Poetry Books

Book SynopsisThis is the truth of you.Because you are all I see.Because you are all I breathe.Because when I cannot find you, I am lost.Because when I’m with you, I am found.Because you have the fire of the universe in you, and sometimes you forget.So this book is here to remind you.Dear You, I want you to know that I see you. I want you to know that even if no one else does, even if you are a ghost in this bookshop, or just the static floating across the screen of your computer, wherever you’re reading this, I see you. I see you in the dark and I see you in the grey. I see you as a story, as words I have spoken or may yet speak. Maybe only in a memory or a dream. I see your hands and your arms and your body and your legs and your face and I see what you have been and what you will be. I see you and in looking at you, I want you to know that whoever you’ve had to be to survive all this, I will not look away. I want you to know that there’s a space inside this book for you. So if you have the time and the inclination, you can sit here with me, just for a while. And perhaps between us, we can see everything that matters. -pleasefindthis

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Book SynopsisSoft spoken yet powerful, Serenity perfectly captures the constant battle of fear and courage that lives within us. The seeds of Serenity were planted in F.S. Yousaf’s last collection of poetry, Sincerely. Struck by inspiration and overwhelmed by the response of dedicated fans, Yousaf wanted to continue this journey in a new collection. While tales of longing, uncertainty, and loss flow through each poem, Yousaf artfully captures the eternal question of how to face pain with courage and quiet resilience. Featuring 140 poems and accompanying illustrations, Serenity is the perfect escape from daily life, helping readers refocus energy and kindness toward themselves and their cherished relationships.

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Book SynopsisIn La Vita Nuova, Italy's greatest poet recounts the famous story of his passionate love for Beatrice. The drama of their relationship unravels through stunning poetry and prose in this, one of the most celebrated love stories in history.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. From the first time the poet sets eyes on Beatrice, he proclaims that ‘love quite governed my soul’ and his devotion to her knows no end. By recalling each meeting with Beatrice this short book is at once a heartfelt account of youthful love and a religious allegory. La Vita Nuova serves as an important precursor to Dante’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.This edition is the English translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti from the original Italian. It was first published in The Early Italian Poets in 1861 and then reissued in 1874 by Dante and his circle. It was met with great acclaim acknowledging Rossetti’s skill as a meticulous and poetic translator.

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Book SynopsisJohn Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry.

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Book Synopsis Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets. Billy CollinsThe Art of Losing is the first anthology of its kind, delivering poetry with a purpose. Editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by therapists, ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss. Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W. H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

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Book SynopsisKim Hyesoon is one of South Korea's most important contemporary poets. She began publishing in 1979 and was one of the first few women in South Korea to be published in Munhak kwa jisong (Literature and Intellect), one of two key journals which championed the intellectual and literary movement against the US-backed military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan in the 1970s and 80s. Don Mee Choi writes: 'Kim's poetry goes beyond the expectations of established aesthetics and traditional "female poetry" (yoryusi), which is characterised by its passive, refined language. In her experimental work she explores women's multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society, a nation that is still under neo-colonial rule by the US. Kim's poetics are rooted in her attempt to resist conventional literary forms and language long defined by men in Korea. According to Kim, "women poets oppose and resist their conditions, using unconventional forms of language because their resistance has led them to a language that is unreal, surreal, and even fantastical. The language of women's poetry is internal, yet defiant and revolutionary".'Trade Review'Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!' - Aase Berg. 'Miraculous weaponry! Miraculous translations! This kind of undomesticated engagement and lawlessness and risk and defiance and somatic exorbitance posits a world and a relation to the world where everything excluded is included - the animal and the vegetal, the molten and the mineral, the gaseous and the liquid, not to mention shame, disgust, failure, terror, raunch. The final poem "Manhole Humanity" deserves its place alongside Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land or Ginsberg's Howl or Inger Christensen's It. Kim Hyesoon's new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It's here to protect us' - Christian Hawkey.

