A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Goose Lane Editions Only Insistence
Book SynopsisThe “insistence” in this poetry is how the language calls out the adjacency to its own presence. Each careful syllable feels right next to what surrounds it. A drum hitting out its own “unbridled association.” — Fred Wah"This is where history began again/where some were told it insisted/itself into a lifelike violence.” Eclectic, darkly fascinating, and at times apocalyptic, Only Insistence is a protean book where lines and phrases echo back on each other, where images of the natural world are bookended by investigations that delve deep into memory. In this ethereal world, the poet interrogates his relationship with his father, realigns his idea of family after the birth of his son, and bears witness to the isolation, paranoia, and surrealism of the onset of the beginning of the pandemic. Here pandemic-era streets are “beaches in early April/Bright and bleached and barren” and a lake is “a rage of waves eroding rocks to a pebble beach,/each small stone confident in immanent restoration.” At times languid, at others cunningly sculpted into towering metaphors, Lindsay’s rich metaverse experiments illuminate a world that rewards close attention with infinite possibilities.Trade Review“Only Insistence reads as a dream might — each disclosure an unfolding, with its own tightly crimped folds waiting to stretch. James Lindsay develops a language of confessions that pour out beyond their boundaries, as ‘dashes of colour clustering’ through ‘slits of vision’ can knit what's behind a slatted fence. It is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope, where bodies are known by what crowd their edges, and coldness is known by how ‘piercing light prods the blue, [...] low and whispered,’ where many geographies of are explored compellingly, and softly as water tests a shoreline. I enjoy how Only Insistence is irreverent in its disdain for borders and discrete bodies, in the same way a dream urges us to revisit its many meanings, the ‘flurries it promises.’” -- Tyler Pennock, author of Blood
£14.39
Goose Lane Editions Stedfast
Book SynopsisBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art — Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision. Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself. Trade Review“Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” -- Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star, Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” -- Joe Enns * British Columbia Review *
£14.39
Goose Lane Editions Sukun: New and Selected Poems
Book Synopsis
£21.59
Goose Lane Editions Terrarium
Book SynopsisRaw, confessional, and often messy, Terrarium continues Matthew Walsh's exploration of Queer identity and desire against the lonely highs and lows of depression and addiction. In this new collection, Walsh begins where their debut collection, These are not the potatoes of my youth, left off. Writing in their trademark conversational style, Walsh wanders from Toronto parkettes with remnants of magnolia leaves to California, a long/black cocktail dress the night lights/amethyst and citrine against the arm/muscle of the sea, their voice intimate and exposed, a whisper between friends or lovers. And then, when they ruminate on influences and themes as diverse as the poetry of Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn MacEwen, the vagaries of Instagram, and the reimagination of Miss Havisham in a Toronto bathhouse, they offer readers the opportunity to think deeply or laugh loudly, reaching out to close the gap between us.
£14.39
Goose Lane Editions The Last to the Party
Book Synopsis
£14.39
Caitlin Press On/Me
Book SynopsisFrancine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesnt fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. On/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Odes & Laments
Book SynopsisThrough poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Nerudas Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Devolution
Book SynopsisDevolution is Kim Goldbergs eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldbergs canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Winter's Cold Girls
Book SynopsisIn her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird''s poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers; two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple; a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness-they balance brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Lost Lagoon / Lost in Thought: Prose Poems
Book SynopsisAfter moving to Vancouvers West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationship between wildlife and fast-paced urban living, questioning the interface between the urban and natural world. Upon learning the lagoon was named by nineteenth century Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson, of Mohawk and English origin, Johnson then becomes a presence in the narrative. Pauline Johnson wrote evocatively about it: Among the wild rice in the still lagoon/In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. During five years of intimate counterpoint between urban living and wildlife, The Humans notions are challenged and altered. Questions of how significant the specificity of place is to story, how our relationship to nature is altered by urban living, and how we might return to the natural world. Reminiscent of Henry Thoreaus Walden Pond, perceptions about nurturing, fear, inventiveness, delight, death, protection, humour, even tenderness change as the lagoon has exposed what being human in the twenty-first century actually means.
