Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA slick and violent black comedy set in the Soho clubland of the 1950s. The hit debut play from the author of Jerusalem. In the seedy gangster underworld of the rock'n'roll scene, club owners fight for control of Johnny Silver, the latest young sensation. First premiered at the Royal Court in 1995, Jez Butterworth's play Mojo won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and earned Butterworth the George Devine Award and Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright. This edition of Mojo was published alongside the play's 2013 revival in London's West End.Trade Review'The Royal Court's most dazzling main-stage debut in years' * Guardian *'The verbal menance of Harold Pinter [meets] the physical violence of Quentin Tarantino' * The Times *'Mockingly male, highly comic and exhilartingly violent... explosive' * WhatsOnStage *'A fabulous play... original, vibrant, gloriously entertaining' * The Arts Desk *'A hell of a show... witty and claustrophobic' * Exeunt Magazine *'Bristles with masculine energy and menace... a confident, ballsy play which explodes its vision of the perils of hopeless, cocksure, violent, seedy criminality with volcanic power' * The Stage *'Beckett on speed, savagely funny, in fast forward, with no time to wait for Godot' * Observer *'Wickedly funny, incredibly dark... a combination of strong plotting and zinging dialogue [makes] this play addictive and disconcerting' * Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisWhat is that, trailing your footsteps, breathing softly down your neck? Rediscover the magic and wonder of the original Grimm Tales, retold by master-storyteller Philip Pullman. In this stage version by Philip Wilson, you'll meet the familiar characters – Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel – and some unexpected ones too, such as Hans-My-Hedgehog, the Goose Girl at the Spring and the remarkable Thousandfurs. Full of deliciously dark twists and turns, the tales come to life in all their glittering, macabre brilliance – a delight for children and adults alike. These Grimm Tales, adapted for the stage by Philip Wilson from Philip Pullman's version of the original tales, were first performed as immersive storytelling experiences underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, London, in 2014, and Bargehouse on the South Bank in 2015. They also offer plentiful opportunities for youth theatres, schools and amateur companies looking for a vivid new version of the classic fairytales.Trade Review'A genuine delight… a compelling and brilliant collection for varying abilities, rich with imagination… gives teachers versions of these stories that would work with any year group' * Teaching Drama *'Beautifully done, and thrilling to stumble upon... atmospheric to the point of inspiring awe' * Telegraph *'A magic box of glittering surprises' * The Times *Table of ContentsThe First Set of Tales Little Red Riding Hood Rapunzel The Three Snake Leaves Hans-my-Hedgehog The Juniper Tree The Second Set of Tales The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich The Three Little Men in the Woods Thousandfurs The Goose Girl at the Spring Hansel and Gretel Faithful Johannes The Donkey Cabbage

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Book SynopsisThe Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. It premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour. It won a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. It received a Special Commendation in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and 'utterly riveting' (Guardian) BBC television series. This edition also features an introduction by the author.Trade Review'A remarkable portrait of a modern woman who shamelessly bares her soul' Guardian; 'Believe the hype, Waller-Bridge's raw writing... really is as good as everyone says' The Stage; 'Sucker-punch funny... I've never seen a play quite like it' Scotsman; 'Frank and sometimes brutally funny... devastatingly good' The Times; 'Blessed with a rare and compelling life force... deliciously dirty and scabrously funny' Evening Standard; 'Very funny... penetrating, pitch-black and nastily brilliant' Metro; 'Unbelievably rude, jaw-droppingly filthy... extremely funny' Time Out; 'A sharp-edged gem of a solo show' WhatsOnStage 'Bitingly funny and genuinely moving... clever and tender and true' A Younger Theatre

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Book Synopsis'Beauty is but skin deep, ugly lies the bone; beauty dies and fades away, but ugly holds its own.' After three tours of duty in Afghanistan, wounded veteran Jess finally returns home to Florida, where she must confront her scars – and a hometown that may have changed even more than her. Undergoing an experimental virtual reality therapy, she builds a breathtaking new world where she can escape her pain. As Jess advances further into that world, she begins to restore her relationships, her life and, slowly, herself. Lindsey Ferrentino's play Ugly Lies the Bone received its European premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2017, in a production directed by Indhu Rubasingham and starring Kate Fleetwood. It was a New York Times Critics' Pick during its sold-out run Off-Broadway in 2015.Trade Review'One of the most painfully truthful portraits of sibling relationships that I have seen in a long time' * Telegraph *'A winningly empathetic piece… messy humanity [is] reflected by a play that's similarly heartfelt… plenty of welcome humour' * Broadway World *'Ferrentino's writing is deeply felt and often touching' * Hollywood Reporter *

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Book SynopsisA passionate, heartfelt play about surviving in a time of civil war, by a leading American dramatist. Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A small mining town deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Mama Nadi's bar her rules apply. No arguments, no politics, no guns. When two new girls arrive, tainted with the stigma of their recent past, Mama is forced to reassess her business priorities and personal loyalties. As tales of local atrocities spread and tensions between rebels and government militia rise, the realities of life in civil war provide the ultimate test of the human spirit. Lynn Nottage's play Ruined was first performed at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in November 2008. It opened Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club in February 2009. The play received its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in April 2010. This edition includes lyrics and music from the original production.Trade Review'An exceptionally powerful piece of writing' * London Evening Standard *'Overwhelming... could not be more powerful' * Observer *'Essential viewing... horrifying, wondrous - and true' * Time Out *

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Book SynopsisA funny, painful and deeply moving play about loss - and cooking. Lucy has lost something very important. One minute Jo's there, the next he isn't, leaving Lucy with a pile of half-cooked food and a collection of invited (and uninvited) guests. As Lucy acclimatises to her new situation, she is absorbed, along with her visitors, into an intimate and sensory experience. Pamela Carter's play What We Know was first performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2010. This edition includes recipes by Rosie Sykes that can be used in a production of the play.Trade Review'Painful, tantalising and deeply moving' * Herald *'A perfect metaphor for loss and for the disbelief and grief that ensues... innovative, sensitive, entertaining theatre' * edinburghguide.com *

