Poetry Books

Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack's second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the `I' of a poem with the `I' of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have `really' happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity. Serious questions of being and belonging, as well as frivolous themes such as the Marquis de Sade, Siberia, genitals, the Fates, and death, are picked up in play, prodded at, then put down in new and sparkling configurations.Trade Review`The first half of On Trust is about a love affair, which is true to all the stumbles of falling in love. An actual affair? Or a vivid thought-experiment? It is both and neither. It is Schroedinger's pussy. It is and it isn't. `In your park, the wind pushes at an empty swing.' Inventive, clever, funny, rueful, ironic, hypnotised by the erotic.' - Craig Raine; 'In James Womack's `book of lies', in the court of love and the erotic, where honesty may be a necessary contrivance, the speaker is both accuser and accused. The poems display a wry, mordant romanticism which manages to be at war with itself while keeping a keen eye on the imaginative opportunities. On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.' - Sean O'Brien; 'Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist... Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that's ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious.' - Heidi Williamson, Eyewear

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Book SynopsisA Full Cone is Miles Champion's second Carcanet volume. It features a substantial body of new work as well as a selection of earlier writing hitherto unavailable in the UK. 'It has often been noted that the pace at which Miles Champion's brilliantly intelligent poems unfold is rapid. Ideas and images tumble into words and the words become present as moments of conceptual or emotional consequence. But, though high velocity is in the making of the poems, there is no swift taking away. The moments aren't rescinded; the poems are not a demonstration of lyric evanescence. Champion's work, rather, is about phenomenological consequence, and consequence lingers, lasts. This is a collection of monumental significance—and the work is gorgeous.' —Lyn HejinianTrade Review'The pleasure is that each poem is a different kind of challenge ... the invention is spectacular and always `up.’' - Larry Price; 'Brilliant stuff. A Full Cone is one of my books of the year.' - Andrew Taylor, Stride Magazine

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Book SynopsisIn The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas – our millennial Dante – is taken under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the course of 147 `songs’ we accompany the pair on their journey through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas’s Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.Trade Review'An enticing and timely collection of translations' - The Guardian on '52 Euros'; `One of the UK’s most fascinating poets … hilarious’ - Yorkmix; 'The greatest New Zealand poet no one has ever heard of.' - Spinoff

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Ned Denny's Unearthly Toys are treacherous playthings, as rigorously structured as they are thematically unsettling, a `rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled about' (as Robert Burton dubbed his Anatomy of Melancholy). The collection opens on a twilit, numinous world of exotic drugs, subterranean drums and visionary apprehension in which - to quote Twin Peaks, a recurrent leitmotif - `the woods are wondrous ... but strange'. Interspersed with original poems in a variety of complex forms is a series of illuminated and darkly erotic `remakes' of other poets' work, from the Old English classic The Wanderer to late Baudelaire via Goethe, Cavalcanti, Li Po, enigmatic troubadour lyrics, and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Politics are never far away: modern man's severance from the earth, the sacred, and his own inner self has grave consequences.Trade Review'Ned Denny is a gifted troubadour who has crossed the ages. Unearthly Toys is formidably learned and formally exacting, but his versions are vividly imaginative and original. This is a book of great beauty and conceptual power: extremely clever but also haunting, proving again that formal requirements such as sestinas can be as much of a liberation as a constraint.' - Bernard O'Donoghue; 'As among the most inventive translators of Dante - watch this space - Denny as a poet goes to Hell and back time after time, with immense verve and authority' - New Italian Studies

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Book SynopsisRod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. Grimspound is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a `wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary. Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.Trade Review`Mengham’s understanding of history as a living, evolving, ever present material template onto which experience can be inscribed and evaluated makes this collection of essays and his evocation of Grimspound so special.’ - Antony Gormley