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Book SynopsisDom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed. Dom Bury is a writer and activist who runs workshops on the emotional and human impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2016 and won the 2017 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Opened Field’. Rite of Passage is his first collection.Table of Contents9 What My Body Showed Me Kyrie 13 Hiraeth 14 Brother 16 The Opened Field 18 Black Bird, Nine Nails, One Child 19 Fois Gras 22 Spring Without Voices 23 The Chapel in the Sea 25 Under Dartington Redwoods 27 Our Species Dies irae 31 Snow Country 33 Why I Have Chosen Not to Have Children 34 Seasons — A Requiem 37 All I Can Offer You is This 38 On the Theme — Fire 40 Hunger Libera me 43 The Body’s New Weather 44 Love as a Project for Small Children with Eyelids 49 I Lie Down On the Ground to Make Peace with the Fire Jumping the Valley Towards Me 52 Completion 53 Extinction In Paradisum 57 Afterwards 58 Seeing the Whole World Begin Kindling 61 Letter from My Daughters 62 Metamorphosis 72 Passageway 73 Threshold 77 Morning

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Book SynopsisThe recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time. The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing. Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.Trade ReviewJane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter’s eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint. -- Adam Thorpe * The Guardian, on Another Country *A major achievement… outstanding… complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation. -- Sarah Broom * Times Literary Supplement, on Another Country *These are marvellously atmospheric poems: they have something of the quality of very careful watercolours. -- Tim Liardet and Vona Groarke * PBS Bulletin, on Silent in Finisterre *Table of Contents9 Waking 10 Inscape 11 The Drowning at Porthcurno 13 Off-spring 14 The Amortals 24 Distance Lane 25 Foundling 26 Lifelines 35 Isolation 36 Grace 37 Out of the Picture 38 Negative Space 39 Snow and Privet 40 Moving the House 41 Little Silver 44 Charm 45 Tall Story 46 Homily 47 The Silence 48 From London far 49 Anchorage 50 Passage 51 Fugue 54 Life Sentence 55 Definition of Huer 56 Stet 57 Sometimes I forget you are dead because 58 Gone Fishing 60 Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead 61 Smokey Considers Hilton’s Cat 62 Cot Song 64 Ghost Rhyme 65 Abstraction 68 New Year’s Day 69 New Atlantis 70 Tailpiece

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Book SynopsisIn 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry – an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo – played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes (3), T.S. Eliot Prize (2), Ted Hughes Award (2), Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers the programme has supported, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes highly personal and politically engaged essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on some of the most significant topics of our time. Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times. Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works.Table of Contents9 Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo 12 Introduction by Nathalie Teitler 18 Preface by Karen McCarthy Woolf ROUND 3 Raymond Antrobus 25 The Perseverance 27 Horror Scene as Black English Royal (Captioned) Leo Boix 29 A Latin American Sonnet 29 A Latin American Sonnet III 30 Eucalyptus Omikemi Natacha Bryan 32 Sirens 33 Home Victoria Adukwei Bulley 35 Declaration 36 Pandemic vs. Black Folk 37 Dreaming is a Form of Knowledge Production Will Harris 39 ‘In June, outrageous stood the flagons…’ 40 The Seven Dreams of Richard Spencer 42 Scene Change 44 ‘Take the origin of banal…’ Ian Humphreys 47 The grasshopper warbler’s song 48 Swifts and the Awakening City 50 The wood warbler’s song Momtaza Mehri 52 Fledglings 54 I AM BRINGING THE HISTORY OF THE KITCHEN SINK INTO OUR BEDROOM AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME 55 Imperatives Yomi Ṣode 57 Exhibition 2.0 59 12:05 in North London, Thinking about Kingsley Smith 60 An Ode to Bruv, Ting, Fam and, on Occasion, Cuz & My Man Degna Stone 63 Walltown Crags 63 Proof of Life on Earth 65 over {prep., adv} Jennifer Lee Tsai 67 About Chinese Women 71 The Yellow Woman ROUND 2 Mona Arshi 75 Yellows 76 February 78 Arrivals 79 from My Little Sequence of Ugliness 80 from The Book of Hurts Jay Bernard 82 Clearing Kayo Chingonyi 86 Kumukanda 86 The Colour of James Brown’s Scream 87 Nyaminyami: ‘water can crash and water can flow’ 88 Nyaminyami: epilogue Rishi Dastidar 90 The Brexit Book of the Dead 91 Time takes a moment 92 Neptune’s concrete crash helmet Edward Doegar 94 from The English Lyric I 94 from The English Lyric II 95 After After Remainder Inua Ellams 97 from The Half God of Rainfall (Act One, Book I) Sarah Howe 102 Sometimes I think 103 Relativity 104 from In the Chinese Ceramics Gallery Adam Lowe 109 Gingerella’s Date 111 Elegy for the Latter-day Teen Wilderness Years 112 Reynardine for Red Eileen Pun 115 Studio Apartment: Eyrie 116 Longways / Crosswise Warsan Shire 120 Backwards ROUND 1 Rowyda Amin 125 Genius Loci 125 We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire Malika Booker 130 My Ghost in the Witness Stand Janet Kofi-Tsekpo 135 Yellow Iris 136 Streets 136 The Wilton Diptych Mir Mahfuz Ali 138 Isn’t 139 My Salma Nick Makoha 142 Hollywood Africans 143 Mecca 144 JFK Shazea Quraishi 147 The Taxidermist attends to her work 149 In the Branches of your Voice Roger Robinson 152 Halibun for the Onlookers 153 Woke 153 Lisbon 154 Returnee 155 Blood Denise Saul 157 The Room Between Us 158 A Daughter’s Perspective 159 Stone Altar 160 Golden Grove Seni Seneviratne 162 Lightkeeping 163 The Devil’s Rope 164 The Weight of the World Karen McCarthy Woolf 166 Excerpts from Un/Safe ESSAYS Raymond Antrobus 173 Bird Song and Resonance Mona Arshi 179 Writing through a Pandemic Leo Boix 185 Multilingual Writing and Translation: A Poetics of Resistance Jay Bernard 190 Manifesto: Stranger in the archives Malika Booker 194 She Will Name Herself Ghost: She Will Haul Up a Poetic Courtroom and There Shall Be a Reckoning Rishi Dastidar 205 Wanted: a screwball poetics. On why we should try to find comedy in poetry Will Harris 216 Bad Dreams Nick Makoha 218 The Black Metic Momtaza Mehri 224 An Emptying: A Gathering Karen McCarthy Woolf 228 It is lovely when…Diaspora poetics & the zuihitsu Inua Ellams 239 On time, money and music 246 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisNew Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, the book builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend who died by suicide.