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Book SynopsisFour plays from award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy, created in parnership with Mulberry School in East London - ideal for performance by schools and youth groups. Tender, uncompromising, haunting and lyrical, these four plays together comprise a contemporary chronicle of the lives of East London's young women. In The Urban Girl's Guide to Camping, four young friends leave the city behind and head into the wilderness, but a burning secret threatens to tear their lives apart. A bittersweet comedy about life, love and friendship once school is long gone. Mehndi Night is a touching family tale about resentment and forgiveness on the night before a wedding, exploring the pleasures and pains of a cross-cultural identity in twenty-first century Britain. From the heart of London's East End, Stolen Secrets are urban fairytales, bold, lyrical and gruesome, that can be performed individually or together for maximum shock value. In The Unravelling, a dying mother challenges her daughters to weave her the greatest tale, using nothing more than pieces of cloth. A Fringe First Award-winning fable about the power of mythology to change your life. These plays are the result of a unique four-year partnership between award-winning playwright Fin Kennedy and Mulberry School in East London. Originally performed by the school at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at Southwark Playhouse, London, they are written in an ensemble storytelling style that will suit younger performance groups around the country, especially those looking for predominantly female roles.Trade Review'To say Fin Kennedy and Mulberry School for Girls are one of the best writer/education partnerships there is doesn't do them justice. To say they're one of the best companies at the Fringe comes closer' * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisDrama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price An intense and powerful drama, set in a Nottinghamshire mining town. Elizabeth Holroyd is an educated woman with refined sensibilities, struggling to make a good home for her two children in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town. Poverty is not the only problem she faces. Her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub. When Blackmore, a mine electrician, recognises Mrs Holroyd as a kindred spirit, he asks her to leave her husband for him, with the promise of a new life for her and her children in faraway Spain. It's a promise that Mrs Holroyd is almost ready to accept... D.H. Lawrence's second play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd was written in 1910 but went unpublished until 1914. It was staged for the first time in 1916, by the Players Producing Company at the Little Theatre in Los Angeles, USA. In 1920 it was staged in Britain, in an amateur production at the Garrick Theatre in Altrincham. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, includes an introduction by Colin Counsell, a glossary of difficult words, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

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Book SynopsisFour full-length plays and two previously unpublished shorts from the multi-award-winning author of Jerusalem. Jez Butterworth burst onto the theatre scene aged twenty-five with Mojo, 'one of the most dazzling Royal Court main stage debuts in years' (Time Out). This first volume of his Collected Plays contains that play plus the three that followed, as well as two short one-person pieces published here for the first time – everything in fact that precedes Jerusalem, 'unarguably one of the best dramas of the twenty-first century' (Guardian). Plays One includes: Mojo, staged in 1995 but set in the Soho clubland of 1958, 'superbly captures the atmosphere of the infant British rock and roll scene where seedy low-lifers hustle for the big time' (Daily Telegraph). It is 'Beckett on speed' (Observer) by a 'dramatist of obvious talent and terrific promise' (The Times). The Night Heron (2002) is set in the Cambridgeshire Fens amongst assorted oddballs, birdwatchers and the local constabulary. 'It's funny, it's sad, it's haunting and it also strangely beautiful. Above all, it is quite unlike anything you've ever seen before' (Daily Telegraph). In The Winterling (2006) a gangland fugitive is visited by two associates from the city who have other things on their mind than a jolly reunion. 'The dialogue is testosterone taut, a sense of menace invades every conversation... and as tales of torture and treachery unfold, the black comedy never misses' (Time Out). Leavings (previously unpublished), a short monologue about an old man whose dog has gone missing. The housing estate in Parlour Song (2008) is 'a place of illicit desire and painful memories, of bad dreams and mysterious disappearances... a play that combines the comic, the erotic and the downright disconcerting with superb panache' (Daily Telegraph). The Naked Eye (previously unpublished), a short monologue about a family preparing to watch Halley's Comet as it passes through the night sky. Introducing the plays is an interview with Jez Butterworth specially conducted for this volume. Trade Review'Combines the verbal menace of Harold Pinter and the physical violence of Quentin Tarantino.' The Sunday Times, on Mojo 'Testosterone taut, a sense of menace invades every conversation - the black comedy never misses.'Time Out, on The Winterling 'Butterworth's play has a wild contrapuntal humour... he exactly captures the more mundane madness beneath the bland routine of affluence.' Guardian, on Parlour Song

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Book SynopsisEngland is in crisis. Fields are flooded, food is scarce and fear grips the land. William Bloor, a foxfinder, arrives at Judith and Samuel Covey's farm to investigate a suspected fox infestation. The Coveys' harvest has failed to meet their target and the government wants to know why. Trained from childhood, William is fixated on his mission to unearth the animals that must be to blame for the Coveys' woes. But as the hunt progresses, William finds more questions than answers… A darkly comic, spell-binding dystopian drama, Dawn King's Foxfinder won the 2011 Papatango New Writing Prize and premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London. Foxfinder had its West End premiere at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by Rachel O'Riordan.Trade Review'Sharp of tooth and riddled with a clawing dread, Dawn King's 2011 rural drama is a fierce and fabulous beast... King's writing feels at once wonderfully strange and naggingly familiar, with echoes of Caryl Churchill's Far Away and Arthur Miller's The Crucible' * The Stage *'The play, riddled with alternative facts, conspiracy theories and fake news, sits right at home in the post-truth world we're told we live in' * WhatsOnStage *'A darkly thrilling new play' * Daily Telegraph *'Dawn King's play shines out like a beacon... the most compelling new work I have seen this year.' * Guardian *'Grippingly atmospheric, dark and tense... We may not find any foxes here but we'll certainly uncover some terrific young talent' * Evening Standard *'Clever and original... remarkable script' * Spoonfed *'Excitingly unusual... fascinating ideas' * The Times *