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Book SynopsisOli Hazzard’s Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. In `Graig Syfyrddin’ notes on hillwalking in the Welsh marches – the poet’s former home – alternate with found text taken from an online walking forum. `Blotter’ is a shepherd’s calendar of sonnets composed of Russian spambot script – a mix of lifestyle advice, gaming tips, authoritarian propaganda, bucolic fragments and apocalyptic messages. `Within Habit’ is a series of prose poems collaged from numerous sources. `March and May’ comprises parallel columns of verse. `Or As’ is a family of 81 seventeen-syllable poems, each one an erasure of the corresponding page in a different book the poet was writing alongside Blotter. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed: the working day, the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd’s calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a Twitter feed. The title, Blotter, connects these concerns, suggesting at once a police blotter, a journal, a thing for drying wet spots, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, or out of focus.Trade Review'Hazzard's gift lies in making the unusual seem aphoristic, turning words on their heads to shock an unsuspecting reader.' - The Economist; `A beautiful, bracing book of surprising, absorbing itineraries, Blotter takes brilliant soundings of linguistic pools and discursive surrounds. These astonishing, seductive sequences explore “how time is layered / into the paint”. Hazzard is a formidably inventive poet; he is also a generous, playful, inviting one. He abolishes the distance between the conceptual and the lyrical, updating Wordsworth’s “selection of the real language of men” for our GPS moment. His sequences bespeak their compositional procedures but also something irreducibly else: the poet in and of the hinge, the gap, the step, the scroll, the click, the synapse — a shaping and shaped tender intelligence. Like the most ambitious works of any era, Hazzard’s poems create their own occasions and terms. They invite us to enter new fields, to go skying toward new horizons, to sense a lover’s touch, to hear both “a lullaby” and “the shocking truth”.’ - Maureen N. McLane

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Book SynopsisErrant, Gabriel Levin’s sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book’s day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. `What Drew Me On’ is inspired by Tamara Rikman’s free-floating works on paper and by Plato’s image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly pres¬ences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet’s take on image-making down the ages. `First came sooty beings shinnying up walls.’ There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa’adi’s Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

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Book Synopsis'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.Trade Review'No one writes like Murray: so truthful, nakedly emotional, wry, watchful. He's set deep in the Australian landscape, writing about back roads, vertigo, sliced bread, old typewriters and the persistence of love. Murray is the holy fool of his own poems, and a hero of poetry.' - Helen Dunmore, The Observer New Review; 'Murray is one of the very few poets with whose best work you feel that having read it you won't, can't be quite the same again.' - London Review of Books; 'Very occasionally you come across something on the page which makes you think "you can't do any better than this." Perfection achieved.' - BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review on On Bunyah

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Book SynopsisTo mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was `shrieking, dumb, defiled’ constantly test a vision of `faith, life, virtue in the sun’. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.Trade Review`Just as it took time for us to recognise Undertones of War as the deepest of the Great War memoirs, so it has become increasingly clear that Edmund Blunden’s haunted, tender, painfully attentive poems will live as long as the language lives.’ - Michael Longley

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Book Synopsis'Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight...' With these words Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through – Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast – in the spirit of a flaneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety and mystery of human experience: the soup kitchens, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Latin Quarter, the refugees, works of art and areas of damage. The title poem pays a debt to Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, whose 'The Hotel Eden' discloses a stuffed parrot and other objects under glass. The eye – the poem – assembles them but cannot tell their intended story. It tells a story all the same. 'On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.' This is a book of revelatory indirections, of unexpected moons, creatures, passions, rituals and histories, of days rich in disclosures and in hints of revelation.Trade Review'Fearlessly physical and observant (John Updike's fiction comes to mind), Brahic carries on writing where many poets would stop, and earns that space.' - Carol Rumens, Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisIn 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan’s Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson’s childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in My Reef My Manifest Array. That totemic image of exile feeds an interest in borders and partings that runs throughout the collection. The Cornish landscape of the poet’s childhood, loaded with new significance following the death of his sister, is Wilkinson’s primary locus, but he ventures – flees, perhaps – farther afield, to Portland (Maine), Chicago, Sydney and Busan. Combining extended sequences with brief lyrics, Wilkinson’s lines tie minuscule linguistic knots that give pleasure when unwoven. The reading becomes archaeological as layers and layers of meaning, of feeling, of reason are exposed.Trade Review'These poems knock the head around enough to cause whiplash.' - Nathaniel Mackey

