A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Dare-Gale Press Of Certain Angels
Book SynopsisA new sequence of startling, haunting poems by award-winning poet David Harsent.
£8.49
ERIS Songs of an Eastern Humanist
Book Synopsis
£16.14
Stanford University Press Shakespeare's Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority
Book SynopsisThis book is about a mad king and a mad duke. With original and iconoclastic readings, Richard van Oort pioneers the reading of Shakespeare as an ethical thinker of the "originary scene," the scene in which humans became conscious of themselves as symbol-using moral and narrative beings. Taking King Lear and Measure for Measure as case studies, van Oort shows how the minimal concept of an anthropological scene of origin—the "originary hypothesis"—provides the basis for a new understanding of every aspect of the plays, from the psychology of the characters to the ethical and dialogical conflicts upon which the drama is based. The result is a gripping commentary on the plays. Why does Lear abdicate and go mad? Why does Edgar torture his father with non-recognition? Why does Lucio accuse the Duke in Measure for Measure of madness and lechery, and why does Isabella remain silent at the end? In approaching these and other questions from the perspective of the originary hypothesis, van Oort helps us to see the ethical predicament of the plays, and, in the process, makes Shakespeare new again.Trade Review"This is criticism of the highest order, whose long, careful readings of King Lear and Measure for Measure are in dialogue with the finest readers of Shakespeare for the past century." —Blair Hoxby, Stanford University"A rigorous yet highly readable attempt to understand Shakespeare and neoclassical drama in general in new terms, Shakespeare's Mad Men demonstrates in admirable detail the analytical power of generative anthropology wielded by a powerful intelligence."—Eric Gans, University of California, Los Angeles"Attentive to both the ruses of bad faith and the truths disclosed by Shakespeare's language, van Oort addresses our human predicament as symbol-making creatures whose search for love is troubled by the ceaseless drive for mastery."—Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine"van Oort's reading is nothing less than a stunning provocation."—Amir Khan, Shakespeare Quarterly"[R]eaders... will find value and pleasure in van Oort's compelling readings, and his clear style makes complex concepts pleasingly accessible."—Molly G. Yarp, Times Literary Supplement"Eminently readable, Shakespeare's Man Men attempts to engage and explain the larger questions the plays raise, particularly why characters behave the way they do and make the choices they do. The readings are original and offer exciting ways to engage with the plays. Highly recommended."—K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The King's Last Potlatch 2. The Judge, the Duke, His Wife, and Her Lover Conclusion
£23.39
Burning Eye Books The Trilogy of Surfaces and Invisiblities
Book SynopsisCombining the collections Monster Poems, Morbus and Fashions, Nora Gomringer’s trilogy offers a modern anthropology. Gomringer shines a light on the all-too-human, plays with the superficial and loves the invisible. Accompanied by Reimar Limmer’s illustrations, these poems unpick ideas around the monstrous, the inscribed and gendered body and the face we present to the people around us. Packed with pop culture references and always casting an eye back to where we came from, The Trilogy of Surfaces and Invisibilities is a call for a radical humanism.Trade Review“Annie Rutherford’s translations of Gomringer’s poems are constantly inventive, lithe and impressive.” Sasha Dugdale
£9.49
Faber & Faber Till the Stars Come Down
Book SynopsisA raucously funny and romantic family drama by Beth Steel (The House of Shades, Wonderland).NOMINATED FOR THE OLIVIER AWARD FOR BEST NEW PLAY.''It seems spun in gold.'' Guardian It's Sylvia and Marek's wedding. Over the course of a hot summer''s day, a family gathers to welcome a newcomer into their midst. But as the vodka flows and the guests hit the dancefloor, passions boil over and the limits of love are tested.Beth Steel''s heartbreaking, hilarious portrayal of a larger-than-life family struggling to come to terms with a changing world opened at the National Theatre, London, in January 2024.