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Book SynopsisRomanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategiesamong them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environmentas it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theoTrade Review"Reading this always arresting, often startling study feels a little like reading a poem by Donne; unlike things and scales of attention get pressed together to yield a new kind of understanding, at once intellectual and emotional. . . . [The Calamity Form] is a page-turner, the likes of which I can’t remember encountering. Reading Nersessian is like talking to a person of enormous intelligence, originality, creativity, energy, wit, confidence, and style who also works to make herself unknowing enough—vulnerable, susceptible enough—to channel the unheard melodies of the best known of Romantic era poems." -- Marjorie Levinson * Critical Inquiry *"The Calamity Form injects a Marxist soul into Deconstruction’s veins. . . [The Calamity Form] is thoroughly a book of the present and is poised to become a touchstone of contemporary Romantic studies." -- Bakary Diaby * Los Angeles Review of Books *"The Calamity Form gives a compelling demonstration of how we might have our formalist cake and eat history too. . . . Formalism doesn’t mean a total sidelining of the historical, but a commitment to studying how literature creates structures that are abstracted from the world. . . . The Calamity Form is a work of Marxist criticism whose key tenet and admirable example is to call for Marxist critics to do their jobs carefully: to use the tools of formal analysis to make precise, ambitious claims about how texts mediate the conditions of their composition." -- Jack Chelgren * Chicago Review *"Nersessian reads promiscuously, in the best sense, across disciplines, traditions, and languages. It's a densely crafted book fairly brimming with ideas—there is action on every page—and it's written with brio and an almost Pynchonesque vocabulary. . . . Nersessian’s prose takes risks and in a small way is commensurate with the excesses she charts so well in Keats or with which she rhymes in Adorno. It is likely we will be coming to terms for years to come with this distinctive foray into clouds of unknowing." -- Ian Balfour * Studies in Romanticism *"Calamity form is simply 'a caution against taking the heroic possibilities of literature too seriously.' That leaves plenty more to take seriously, chiefly the experience of these texts, which Nersessian both plumbs and re-creates with erudition, verve, extraordinary intelligence, and a literary mind par excellence." -- William Galperin * Modern Language Quarterly *"Nersessian brings a new and deeper understanding to Romantic poetry’s response to capitalism, but she also includes discussions of 20th- and 21st-century visual media. Because of this range and the author's attentive 'thinking about the limits of historical materialism for literary study', this probing, erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in such subjects as formalism, ecocriticism, Marxist theory, and literary theory as well as to those who study literature." * Choice *“Acute, lyrical, beautifully researched, and crisply argued, The Calamity Form tracks the ‘slender promise’ of momentary solace Romantic poetry made in the face of early nineteenth-century capitalism. Though Nersessian ratchets down the claims that have been made on the poetry’s behalf, she neither imagines it as simply making peace with the world as it was, or as guilty of the failure to change it. Instead, The Calamity Form sees in its archive a myriad of subtle openings onto possible futures, offering not a solution to capitalism but a range of wary, vigilant attitudes toward it, probing something like what Nersessian suggests Keats thought was ‘the upside of degradation.’ It is a powerful book.” -- Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University“To name the Industrial Revolution as ‘the calamity form’ is to begin at the end, at the birth of a total transformation that will promise planetary death. This book intervenes into an astonishing multiplicity of debates: poetry and its scholarship, ecocriticism, the matter of capital, literary theory, and more. It renovates Romanticism and takes its place in the blossoming field of Marxist poetics. But perhaps most of all it is a demand, careful and clear, that we unmake the world that gave us this calamity and the calamity that gave us this world. At this late date, a romantic communism is no longer possible; a communist romanticism herein makes its return.” -- Joshua Clover, University of California, Davis"Anahid Nersessian's star has ascended at a pace almost unheard of in our contemporary moment, where ambitious theory is mostly in abeyance, and the sheer glut of publications, to say nothing of our deracinated academic labor market, makes it nigh impossible to gain a hearing beyond one’s narrow disciplinary specialism. Nersessian stands out in part because hers is a critical voice that often enough refuses the scholarly commonplaces of our age, not least an adherence to positivist notions of 'context' and the 'archive.' Of her three monographs to date, The Calamity Form is, I think, the best." * Genre *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Parataxis; or, Modern Gardens Chapter Two: Wordsworth’s Obscurity Chapter Three: Keats and Catachresis Chapter Four: Apostrophe: Clouds Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisSunday Times BestsellerThe brand new collection of verse from the nation’s favourite poet, Pam Ayres.With the same magic that has enchanted her fans for more than four decades, Pam’s new collection is by turns hilarious, reflective and profound. From the dubious joy of being an exhausted, panic-stricken hostess in ‘The Dinner Party’ or feelings of unease about pub tableware in ‘Don’t Put My Dinner on the Slate!’, to a poignant reflection of war in 'Down the Line'and the bittersweet nostalgia of ‘Up in the Attic’, this new collection will tickle and move readers in equal measure.Trade ReviewPam Ayres is absolutely essential to British humour, reminding us all to be tickled by the small joys and ridiculousness of everyday life. * Mail on Sunday *My prescription for Christmas jollity would be Pam’s book passed around by the family * Daily Mail *

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Book SynopsisA complete volume of the writer's poetry and songs includes previously unpublished pieces, draws on extensive scholarship and Burn's own letters, and offers supplemental information about his life, early hardships, political beliefs, and literary contexts.Trade ReviewA magnificent and definitive work of scholarship. A thousand pages long, it provides not only a glossary and a context for the poems, but also a textual and historical note for each poem and song. -- Colm Toibin * * The Independent * *A very fine edition, and the long introduction, which sets out to clear the tangled banks, is alone worth the cover price. -- Andrew O'Hagan * * The Scotsman * *Scholarly and comprehensive. * * Sunday Telegraph * *

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Book SynopsisWilliam Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is a comedy. In medieval and Tudor times, the 'Twelfth Night' was the end of a winter festival that started on 31 October (All Hallows Eve, or as we know it today, Halloween). Mulled cider was drunk, and special pastries baked, and a king and queen (who could have been servants in charge for the night) ruled the festival until the clock struck midnight. People expected a topsy-turvy evening, with singing and clowning about, when the normal order of things was reversed, and the Lord of Misrule symbolised the world turning upside down. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, with its rebellious gender jokes, crossdressing, practical jokes, daft costumes, moonstruck lovers and comic revenge would have been amusing for audiences. Today we study the play to understand the language and appreciate the play's entertaining nature, and we enjoy the farcical mixing- up of men and women, and the funny characters such as Malvolio. This new edition includes the complete text with explanatory notes, Shakespeare's language, and themes, and also explores typical exam themes and questions.Table of ContentsIncludes: Introduction The Story of Twelfth Night The Play's Characters Themes and Language Examining the Play The Play Notes throughout

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Book SynopsisIn forms as various as the melodramas of old Scottish ballads and the hard-boiled poems of twentieth-century noir, here are assembled the most colourful villains and victims ever to be immortalized in verse, from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard to Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Mafia hit-men. Browning, Hardy, Auden, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Simon Armitage and Stevie Smith are only a few of the wide range of poets, old and new, whose comic, chilling and occasionally profound poetic musings on murder are gathered in this uniquely - and irresistibly - heart-racing volume.

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Book SynopsisScience and religion go head to head in David Baddiel's debut play: a ferociously funny battle for power, fame and followers. When physics student Edie seems to prove, scientifically, the existence of God, it has far-reaching effects. Not least for her lecturer, Henry Brook, his marriage to celebrity atheist author Virginia – and his entire universe. God's Dice is an electric tragicomedy about the power of belief and our quest for truth in a fractured world. It premiered at Soho Theatre, London, in October 2019, starring Alan Davies as Henry, and directed by James Grieve.Trade Review'A satire straight from heaven' * Daily Mail *'Top-class theatre… funny, captivating exploration of people's desire for hope, power, legacy and answers with an artfully written script and brilliantly believable characters' * Londonist *'A cracking theatrical gift... a combination of dizzyingly ingenious mathematics, theatrical excitement, genuine human interest and thumping good jokes... intelligent and eminently watchable throughout' * WhatsOnStage *'A brilliant debut from David Baddiel... his mastery of the stage is mature and his handling of complex themes nearly faultless in this fascinating take on the endlessly vexed question of proving the existence of God... crafted intelligently and elegantly' * BritishTheatre.com *

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Book SynopsisA new edition of The Peacemakers, which includes some of Waldo Williams'' most celebrated poems. It comprises the Welsh-language originals plus parallel English translations by esteemed poet and translator Tony Conran. First published by Gomer in 1999 but out of print for many years. New foreword.