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Book Synopsis`Death is a many-colored harlequin,’ Stanley Moss affirmed on his ninety-second birthday. Rosanna Warren writes of his latest poems, `Undaunted, outrageously alive, Moss flaunts more colors than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire. This is a book to hold onto for dear life.’ And dear life is what Moss’s poetry has always been about, asking what John Ashbery called `unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight.’ Stanley Moss has been part of the American and European scene for seven decades: a defining editor of world poetry, he is a major poet of the generation of Ashbery, Merwin, Wright and Kinnell. This book richly supplements his Almost Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2017) with recovered writings and new-minted poems that address the monsters of the age while celebrating its angels.

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Book SynopsisA work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. with a preface by Richard Holmes PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUSTTrade Review'The lives and the landscapes flash before us like vivid slides in a continuous poetic magic-lantern show.' - Richard Holmes

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Book SynopsisLater Emperors is four poems, each of which approaches Roman history from a very different perspective. It is also four voices, each one concerned with the living and the dead: voices of historians and moralists, voices of great (and not so great) emperors. Jones has written a book which is all the more for our time because it looks so clearly at other times and identifies in them familiar patterns, difficulties, ambitions and desires. History becomes a crystal ball in which the past chides the future, the same mistakes predicted and made again, the same injustices repeated. The Byzantine historians Michael Psellos and Anna Komnene reveal themselves as the significant chroniclers they always were. The book concludes with a retelling of Plutarch's 'Consolatio Ad Uxorem', in which Jones considers what we might hold on to in a world of suffering.Trade Review'an intelligent, allusive poet who has elegantly synthesized his roots in Greek culture' - Fiona Sampson; 'The poems in Later Emperors surprise and delight like those incisive, wry and honest inscriptions that come down to us from antiquity seemingly having survived everything, not least history's ravages. At the same time, there's a deeply distinctive literary wit at work in this book as Jones's lines limn (and update) the lives of the fleetingly powerful with the acuity and concision of Martial, the wit and heart of Horace. How those later emperors resemble the tyrants of our own time! What a skilled guide to them we have in Evan Jones!' - Don Share

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Book SynopsisA Tenderfoot is a novice, someone unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. Later he hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him. A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett's celebrated first Carcanet collection, Tenderfoot teems with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot's own stomach that hangs 'like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree'. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy's mind and body - a human transformation.Trade Review'These poems are utterly distinctive, there is something at once proud and sad in them, as the reader senses that Tenderfoot loves but stands outside what he loves.' - Sasha Dugdale; 'Chris Beckett's poetry is highly original [...] The language is always fresh and surprising' - Daljit Nagra

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.Trade Review'Horrex has an imagination that's both wayward and precise, matched by the way she uses words: every line feels unpredictable yet somehow inevitable. None of her poems sound like anyone else's: things open up when she writes about them. This is more than a matter of skill - it's about the rigour with which this poet sees her feelings and her ideas through into language.' - Patrick McGuinness; 'Katherine Horrex's is unmistakeably the voice of now: uneasy, ironic, apocalyptic.' - Caitriona O'Reilly

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Book SynopsisAs Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.Trade Review'Jeffrey Wainwright's work is among the most interesting of any poet now writing. Although he has an admiring readership, he has stayed under the radar much of the time, pursuing a line of poetic inquiry that links him to writers as various as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, Tony Harrison and even Charles Tomlinson (who like Wainwright was from the Potteries) - all of them in various ways historian-poets. Wainwright's particular imprint is a richly charged austerity, an ostensible plainness that, like a powerful magnet, summons suggestions to the page and the ear. Part of the pleasure of reading his work is trying to establish how he does so much by such apparently unspectacular means. An equally unobtrusive formal assurance has much to do with his success.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian

