A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Carcanet Press Ltd Andrew Crozier Reader
Book SynopsisAndrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, 'becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of ...being alive', and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language. Ian Brinton, editor of The Use of English until 2011 and author of Contemporary Poetry since 1990, has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier's poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.
£18.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Zig Zag
Book SynopsisZig Zag consists of five new sequences by Anthony Rudolf, a poet whose craft has been enriched by his experiences as a translator of French and Russian literature. Poems about memory, time and loss are complicated by humour, lyricism and a light touch.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems
Book SynopsisNew Selected Poems is a poet's choice of over thirty years' work. Minhinnick's poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes 'An Opera in Baghdad' as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.Trade Review'Robert Minhinnick is the leading Welsh poet of his generation' - Sunday Times 'There is something imposing in the way he makes his chosen locale, the strand of Porthcawl, feel like the edge of the world, on which wash up echoes of world politics and broad sweeps of history.' - Philip Gross, Poetry London 'Minhinnick is one of the few poets who writes about a dockyard or a hedgerow with equal authority...A friend of mine once said that he liked to think of R.S.Thomas as "just being there": outside the media hubbub, steadily producing wonderful poems. Although Minhinnick's considerably younger, and more cosmopolitan in scope, I'd say the same about him.' - Poetry London 'Minhinnick is a poet of the moment...his best work takes you and places you slap bang in the middle of an experience. Like a mini tardis.' - The Big Issue 'Biodiversity is at the heart of what he writes about, backed up by a knowledge of archaeology and geology. He is now entering his mature phase and is already one of our most accomplished poets.' - The Western Mail
£12.30
Carcanet Press Ltd Between Two Windows
Book SynopsisIn "Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. His lyrics and satires dance in the spaces that open up between intention and expression, the moment when the horse attempts to throw its rider.Trade Review'Hazzard's gift lies in making the unusual seem aphoristic, turning words on their heads to shock an unsuspecting reader.' - The Economist 'He brilliantly conveys the experience of experiencing; although his observations are hyper-real, he seems always to be questioning - and to be making us question - whether they are sufficiently "like"...His work perfectly exemplifies Touchstone's saying that the truest poetry is the most feigning.' - Jane Griffiths 'Haunting, hilarious, exquisitely inventive, Between Two Windows is a brilliant first collection by one of the brightest young stars in the poetic firmament.' - Mark Ford
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd The Same Life Twice
Book SynopsisComic, cosmic: for Kuppner the terms are inseparable. In the three plaited sections of "The Same Life Twice", Frank Kuppner asks the essential, answerless questions about human existence: What are we doing here? Is it really here? And why here? 'Fortunately,' he writes, 'it is nearly always possible to take notes, even if these habitually contradict each other.' Here are Kuppner's fieldnotes from life in an unfathomable universe. A sardonic Virgil showing us a directionless "Infinity", Kuppner guides us through a reality in which we are just 'one more of the ignorant infinite dots / rather than the vast central vortex we must feel ourselves to be'.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Bevel
Book Synopsis"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of daily life: work and love, seasons and cities, and his writing is alive with the wonder and comedy of the mundane. Bevel is filled with voices - 'an he says / A love the summer / it's hoat / ye kin wear yer shoarts...' - and with the knowledge that becomes engrained in the body: 'The weight of a drill. The texture of rust.' Letford works as a roofer, a trade that gives him a particular perspective on life at ground level. 'Be prepared', he writes: pay attention to the moment, know which way to fall. His poems are sure and strong, the words dance.Trade Review'The pleasure I have gained from William Letford's poems... will, I am confident, stay with me for ever.' - Nicholas Lezard, the GuardianTable of ContentsWaking for work in the winter Becoming For the journey It's aboot the labour Be prepared [coffee shop window] Wit is it By the time we met We are Elderly ladies and afternoon tea This spring evening Fusion expands Worker A bassline Newsflash Hollow words in the black dog days Moths Taking a headbutt Working away In the mountains of northern Italy No holding back Breakfast in Baiardo No distractions [it rains] Outside the city Sunburst [T-shirt wrapped around my head] The light and dark of Adeona A bad day Orchards Helsinki, Finland Mhari and Annika Our life Cafe culture Don't you think i know Let's just be Sex poem number 1 Prowl: Sex poem number 2 Sex poem number 3 Impact theory Thurs hunnurs a burds oan the roofs They speak of the gods For the spirit Chimneys The songs we love Schrodinger Sunday, with the television off Winter in the world A poem
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd Hands
Book SynopsisIn Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.Trade Review'In this new collection, Moya Cannon, through intent attention to light and sound and the natural materials that produce them, touches the very principle of life itself. HANDS is a profoundly moving set of meditations on what it means to be alive, physically and emotionally.' - Bernard O'Donoghue
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Ice Roses
Book SynopsisSarah Kirsch (1935 - 2013) is recognised as one of Germany's most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry's free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes' translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch's writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch's poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes.Trade Review'Sarah Kirsch is a poet of rare power and invention, who - rather like Akhmatova - can evoke a relationship in crisis with a few lines of dialogue. Direct and lucid, always lyrical, she finds music in the cadence of speech and the hesitations between words. It is a great fortune that these German poems have found a translator who can honour the shape of the originals, while writing them afresh in English.' -Elaine FeinsteinTable of Contents0
£14.20
Carcanet Press Ltd Small World
Book SynopsisSmall World tells a story of the changing relationship between a father and his two daughters, one severely disabled, a 'mermaid in a wheelchair', the other discovering the difference of her elder sister, the 'moon' to her 'earth'. Each succeeding poem gathers further telling detail as the father listens and observes with affection and surprise the strange world they inhabit, gradually reflecting on his own contrasting childhood. Finally, the book ends with a shock experience that brings all that has gone before into sharp focus.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Steep Tea
Book SynopsisSingapore-born poet Jee Leong Koh's first book to be published in Great Britain.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Careful What You Wish for
Book SynopsisThe latest collection by an award-winning poet, editor and publisher.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Invisible Gift
Book SynopsisStories of nature, folklore and Romani heritage by an award-winning poet, critic and teacher.
