Poetry

A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one’s native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey. In the first part of the collection, Plenty — “before the fold” — the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad — a father’s illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.

Read more less

A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet. During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body of poems that range from the exquisite to the obsene, while simultaneously living a life of dissolute excess with his lover and fellow poet, Verlaine. At the age of 21, he abandonned poetry and travelled across Europe before settling in Africa as an arms trader. This edition sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a sparkling translation of his most exhilarating poetry and a generous selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.

Read more less

Kathleen Jamie’s Selected Poems gathers together some of the finest work by one of the foremost poets currently writing in English. Although Jamie is perhaps best known for her writing on nature, landscape, and place, Selected Poems shows the full and remarkably diverse range of her work – and why many regard her work as crucially relevant to our troubled age. No poet currently writing has a keener eye or ear; no poet has paid more careful attention to the other consciousnesses with whom we share the planet – and no poet has Jamie’s almost miraculous ability to show us just how the world might look when the human eye ceases to gaze on it. This exceptional collection of poetry, spanning several decades, allows readers to chart the development of one of our most important contemporary talents, and serves as perfect introduction to her work.

Read more less

'Exquisite' (New Yorker), 'breathtaking' (Los Angeles Times), 'baroque and moon-lit' (Boston Globe) - House of Lords and Commons enthralled readers in the Americas when it recently appeared, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and being widely applauded in 'books of the year'. No wonder this first British publication is a significant and much anticipated event. Ishion Hutchinson's book is a profound engagement with culture and landscape, seascape and language, inheritance and race. It speaks - as its title implies - to a pursuit of justice and rebalance of a world in which lords and commoners must live side by side, and where the distance between those who 'have' and those who 'have not' is a more breaching and surprising journey than we perhaps once thought. The poems convey the complex allure of Hutchinson's native Jamaican landscape, and the violent forces that shaped its history, with remarkable lyric precision. But they speak far beyond Caribbean experience, thanks to the author's uncanny ability to reach the universal within the local. House of Lords and Commons is a skilfully crafted and tender expression of human experience in a world of prejudice and danger that is also a world of intense colour, remarkable music, indefatigable love.'Ishion Hutchinson's darkly tinged yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation.' William Logan, New York Times Book Review

Read more less

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. `Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

Read more less

With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.” Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.

Read more less

** WINNER OF THE LAUREL PRIZE 2021 ****A SPECTATOR AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES / UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2021****SHORTLISTED FOR THE DALKEY LITERARY EMERGING WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021**A remarkable first collection by an important new poetIn this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

Read more less

Plainspeak is the highly anticipated second collection by Astrid Alben, following her acclaimed debut Ai! Ai! Pianissimo. In these startling poems, readers will experience Alben’s unorthodox alter-ego-thinking-out-louder approach with the same exhilaration as they might engage with art or jazz. The poems in Plainspeak deal with place, ancestral ties, solitude, flight, insomnia and the embattled absurdities of daily life.Alben plays with formal boundaries, linguistic identity and the lyrical poetic voice, writing with rhythmic vitality and visual imagination. The poems tell multiple narratives whilst retaining the freedom of abstraction; they are supple and precise, each one an installation evoking different aspects of a particular theme. Plainspeak reinvents play and logic, is poignant and humorous, absurd and anguished: a book for and of the times we live in.

Read more less

Poetry selection in the popular Cranes Classics series, well known poets produced in small 64 page hardbacks with attractive covers.

Read more less

At his death in 2016, Geoffrey Hill left behind The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, his last work, a sequence of more than 270 poems, to be published posthumously as his final statement. Written in long lines of variable length, with much off-rhyme and internal rhyme, the verse-form of the book stands at the opposite end from the ones developed in the late Daybooks of Broken Hierarchies (2013), where he explored highly taut constructions such as Sapphic meter, figure-poems, fixed rhyming strophes, and others. The looser metrical plan of the new book admits an enormous range of tones of voices. Thematically, the work is a summa of a lifetime's meditation on the nature of poetry. A riot of similes about the poetic art makes a passionate claim for the enduring strangeness of poetry in the midst of its evident helplessness. The relation between art and spirituality is another connecting thread. In antiquity, Justin's gnostic Book of Baruch was identified as the 'worst of heresies,' and the use of it in Hill's poem, as well as the references to alchemy, heterodox theological speculation, and the formal logics of mathematics, music, and philosophy are made coolly, as art and as emblems for our inadequate and perplexed grasp of time, fate, and eternity. A final set of themes is autobiographical, including Hill's childhood, the bombing of London, his late trip to Germany, his alarm and anger at Brexit, and his sense of decline and of death close at hand. It is a great work, and in Hill's oeuvre it is a uniquely welcoming work, open to all comers.