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Book SynopsisFall of the Kingdom, Rise of the Foot Soldier by Somalia Seaton - a racially-motivated attack on a student forces her teacher to confront the uncomfortable truth lurking beneath the community. Fraser Grace’s Always Orange, set in the aftermath of the London terrorist attacks, looking at how to be human in a world always on the edge. The Making Mischief Festival features work from some of today’s most exciting playwrights who are challenging and questioning our society. The Festival runs from 27 July to 27 August from The Other Place Studio Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

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Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to be an adult and when do you become one? Alicia is a hot mess. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life. Swiping left, swiping right to find the perfect match. Even though she’s a Londoner, born and bred, the scent of Lagos peppers her existence in 'the ends'. Everyone around her seems to know where they’re going in life, but she’s just trying to find ways to cheat growing up and keep her 16-25 railcard. This funny and well-observed one-woman show explores the contradictions faced by young people when the markers of 'growing up - having a career, a relationship and independence - are difficult to achieve. It also offers insight into life as a second generation migrant living in London, and highlights issues such as immigration, race and the expectations placed on young women today. Quarter Life Crisis had its full production premiere at The Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, where it was described by The Stage as a "vibrant storytelling show about life as a young black Londoner".

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Book SynopsisIn 1878, in London, a woman served a prison sentence for deserting two of her children, a charge she denied. Almost nothing else is known of her life or that of her husband, a dealer in 'foreign birds and curiosities', who was himself a migrant. The two children vanished from the record. This is where Fleet begins, with elusive histories and lost voices. The title suggests imperial power, conquest, traffic in commodities (which in the nineteenth century included vast numbers of exotic birds). It is shadowed by other meanings: the fleeting glimpse and swift flight; floating memories, enigmatic and insistent. Judith Willson's second book of poems was written during years when migration and displacement have become central facts of the human condition. The collection works outwards from found text – historical documents, archive materials – into other places and times. In the silences of such records, their erasures and omissions, are stories that haunt our present.Trade Review'Judith Willson's poetry takes us, in a dazzling flow of images, to lives which have the solidity of Central European fairytale with all the frightening reality of history behind them. It is richly inventive in form and precise in tone.' - Elaine Feinstein, on Crossing the Mirror Line (2017)

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Book SynopsisIn 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.Trade Review'Angela Leighton is not only one of our most skilfully moving writers: she is also one of our most successful exponents of 'experiment'...' - Oxford Poetry; 'poems whose variousness and musicality will be familiar to those who have read her splendid Shoestring Press collections' - Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisAn Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. This is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again. 'American Goshawk', the opening poem in this collection, concludes with these words. The word 'witness' comes with a wealth of meanings. The poems are, at one level, acute observations of the world in its physical and dramatic detail. But eye and ear detect, in what is there, shadows and figures of what is beyond, what imparts to the things perceived their deeper form, significance and beauty. Such seeing is a craft, a form of translation that engages not just the surface but the essence of what is seen, what the poet calls 'eye-proofs of the epiphenomenal world'. The ophthalmologist in 'A Mystic's Guide to Arches' keeps asking, 'Can you see this?' And we can, seeing it more fully each time we re-read the poem and the separate things configure into a single, powerful seeing. Language obscures - until it releases what it names to the senses. The Earliest Witnesses is G.C. Waldrep's British debut.Trade Review'I love Waldrep's work.' - Ilya Kaminsky