£13.49
Carcanet Press Ltd Spills
Book SynopsisPoems on death and mortality accompany memoirs of the poet's childhood between Yorkshire and Italy
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd The Italian Visitor
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£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd The Rose of Toulouse
Book SynopsisThe Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing where the poet has lived and taught, their histories, and his history as he travels away from who he was.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Oracabessa
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£12.30
Carcanet Press Ltd New Selected Poems
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£12.30
Carcanet Press Ltd Muddy River: Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSergey Stratanovsky's Muddy River is the first comprehensive English-language selection of a contemporary existentialist Russian master. Taken together, the poems express the full range of Stratanovsky's verse, drawing on seven collections that represent half a century of writing. Muddy River is the essential Anglophone introduction to Stratanovsky's oeuvre, its now satirical, now psalmic, ever-searching poetics.Trade Review'He does not paint in half-tones. The clash of clear, bright colors and sharp lines - this is his poetry.' - Russian literary critic Nikita Eliseev. 'It is very difficult in a few words to point to an unprecedented quality in Stratanovsky's work. It seems to me that his particularity is not even in how it is expressed, but from where it is articulated, there where sound has its source. From somewhere terribly deep: in a time of faith and magic, where and when element and consciousness are not divided and continue to constitute a meaningful whole.' - Mikhail Aizenberg
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems
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£14.20
Carcanet Press Ltd Gumiguru
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£9.95
Clinical Press Ltd Parables from Parallel Places
Book SynopsisCats that are both alive and dead, levitating shoes, gods of war, gods of love and discarded gods. Allegorical tales of weird worlds where the leaders are elected on the basis of reality shows and worlds where carnivorous plants can mimic the appearance of a naked human being. Welcome to the disturbing poetry of Paul R Goddard. This anthology is an expanded version of the Number 1 worldwide Amazon download e-book of the same title with many extra illustrations and nine more poems.
£8.07
Carcanet Press Ltd Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac
Book SynopsisThe Communicado Theatre's production of this verse rendering won the Edinburgh Fringe First award at the 1992 Festival, and has gone on to tour Scotland and England in 1992-3. Edwin Morgan provides an introduction, which sets the play in its time and discusses the style of his translation; it aims to provide insight and stimulation to a new generation of readers and playgoers.
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd King of Britain's Daughter
Book Synopsis"The King of Britain's Daughter" has been specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the Mabinogion of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest, the family farm, where the giant's footprint is preserved as a rock pool, and Fforest and Welsh legend have provided the inspiration for this part of the book, which also contains a variety of other vivid and memorable poems.
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Days Beside Water
Book Synopsis"Days Beside Water" is an ideal introduction to the poetry of Gregory O'Brien, one of the best younger writers (and artists) of New Zealand. The poems are set where sea, land and sky, past, present and future, meet in different lights and moods. There are lyrics, comic interludes, an imagined account of the marriage of Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missioner. The theme of spiritual marriage - a union of clements in imaginary or historical contexts - recurs in two sequences: an invented life of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and "The Milk Horse", about a foundling and the Mother Superior of an orphanage. The poems capture the permanent value in moments and emotions, chiefly love. O'Brien's involvement with the graphic arts and add richness to his imagery.