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral,Poet pilgrims competing for free picks,Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remixFrom below-the-belt base to the topnotch;I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatchwhen the tales overrun, run offensive,or run clean out of steam, they're authenticand we're keeping it real, reminisce this:Chaucer Tales were an unfinished business.In Telling Tales award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retelling all of the stories, from the Miller's Tale to the Wife of Bath's in her own critically acclaimed poetic style.Celebrating Chaucer's Middle-English masterwork for its performance element as well as its poetry and pilgrims, Agbabi's newest collection is utterly unique. Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the seams, Telling Tales takes one of Britain's most significant works of literature and gives it thrilling new life.Trade ReviewThe liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read - every page a virtuoso performance of language, character and story -- SIMON ARMITAGEThe language is every bit as Chaucerian as Chaucer - ripe, rollicking and humorous - and Agbabi's redesigned pilgrims are as much a mixed bag as the originals * * The Times * *Inventive, innovative and ingenious - Agbabi's take on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales zooms right into the 21st Century -- JACKIE KAYHer poems draw on rap, jive and disco rhythms as much as the formal subtleties of free verse. Agbabi is a fine poet, and her linguistic wit carries satirical fire * * Daily Telegraph * *Anyone giving a poetic echo to The Canterbury Tales needs exceptional imagination, human warmth and rhythmical energy; without them, the echo is doomed to fade. But Patience Agbabi has all these things and more: a completely appropriate sense of variety, fun, seriousness and good humour. Stirred all together, they make Telling Tales a compelling collection of story-portraits, at once contemporary and time-honoured. It's a wonderful achievement -- ANDREW MOTIONPatience Agbabi has brilliantly created a Canterbury Tales for a multicultural Britain, about the oversexed and the losers, the damned and the blest, in rap, sestina, text, sonnets and rhyme royal. Responsive to their models in endlessly inventive ways, they are a treat to read, and even better if you know the originals. Chaucer would have been proud of what he has inspired -- HELEN COOPER, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of CambridgePatience Agbabi's Telling Tales is a brilliant, virtuosic take on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as spoken by a dazzling list of contemporary characters in a variety of contemporary idioms. Her use of received and improvised form is masterly, a great entertainment in itself, her wit and sense of poise remarkable. If Telling Tales is not one of the books of the year or in line for a major prize it will be proof the world has grown very dull indeed. This is a landmark book that extends the domain of poetry. Forget the diviison between live and page. This is live on the page -- GEORGE SZIRTESTelling Tales is a carefully constructed wonder tour. Agbabi is a genius. And this is her best work yet -- LEMN SISSAYTelling Tales is a pilgrimage of punks, badasses, broken hearts, beat poets, silver-tongued fixers, town criers, beauties, sinners. A jostle of life; loud language, noise, sudden refection, quiet, pain. A busload of voices. A poem on wheels. Inventive, risky, serious and fun -- JEANETTE WINTERSONA rising star * * Observer * *Thrilling. Has a multi-dimensional richness . . . A bold, brassy work * * Independent on Sunday on Transformatrix * *An energetic compendium of familiar stories translated into the contemporary idiom of street slang and slam poetry * * Times Literary Supplement * *