Read more less

When she died in poverty at 31, Edith Södergran had been dismissed as a mad, megalomaniac aristocrat by most of her Finnish contemporaries. Today she is regarded as Finland’s greatest modern poet. Her poems – written in Swedish – are intensely visionary, and have been compared with Rimbaud’s, yet they also show deep affinities with Russian poetry, with the work of Blok, Mayakovsky and Severyanin in particular. Born in 1892 of a Finno-Swedish family, Edith Södergran grew up in Raivola, a village on the Russian border, but was educated at a German school in St Petersburg. Her early influences were Goethe and Heine, and she wrote first in German. The driving force of Edith Södergran’s mature Swedish poetry was her struggle against TB, which she contracted in 1908. For much of her short life she was a semi-invalid in sanatoria in Finland and Switzerland. Her last years were spent amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and in desperate poverty in Raivola, where she died in 1923. Edith Södergran saw herself as an inspired free spirit of a new order, a disciple on her own terms of Nietzsche, then of the nature mystic Rudolf Steiner, and ?nally of Christ. But her voice is subtle and wholly original. It transcends the limits imposed by her illness to make lyrical statements about the violence and darkness of the modern world – imagistic poems that are alarming in the surreal beauty of their fragmentary diction. David McDuff’s edition was the first complete translation into English of Edith Södergran’s Swedish poetry. His versions adhere as closely as possible to the spirit and the letter of the Swedish original. In his introductory essay David McDuff gives a comprehensive and illuminating account of Edith Södergran’s life and work.

Read more less

In ancient Roman times rituals were performed to sanctify the ground on which new cities were founded. With this invocation, space could then be occupied. In her brilliant new collection, Alice Major's poems concern themselves with human occupation: how we occupy cities; how we occupy ourselves as citizens, workers and thinkers; how we occupy mythologies and metaphors; and how we occupy the passage of our lives. Written largely in a public voice, these poems invoke human preoccupations that resonate through landscapes of time and space.

Read more less

It is Christmas Eve, 1799, and Dorothy Wordsworth is awake in the dead of night. She stands outside in the winter cold, waiting patiently.When the new day breaks it will bring family and friends to Dorothy's door. For tomorrow is a double joy: tomorrow is her Christmas Birthday.Carol Ann Duffy's wonderful poem Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday takes us to the frozen landscape of the Lake District, where a merry celebration is about to begin in the Wordsworths' cottage.Gorgeously illustrated by Tom Duxbury, this festive poem evokes the snowy Lake District as Dorothy celebrates her birthday with her brother William Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Read more less

Kit Fan's As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones. There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival. Divided into three parts, the book weaves back and forwards between East and West, past and present, art and memory, pivoting around a central sequence called `Genesis', an uncanny re-telling of Chinese creation myths in the language of the Authorised Version. The first part of the book is a brilliantly chromatic travelogue, while the collection ends with a more grounded sequence, `Twelve Months', focusing on a kind of diurnal poetic house-keeping, based on the poet's migrant life in Yorkshire.