£12.34
Caitlin Press Sweet Water
Book Synopsis
£13.49
Caitlin Press The Hammer of Witches: Poems
Book SynopsisBlending lore and magic with contemporary questions around belief and beauty, power and fear, this stunning new poetry collection from Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a grimoire for our times. Spanning centuries, The Hammer of Witches reaches from present-day urban dystopias and the unlikely enchantments that they harbour, to medieval Norway, where the first Christian king waged war on the countrys gender-nonconforming wizards. Macabre imagery, speculative themes, and everyday mysticism blur the distinction between the real and the unreal, challenging modern concepts of beauty, power, and fear. In her first full-length collection, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back weaves together the magical and the monstrous, the sacred and the profane, to make sense of a world where primeval forests are clear-cut to build parking lots, and where it often seems that the gods have all gone to live behind the veil.
£11.39
Caitlin Press The Burden of Gravity: Poems
Book SynopsisIn this haunting and disarming debut, McConnell recalls a dark time in BCs history to give poetic voice to the many forgotten residents of the infamous Woodlands School. In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminsters Woodlands School, a former lunatic asylum opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine residents lives, giving voice to those who were unable to speak for themselves, to shift focus from the institutional authority to the experience of residents. As poetry of witness, the collection uses a grounding tone to excavate the individual experiences through traditional narrative, ekphrastic and experimental erasure forms that elicit an array of emotions, from heartbreak to anger. Drawn from archival research, The Burden of Gravity, challenges readers to consider how we, in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization, choose to remember institutions like Woodlands School.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Atlas of Roots
Book SynopsisWithin us all are questions of identity, belonging, and connection. Beth Kopes third poetry collection, Atlas of Roots, is a work of the heart that uncovers the many facets of adoption. In poems that both witness and question, Kope shares her own quest to uncover family history and answers -- finding her adoption records, questioning her parents choices, and the truth of her own conception. Moving beyond the personal, Atlas of Roots shares other stories of adoption through the voices of other adoptees and parents of both relinquished and adopted children. In seeking a name and ones own story, Kope has written a striking and courageous narrative of adoption.
£10.44
Caitlin Press Run Riot: Ninety Poems in Ninety Days
Book SynopsisThis is a weird place to wake up / For someone who has woken up in some pretty strange places before. With one poem written each day during Ash Winters ninety-day stay at a Vancouver rehab centre, RUN RIOT is a fiercely personal account of what it feels like to stop drinking after a decade of excess. The book takes the reader through moments of determination, anger, hilarity, and heartbreak. Winters frank portrayal of early sobriety offers companionship to those who know it well and insight for those that want to know it better. Weaving the past and the present together with ruthless vulnerability, RUN RIOT is a powerful portrait of one persons struggle against addiction, laying bare an honest search to heal and better understand one''s self.
£10.44
Caitlin Press Essential Tremor: Poems
Book SynopsisTaking the name of a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary shaking, Essential Tremor undertakes an exploration of the body that holds disruption at its heart. The captivating and timely poems in Essential Tremor attend to many bodiesthe body of the world, changing, unreachable, at times momentarily illumined; the human body, loved, ill, mourning, passing or passed from this world; and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest. In her third collection, award-winning poet Barbara Nickel blends sonnets in sequences and scattered stand-alones with more formal innovations and extensionserasures of the notes accompanying da Vincis anatomical drawings, lines found from Beethovens autopsy, and the musings of poet isolating in the midst of a twenty-first-century pandemic. Nickel asks her readers to consider the many facets of the body, how it finds the words, lines and poems that together form an essential life, a gift among our deepest wounds and terrors.
£13.49
Caitlin Press The Last Show on Earth
Book SynopsisMany of the poems in this book come out of me determination to write about the imperiled Pacific Ocean during my tenure as the City of Victorias Poet Laureate. During that time, I was also raising my special needs son and my mom and father-in-law both died. The writing expanded to other creatures on the planet, and the harm we are doing to them, through a collaboration with Robert Batemans paintings and through work with the Royal BC Museum and their National Geographic Photography display. The poem I wrote in response to Robert Batemans Circus Train, Night Hawks contains within it the metaphor of the train as an extinct creature moving along the prairie and I began to feel the train and the idea of circus caries the metaphorical context of what this book, and the poems in it, explore. That is, endangered animals, lost moments, and events as in circuses themselves, unusual or neurodiverse people who are circus performers, all contained within this endangered beast, the train, or the earth. I watched The Greatest Show on Earth as a child and feel The Last Show on Earth and apt title for a book exploring death, disability and the imperiled world.