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Book SynopsisThe September-October 2021 issue; PN Review has a ‘soft relaunch’ with a new cover design, new internal design and layout; Dutch supplement: outstanding new writing from Holland; Major essays:; Colm Tóíbín on Thom Gunn; David Herman on ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’ – Edward Said; Gwyneth Lewis on Gillian Clarke’s The Gododdin; New to PN Review this issue: Alice Hiller, Theodore Ell, Jane King and Joshua Weiner; 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 Extasie is a compelling book of love poems with its lyrical roots deep in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rural traditions of the nineteenth. Among New Zealand poet John Gallas's spirit guides are John Clare and, in particular, Wyatt and Donne, writers from our poetry's wittiest and most ecstatic age. But the book's heart is set firmly in the twenty-first century. Its two parts follow the seasons of a revelatory love through different weathers and forms. The poems follow the sequence of their composition, so we register the intimacies, forced separations, complexities and climaxes as on a lyrical fever chart. Things are never still or static, everywhere is growth and wonder - birds, tides, skies, trees, sheep, planets and flowers: a celebration of the natural world, and a seeing together. The eye of the poet is always turned to the world: how the world is seen and felt is a sufficient record of the partners' intimacy. Gallas's language is marked by vigorous verbs, arresting inversions, a world of process and mutation, of transformation about one constant belief. It is hard to find poetry so at ease and at home with the particular detail of rural England, of a Lincolnshire and Norfolk imbued with their own histories and a new-made sense of place.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the African Poetry Book Fund's 2022 Luschei Prize for African Poetry. A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2021 Recommendation. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. Virga is the third book of poems by Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo, following on from his acclaimed collections Spirit Brides (2006) and Gumiguru (2014). Set in the twentieth century, Virga features historical events woven together by the weather. From the spiritual silence of a sundog during the 1911 Japanese Antarctic Expedition, to the 1921 World Championship chess matches in the Cuban heat, to the final hours of a young Bavarian mountaineer in the Bernese Alps in 1936 and strange white clouds decimating whole villages in northern Cameroon in 1986 - the poems capture stories of a rapidly evolving century beneath an ancient, fragile sky. The title relates to the meteorological phenomenon in which a column, shaft or band of rain or snow is seen falling from a cloud but never reaching the earth - evaporating before touchdown. Like Gumiguru, which has so much to do with weather, Virga continues with it, its impact on our daily lives. But, here, his geography broadens out to include wider worlds and different histories artfully strung together by the poet's fascination with the elements. Togara Muzanenhamo was shortlisted for the Jerwood Alderburgh First Collection Prize and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.Trade Review'Muzanenhamo has a rare gift and should be admired for the risks he takes, which have enabled him to write unusual, moving and yet understated poems about conflict, love and work.' - Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThe November-December 2021 issue Includes 'Scattered Snows, to the North' by Carl Phillips, shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem Award 2022 Major spread of poems by Carl Phillips, one of America's leading contemporary poets, essayists and translators Jee Leong Koh's erotic lyrics Poet-editor Rachael Allen in conversation Raymond Williams remembered Francesca Brooks's 'Love Letters of the Hampstead Modernists' New to PN Review this issue: Subha Mukherji, Charlie Louth, Joyelle McSweeney and Michelle Penn 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 SynopsisIn the title poem, the speaker sits at the window of a small hotel room. The room is a holding zone, a temporary stopping-place between memory and possibility. In the Quaker Hotel is full of questions about the world. Rooted in nature, the poems are fearful for it. They move out through identifiable landscapes (Merseyside, north Wales, Nova Scotia, southern France) to off-kilter, tilted places beyond our immediate reality. We are temporary guests in these places and in our own lives. Who will come after us, how will they see things: 'who will tend the bees / in the communal garden'? Helen Tookey experiments with form and theme, as in her earlier books Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize) and City of Departures (Carcanet, 2019, shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection).Trade Review'There is an apocalyptic fear coursing through these poems, electrifying them with an often heart-breaking and urgent apprehension of ecological crisis. Through visiting and revisiting, Helen Tookey examines places with a sharp eye, both philosophical and painterly, asking us to attend to their vulnerabilities, their mystery. Behind these carefully made poems, Tookey gives us access to something infinite and disturbing. Delicate, eerie, anxious, prophetic and cinematic, In the Quaker Hotel is a haunting record of our times.' - Sean Hewitt