Read more less

A definitive new edition of one of the greatest philosophical poems in the English languageVoltaire called it "the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language." Rousseau rhapsodized about its intellectual consolations. Kant recited long passages of it from memory during his lectures. And Adam Smith and David Hume drew inspiration from it in their writings. This was Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733–34), a masterpiece of philosophical poetry, one of the most important and controversial works of the Enlightenment, and one of the most widely read, imitated, and discussed poems of eighteenth-century Europe and America. This volume, which presents the first major new edition of the poem in more than fifty years, introduces this essential work to a new generation of readers, recapturing the excitement and illuminating the debates it provoked from the moment of its publication.Echoing Milton's purpose in Paradise Lost, Pope says his aim in An Essay on Man is to "vindicate the ways of God to man"—to explain the existence of evil and explore man's place in the universe. In a comprehensive introduction, Tom Jones describes the poem as an investigation of the fundamental question of how people should behave in a world they experience as chaotic, but which they suspect to be orderly from some higher point of view. The introduction provides a thorough discussion of the poem's attitudes, themes, composition, context, and reception, and reassesses the work's place in history. Extensive annotations to the text explain references and allusions.The result is the most accessible, informative, and reader-friendly edition of the poem in decades and an invaluable book for students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and thought.

Read more less

Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.

Read more less

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the 20th century, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of 88 lyrics which, to gain their full effect, must be read as a whole. Halcyon is a "solar diary" of a summer spent in Tuscany, part of the time with the legendary Eleanora Duse. The poems evoke specific times and places; more importantly, they conjure up emotions, memories and myths associated with each place. Beginning in early summer, they move through the seasons, changing in verse-form and mood, always delighting in the sensuous qualities of language. J.G. Nicholls's translation makes the richness and subtlety of d'Annunzio's poetry accessible to the English-speaking reader, and his introduction illuminates the complex themes and structure of the work. He provides a full glossary of places and references.

Read more less

In the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante recounts his journey through heaven, after the travails and torments of Hell and the arduous ascent of Mount Purgatory, creating a cosmology of the highest realm of creation which is astonishing in its complexity. In Dante's imagining, Paradise is formed out of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, beginning with the Moon and ending with the Empyrean. Dante must traverse these ethereal regions guided by his beloved Beatrice, as a means of attaining wisdom, revelation and beatitude. Containing some of Dante's finest poetry, Dante's Paradise is an enduring vision of grace and a powerful allegory for the struggle for redemption. This dual-text edition completes J.G. Nichols's masterful verse translation of The Divine Comedy.

Read more less

This new, comprehensive selection of one of America’s foremost modern poets draws on two dozen collections published over six decades. Edited by Paul A. Lacey, it replaces her earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems (1986), and includes selections from both her earlier work and from the six later collections published by Bloodaxe in Britain, from Oblique Prayers to the posthumously published Sands of the Well and This Great Unknowing. Preface by Robert Creeley.

Read more less

The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. After four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.’

Read more less

The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light.

Read more less

Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice "sins" on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins.

Read more less

'Truly a marvellous collection ... There is balm for the soul, fire for the belly, a cooling compress for the fevered brow, solace for the wounded, an arm around the lonely shoulder - the whole collection is a matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss' Stephen FrySometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and that precious realization - I'm not the only one who feels like this.In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary: those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.'The book is delightful; it rightly resituates poetry in relation to its biggest and most serious task: helping us to live and die well' Alain de Botton

Read more less

The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman‘Poetry so alive you want to hold it and protect it’ Malala YousafzaiThe luminous poetry collection captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.‘A new collection full of hope and healing from the young American poet who electrified the world’ Guardian‘Reading these poems, I feel at once haunted, heartened and formidably ministered to’ Tracy K. Smith‘The liberating force of the stories these poems tell about our resilience and survival showcases a powerful griot for our times’ Oprah Daily

Read more less

In her first collection of new poetry since 2011's acclaimed Family Values, Wendy Cope celebrates 'the half-forgotten stories of our lives' with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time. In several of the poems she reimagines Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion; in others she offers heartfelt tributes to friends and to public figures including Eric Morecambe and John Cage. Anecdotal Evidence demonstrates the formal brilliance and empathetic insight which have delighted readers for years, and shows why Wendy Cope is one of our best-loved poets.

Read more less

What does Ireland's nature poetry say about us as a people? How does it speak to us of our past, our inheritance, the values to which we aspire? What clues lie within its language that connect us to our deeper selves and our place within our communities and environments?As varied as our plants, animals and habitats, Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect presents a portrait of an ever-changing vista. Jane Carkill's captivating original illustrations of Ireland's rich and diverse natural world add to the sense of enchantment and wonder.Each poem pays attention to nature while also reflecting on the loves and losses of our everyday lives. Award-winning poet Jane Clarke's selection includes some of our best-known poets, from Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Paula Meehan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paul Muldoon.There are poems here to make us laugh and cry, to help us celebrate and grieve; poems to put words on what can seem inexpressible as we connect to the other living beings with which we share this island.