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Book SynopsisBelly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chorahumming, screaming, rhythmtransporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of motherfear, where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound. This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

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Book SynopsisA new collectable edition of Poe's poetry which demonstrates his skilful and imaginative command of the English language. Often regarded as the founder of the modern short story Poe also laid the foundations for the symbolist poets and futurists of the 20th Century, his razor-sharp dissections of the world offering dark romantic notions to the reader. Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The original text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"With the original cover and high-quality interior layout as Cha had designed them, this [restored edition] is the most aesthetically appealing edition of the five that have been produced." * Asian Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents CLIO HISTORY CALLIOPE EPIC POETRY URANIA ASTRONOMY MELPOMENE TRAGEDY ERATO LOVE POETRY ELITERE LYRIC POETRY THALIA COMEDY TERPSICHORE CHORAL DANCE POLYMNIA SACRED POETRY

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Book SynopsisThe Works contains 120 of Pam Ayres' best-known poems, including 'The Battery Hen', 'Please Will You Take Your Children Home Before I Do Them In?', 'Sling Another Chair Leg on the Fire, Mother' and, of course, 'Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth'.This edition includes a general introduction by Pam, as well as individual introductions to these classic poems of the seventies and eighties, many of which are now illustrated with specially commissioned line drawings by Susan Hellard. The Works is certain to delight Pam's fans of all ages.Trade ReviewPam Ayres is a proper poet, whose wistful, funny, and perceptive verse captures both the joy and unfairness of life * Sunday Times *One of the fastest selling tickets at the Fringe, Pam Ayres' appeal seems undiminished * Edinburgh Herald *Pam Ayres is a poet for the people. Her verse portrays a wicked sense of humour, and deals with subjects not normally thought to be worthy of poetry * Melbourne Herald Sun *Pam Ayres, the bestselling poet, writes as rhapsodically about the Wonderbra as Wordsworth did about daffodils * Guardian *There are clear comparisons between Pam and Sir John Betjeman * Daily Express *

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Book SynopsisIn her new collection, The Way Home, Millicent Graham focuses on memory and the idea of home, whilst questioning the very nature of "home" as both a physical and emotional space. There are comforts – the landscape, the vegetation, the food, the playground, the hand of parents, the romantic escapades – and there are the disquiets – the bullying, the violence, the fearfulness, the failure of memory, the losses.In these very intimate poems, Millicent marks out a distinct poetic territory for herself with an immediately recognizable voice, an assured handling of language and image, and the sensation that she is adding to the corpus of Caribbean poetry in important ways.Millicent A. A. Graham lives in Kingston, Jamaica. Her first collection, the damp in things was published June 2009 by Peepal Tree Press. Her work has been published in So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets, The Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Writer.

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Book SynopsisDorothea Smartt connects past and present, presence and absence in this rich new collection of poems. At its heart is a sequence of poems set in Lancaster that excavate the missing history of Samboo, an African slave brought from the Caribbean by a Lancaster sea-captain as a present for his wife. Samboo died within days of his arrival and is presumed buried at Sunderland Point. The sequence both imagines Samboo's mostly unrecorded experience and draws connections between present day Lancaster and the foundations of its 18th century prosperity in slave trading. Begun as a commission by Lancaster Litfest, the sequence is a deeply personal response to the bicentenary of the abolition of British slave trading. It is accompanied by photographs which place Samboo's tragedy in the Lancaster landscape.Surrounding this sequence are contemporary poems that, on one level, in the vitality of lives revealed, provide a counterpoint to the emptiness of Samboo's too soon curtailed life, but on another level echo a continuity of loss wrought by the fragmentation of African Caribbean families through continuing migrations and death.The need to imagine who Samboo might have been, to tell his missing story and see through the false identity that others imposed on him connects to a more personal, contemporary sense of obligation in Dorothea Smartt's work. This is the duty to record family history, to envision a wholeness out of the fragments and dissolve the differences that prejudice may interpose between private and public selves.Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.

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Book SynopsisBougainvillea Ringplay is the long awaited second collection by Marion Bethel, a poet who has long established herself as one of the most necessary voices in Caribbean poetry. These poems are finely crafted works that reveal a maturity of voice and a distinctive use of language that delves into the fruitful place of intersection between her Bahamian dialect and the English that she plies as a lawyer. Marion Bethel's poems reveal a mastery of syntax that one finds in only the most sophisticated poets. Her poems eschew all but the most utilitarian of punctuation marks, (question marks, apostrophes, and inverted commas), but commas, periods, colons, dashes are all ignored, thus demanding everything of rhythm and syntax.The achievement of these poems is that they read with such control of sound and breath that such markers seem completely superfluous in her hands. Her poems are rooted in the landscape of the Bahamas, and so we will find the flora, we will find the sea, we will find the food, we will find the dialect, and yet we are never for a moment allowed to imagine this place as a cliché, as a tourist location. Instead, Bethel's sharp sense of detail, her unsettling truth-telling, and the risks she takes with narratives about love and hurt in all kinds of relationships open for us an emotional intelligence that is arresting. History is constantly present for her, and it is hard to walk away from her poems without feeling as if you have finally met her homeland.These poems are sensual in the most literal sense - the poems are about the senses, the smell of vanilla and sex, the sound of waves - radio, voices, sea; the taste of crab soup; the texture of hurricane wind, and the chaos of colors bombarding the eye. Bahamian poetry is being defined in the work of Marion Bethel and in Bougainvillea Ringplay she is doing so with grace.Marion Bethel was born in the Bahamas where she currently lives and works.