£13.29
Caitlin Press Time Out of Time
Book SynopsisIf books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then TIME OUT OF TIME is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnans astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in TIME OUT OF TIME are in love with the poems in Adnans Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Times author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painteror perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnans words. Parés poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of TIME OUT OF TIME, creating a rare intimacy in Parés collection. Parés work pays homage to Adnans work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in stanza after sweet-smelling stanza, Paré attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the worlds general collapse.
£12.59
Caitlin Press Larder
Book SynopsisFully immersed in the organic world, Larder is at once an elegant transcription of the spiritual nourishment that comes from our embrace of the earth and of the inevitable loss in our unwillingness to embrace sustainability. In her latest collection, McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
£15.29
Caitlin Press Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay
Book SynopsisIn WORTH MORE STANDING, celebrated poets and activists pay homage to the ghosts of lost forests and issue a rallying cry to protect remaining ancient giants and restore uncolonised spaces. Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and protection are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets, several of whom have attended the recent Fairy Creek blockades and still others who defended old growth ecosystems in Clayoquot Sound nearly 30 years ago. Contributors include ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, GG winner Arleen Paré, Canadian icon bill bissett, Griffin Poetry Prize winner Eve Joseph, ReLit Award winner Patrick Friesen, Order of Canada and Order of the Rising Sun recipient Joy Kogawa, Vancouver Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam, Harold Rhenisch, Jay Ruzesky, John Barton, Kate Braid, Kim Trainor, Kim Goldberg, Pamela Porter, Patricia and Terence Young, Russell Thornton, Sonnet LAbbé, Susan McCaslin, Susan Musgrave, Tom Wayman, Trevor Carolan, Yvonne Blomer, Zoe Dickinson and the late Pat Lowther.
£19.19
Caitlin Press Bent Back Tongue
Book SynopsisIn his latest collection, Secwépemc rancher and renowned poet Garry Gottfriedson explores the fraught mechanics of contemporary masculinity, politics, and love.Bent Back Tongue is a raw examination of love, identity, politics, masculinity, and vulnerability. Through sharp honesty and revealing satire, Gottfriedson delves into Canadian colonialism and the religious political paradigms shaping experiences of a Secwépemc First Nations man. This is a book that tears through deceptions that both Canada and the church impose on their citizens. Gottfriedson tackles the darkest layers of a shared colonial history; at the same time, the poems in Bent Back Tongue are a celebration of love, land, family, and the self.
£13.59
Caitlin Press Exit Wounds
Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to feel at home? In his groundbreaking debut collection Exit Wounds, Indo-Canadian poet Tariq Malik weaves together history and myth with his own family?s experiences of immigration to uncover what it truly means to belong. Whether he is recalling his childhood memories of the death of his father, imagining himself as a dead soldier lost in the sands of the Kuwaiti desert, or drawing upon his family?s experience of ?three wars and migrations,? Malik?s moving search for home will resonate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with a dominant monoculture. Malik?s poetry combines traditional Punjabi mythology and First Nations? symbolism with contemporary events that have shaped the lives of immigrants: 9/11, RCMP violence, war. The result is a defiant triumph of the plurality of minority experiences?a poetic chorus of immigrants and their descendants coming home to the truth and power of their many worlds.
£14.39
Caitlin Press Worth More Growing: Youth Poets and Activists Pay
Book SynopsisA new generation of old-growth defenders and activist-poets, fromkindergarten to grade twelve, express their love and respect for trees. In Worth More Growing, youth, from kindergarten through grade twelve, share their love and respect for trees. Speaking to our changing climate, this new generation of old-growth defenders express their observations, anger, kinship, hope, and sorrow. This unique anthology includes a wide range of voices?Indigenous, settler, immigrant, and even international youth. Worth More Growing is a necessary anthology highlighting the importance of nature to a generation that will experience the ongoing consequences of climate change.
£14.44
Caitlin Press Emily & Elspeth
Book SynopsisEmily & Elspeth follows two women and their unique paths to love? and each other. Catherine McNeil?s latest collection is a delightful romp through South America, the imagined inner-workings of Frida Kahlo?s relationship(s), and Vancouver bedrooms. Through poems that flirt with the intersections of desire, art, and commitment, she pieces together Emily and Elspeth?s relationship as playfully as she takes it apart. Along the way, Emily & Elspeth brings you to places both intimate and unexpected: a belly where a uterus used to be; a girl matador facing off against a bull; and ?fat, honeyed days, swollen with desire? that risk being destroyed by the nefarious aims of a government spy. Weird, wonderful, and slightly dangerous, this is a queer love story that?s anything but typical.