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Book SynopsisSweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.Trade Review'Rory Waterman writes poems of the kind there'll always be a need for.' - Alan Jenkins

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Book Synopsis'A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness,' Guardian'In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones' lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle' Amanda GormanA mighty anthem about the saving grace of friendship, Danez Smith's highly anticipated collection Homie is rooted in their search for joy and intimacy in a time where both are scarce. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption.Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is written for friends: for Danez's friends, for yours.'This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way' New York TimesTrade ReviewI’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady. -- Parul Sehgal * New York Times *A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness. * Guardian *Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it’s here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they’ve built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, "your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us" -- Franny Choi, author of Soft ScienceThis book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly -- Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come For UsHomie is how we survive – in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt -- Tish JonesHomie is deeply moving and funny… [and] a step change from Smith’s earlier work -- Lanre Bakare * Guardian *The president of black voices in poetry. Smith uses their new collection to explore the ideas of friendship, intimacy and comfort * Stylist *I return to this collection to remind myself of what is possible on the page, the joy, the rigour, the necessity of a strut. Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be -- Raven Leilani * Week *A great collection of poetry about friendship, sex and Blackness. It's rare for me to go back to poetry but I come back to this again and again... It's beautiful -- Travis Alabanza * Dazed *A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *Homie felt like a book for this year as we learned to look after one another in new ways -- Željka Maroševic * White Review *[Homie] filled me with pure joy. It is a book as inventive, funny, sad, warm and sharp as any I've ever read -- Yaa Gyasi * Techregister, *Books of the Year* *Much of Smith's early success came through the slam poetry scene... Homie makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page -- Kevin Okoth * London Review of Books *

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Book Synopsis'A Blood Condition is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year' Guardian, Books of the Year 2021*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 JHALAK PRIZE*The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo ChingonyiKayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances -- of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go -- and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.'A thing of beauty. It's a pleasure to read such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most celebrated young poets' Diana Evans'An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading' Telegraph'The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it' Andrew O'HaganTrade ReviewChingonyi's poetic voice finds its full-throated maturity... Deep introspection becomes the vulnerable and brave heart of the book, rendered into jewel-like poems in "Origin Myth"... An elegantly spare, cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading -- Dzifa Benson * Telegraph *A Blood Condition is a thing of beauty. It's a pleasure to read such a sure and strident second outing from one of our most celebrated young poets -- Diana Evans * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2021* *I was changed by Kayo Chingonyi's recent volume of poems, A Blood Condition. The musicality and the hard reason is just so fresh, you feel altered by it -- Andrew O'Hagan * New Statesman *A Blood Condition has a dignity that honours the past without indulging in any overflow of personal feeling. Dignity is an interesting quality in a writer - it cannot be faked without presenting as pomposity. Chingonyi's authentic, reined-in passions are stirring... Chingonyi's poems grow out of gaps, out of the moments when nothing more can be done. The dead cannot be recovered, time cannot be reclaimed, the damage to the river is likely to be permanent, but a poem can be written and take its quietly powerful stand -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London... These fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we might "carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith" -- Aingeal Clare * Guardian *There is thrilling formal accomplishment on display in these poems... poignant and moving... there are brilliant evocations of the north of England -- Andrew McMillan * Poetry Book Society *Chingonyi seems to have hit upon the telling image, the poem-as-snapshot, as a means of making his writing at once more exposed and more sharply defined... This new version of Chingonyi's voice, whittled down to its essentials and built on the seen, is behind almost all the best poems here... A Blood Condition...[is] a significant development in his work -- Declan Ryan * Times Literary Supplement *Kayo Chingonyi's second book, A Blood Condition, is one of the most arresting and beautiful set of poems of this or any year. His ability to blend music, grief and yearning is unmatched -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisSee the kitten, how she starts,Crouches, stretches, paws and darts;With a tiger-leap half wayNow she meets her coming prey.Lets it go as fast and thenHas it in her power again.From 'The Kitten at Play' by William WordsworthCurious, enigmatic and playful, cats have often inspired the literary imagination. This beautifully illustrated anthology of cat poetry is a celebration of the world’s most loved pet by the world's most loved poets. The purrfect gift for cat lovers.