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Book SynopsisA firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest. Jacqui Germain’s debut collection, Bittering the Wound, is a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Part documentation, part conjuring, this collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them. Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes—from mid-protest to post-protest—and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye. Bittering the Wound was selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize. Trade ReviewFinalist * 2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Awards *“Every poem held me right where I was, a place also called the United States, but more specifically, in my Black life. And I am grateful to her for that, as grateful as I am for her harrowing actions in that city. Beyond gratitude, however, I feel astonishment for what she demands from her lines, from her sentences, the images she reels, the force of her skepticism, commitment, her love, that she makes it home in a place called the United States, that she won’t vanish before the headlights in her rearview do. . . . a singular work of poetry. I call it an unflinching lyric of living under brutal powers that insist 'Black life' is an oxymoron.” -- Douglas Kearney, author of ShoTable of ContentsThine Eyes, Thine Eyes (for the street medics, trained and untrained)On This DayWhat We Purged Before the FightOn Courting the FireFor The Street That Held UsBy the Grace of the GazeWhat is Known as Paranoia or Maladjusted Self-defenseA List of Items Recovered from ProtestersNat Turner Comes to the Highway ActionWe Called It A ‘War’ Because It Was Useful or Alternate Names for TeargasThe Streetlights Christened Us Saved (or at least salvageable)FlatlandOn the Chemical Properties & Uses of Dried BloodFor the Hooked KnifeA Series of Proofs, ExplainedSelf-portrait Framed in Life Between ProtestsTerrible and So, So AliveHow the Fires Got MisnamedThe One Where They Watch the Director’s Cut Because It Has an Edgier EndingSelf-portrait Standing in a Field of Text Messages, All Sent and All Blooming UnansweredThe Grill Shop as An ArmoryOh, the Love We Had Back Then Survived the SmokeHomeboundAll Ash, An AnointingHow to Make South Grand a Ghost TownAmerican Fear: Director’s CutObscenities, But as A Prayer Dripping Villanelle for the Burned Walgreens, QuikTrip, Prime Beauty, et al.Ulcer (with footnotes)I Bend and the Tender Joint Buckles (softly)Kindling It Didn’t Rain Much that August, But After Pick One, It Says (in two parts)Brick-made and SteadySTILL UNBUTTONED & UNBOTHERED: On Imagining That Freedom Probably Feels Like Getting the Itis

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Book SynopsisWritten in the wake of Ireland's 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland's south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy's politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon 'where the sun lies down in the west to die' is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet's eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy's subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet's only weapon, the word - 'the ink trail that pain makes on the page'.Trade Review'No other poet comes to mind, living or dead, who has succeeded in engaging the political as poetic subject matter ... McCarthy, it would seem, has been able to internalize the subject matter and given it the time to cool down and clarify, until his art can give it a shape.' August Kleinzahler; 'Pandemonium's urgent, involving and rewarding poems make us question where we have come from and look again at where we are going.' The Irish Times; 'His voice - with its idiosyncratic tone and verbal texture - registered firmly as one of the most distinctive and it is now one of the most authoritative among poets of his generation. The weight of that authority and his mastery of a personal tone are evident in this fine new collection.' Dublin Review of Books

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Book SynopsisSecond Place winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds (`technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an `activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'.Trade Review'McCarthy Woolf has a powerful command of form and rhythm.' - Poetry Review; 'I loved Karen McCarthy Woolf's technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak.' - The Observer New Review; `Seasonal Disturbances might be strange, but it's also a brilliant selection of poems [...] It's a collection that teaches you something about human beings as well as yourself.' - The Poetry School

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in 'Mask', are both 'themselves and strangers'. 'That's all they wanted.'Trade Review'Bergin succeeds in creating a clear voice and a dramatic situation.' - Irish Times

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry 2017Claudia Rankine described the poems in Alsadir’s first book as 'lawless,' ‘provocative, and 'heartbreaking' as they 'converse from the inside out… come alive in the back and forth of a mind attempting to understand what it means to be in relation to.’ Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric – and human relationships – in the 21st century.Trade ReviewReviews Fourth Person Singular ‘defends and explodes lyric form.’ Walton Muyumba, National Book Critics Circle ‘Blazingly intelligent.’ Patrick Flanery, BBC Radio 4 Open Book ‘It’s a way of writing, fragmentary, distilled, claiming for itself the unmediated interior lyrical thought without its usual formal decoration, that seems particularly current... looking aslant at the grand narratives... pressing at the problem (of creativity/authenticity) with a kind of honesty the lyric doesn’t have, disowning the lyric, whilst simultaneously stealing all its furniture.' Sasha Dugdale, PN Review ‘While there’s a buzz of Superwoman sci-fi, even self- satire, about some of this...Alsadir makes a whole book out of a notion English readers have found hard to grasp for the past half-century, that it isn’t the poet who narrates the poem but the writer’s creative persona addressing a created listener...Fourth Person Singular [is] ambitious, witty, profound and fun.’ Magma Poetry Magazine ‘Tonally quiet yet barbed with insight.’ BK Fischer, American Book Review ‘One of the strangest most provocative books of poetry to arrive in these islands in many years.’ Dave Coates, Dave Poems ‘Written mostly as prose poems, the vignettes, aphorisms and anecdotes in Alsadir’s second poetry collection, Fourth Person Singular, turn inward to explore the rabbit holes of daily experience. Alsadir is an alchemist of the mundane. She finds metaphors in everything from highbrow art films and philosophy. The poems get emotionally messy, which I find exciting because this is a poet who knows a thing or two about rabbit holes and chooses to explore them anyway.’ Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet ‘[A] flashing and aphoristic examination of the anxious mind.’ Jeremy Noel-Todd, The Sunday Times ‘To read Fourth Person Singular is to fall in love – that’s all I can say to capture the experience of being so scarily and exhilaratingly close to someone else’s thoughts on every vital page. Alsadir’s work is, as ever, full of astute observations and insights driven by a deep intellect, alive to the world and our fears, pressures, dreams and ideas. But there’s something greater here too: a unity of form and content, process and delivery which transfigures the conceptual and the lyric. I don't remember the last time I've read something which is at once so alive and so vigorously smart and ambitious; uniquely self-aware, caustically funny whilst constantly generous and compassionate. The rare joy of a writer finding the exact form for their voice and their mission. Essential reading.’ Luke Kennard ‘The movement from philosophy to personal experience, poetry, and atrocity, is intuitive yet careful, and without voyeuristic flânerie.’ Paul Batchelor, The New Statesman ‘A relief from the unbending isolated lyricism of mainstream British poetry.’ Sandeep Parmar, The White Review 'Books of the year' list ‘Fourth Person Singular is poetry that is neither verse nor exactly prose poetry, but aphorism, perception, quotation, annotation, a squeezing between the gaps in the windows and doorways of experience seeking for air. It is more than its pieces: it is a whole that is a form of understanding. It is that whole that is the complex and revelatory poem.’ George Szirtes ‘An important book for contemporary poetry.’ Sophie Collins, The White Review ‘Fourth Person Singular is an exhilarating, scrambling, blankly depressing, grieving, stabbing, and brilliant attempt at restoring silence (and thought) to our experience of the world.’ Will Harris, The Poetry School ‘[S]ardonically funny as well as cerebral', 'Alsadir’s “I” is refracted through a series of simultaneous and overlapping texts; lyric fragments jostle with footnotes, annotations and marginalia, all of which explode the “fiction of a singular voice”.’ Joanne O'Leary, The Times Literary Supplement ‘Fourth Person Singular is an elegant reckoning with the paradoxical temporality and multiple ontology of first-person writing. In probing the possibility and claims of lyric poetry, as well as its relationship to shame, Alsadir provides a powerful, ambivalent, yet beautiful instance of its ongoing need.’ Katherine Angel ‘Fourth Person Singular… merges questions of psychoanalysis and the self with fragmented considerations of lyric meaning.’ Rebecca Tamás, The White Review