£14.39
Caitlin Press Tilling the Darkness
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£13.59
Caitlin Press Knee Deep In High Water: Riding the
Book SynopsisFollowing a devastating leg injury that would leave her with an acutely crooked knee, Bronwyn Preece embarks on an ambitious and immersive journey into a remote area of Northern BC. Written on the trail, knee deep in high water is a chronicle of the most physically challenging experience following her accident -- a two-week-long horse expedition -- and an impassioned ode to the breathtaking beauty of the backcountry. As she journeys through melting mountains and rising rivers, Preece encounters new moments of thwarted plans and questioned ethics that parallel her personal path of healing, both physical and emotional. These poems are an account of one woman''s movement into a deeper understanding of self. She grapples with her role as a settler in the unceded lands that provide her with so much comfort and attachment, as well as her own fragility and strength in relation to the terrains she explores. Through struggles and celebrations, lessons and longings, knee deep in high water is a love letter to the trail, and to returning home.
£15.29
NeWest Press How to Hold a Pebble
Book SynopsisHow do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one''s life in the Anthropocene?How to Hold a Pebble-Jaspreet Singh''s second collection of poems-locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary. Of loss no scale remains no seawall. Between one''s despairs / they will brighten / Hope''s in-built traces.
£15.19
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Wreck of the Fathership
Book SynopsisBeing appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a ?at overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s de?ning modern disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands – becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy ?ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s ?otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is re?ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Den?ends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s later trade of precision engineer, it ?ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.Trade ReviewA weird mix of Desperate Dan, MacDiarmid and Dostoyevsky… a rare and fantastic voice. -- Fiachra Gibbons * Guardian *This antithesis of the slim volume bubbles and seethes with wit and polysyllabic adventurousness. -- Edwin Morgan * The Scotsman *W.N. Herbert's poetic prescription is kill or cure. Herbert specialises in big, spine-burstingly various and formally eclectic books, in both Scots and English, that are always in the end unified by the energy, wit and intellectual adventurousness of their author… several books in one by a writer who should by rights count as several poets in one. -- Patrick McGuinness * The Guardian *Table of Contents13 Fathership Glosa Good Makar 16 Cuttlefish Bone 17 Nightfishing 20 Broughty Ferry Beach: a renga 23 Balgay Hill 24 Blackness Caganer 25 Ghost Bowling 26 The Dundee Eve 28 Clouds at Night 30 Tay Nocturne 31 The Road Bridge 32 The Three Flies 34 Tay Lightning 36 Beach Terrace 36 i ‘The swans glow grey in the night harbour’ 36 ii ‘Woken by a ghost helicopter’ 37 iii ‘Swans in the smirr’ 37 iv ‘Through some error when I wake up’ 38 v ‘The occasion of a death’ 38 vi ‘The buildings in the river’s reflection’ 39 vii ‘The wind’s inventing whiteness again’ 39 viii ‘Why do we think of them at all, the dead’ 40 The Continuity 41 June Dolphin 42 Kafka Eskimo 44 Rain Habbies 45 Burns’ Night Impromptu 46 Physic 47 Bregus 49 Salary 50 The Swans at Broughty Ferry Beach 52 Sunday Morning Improv 55 The Wreck of the Javanese Princess Algos 59 The Tortoise 61 Kalighat 63 Ganesh is Reading 64 The Losers’ Table 65 Four Songs in the Guangling Style, and a Signature 65 i ‘Wine Madness’ 65 ii ‘Wild Geese on a Sandy River Bank’ 65 iii ‘Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student’ 66 iv ‘The Woodcutter’s Song’ 66 v ‘Three Day Monk’ 67 Nanjing Nightboat 68 The Two Haircuts 70 An Exotic Dream of Leonora Carrington 71 Teatro Orfeon 74 Keaton in Space 75 Lion in Sidecar 76 Mother Goo 79 The Fathership Jesus Mary and Jetsam 1 82 Verbotentotentanz, i ‘At first, owing to the absence’ 83 A Jesus of the Moon 84 Emmaus, 1997 85 A Jesus of the Mammoths 87 The Muriels 89 A Jesus of the Beetles 91 The Lost Poem 92 Verbotentotentanz, ii ‘Meh skeleton twin’ The Wreck of the Fathership 95 i ‘My father was never old’ 95 Boat 96 iii ‘The yellow man was doomed and knew it’ 97 The Assembling of the Crew 98 v ‘He held up his hand and we watched it tremble’ 98 The Last Voyage 100 Hopkinsian 1 101 viii ‘Eating sibling-quick, too socially’ 102 The Discovery 104 Hopkinsian 2 105 xi ‘He approached it methodically as though’ 105 The Telling of the Wives 106 Hopkinsian 3 107 xiv ‘My father’s hand was larger of palm than mine’ 108 The Report 109 Hopkinsian 4 110 xvii ‘I remember the nurse saying ‘Goodbye’ 110 The Burning of the Mona 112 xix ‘I keep seeing them wrestle you into’ 112 xx ‘Grant them peace, Patron of the sea’ Dundee Doldrums 115 23rd Doldrum