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Book Synopsis*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE*After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'.McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.Trade ReviewA moving exploration of mental health. * i, Entertainment to look forward to this Spring *A fascinating collection - troubling and moving to read... McMillan has mastered the art of self-reproach... [an] exceptional vigil of a book. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *

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Book SynopsisGrowing from a year-long commitment to write one haiku a day, Catstrawe ranges through family history and female relationships, the stimulation of travel and the inspiration to found in the immediate environment, politics and the world situation, but always, at its heart, the experience of living with cancer. Quickly outgrowing the limitations of seventeen syllables to explorer more extended forms, this is a book about living life to the full in the face of the inevitability of death.

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Book SynopsisSue Lewis has won previous pamphlet awards and one of the many things that delights about her work is that each new collection pushes the boundaries of language and integrity further. The writing is lucid, precise, the metaphors are precise and fresh, but the effect is to take us withinto interior landscapes where there is not certainty but the constant liminality of life in process, the questions and doubts we contend with, the moments of compassion alongside the bittersweet ache for the lives that might have been, while tending to the life that is. There is not a false word in this exquisite collection as it makes its risky/tender pilgrimage.'

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Laurel Prize 2023. A Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The Irish Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year. To 2040 begins with question masquerading as fact: 'Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.' These visionary new poems reveal Graham as historian, cartographer, prophet, plotting an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant, 'the American experiment will end in 2030'. Graham exposes a potentially inevitable future, sirens sounding among industrial ruins. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, we pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a burrowing worm. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham invites the reader to sit silent, to hear soil breathe. To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality - in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first 'claw full of hair' placed gently on a green shower ledge. 2040 as both future and event-horizon: the reader leaves the book warned, wiser, attentively on edge. 'Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me'. The title poem asks, 'what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?'Trade Review'A mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its continuation' - The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisFour book-length poems respond to the experience of walking in the wild landscapes of the highlands and islands of Scotland.

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Book SynopsisIn a fast-paced world, The Wild Verses invites you to slow down, reflect and to seek solace through poetry and nature.From consoling words of hope and healing to meditations on love and friendship, this beautiful collection has a poem for every feeling. Accompanied by emotive illustrations of animals in the wild, this is a poetry collection to be returned to again and again.The perfect gift book for fans of Donna Ashworth and Charlie Mackesy.Trade ReviewThe Wild Verses... is a wonderful collection of nature poems, with magnificent illustrations by Sarah Maycock. These poems focus on the things which matter most - love, friendship, hope for the future and healing. Children and adults alike will love the images and messages written in rich, beautiful language. -- Emma Dunn and Clare Fulton * The Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisThe new collection from ''one of America''s most legendary living poets'' (Ocean Vuong), written in the drive to fall in love with the world again not as it was, but as it iswhen the hammerapproached we thought is that thing coming this wayBreathing, moving, living on the page, CAConrad's exhilarating work is centred on the (Soma)tic ritual, their celebrated practice which draws on nature, crystals, meditation and interactions with strangers to create an extreme present' of unfettered creativity from which poems can emerge.Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return gathers the results of a single new ritual, focused on fellow animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, and spanning environments from Seattle a city built in the midst of an abundant nontropical rainforest to the Mojave Desert. The poet receives gifts from a crow; associates different parts of their body with nine different species encountered in the dese

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Book SynopsisWhen it feels like your ears are beginning to flop and all of the bounce has gone out of your hop, when everything''s driving you right round the bend, you know what you need? What you need is a friend. Join Little Bunny as he discovers how important friends can be, how they can help you tackle some of the more complex emotions, as well as how to be a good friend to others.