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Book Synopsis"The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological and literary importance, containing the lion's share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc. Jackson Crawford's modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today's readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings." --Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–MadisonTrade Review"An excellent and entertaining work that succeeds in achieving its intended purpose: to create an accessible and readable English translation of the Poetic Edda. Crawford's knowledge of and passion for the topic is clear throughout, and he strikes an excellent balance between approachability and authenticity. I will most certainly be using this translation when I teach Norse mythology in the future and will recommend it to anyone looking for an approachable introduction to the subject." —Natalie M. Van Deusen, University of Alberta, in Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

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Book SynopsisA sinister night.Evil and edge in the air.What are they celebrating?Clytemnestra's world is torn apart when Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter for the sake of war. Ten years later, the couple are reunited. What follows is a dangerous battle fuelled by love, grief and power.Marina Carr's adaptation of the infamous Greek myth brings Clytemnestra's story to the fore and asks if it is possible to forgive the unforgivable.He turns to me in hall one evening, wine on him, sentimental. There is nothing I would not do to have your good opinion again, he says.Girl on an Altar opened at the Kiln Theatre, London, in May 2022. The production transferred to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in July 2023. ''Mesmerisingly compelling . . . Carr''s words are a delight to hear, even at their most bleak. Bracingly good.'' Evening Standard''Cool and deadly . . . Homeric in its vivid detail and oral splendour.'' <

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Book SynopsisRodgers & Hammerstein''s only musical written directly for the screen is now a stage musical that''s had critics raving from coast to coast. Set against the colorful backdrop of an American heartland tradition, State Fair travels with the Frake family as they leave behind the routine of the farm for three days of adventure at the annual Iowa State Fair. Mom and Pop have their hearts set on blue ribbons, while their children Margy and Wayne find romance and heartbreak on the midway. Set to the magical strains of an Academy Award-winning score and augmented by other titles from the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook, State Fair is the kind of warm-hearted family entertainment only Rodgers & Hammerstein could deliver!

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Book SynopsisA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2022 ‘Peter Fiennes’s road trip around Greece [is] engagingly described’ Mary Beard, TLS ‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide through Greece’ Observer ‘A wonderful… really profound meditation on what it means to hope… a gorgeous excursion into Greece and across the centuries on an environmental quest’ BBC Radio 4 Open Book Book of the Year choice by Anita Roy What do the Greek myths mean to us today? It’s now a golden age for these tales - they crop up in novels, films and popular culture. But what’s the modern relevance of Theseus, Hera and Pandora? Were these stories ever meant for children? And what’s to be seen now at the places where heroes fought and gods once quarrelled? Peter Fiennes travelTrade Review‘Peter Fiennes’s road trip around Greece – engagingly described in A Thing of Beauty – began with a visit to Lord Byron’s house… Fiennes’s tough talk and his down-to-earth refusal to put up with pretentious silliness contributes a lot to the pleasure of the book… [he] is well attuned to the ambivalence of hope.’ -- Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide… a must-read.’ -- Alex Preston, Observer‘This book is a lament for a poisoned planet… He goes in search of the numinous but relishes the bathos of modernity… not so much a travelogue as an excursion into the psyche of Anthropocene man.’ * Literary Review *‘A wonderful book by a wonderful writer.’ -- Tom Holland‘A wonderful… really profound meditation on what it means to hope… a gorgeous excursion into Greece and across the centuries on an environmental quest’ * BBC Radio 4 Open Book BOOK OF THE YEAR choice by Anita Roy *‘A Thing of Beauty is an immensely pleasurable read. It takes you on an adventure around Greece and the myths that the ancients told there. But what really stayed with me were the reflections on storytelling, joy, and hope. Essential reading for our pandemic and pollution ravaged times.’ -- Helen Morales, author of Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths‘Peter Fiennes has a way of making even the most serious of subjects enjoyable and riveting to the end, and A Thing of Beauty is certainly no exception, this is great travel writing that makes the reader a part of the adventure, and one of the most engaging and enjoyable books I’ve read this year.’ -- Pilgrim House‘A deeply humane travelogue, a beautifully written book of stories, A Thing of Beauty is a siren song for Greece and a generous and precious gift – a classical education for those of us who are bereft of one.’ -- Patrick Barkham, natural history writer and author of Wild Child‘Peter Fiennes… follows in the footsteps of Pausanias, Lord Byron and others to rediscover some of the most evocative landscapes and sites from classical myth.’ -- Argo‘Fiennes is a brilliant and generous guide through Greece. He weaves the ancient world and the modern together with intelligence and elegance… There’s a wry Sebaldian humour at work here … A Thing of Beauty is a must-read for anyone visiting Greece.’ -- Alex Preston, Observer‘A Thing of Beauty is an entertaining, erudite travelogue through Greece, both ancient and modern.’ * Foreword Reviews *‘An evocative and informative book… It’s for anyone interested in the Greek Gods and their myths, the Greek countryside and wildlife, Greek politics and history, climate change and sustainable living, whether there’s any hope in the world today… and just how many Greek salads can one man eat? If you’re interested in more than one of those topics, it’s definitely the book for you.’ * Greece Travel Secrets *‘Fiennes sets out to explore the birthplace of Western civilization, Greece, in search of Hope… It’s a highly personal travelogue…with the historical and modern-day detail that late British travel writer Jan Morris might bring to the task.’ -- Booklist, starred review‘Passionate and lyrical’ * Publishers Weekly *‘An enjoyable journey through Greek myths and modernity in [Fiennes’s] search for hope, beauty and new understanding of our world.’ * Choice Magazine *‘In A Thing of Beauty, myths are not presented as dust-covered artefacts but vibrant, living, often frightening things that, like Greek gods, still affect and manipulate our lives. The quest that Peter Fiennes undertakes is of urgent relevance in this time of environmental change. Startling, informative and often very funny.’ -- Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish‘Fiennes is a talent and an important voice. His search for hope in the stories of the past feels vital for these times.’ -- Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground‘A Thing of Beauty is such a joy. Peter Fiennes invites us to travel with him to visit the ancient Oracle at Delphi as he searches for hope while the pre-vaccine pandemic is at its height and the wild fires rage. Self-deprecating, funny, deeply knowledgeable about Greek mythology, yet simultaneously confronting the challenges that face our world head-on, Fiennes is a most delightful travelling companion.’ -- Katharine Norbury, author of The Fish Ladder and editor of Women on Nature