Sailors’ Graveyard 116 24th Doldrum ‘Thi Toun as thi homunculus o us’ 117 25th Doldrum ‘Hunkirt wee man in blae skeh blue’ 118 26th Doldrum ‘When the ghaists o thi dinged doon’ 119 27th Doldrum ‘Tae loup intae nithin’ 120 28th Doldrum ‘Fellini fiss oan thi Nummer 73’ 121 29th Doldrum The Fireman’s Daughter 122 30th Doldrum Snugs 123 31st Doldrum Cloud City Executive Quatrains/Captain my Captain 126 1 inaugural rain/‘In an attempt to circumvent terrible times’ 127 2 the misrule/‘Language you were always going to tell us’ 128 3 a gowfbaa welcomes a bawbag tae balmoral/‘What is it like this to imagine someone’ 129 4 if in doubt, bomb/‘To listen as ekphrasis is an act of praise’ 130 5 strait is the visit/‘The high desert for your ocean floor’ 132 6 golfo de la empatía/‘You knew from the inside of childhood’ 133 7 der totentango/‘The mess of ages has got into the messages’ 134 8 sonetto per trumpo solo/‘Caged in renegado cabin’ 135 9 memento aurantium/‘The great moment keeps passing’ Jesus Mary and Jetsam 2 138 Verbotentotentanz, iii ‘It’s braa when ye’re deid’ 140 Helen in the Bardo 144 On Napkins 146 The Municipal Labyrinth 147 On Cutlery 149 Letter to Cath Jenkins 151 On Brown Paper Bags 153 Verbotentotentanz, iv ‘This thing you’re in’ 155 Death Wullie Nostos 159 Cold City 160 The Sleepers 161 Byron’s Mask 161 Follow Me 162 Fish-fight at the Basilica Cisterns 163 The Dream of the Airport 164 Pagomenos 166 Portokáli 167 Zone 168 How to Drink Ellenikós Kafés in Emprosneros 169 Kombolói 171 Maroudianá 173 Whose English Is It Anyway? Bad Makar 176 Tyne Valley Section 180 North of the Book 182 The Calotype 183 To a Ploughman 184 The Parliaments of Birds 186 Showing Sharon Olds the Carcasses in St Andrews 187 Kirsty Wark on Broughty Ferry Beach, Or, An Indy Ref Ode 189 Explaining Irn Bru to the English 190 The Farewell to Jim Murphy (et al) 192 To a Rat 194 Bad Makar McGonagalliana 194 i The Resurrection of William McGonagall 194 ii McGonagall and the Burns Statue 195 iii McGonagall as a Dog 195 iv McGonagall and the Baxter Park Pavilion 196 v Ode tae Yet Anither Dundee Railway Station 197 vi Address to the Girders 197 vii Broughty Ferry Blackout 198 viii Address to the Dundee V&A 201 Ode to the USS Discovery (Season One) 203 The Couthier 204 Undeed 206 Mastercannibal 209 Owed to Groucho’s 210 Remains of Doggerland 212 Rogues Reparcelled 214 The Fall of Brexitopolis 216 Gunlandia 218 The Nine Trades Welcome You to the City of Refuge 220 Il Futuro 222 Dirt Bath 225 The Giantess 229 Notes
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Marrying the Ugly Millionaire: New and Collected
Book SynopsisSophie Hannah is one of Britain's best-loved poets, a disarmingly witty, sharp-eyed chronicler of everyday life and its peculiarities. She is also an internationally successful author of psychological crime fiction, and has written the first new Hercule Poirot novel to be authorised by the Agatha Christie estate. This book collects all of her previous collections of verse and also includes new and uncollected poems.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Mexico in My Heart: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisWillis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as 'a superb act of restoration'. Borges himself declared, 'Four of the best things in America are Whitman's Leaves, Melville's Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes - ' Mexico in My Heart is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.Trade Review"I think Barnstone has been appointed a special angel to bring the other to our attention, to show how it is done. He illuminates the spirits for us and he clarifies the unclarifiable..." Gerald Stern, acclaimed USpoet"
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd Keats Lives
Book Synopsis
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Chance of a Storm
Book SynopsisFor Rod Mengham sculpture and painting exist in the world the way poems do. He invokes the Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who believes that sculpture must be understood as part of the world around it. In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. 'Poems should be finished, but be still hot to the touch, giving a vivid sense of the thinking and feeling that went into their creation,' he says. Drew Milne speaks of the poems' 'beautiful, belligerent laconicism'. While the lyric is central to his work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these prose poems, a species of modernist fable.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd European Hours:: Collected Poems
Book SynopsisFor more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.European Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.Trade Review'Every poem like a new geometry - of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light - very strange and unpredictable.' - Ted Hughes
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Moon for Sale