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Book SynopsisSubhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention centre after his mother fled the violence of a distant homeland, life behind the fences is all he's ever known. Now his imagination is pushing at the limits of his world. One day, Jimmie appears on the other side of the fence, bringing a notebook written by the mother she lost. Unable to read it, she relies on Subhi to unravel her own family's mysterious and moving history. Together, Subhi and Jimmie must find a way to freedom, and they must be braver than they've ever been before... The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon's powerful and deeply moving novel about the displacement and treatment of refugees and sanctuary seekers, has been widely read and studied around the world since its publication in 2017. This enthralling stage adaptation by award-winning Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan was first produced on a UK tour in 2022 by Pilot Theatre with York Theatre Royal, Derby Theatre, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, and Mercury Theatre Colchester. Also included is a range of teaching materials and resources designed to help educators bring the play to life for their students. Praise for the novel, The Bone Sparrow: 'With an affecting and distinctive narrative voice... [Zana Fraillon] builds a convincing and complete world. Moving and memorable, The Bone Sparrow deserves to be read by all who care about our common humanity' Guardian 'A heartrending tale about how our stories make us, and also an angry polemic, vividly convincing in its detailed description of what it means for your home to be a tent in the dust behind a guarded fence' Sunday Times 'This is a tragic, beautifully crafted and wonderful book whose chirpy, stoic hero shames us all' Independent Winner of the Amnesty CILIP Honour Award Shortlisted for the Carnegie Award and the Guardian Children's Fiction PrizeTrade Review'Powerful... such stories are as necessary as ever' * Guardian *'Powerful and moving... the writing soul-shakingly communicates the truthfulness of the characters' experiences' * Observer *'A timely reminder of our unseeing cruelty towards those forced out of their homes by war, genocide, or other atrocities' * British Theatre Guide *'A touching, relevant and educational text on refugees… highlights the awful conditions that millions are forced to live in' * Drama & Theatre magazine *

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Book SynopsisLove is challenged by divisive political realities in Harrison David Rivers' play at Soho Theatre, London, in 2025, starring Omari Douglas.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisThis handsome volume presents more than twenty images of book covers, poems and other works that reflect Sligo's presence in the work of W.B. Yeats and his family.

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Book SynopsisPublished to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work.

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Book SynopsisWhether you love poetry or haven't read it since school, The Splash of Words will help you rediscover poetry’s power to startle, challenge and reframe your vision. Like throwing a pebble into water, a poem causes a ‘splash of words’ whose ripples can transform the way we see the world, ourselves and God. Through thirty selected poems, from the fourteenth century to the present day, Mark Oakley explores poetry’s power to stir our settled ways of viewing the world and faith, shift our perceptions and even transform who we are.Trade Review'This beautiful and wise meditation centred around Mark Oakley’s anthology of the ‘soul language’ of poetry opens new windows in the shared house of both poetry and belief.' -- Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate‘A very moving book, opening all kinds of doors into a more compassionate, more truthful understanding.’ -- Rowan Williams'A wonderful exposition of the relationship between faith, poetry and struggle.' -- Shami Chakrabarti, The Guardian