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Book SynopsisPortobello, the district in Dublin where the Irish poet Harry Clifton lives, is a microcosm of a changing, cosmopolitan Ireland. These sonnets, written on his return from sixteen years in continental Europe, are at once a celebration of place, a coming to terms with age and a rediscovering of the universal in the local. Harry Clifton has published seven other books of poetry, most recently The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012) from Bloodaxe, and Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 (2007), winner of the Irish Times / Poetry Now Award, from Wake Forest University Press in the US. His other books include On the Spine of Italy (1999), his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, and Berkeley's Telephone (2007), a collection of short fiction.Trade ReviewClifton’s civilised appreciation of the cosmopolitan fluidity of his chosen place is matched by the fluency of these sonnets… Clifton’s is a sophisticated and humanistic imagination, alert to the saving human detail and at some level always in search of the bigger picture. His work is ridden by time and the sense that there is nothing new under the sun except the capacity for seeing the world afresh. -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *In Harry Clifton’s magisterial Portobello Sonnets (Bloodaxe Books), the everyday life of Portobello is seen in the light of his unflagging poetic quest. It is heartening to see the poet striking out, undaunted, into new imaginative territory. -- Michael O’Loughlin * The Irish Times, Books of the Year *These thirty-five sonnets from 2004-05, running in their narrow grooves, remain a remarkable achievement, and they also show him firmly claiming the poet’s privilege of remaining on the edge… his voice in Portobello Sonnets claims a poetic authority as willed, as unambiguous, as James Clarence Mangan’s. -- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin * Dublin Review of Books *Table of Contents1 'Dublin under sea-fog, dreeping weather...' 9 2 'Look me up, with the blind, the lame and the halt...' 10 3 'Overnight snow in the east...' 11 4 'Tell me, does anyone ever get blind drunk...' 12 5 'How to survive the dangerous Dublin stretch... 13 6 'The envelope, bright yellow or bright blue... 14 7 (Death of an Editor) 15 8 'The man in here, demanding time and silence...' 16 9 'When you emerge from the other end of books...' 17 10 'They frighten me slightly, those nice boys and girls...' 18 11 'Who was it said we're born in the second act?' 19 12 (To the singer Freddie White) 20 13 'Linoleum, yellow light...' 21 14 'Rogue narcissus, how did you get in there...' 22 15 'Clouds, too, are incoming information...' 23 16 'What feeds the secret sources?' 24 17 'Is there a lockkeeper here, who understands...' 25 18 'These are the days that March has lent to April...' 26 19 'Crunch of a car, in the gravelled yard below...' 27 20 'Not for us high priesthood, Dan and I...' 28 21 'With Jeremiah's lamentations sung...' 29 22 'The Pope and Rainier dead, Saul Bellow dead...' 30 23 'Dim snugs, in coloured little towns...' 31 24 'People I meet, on the blind wheel of fortune...' 32 25 'I have it in mind, North African gentlemen...' 33 26 'Sitting still, or hurtling through the noosphere...' 34 27 'Weeping, I feel better...' 35 28 '"'I saw an extraordinary thing, the other day..."' 36 29 (For Marina, who cut my hair) 37 30 'Ask yourself, as you struggle with your pen...' 38 31 (The Night Bakery) 39 32 'High up here, in the northern latitudes...' 40 33 'Water is there to be looked at, not looked into...' 41 34 'Today I have been a good boy...' 42 35 'Even Christ, in his unrecorded years...' 43 Epilogue: William Bates, 1931-2013 45

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Book SynopsisA new edition of A. E. Stallings''s first book of poems, which was awarded the Richard Wilbur Award. In Archaic Smile, by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist A. E. Stallings, the poet couples poetic meditations on classic stories and themes with poems about the everyday, sometimes mundane occurrences of contemporary life (like losing an umbrella or fishing with one's father), and she infuses the latter with the magic of myth and history. With the skill of a scholar and translator and the playful, pristine composition of a poet, Stallings bridges the gap between these two distant worlds.Stallings invigorates the old forms and makes them sing (Meryl Natchez, ZYZZYVA) in her poetry, and the scope and origins of her talents are on full display in the acclaimed author''s first collection. The poems of Archaic Smile are sung with a timeless, technically impeccable, and utterly true voice.

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Book SynopsisThe textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke's debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on. Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016.Trade Review'These are subtle, tender poems of love, loss and growing up on a farm in rural Ireland. Jane Clarke writes with a fine eye for remembered detail in language marked by good farm words like "slane and sickle", "clout and stud nails". The river Suck, and the river of life, run through the book and the farmland where the poet was brought up. Every poem leaves something in the mind: the beauty and cruelty of farming, the life of land and animals, of parents remembered in their strength, and in their ageing. A quiet, powerful collection' - Gillian Clarke. 'These poems burn with the ferocity of their intent in supple and profound music. Many of them are rooted in family life and the seasonal farm work Jane Clarke depicts with such respect and compassion. Others treat of adult relationships in the face of a beautiful, if brutal world. The river music is sometimes the real river music of the Suck and other rivers with their riparian birds and hunger for the sea. Her philosophical bent finds the river in us, in the emotional fluxes, whether in the rapids or the calm shallows. This is not pastoral poetry though there's plenty of pasture in it, and hens and hay and alders and willows and heifers. 'There's a visionary at work here, a shaper and shifter, moving us in language that is plain, exact, and true. She invokes Heraclitus' famous river that can't be stepped in twice; she could as justly invoke Hopkins' Heraclitean fire. And the comfort of the Resurrection - for nature to Clarke is a site of renewal and integration. There is both heartbreak and heart's ease in this auspicious debut from an accomplished craftswoman' - Paula Meehan. 'Clear, direct, lovely: Jane Clarke's voice slips into the Irish tradition with such ease, it is as though she had always been at the heart of it' - Anne Enright.

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Book SynopsisHannah Sullivan's first collection, Three Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book's project, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time. But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic event and present disaster. Tenants', the first poem, is an elegy for Grenfell, written from the uneasy perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting. Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, from the thin concrete pillars of a flyover to an elderly peacock's broken train. There is a memorialising strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.