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Book SynopsisThe March-April 2022 issue; Major interview with American poet Carl Philips; Nuash Sabah, editor of Poetry Birmingham, in conversation; Frederic Raphael writes to Wittgenstein; Isobel Williams adds to her Shibari Catullus; John Clegg discovers Mrs Bleaney; New to PN Review this issue: Wendelin Wai C. Law, Alex Macdonald, Nuash Sabah and Colin Bramwell; 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 September-October 2022 issue. Anthony Vahni Capildeo explores mourning. Stav Poleg travels between languages. Anthony Rudolf evokes being a life model for Paula Rego. Jeffrey Meyers reflects on W.H. Auden. Nicolas Tredell considers computers as poets. New to PN Review this issue: Kyoka Hadano, Fawzia Muradali Kane, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Kudzai Zinyemba. 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 third Carcanet collection from award-winning Glasgow-based poet and novelist Oli Hazzard.

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Book SynopsisThe July-August 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes Jane Duran on her poet father and Spain; Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk in conversation with Sasha Dugdale, and a wide selection of her poems drawn from the conflict; Recovering the Welsh poet Iwan Llwyd; Tom Pickard’s Chapters of Memory; Introducing German poet Mara-Daria Cojocaru; and Jon Glover, editor of Stand, in conversation. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.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 May-June 2023 issue During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes new artwork Antony Gormley and Mary Griffiths; poetry from Gillian Clarke, Tara Bergin, Sheri Benning; wonderful anecdotes from Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Dan Burt, Rebecca Watts, Philip Terry, Jeffrey Wainwright, and Carol Rumens; tributes from Lorna Goodison and Bill Manhire; and an AI generated conversation between William Empson and Robert Graves. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox. https://pnreview.substack.com/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 March-April 2023 issue An issue of dialogues, with whales, with Rimbaud, with Mexico, Afghanistan, Germany, Canada, with John Lucas, D.H. Lawrence and many more Includes new poems by Colm Tóibín, Claudine Toutoungi, Parwana Fayyaz, Stav Poleg and others Anthony Vahni Capildeo 'Touch and Mourning' Zohar Atkins 'Are Philosophers Normal?' New to PN Review this issue: Fabio Morabito, Sarah Mnatzaganian, Mark Haworth-Booth and Maithreyi Karnoor 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 SynopsisThis collection thinks about two main things: the efforts we make as individuals to find some form of connection between ourselves, and the efforts we make as a group to connect to the environment we live in.

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisThis collection brings together verses that mark the last moments of life, the passing of one stage to another. At a time of grief, we often search for the right words to say, words which will help us come to terms with death, with loss and with the fear of what comes next. The poems and readings in this collection gather together beautiful, lyrical, insightful writings on death, grieving and healing by poets including Christina Rossetti, John Donne, Emily Dickinson and John Keats. A source of comfort, solace and fortitude.

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Book SynopsisA two-hander, therefore popular with both professional and amateur dramatic groups.

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Book Synopsis'We needed coffee but we'd got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we returned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind'. From its title, which runs to 101 words in full, to its wordless concrete poems; from its World Cup fixture list to its transformations of four-letter words, "We needed coffee but..." is audacious, mischievous, even outrageous. As in his award-winning first collection "The Book of Matthew", the poet attends precisely to each detail: the rhythms are musical but unexpected; the brightness control on imagery is turned up high. New in this book is the emphasis on collaboration. Some of this work began in text pieces for art exhibitions or as song-cycle lyrics.Other poems respond to the influences of Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Inger Christensen, dom silvester houedard, Yoko Ono and Gyorgy Ligeti. Matthew Welton turns rigorous control into a dancing display of wit: we become his collaborators in the shared delight that inventive poetry can contrive.Trade Review'a poet who has consistently (but slowly) produced some stunningly beautiful work.' - the Observer 'It arrives with a unique and distinct sensibility; his poems create their own evocative and elusive worlds. There is a kind of relaxed quizzical sensuality running throughout, an easy, compelling confidence.' - Guardian 'I think this is the first poetry book I've recommended, but it's just stunning and deserves far wider recognition. While there's a playfulness and a lightness of touch to the writing it also left me feeling that every single word was in exactly the right place. Beautiful. - Dave Gorman

