another side of history. Her new book zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood. Sister Iggy, as the boys called her, ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys. There she mentored many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, including the brilliant trombonist Don Drummond. Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood (Mahfouz) was a strikingly beautiful dancer of Lebanese descent, who became Don Drummond's lover. The poems in Mother Muse move boldy and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; notable women such as Mahalia Jackson share pages with the less well noted - women like Sandra Bland, Windrush victims and two of the last enslaved women to be set free.Trade Review'[Gooidson] has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue' - Simon Armitage

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Choice. The fourth Carcanet collection from Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar.

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Book SynopsisIan Pople is a man of the world. He has travelled and taught in the UK, Greece, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His poems explore England, the larger world, and how changing perspectives readjust the sense of England and of home. They deal with borders, crossings, closing boundaries. They are about transitions in space and time, the ways life and relationships change and adapt to illness, love, estrangement and loss. The traveller changes identities as he moves, responding to different surroundings, and the early poems collected here provide a varied retrospect, moving through Africa, Europe and Asia – so that we read the more recent work from a different perspective. The travel poems explore the range of reactions, appropriations and misappropriations as physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. More recent writing responds to music and the visual arts, using assemblages or bricolage to convey the painfully familiar experience of displacement, dislocation. There are poems that answer back to figures from jazz history, Roland Kirk, Dupree Bolton and Pat Metheny among them. It is wonderful to encounter such an accomplished and varied body of work which shares with us its vivid spaces and tones. Pople, a lucid critic of modern and contemporary – especially American – poetry, is an original artist in his own right.Trade Review'Ian Pople writes poems of such intense observation they amount to a kind of grace. In his concise idylls, undeceived odes, and scrupulous ekphrastics, the sometimes ominous and always indigenous details resolve as if by action-at-a-distance to a mystery that never decays into cynicism or belief. It feels suddenly timely as well as sustaining to have his vision assembled in a major selection at last.' - Douglas Crase';[an] acute eye for the detail of the human world as well as the natural one' - Ian McMillan

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Book SynopsisBook of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the popular pilgrimage route, or 'Camino' to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of those encountered along the way, combining a multi-voiced soundscape with vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture. The possibilities and contradictions of a twenty-first-century pilgrimage are revealed: inevitably informed by tourism and technology, yet offering new kinds of fellowship and connection in an age of individualism and rootlessness. Book of Days can be read as a travel memoir, a meditation on community and solitude, on friendship and sisterhood, and on spirituality. What pilgrims seek on setting out and what they discover as they go prove to be complementary. Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.Trade Review'Hers is surely one of the freshest new voices to emerge in years' - Caitriona O'Reilly; 'Surprising, observed with a sharp eye for detail and a quick sense of humour [...] Power's utterly contemporary voice is one you want to hear more from.' - Bidisha, judge of the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2018 [Praise for Shrines of Upper Austria]

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Book SynopsisJane Duran's new book of two striking sequences takes readers into other worlds – 'gridlines', in which the life and paintings of Agnes Martin are interwoven, and 'miniatures of al-Andalus' inspired by the illuminated Cantigas de Santa María and the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia. The simple gridlines of Duran's couplets recall Martin's square canvasses, her precisely rendered grids and luminous stripes. Responding to individual images and to Martin's own biography, discovering lovely breaths of life entering the 'grey rectangles', the poems' intricate interlockings and brilliant images seem almost to escape the poems' formal enclosures, so that Martin's 'The Peach 1964', 'gave me back // only beige, graphite, / ink, sanity // and orchard after orchard'.Trade Review'Duran twists her hybrid colours into rich, sensual, and perfectly controlled statements of memory and loss... A poet to rejoice in.' - The Observer; 'Full of beauty and perception, these unusually supple responses seem to reach, in their open-endedness, for the infinite. Jane Duran shows a deep knowledge and engagement with the terrain in both complementary sequences. These are exquisite poems: 'Each one, clarified / true in miniature'.' - Moniza Alvi

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021. In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer. During his months of recovery from three brain bleeds, a shattered right arm, multiple seizures and pulmonary bleeding, Lowery returned to writing poems, many of which address the strangeness, the disorientation, of his situation and that of the world in general. Lowery wrote these poems amidst reports of Government and health initiatives that suggested potential utilitarian sacrifices of 'the vulnerable'. Completed shortly before his death in May 2021, the fear and loss of the vulnerable and the voiceless haunt many of the poems. In the 'Crash Wake' sequence, Lowery adopted a twelve-line form. Twelve lines was as long as he could manage to sustain a poem at the time, due to repercussions from his head injury. The form also allowed him to take what Keith Douglas called 'extrospective' snapshots of the new environment in which he found himself: streets empty of people, an Italian village cut off by the army, a train in India killing migrant workers in their sleep. Recovery, nature and love fill the gaps in this changed world. Lowery's final book appreciates afresh landscape and wildlife, family and marriage, the importance and fragility of life.