£11.39
Carcanet Press Ltd Cottage Tales
Book SynopsisThe first literary experiences of John Clare (1793-1864) included the tales handed down by word of mouth in his native village, and as a mature poet he reworked them in his narrative verse. This edition, published for Clare's bicentenary, comprises the tales he wished to include in his third collection, "The Shepherd's Calendar" (1827), and previously unpublished poems which show the range of his narrative achievement. The detailed introduction traces the composition of the poems. Clare's own description of local customs, his previously unpublished draft essay on English pastoral poetry, and a full glossary are included. Clare's original spelling and punctuation are preserved.
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd And the Stars Were Shining
Book SynopsisThis 16th collection by the author contains 59 comic and lyrical poems, including the 13-part title-poem. John Ashbery was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems
Book SynopsisThis work draws on John Ash's four collections and is virtually a Collected Poems. Among contemporary British poets he is known for his wit, formal ambition and his Byzantine range.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Hero and the Girl Next Door
Book SynopsisThe virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colors. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.
£11.39
Carcanet Press Ltd Hotels Like Houses
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£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd There Was Fire in Vancouver
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£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Translations
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£26.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems
Book SynopsisThis text gathers together all Robert Pinsky's poetry, including 21 new poems. The verse essay "An Explanation of America" (Carcarnet, 1980) remains at the heart of this work. The book also includes "Ginza Samba", a history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell", a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), "History of My Heart" (1984) and "The Want Bone" (1990). Also included are some of Pinsky's translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's "Inferno" (1994).
£12.30
Carcanet Press Ltd Second Best Moments in Chinese History
Book Synopsis"The 501 quatrains of Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984)". But it isn't: 'Please note that this is a completely different work, although it is formally identical and very similar in its preoccupations.' Its tone is different - something to do with maturity and cadencing, which make the laughter and heartbreak more intense, more political.
£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems: Anne Ridler
Book Synopsis'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd Severn and Somme
Book SynopsisThis volume includes Gurney's early small volumes of verse, "Severn and Somme" (1917) and "War's Embers" (1919).
£14.24
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Andrew Young
Book SynopsisFirst selection of Andrew Young's best-known short poems and the long mystical poem Into Hades. The volume is illustrated by Joan Hassalal's powerful wood-engravings.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of
Book SynopsisTo mark John Ashbery's 70th birthday, Carcanet publish his first five books of poems in a single volume: "The Tennis Court Oath" (1962); "Same Trees" (1956); "Rivers and Mountains" (1966); "The Double Dream of Spring" (1970); and "Three Poems" (1972).
£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems
Book SynopsisDonald Davie is a poet of the English perspective refracted through historical meditation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities.
£27.00
Carcanet Press Ltd Five Fields
Book SynopsisThe poems in Gillian Clarke's Five Fields break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences. There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.Trade Review'Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power... her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
£8.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Leaving and Leaving You
Book SynopsisCombining traditional forms and those associated with modernism, this collection focuses on love, loss, and the different ways in which people - for better or worse - can be significant to each other.
£11.39
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Thomas Blackburn
Book SynopsisThomas Blackburn was a haunted and difficult man. His childhood was tormented by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin colour, and an overaffectionate mother. The moral and sexual uncertainties of this period were to form the core of his later poetry and prose. Influenced by Yeats, his work in the Fifties and Sixties dramatized the conflict between faith and sexuality, drawing on myth, Christian imagery and Jungian tropes, he produced a spare and challenging body of work. Although his life was interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he continued writing through the early Seventies, his work becoming more intimate and confessional. He was an influential teacher and friend of many artists in London during the 1950s and 1960s, his daughter recalling a scene in which her father, wearing a white linen suite, danced cheek to cheek with a black leather-clad Francis Bacon.
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Your Name Here Poems
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£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Selected Poems: Grevel Lindop
Book Synopsis'Transparently accomplished,' as John Kerrigan has written, 'his work displays the kind of internal "itinerary" which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry'. This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a journey through worlds exotic, domestic, surreal and psychic, explored with visual sharpness and linguistic acuity. This is above all a poetry of colour and celebration, of strangeness blossoming inside familiarity, nurtured with a meticulous patterning of language and form. Eavan Boland has called Lindop's 'a lyric voice that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace, draws you in, reminds you of an ordered and structured world the voice of a happy spirit with, maybe, a measure of regret and an interesting intimation of waste.'
£12.34
Carcanet Press Ltd Collected Poems Burns Singer Poetry Pleiade
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£14.20
Carcanet Press Ltd Emeritus Poems
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£8.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Scientific Papers
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£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Anatolikon
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£9.95
Carcanet Press Ltd Cathures
Book SynopsisEdwin Morgan was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 1999, and many of these poems reflect the life of the city both now and in the past. But equally the poetry moves to other places and other worlds. A sequence of poems about a demon allows the mind to expatiate on a wide range of subjects.
£9.95