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakanyova, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.Trade Review'Fully alive to our financialized, precarious situation, this poet is also alive to the human sensorium and the revels of language, its permutations, transmutations. Moon for Sale announces in its very title this poet's mordant wit but also his romanticism. A formidable intelligence powers this work, its whiplashing jingles and ditties, its visual poems, its sonic brilliances, its micro-shifts and micro-tones, its ominous deadpans, dry diagnoses. Yet for all Price's severities, we also encounter "intimate risks,/a whispered promise." He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.' Maureen N. McLane; 'Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation.' Carol Ann Duffy; 'Reading the poems you become aware you are in the presence of a mind working much more quickly and sharply than your own.' The Poetry School
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Several Deer
Book SynopsisWinner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n' roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are acrobatic: homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic's ironizing compulsion. 'Now send in the clowns', ends the collection's opening poem - and so they follow: happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer. Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn't take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.Trade Review'The rollicking Adam Crothers confesses a preference for form "as jester or saboteur". There is menace and mischief in equal measure.' The Guardian on New Poetries VI (Crothers was a contributor); 'There may be a little Tennyson in the lighting here, but there's also Kanye and Austin Powers and an associative sequencing of phrases reminiscent of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon.' The Irish Times
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd All Under One Roof: Poems
Book SynopsisThe Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018. The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder’s brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag’s most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the `Sprachpulsate’ (pulses of language): `Evelyn Schlag’s poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.’ Leeder’s selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Holy Toledo!
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize For Second Collections. Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade. In Holy Toldedo! John Clegg tracks the critic's silhouette over the dangerous, sun-drenched landscapes of New Mexico, California, Nashville, Utah, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Here is Donald Davie listening to gospel radio in a Nashville taxi, and here is F. R. Leavis standing on a chair, 'unscrewing instead the world from round the lightbulb'. Vistas of bristlecone and citrus groves, pocked with fruit flies and rain birds, fuse with the glib-core of Oxbridge England, the university science labs where 'all three entrances felt like the back way'. Holy Toledo! is a history of English literary criticism in the twentieth century, a bestiary of the American Southwest, an unreliable guide to the desert. Generous, humorous, happily askew, Clegg's first Carcanet collection signals the flourishing of an 'emerging' poet as a major voice.Trade Review'No poet writing today matches John Clegg for wit and rigour. Holy Toledo! opens up a brilliant, uncanny frontier between the American West and the England of Empson, Davie and Woolf. Questioning language, rejoicing in it, Clegg's poetry plunges headfirst into the Great Tradition and comes out swinging.' Dai George;'Shaking off the dust of Cambridge, John Clegg spoors Bloomsbury, and then - Holy Toledo! - enters some western from another planet. Whatever horse he rides he makes it go, a lasso his modus operandi for capturing images.' Marius Kociejowski; 'I must have been waiting for a poet to fuse deep sincerity and irony, craft and process, the surreal and the historical, because I read this twice in one sitting, fizzing with jealousy. Clegg's poetry is a must.' Luke Kennard
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Occupant
Book SynopsisFollowing the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium a grand piano dreams of the voices and music of days past, 'rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking'. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, 'The Occupant', draws on scenes proposed but left unwritten in Martinus Nijhoff's Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott's occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city whose 'dead lanes keep their silence', where 'the frail expire and pale dogs whimper', as its police post notices: 'Missing: Have you seen this wind?'Trade Review'Jane Draycott's quiet, meticulous poems inhabit the vague, evanescent world between waking and sleeping. Her vision is of an England half in dream, a Samuel Palmer twilight in which things begin to move into an unexpected focus.' - Times Literary Supplement; 'I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact The Night Tree is the finest collection I've read for ages.' - Guardian; 'Her searching curiosity and wonderful assurance make her an impeccable and central poetic intelligence.' Penelope Shuttle, Manhattan Review