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Book SynopsisDavid Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”Trade Review"A poet known for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller." —Siham Karami, Los Angeles Review of Books "Mason is a poet defined by place, if it is Southeast Asia on the Pacific Rim or Northwest America, his poems breathe life of the people around him as well as the nature he observes and partakes in." —g emil reutter, North of Oxford “With narrative clarity, . . . the poet manages to convey the tremulous geologic mystery of the whole world, and the smallness of our place within it. . . . Pacific Light is saturated with a lifetime’s worth of reflection, and mature and complex in its expression.”—Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters “Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal The sonic pleasures of David Mason’s Pacific Light carried me swiftly through this stunningly crafted collection. Each poem is at its best read aloud, the accomplished rhythms emerging as a lilt and ease, a physical pleasure of the human mouth and lungs. These stories, meditations, monologues, and love songs slowly develop an expansive vision of the natural world in which the speaker is observer and participant, a brushstroke in the painting, forever in relationship to memory, to history, and to the Earth. What emerges across these poems is a full life lived in communion; what emerges across these poems is wisdom. —Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight As a poet of America’s Pacific Northwest, David Mason has found its mirror reflection in Australia’s Southeast. Turned upside down by love, he has learned “to walk upright under the Southern Cross.” Generously, he extends his feeling of renewal to all of us and urges us “to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.” In Pacific Light, David Mason, one of our indispensable poets, shares his discovery of a new world—and amazingly, it turns out to be this one. —Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry In the last stanza of the last poem in David Mason’s startling and soulful new book of poems, Pacific Light, the poet writes: The effort of a life, the wasted hour,the kind word given to a stranger’s childare understood as kin and disappear.Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild. This stanza testifies to last things: the last journey, the last shape shifting, the last immigration in a book filled with such arrivals and departures. The formal rigor of the poems—handled with an easy and almost offhand poise—only accentuates the sense of almost constant movement, which is at the heart of the book. This book is the story of a life's deepening and reconfiguration. As such, it both inspires and challenges the reader in ways that only poetry can do. What a pleasure to read a book of poems by a poet at the height of his powers, a poet whose life has been transformed and whose poems are the embodiment of that transformation. —Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems "It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition." —Geoff Page, Australian Book Review David Mason wrote for LARB David Mason wrote for The Woven Table

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Book Synopsis"There are no words for it," the final line states in the poem, "If You're Lucky." There are no words for it, for the silence? Yet, it speaks. There are no words for the depth of experience, yet many words are used to suggest what it might be, what moments of happiness, sadness, loss and love - the important things - feel like in lives destined for demise. Whether in longer poems or the briefest, Hav invites a reader to consider along with him the feeling of existence, its inevitable joy, sorrow, noise, silence, not in binary terms but as mixtures. We took up his invitation as translators and now invite you to join us and him to enter the space he has created to ponder the important things.

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Book SynopsisOn 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fiancee and his friends, troubled by money worries and broken in body and mind, the young poet launched on his last journey on earth with both a sense of hope and a deep foreboding that his efforts would be in vain. Despite Keats's own assertion that by then he no longer felt a citizen of the world and was leading a "posthumous life", his final five months were filled with events of great biographical interest, and deserve to be examined much more carefully. Using exclusively primary sources and first-hand accounts, Keats's editor and translator Alessandro Gallenzi has pieced together all the available material - adding newly discovered and previously unpublished documents - to help the reader follow the poet step by step from his departure and tumultuous voyage to Naples, through to his arduous journey to Rome and harrowing death in his lodgings by the Spanish Steps in February 1821. The result is a gripping narrative packed with detail and new revelations, one that invites us to strip away the Romantic patina that has formed over the story of Keats's short life, offering a wider picture that enhances our understanding of both poet and man.Trade ReviewEnthralling and original... Gallenzi’s meticulous commitment to his subject shines through. Although he presents himself as something of an embattled outsider, he is working within, and contributing to, a long tradition of Keats scholarship. There’s no doubt that all Keatsians will appreciate the new details and insights he adds to our picture of the poet’s last five months. -- Lucasta Miller * The Spectator *Superbly researched… crisply written… a work of vivid and absorbing scholarship, [which] serves as a stringent corrective to the mass of lazy scholarship that proliferates on Keats by the day. Anyone interested in Rome and the Romantic poets will gain much from reading it. Terrific. -- Ian Thomson * The Tablet *Anyone who relishes the chance to spend a little more time with John Keats (I’m one) will find this an affecting read. -- Suzi Feay * he London Magazine *Focusing on the last five months of John Keats's life, and proceeding with solid method and original research, Alessandro Gallenzi's biography of the poet extends, without stretching, our knowledge of his 'posthumous existence'. Old beliefs are dismissed and new discoveries are made, which raise more questions. An indispensable work of scholarship – and a great read too. -- Dr Luca Caddia * Keats-Shelley House, Rome *His integrity as a researcher is a welcome addition to scholarship. -- Christy Edwall * TLS *Every single fragment of primary knowledge we had is expanded into a coherent narrative in which facts are ascertained and minor characters brought to life * The Keats-Shelley Review *Written in Water provides a long overdue vetting of the available evidence as well as unearthing new facts and it is sure to become an indispensable resource for future Keats biographers and scholars. * European Romantic Review *

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Book SynopsisPoet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies.Trade Review“With keen observation and rigorous inquiry, The American Sonnet documents and celebrates American poets’ vital contributions to an ancient, global verse form. The poems and essays collected here situate the ‘American sonnet’ within a centuries-long conversation about how poetry happens on the page and in the mind. By centering diverse, living American poets for whom the sonnet is a way to think deeply about social and political questions, this work offers a timely snapshot of our urgent literary moment. The American Sonnet is a feast of discovery for all readers.”—Kiki Petrosino, author, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia “The American Sonnet will be embraced by all who’ve noted the lack of diverse scholarship on the sonnet, particularly regarding historically underrepresented sonneteers. Malech and Smith have deepened and expanded the range of our thinking on this form. I can’t wait to teach this book—and be taught by it.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs “I can’t imagine a group of people with whom I would be more excited to talk with about the sonnet than the essayists herein, nor talk more illuminating than their essays. And the sonnets themselves cover whatever the essays don’t (more Dunstan Thompson in anthologies, please). This is an ideal anthology.”—Shane McCrae, author, Cain Named the Animal “’We shall not always plant while others reap,’ promised Countee Cullen; the robust tradition of sonnets he represented is just one of several in this memorable, thoughtful, useful, and sometimes stellar collection’s deeply American braid, reflecting both a panoply of sonnets from U.S.-based writers (and translators!) and a splendid variety of contemporary writings on the form, a modern—but not too modern—pattern designed to make ‘the soul swing open’ (as Mona Van Duyn puts it) ‘on its hinges.’ Sonnets themselves train up to the present day and then introduce up-to-date reflections on the form, from major critics’ takes to up-and-coming poets’ thoughts: Jahan Ramazani on this ‘tightly wound global form,’ Meg Day's ‘Deaf and disabled existence,’ Timo Muller on Harlem Renaissance translation, arguments about neuroqueerness and autism in (wait for it) Robert Frost, and about where on Earth this form is going beyond the pentameter, beyond—or is it back to?—the past. ‘A sonnet is a mother,’ as the great Diane Seuss writes: here are its children.”—Stephanie Burt

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Book SynopsisKathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collection The Tree House won both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead was shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize. The Overhaul, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and won the Costa Poetry Award. Kathleen Jamie's non-fiction books include the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines. She is Chair of Creative Writing at Stirling University, and lives with her family in Fife. The Keelie Hawk is her fifteenth book.

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Book SynopsisA new poetry pamphlet by Nicola Nathan. The Goddess Hekate is discovered in her many guises.

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