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Book Synopsis‘Vanishing. It’s a powerful word, that. A powerful word.’ County Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor. Developed by Sonia Friedman Productions, Jez Butterworth's play The Ferryman premiered to huge acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in April 2017, before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The production was directed by Sam Mendes. It went on to win the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play, and the Critics' Circle, Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards for Best New Play. It also won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Play.Trade Review'A richly absorbing and emotionally abundant play… an instant classic' * Independent *'An astonishing, enormous, shattering eruption of a play… it left me genuinely stunned' * Time Out *'Huge in the scale of its cast, of its ambition, of its rich themes. But above all, massive in its capacity to hold an audience rapt, in silence, telling them a story. It is, like Jerusalem before it, an extraordinary, thrilling act of belief in the power of theatre to gather people in a room and make them listen… Butterworth's writing, both flexible and controlled, makes every moment, whether funny, tender or tragic worth leaning forward to catch… a triumphant, bold piece of theatre, full of life and heart and passion' * WhatsOnStage *'Butterworth has done it again… a drama of mighty magnitude... miss this and you've missed a marvel' * Telegraph *'A ripping thriller in a big family home, stuffed with eccentricity and black comedy, it swells into an expansive examination of Republican history, politics and identity, as tied up with the IRA… a tumbling and tumultuous play, one that swerves off into storytelling, song and dance, and debate, without taking its eye off the need for suspense. It's a thriller that bursts the bounds of its genre, but never forgets what makes the form tick. Butterworth loads his traps patiently, then bides his time... it's a prime example of thinking through theater, as Butterworth embodies ideas and makes images felt, rubs stories off against each other and stirs motifs into the mix. From missed-out motherhood to lost love, the play courses with yearned-for connections that remain agonizingly incomplete. But it is, above all, entirely entertaining' * Variety *'Fully justifies the hype... a feast of intricate storytelling, it's absorbing, soulful and ultimately shattering' * Evening Standard *'Jez Butterworth is back – and how... his new play is a mighty affair, sending stories, characters, history, politics and love skittering across the floor with the flair of a gambler rolling dice. It's a stunning piece of writing: teeming with life; haunted by death… Butterworth takes the great family drama and makes it his own. You can see traces of Friel, Miller, Chekhov, Ibsen, even Aeschylus and Sophocles, and it's clearly a twist on the Irish dramatic canon. He offers a masterclass in observing the classical unities, using dramatic irony and building tension. But he also brings to it his own love of storytelling and skill with menace, binding the two to depict the tragic mesh of conflict… a magnificent play that uses, brilliantly, the vitality of live theatre to express the deadly legacy of violence' * Financial Times *'A serious, seriously good, grown-up play... something special' * The Times *'A rich, serious, deeply involving play… what gives Butterworth's play such shattering force is its Hardyesque love of rural rituals and its compassionate exploration of unspoken love' * Guardian *'A stunning, sprawling and richly written play… a mixing of the mythic and the modern' * The Stage *'A story that heaves with narratives and with incidents, with jokes and with surreal moments… an amazing experience. Butterworth’s storytelling finesse carries all before it' * The Arts Desk *'A harvest feast of immeasurable brilliance. Butterworth's writing offers an exquisite balance of humour and drama, revelry and mourning, surprise and expectation. It is a masterclass in every aspect… an unforgettable piece of theatre that will no doubt be talked about for decades to come' * Broadway World *'A stunning piece that might be even better than Mojo and even Jerusalem, which is really saying something… combines elements of Greek tragedy with a shrewd commentary on recent Irish history in the wrapping of a high octane family drama' * British Theatre Guide *'Fiercely gripping… overflows with storytelling vitality, the kind that so holds the attention that three and a quarter-hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye, albeit a bloodied and black one' * New York Times *

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Book SynopsisJacob Sam-La Rose has been described as 'a one-man literary industry'. This was Patrick Neate's comment on the BBC Poetry Season website: 'Passionate about poetry and its power to change people's lives, he's a lesson to us all. He's also a damn fine writer.' Already well-known on the UK performance circuit, Sam-La Rose has also spent many years working with young people in schools and communities, especially around London. So it will come as a surprise to many that Breaking Silence is his first book-length collection of poetry. It is a collection that sits on the threshold between the personal and the profound, with eyes on race and dual heritage; masculinity and manhood; definitions and senses of self. Above all, it's a collection that's invested in the power of the voice, in the work of giving a voice to issues and entities that would otherwise remain silent. It speaks on divides, from the spaces in between. Jacob Sam-La Rose's work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and that it's possible to combine the immediacy of poetry in performance with formal rigour and innovation on the page. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Aldeburgh First Collection PrizeTrade ReviewPoetry that is - fresh, vivid and masterly in its evocation of contemporary Britain. -- Choman Hardi & Martyn Crucefix * PBS Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisDrama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price García Lorca's passionate, lyrical tale of longing and revenge: a twentieth century masterpiece. Translated from the Spanish and introduced by one of Scotland's finest playwrights, Jo Clifford.

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Book SynopsisA facsimile capturing the essence of Sussex as it was one hundred years ago, Eleanor Farjeons' creative ramble across the South Downs celebrated in 26 poems; an inspirational landscape now embraced as the South Downs National Park, a lasting testament to Sussex.

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Book SynopsisThis is the full and unabridged play as a graphic novel! 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun'! This title presents the tragic tale of doomed love, set in Verona, Italy, where the Montagues and the Capulets constantly feud and bring unrest to the city. So how could love possibly survive between this pair of star-crossed lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet? Only Shakespeare could take such a romantic story and turn it into a soul-searching tragedy.

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This is the entire unabridged play brought to life in full colour! Although "The Tempest" was the first play to appear in the first official Folio printing of Shakespeare's plays, it was almost certainly the last play he wrote. It held pride of place in that first collection, presumably because the editors thought it to be his masterpiece; a crowning glory to the career of the most brightest of playwrights. Needless to say, we had to select the very best artists to do it justice, and to bring you the stunning artwork that you've come to expect from our titles. Poignant to the last, this book is a classic amongst classics.

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