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Midnight Letterbox
Book SynopsisOne of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Prologue, 5 1950s, 6 1960s, 52 1970s, 243 1980s, 324 1990s, 386 2000s, 463 Further Reading, 519 Index
£18.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Commotion of the Birds
Book SynopsisA crackling, moving new collection from one of Americas greatest living poets. In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashberys mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric agility: wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humour, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.Trade Review'The lyrics in Breezeway are as good as his finest.' - The Observer New Review; 'Quick Question, with the hushed intensity of its music and great lyric beauty, could only be Ashbery.' - Financial Times; 'He is quite simply the finest poet in English of his generation.' - The Times
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Almost Complete Poems
Book SynopsisMoss is oceanic: his poems rise, crest, crash, and rise again like waves. His voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression, and the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims with awe and familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality and an earthy holiness. Or putting it another way: here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible and erudite, inevitably compelling. All of which is to recommend Mosss ability to participate in and control thoroughly these poems while resisting the impulse to center himself in them. This differentiates his beautiful work from much contemporary breast-beating. Moss is an artist who embraces the possibilities of exultation, appreciation, reconciliation, of extreme tenderness. As such he lays down a commitment to a common, worldly morality toward which all beings gravitate.Trade Review'Moss is the kind of poet who tries to find words that help us live, that tell us directly how to laugh down folly or take courage.' - New York Times reviews US edition of Almost Complete Poems
£18.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Raking Light
Book SynopsisShortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017. Raking Light is Eric Langley's debut collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of 'raking light', in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays. Under raked light, paint reveals its damage and deterioration, its craquelure and canvas-warp, and discloses a backstory of abandoned intentions. With his attentiveness to resonance and echo, Langley picks up on lost meanings and buried contradictions in language, probing its abandoned significances. Finding traces of obscured sense or inarticulacy, his verse picks at words to test their efficacy and authenticity, feeling out their substance, proving their worth. These are poems - elegies, love lyrics - concerned with miscommunication, with intentions gone astray, with loss and the uncertainties inherent in interaction. They are excited and exciting, defusing and detonating by turns the 'hectic honeyed hand-grenades / in amongst your alphabets'.Trade Review'How often, when reading another's work, does a poet think: I wish I'd written that?' - Adam Crothers
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Waiting for the Nightingale
Book SynopsisMiles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused - as lovers tend to be - by the inconstant nature of 'the other'. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture's Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality. Eros and Thanatos tap at his funny bone. Does God exist? he asks. Will the nightingale, the one right nightingale, sing?The landscapes of these poems are drawn from the Far East, New Guinea and the Home Counties, where Burrows has served as a doctor, psychiatrist and a teacher. Thematically the poems build on Burrows's eccentric childhood in a vanished but vividly reimagined, even re-invented England, rich in voices, disappointments and epiphanies and always maintaining a dialogue - now mischievous, now outrageous - with the present. The reader gratefully turns the pages, hoping the conversation will continue well beyond the back cover.Trade Review'I'm proud to declare myself your fan. More a Mercedes than a minipoet.' Julian Mitchell; 'Your writing amused me greatly.' Anthony Powell
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Sarajevo Roses
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move. On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma’s Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where `selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar’. Sarajevo’s `neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete’ is twinned with the `church spires and rain-bright roofs’ of the poet’s former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book’s title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.Trade Review'Rory Waterman writes poems of the kind there'll always be a need for' - Alan Jenkins; `By just picking his words with an almost scientific exactitude he makes a poem that is meditative and unforced.' - The Irish Examiner; `Waterman is at once restrained and assured. He has a fine eye for a poem's architecture, playing with symmetry, taking pleasure in the shape of the page, and he demonstrates a remarkably good ear.' - John Greening