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Book SynopsisIndonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua: many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt's many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa's sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter's voice in birdsong - and the 'poppies in translation' mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the 'haunted undertow' of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, 'with their black souls in the wind'.Table of ContentsI A Different IncarnationToday 3Truth is Mute 4Another Muse 6Redness 8Schlafmohn, Blaumohn: Allerleilustblume 10Six Poems for John AshberyApres un Reve 13L'Heure Exquise 14My Dear Jungle 15Dorothy's Summer Dream 16Icarus 17Poisson d'Avril 18Between Hearts 20Ars Poetica with Poppies and Birds 21Conil de la Frontera, June 2012 23Where a Scorpion Sleeps - Tete Fantastique 24Elephant and Boats 25Underneath the Bridges 27Some Days 28...bis wir kleine Fische geworden sind... 29Florence 30A German Education 32Self-Portrait as a Soul 34Another Daphne 36Blumenmuskel 38Reading Sappho, I am Reminded of Chickpeas 39Fragments for Lise 41Old Love Never Rusts 43Crear 44Poppies in Translation 46A Secret 48Viriditas: Hildegard and Jesus 51A Different Incarnation 55II Where is Your Silver Dream?Always Choose the Jack of Hearts 63Gregor's Sister Speaks 64A Word Spoken on Land 65She Flies High 66The Tired Butterfly 68No Tiger is Plain 69Where is Your Silver Dream? 70You Have the Blue 71Oblique 72At First She Was a Butterfly 73Long Yellow Dresses 74Faux Fable, with Butterfly 75III Magelang MorningLand of Many Birds 79Ornithologists 80Achill 82In a Small Boat 83Magelang Morning 84Green 86At the Equator 87It's Our Reality 88A Chinese Cook 901980 91A Witness 92Pet the Orphaned Lion Cubs 93As We Leave the Black Sea 95Palitana 96By the Railway Tracks, Ahmedabad 97Notes from India 98Sea Turtles 99Sisyphus 100Straight Through the Heart 102IV A Captain's ConfessionHis Brother's Knife 109Why Didn't You Sing Last Night? 110A Cup of Tea 112So Many Oaks 114A Captain's Confession 115Flight 116Such Sweet Cherries 117Where Were You Last Night? 118What Did You Drink? 119If I Weren't French... 120He Speaks in Riddles 121You Never Know 122I Didn't Say That 123Can You Tell Me...? 124A Cherry Tree in Her Garden 125The Grapes are Ripe 126A Hearty Appetite 127Mr Ludwig 128Mr Matsumoto 129When Passions are Strong 130What Can You Tell Us? 132Notes 134

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Book SynopsisChris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his engagement with the precise crafts of language and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem 'Dust' from his 2009 collection Polder, a meditation on extinction: 'dust again the voices of the pages and the voices of the lovers'. Other voices follow, conversations in which civility, memories of friendship, art and literature respond to the desolation of dust, asserting what imagination can create from it. In translations from Old English, sonnets, villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates the fragile place in which we live, 'between space and space - / and both are dark'.

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Book SynopsisIn the five volumes of poetry he has published since 1989, Peter McDonald explores an intimately known territory that becomes strange: pulled out of shape by history, made unfamiliar by distance, made new by the attentive imagination. McDonald's "Collected Poems" is a sustained meditation on place and belonging, loss and love. The classical world is a haunting presence; the landscape of McDonald's poems resonates with past voices, with memories and acts of remembrance. The assured and scrupulous craft that creates the telling detail, the unsettling depth, has made him one of the most important Northern Irish writers of his generation.

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