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Book SynopsisThe chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' which take us from Codon to Coda via a number of -ines (Glycine, Asparagine, Tyrosine etc). The complex exercise grows out of George Herbert ('What though my body run to dust?') and administrative duties at a genomics conference in which the language spoken, the terms used, find their way into the organising imagination and prosody of a formidable, witty verse craftsman, with serious contemporary concerns. Aliquot, John Clegg's second Carcanet book, is storm-spooked and jumpy: haunted by jaguars and lynxes, its uneasy silences broken by the retort of punt guns, lightning strikes, and floodwater breaching defences. Among these stretches of foreboding are moments of calm, especially arising out of the joy and rowdy peace of parenthood. These poems are themselves aliquots, of a realised, restive and unique individual world.Trade Review'Whatever horse he rides he makes it go, a lasso his modus operandi for capturing images.' - Marius Kociejowski; 'No poet writing today matches John Clegg for wit and rigour. Questioning language, rejoicing in it, Clegg's poetry plunges headfirst into the Great Tradition and comes out swinging.' - Dai George

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Book Synopsis'Borel was the sun,' said Théophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

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Book SynopsisCelia A Sorhaindo's engrossing debut, Radical Normalisation, writes back from the margins, bringing readers to her Dominican home. It adjusts perspectives on the universal questions about poetry as a resource and value in the present. Sorhaindo's wit and linguistic inventiveness are clear in her reflections on the art and the arts, her dramatization of the Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys's voice, and her reflections on the natural world—a natural world different from others but continuous with them. She records its changes and reckons with it in a series of poems that respond to the destruction visited on Dominica, most recently by Hurricane Maria. Her writing led John Robert Lee to hail, 'a new voice that speaks with sensitivity, maturity and assurance out of a horrendous experience'.Trade Review'Radical Normalisation is a tour-de-force of ars poetica. In running dialogue with herself and numerous other poets and writers, Sorhaindo repeatedly addresses poetry—and has poetry talk back. Whether focused on survival after a hurricane or the line between "madness" and "unravelling", Sorhaindo pushes, defines, and redefines the terms and stakes of "this poem". In sonically, imagistically, and formally explosive measure, she makes the "normal" radical and frees it to sing in its chains.' - Shara McCallum

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Book SynopsisThe May-June 2022 issue. Interview feature: Julia Blackburn talks to the artist Jeff Fisher. Kirsty Gunn on Henry James. Rory Waterman talking with Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse. Meditations on language and how it works. New to PN Review this issue: Jay Gao, Shash Trevett, Louis Klee and Jeremy Page. And more...Trade Review'The most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world' - John Ashbery; 'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines' - Simon Armitage

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Book SynopsisThe July-August 2022 issue. Major autobiographical essay by Alberto Manguel. Fleur Adcock writes an elegy for her long-time editor. James Campbell takes us on a tour of the TLS and his celebrated NB page. Vahni Capildeo visits Charles Causley's world. Tony Roberts evokes the original Iowa Writers' Workshop and its personalities. Richard Gwyn takes us into the Dark Woods of Latin America. New to PN Review this issue: Hsien Min Toh, Catherine Esther-Cowie, Dominic Leonard and Kit Fan. And more...Trade Review'The most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world' - John Ashbery; 'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines' - Simon Armitage

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Book SynopsisMichael Edwards returned to the English tongue for his last book of poems, At the Brasserie Lipp (2019), after years as a French-language author. English revived many nerves of memory, and in Another Art of Poetry he explores them further, in ten chapters, each consisting of continuously numbered sections. There are 194 sections, so we can read the book as a continuous sequence, as ten discrete poems, or as single lyrics and epistles interspersed. There is something Augustan about the approach, humorous, alert, like a series of letters and reflections spoken to us. The formal variety of the sections reminds us how well Edwards knows his Eliot, Williams, Pound, his David Jones; he understands modernism and the other resources that inform the grateful poets who value our European and wider traditions. ('The godsend of influence.') Originality has to do with origins. 'Everything has been said,' he begins, 'and we come / just at the right moment.' His English re-visions once familiar landscapes in Wivenhoe, in Paris and elsewhere; it finds his antecedents, it restores access to belief and transcendence. Doorstones, an additional full collection, bridges the gap between At the Brasserie Lipp and this ars poetica.Trade Review'At the Brasserie Lipp, I am convinced, represents contemporary English poetry at its best' - Igor Vishnevetsky, Russian poet and film-maker

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Book Synopsis'Partial Shade' is the common gardening term for plants that in fact need a measure of sunshine. In John Birtwhistle's poems, there is a continual play of light and shadow – and even glimpses of 'full sun'. This selection from his own work does not follow chronology. It is an entirely fresh ordering, in which poems converse and argue with each other across the years. Lines about politics, parenting, mortality, art (and love, 'that bookish theme') are plaited together, intimate yet distinct. Partial Shade is a new book for new readers. It makes available poems from out-of-print collections, as well as substantial new poems. The rhythm varies from lyric and narrative poems to 'haiku-like miniatures: agile, mobile and eventful' (Hugh Haughton). 'John Birtwhistle is a marvellously versatile intellectual gadfly of a poet. No sooner do we think that we know his manner, his theme, than he is off elsewhere, teasing, amusing, throwing out possibilities like sweets strewn along a woodland path.' (Michael Glover) The poetry is distinguished by deep feeling conveyed with visual precision, careful phrasing and formal clarity. Peter Jay writes of 'These lucid, witty, tender poems, full of felicitous surprises and unexpected turns of imagination', whilst Imtiaz Dharker finds them 'So rich in scope and style, with surprising shifts and echoes'.Trade Review'an ambitious and original poet, not afraid to take chances' - John Heath-Stubbs

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