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Smoothie
Book SynopsisSmoothie is Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off despair – fulfilled. Smoothie plots the wayward wanderings of a beguiling cast of misfits – hotel eavesdroppers, city interlopers, lone wolves, phantom bird-watchers, disaffected language robots and triumphant piano-swallowers – as they try to express themselves. The poems are candid without being confessional: the poet’s `I’ encompasses the reader. Language’s smooth surface bubbles up as Toutoungi’s characters reveal their peculiarly twenty-first-century disorientations, riffing off loneliness, authenticity and heartbreak as they go.Trade Review'One way of judging a book is by whether it stays with you after you’ve read it. This is a book that does. Perhaps that’s because it’s peculiarly vivid. Perhaps it’s because it has genuine wit, or because of its lightness of touch, or its sophistication or inventiveness, or the rigour of the logic that holds the poems together. But actually I think it’s because it also has a kind of unafraid honesty, a quality completely unrelated to the skill of writing, but so crucial to the best poetry' - Mark Waldron
£9.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Long Pass
Book Synopsis'Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this ...' In Long Pass, Joey Connolly's first collection, the poet - in love, in puzzlement, in frustration or in elegy - keeps catching himself out, starting again. He wants to speak truthfully. He wants to say things simply. But nothing is as simple as it seems at first. Nothing strikes the interlocutor quite as he intends. Ach! He goes back. Deflections, tangents: the long pass, the long unfolding sentence, the growing sequence, move away from what they intend to say in order at last, wittily, angrily, ironically, to swerve in and say it.Translation, too, is hard. There are often competing versions - of Lorca, for example, and Cavafy. ' The painter is frustrated to be always / painting onto something, to be / concealing precisely as he displays.' Words reveal and at the same time conceal, yet what they conceal is part of what they want to say.The poet throws the poem for someone who isn't always there to catch. The fortunate reader intercepts.Trade Review'A North-of-England Cavafy' - David Wheatley, The Guardian; 'Long Pass, for its humour, strange voicings, playfulness, and ability to move the reader, should be celebrated.' - New Welsh Review on Long Pass
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Poems - Alain Fournier
Book SynopsisAlain-Fournier's poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses - and young love reaching out 'in the frightening dark, with timid fingers'. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier's verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.
£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd In Search of Dustie-Fute
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. Who is Dustie-Fute? A vagrant, a hawker, a poet. A dustyfooted Scottish Orpheus. A stranger, a migrant, a ghost. In his search for Dustie-Fute, David Kinloch begins amid the Parisian floods of 1910: with the waters rising, a lonely giraffe speaks from the abandoned zoo, witness to what seems the end of the world. Other animals chime in, Dustie-Futes all, a hooved and humped chorus of watery sages. Elsewhere, two young college dudes quote Rilke at each other. Cain's wife, the Virgin Mary and that eternal stepdad St Joseph draw on memories they didn't know they had. In a series of feminist monologues, feisty biblical women seek revenge on their husbands and oppressors, before Dustie-Fute's final incarnation as a Cavafy-reading Syrian refugee. Who is Dustie-Fute? Many are, and many have been. A fellowship of strangers across time: free spirits, survivors. Kinloch's bestiary of forgotten voices spans apocalypse and salvage, elegy and humour. Mythic and erotic, his poems engage ecological disaster, LGBT art and politics, and that great resistance movement, love.Trade Review'A sparkling collection: full of sensuous richness and linguistic inventiveness. As the punning title of the book might suggest, there is much about fathers and sons, including the moving simplicity of a walk with a dead father 'and then/I let him go,/but this moment/which is far the hardest pain/remains'. But Kinloch unrolls a convincing set of unexpected scenarios: outspoken excerpts from Roger Casement's diaries intercut with the horrors of the Belgian oppression in Africa; tightly drawn translations of Celan into Scots; and a most impressive long poem, 'Baines His Dissection', where a medical man is seen embalming the body of his friend and lover, against the background of a brilliantly evoked Middle East of the seventeenth century.' - Edwin Morgan
£9.99