Read more less

If listening is a form of attention, and attention is a form of love, Bella Cox's Sikiliza presents itself as both an imperative and a promise for exploration of the bonds that tie the constituent elements of a self together. A self woven from voices rooted in different continents. A self both defined by and defying notions of what it means to be woman, sister, daughter, lover, loved, queer. A self versed in the languages of scalpels and flowers. A self that howls, soothes and sings off-key. A self that's unapologetically here, wherever here may be.

Read more less

Raining Upwards is Henry Normal's first all-new poetry collection in over twenty years. These poems explore relationships with science, nature, humanity, and other vital matters we are usually too busy to think about. Includes a Foreword by Tim Firth. "In amongst his work lie some of the most tender, compassionate and moving pieces I have read from a modern poet" - Artful Reporter "Dovetails bittersweet poetry with a sublimely observant wit" - The Guardian "The Alan Bennett of poetry" - The Scotsman

Read more less

Preface; Introduction; Hávamál; Commentary; Bibliography and Abbreviations.

Read more less

"In a dark time," wrote Theodore Roethke, "the eye begins to see"--and with Braille Rainbow, Mike Barnes reveals both darkness and the light that shines beyond it. Beginning with a suite of poems completed before and immediately following his admission to a psychiatric unit as a young man, Barnes's quiet lyricism and formal sensitivity capture those moments of perception that remind us how to see.

Read more less

Filled with portrayals of deception, love, murder, and revenge—yet defying traditional medieval epic conventions for representing character—the Nibelungenlied is the greatest and most unique epic in Middle High German. The Klage, its consistent companion text in the manuscript tradition, continues the story, detailing the devastating aftermath of the Burgundians' bloody slaughter. William Whobrey's new volume offers both—together for the first time in English—in a prose version informed by recent scholarship that brilliantly conveys to modern readers not only the sense but also the tenor of the originals.

Read more less

“Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns in cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” William Wordsworth’s verse was the embodiment of the Romantic age, with its evocation of a unifying spirit running through all things. This collection brings together a rich and diverse selection of his works, from the epic autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude to much-loved shorter poems such as ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘She Was a Phantom of Delight’. Alongside his more personal and introspective compositions, poems such as ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’ demonstrate, in an era of political and social ferment, the manner in which Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forged a revolutionary new poetic style through the publication of Lyrical Ballads – one that embraced the vernacular and subjects previously deemed unworthy of poetry – and thus changed the literary landscape of England for ever.

Read more less

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passionate'.This collection, first published in 1967, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

Read more less

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects - the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccomodating sublime of the new world, time's cunning passages, the poet's place in all of this - with a passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem, and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018A New York Times Notable Book of 2018Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

Read more less

This volume is a new annotated edition of J.H. Prynne's 1983 poem The Oval Window, making use of photographs taken by the poet at the time and place of composition, together with a substantial portfolio supplied by him of source and reference material. This source material includes political and economic news published during the period in early autumn 1983 when the poem was written, together with extracts from literature, Eastern and Western philosophy, optics, anatomy, computer programming language, and a considerable quantity of ancient Chinese poetry. The edition has two commentary essays: the first primarily concerned with approaches to reading, including the use of search engines, and with the relations between different elements in the work, and the second with the topography and the critical antecedents of the poem. For ease of reading, a clean reading text is included as well as the annotated text. The expanded third edition of Prynne's Poems (2015) was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

Read more less

When she arrived in Palestine in 1935 at the age of twenty-four, Leah Goldberg was already known as a significant emerging poet in contemporary Hebrew literature. Today, mention of her name is apt to evoke a nostalgic sigh among Israelis who have grown up hearing her poems read, quoted, recollected, and—having been set to some four hundred melodies—sung on the radio. In the wake of overwhelming new attention on Goldberg's work in Israel, With This Night makes available for the first time in English the final collection of poetry that Goldberg published during her lifetime.

Read more less