£10.44
Nick Hern Books Small Island
Book SynopsisHortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica. Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer. Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. Three intimately connected stories, tracing the tangled history of Jamaica and Britain. Andrea Levy's epic novel, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson, journeys from Jamaica to Britain in 1948 – the year that HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. Small Island was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 2019, in an acclaimed production directed by Rufus Norris. This revised edition of the play was published alongside the revival of the production in 2022.Trade Review'Extraordinary. A spectacular adaptation of Andrea Levy's Windrush novel' * Observer *'Edmundson has a knack for skilfully distilling story... ferociously entertaining' * Time Out *'A landmark in the National Theatre's history: a tumultuous epic about first-generation Jamaican immigrants... skilfully adapted... one of the most important plays of the year' * Guardian *'Inspiring adaptation... a gripping state-of-the-nation epic... the show acknowledges struggle and strife on all sides, flies the flag for compassion and achieves a hard-won (and still to be fought for) inclusivity' * Telegraph *'A passionate engagement with the past that's sure to resonate with audiences at a time when the very idea of Britain is under such fierce scrutiny' * Evening Standard *'Utterly sensational – an engrossing, all-embracing piece of theatre... a staggering achievement' * WhatsOnStage *'Beautifully translated to stage by adaptor Helen Edmundson, using thrilling theatrical solutions to honour Levy's epic - and still urgent - tale... a stirring spectacle that never loses sight of the people at its heart' * Broadway World *'What a huge-hearted achievement this is, a sweeping, captivating dramatisation... thrilling in its scope and exquisite in its detail... Helen Edmundson's adaptation feels at once effortlessly epic and delicately intimate' * iNews *
£9.89
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece
Book SynopsisA rigorously and imaginatively researched anthology of classical literature, bringing together one hundred stories from the rich diversity of the literary canon of ancient Greece and Rome. Striking a balance between the 'classic classic' (such as Dryden's translation of the Aeneid) and the less familiar or expected, Of Gods and Men ranges from the epic poetry of Homer to the histories of Arrian and Diodorus Siculus and the sprawling Theogony of Hesiod; from the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides to the biographies of Suetonius and Plutarch and the pen portraits of Theophrastus; and from the comedies of Plautus to the fictions of Petronius and Apuleius. Of Gods and Men is embellished by translations from writers as diverse as Queen Elizabeth I (Boethius), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Plato), Walter Pater (Apuleius's Golden Ass), Lawrence of Arabia (Homer's Odyssey), Louis MacNeice (Aeschylus's Agamemnon) and Ted Hughes (Ovid's Pygmalion), as well as a number of accomplished translations by Daisy Dunn herself.Trade ReviewThis book is a big and wonderful read for anyone who loves classical literature... Each story is a truly fascinating tale of wars, endless fighting, heroes, deaths, beautiful women – Helen features, of course – gods and goddesses, cruelty, pain and love * Pennant Magazine *This is an excellent collection. Everyone needs to know the Classics, and this volume is a good place not just to start but also to continue and depend one's love for the Ancients * Catholic Herald *The book is perfect gift material but really, you should treat yourself to it first * Minerva *This anthology is hard to beat for big names * BBC History Magazine *
£18.00
Oxford University Press As You Like It
Book Synopsis''We that are true lovers run into strange capers.''Four centuries after its publication in the Folio, As You Like It''s capacity to entertain and instruct remains evergreen. This edition provides a friendly yet authoritative introduction to the play, upholding it as a crowning expression of the Elizabethan Renaissance while underscoring its appeal to twenty-first century readers as Shakespeare''s most intrepid exploration of gender, sexuality, and the environment. Its double-cross-dressed heroine dominates the plot (and their love interest Orlando) to conduct a masterclass in gender fluidity. The melancholic Jaques unmasks the fundamental theatricality of existence and questions humanity''s prerogative to displace and harm other species. Through the clown Touchstone, the comedy tests the possibility that we might laugh ourselves wise, especially when we learn to laugh at ourselves. In the Forest of Arden, we encounter Shakespeare''s most beguiling vision of the natural world as a real
£6.99
Oxford University Press The Tempest
Book Synopsis''How beauteous mankind is! O brave new worldThat has such people in''t!''Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare''s genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is now generally seen as the playwright''s most penetrating statement about his art.The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare''s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare''s work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare''s work.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
£6.99
Oxford University Press Measure for Measure
Book Synopsis''Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.''Can one life be measured against another? Can a woman''s body be measured against a man''s life? Can consensual sex be measured against rape? Measure for Measure explores these questions through a series of substitutions: Angelo deputises for the Duke, who disguises himself to spy on his subjects; corrupt Angelo demands that almost-nun Isabella gives her body in exchange for her brother''s life; and the Duke substitutes living bodies and decapitated heads to bring about a ''happy ending'' in this problematic comedy. Exploring corrupt power, state surveillance, and the silencing of women by powerful men, Measure for Measure continues to resonate today.The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare''s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer
£6.99
Copper Canyon Press,U.S. The Glass Constellation
Book Synopsis**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award** An affordable paperback edition of Arthur Sze''s Collected Works—which includes many new poems—by one of the most astonishing poets writing today. The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems, from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions―employing startling juxtapositions that are always
£23.74
Nightboat Books Hydra Medusa
Book SynopsisA book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.Trade Review"'The Desert,' from Brandon Shimoda’s new collection, 'Hydra Medusa,' is emblematic of the complex lyric-historical landscape of borders, dreams, shrines and underworlds found throughout his work. I asked Shimoda about the context and composition of this poem, and his answer was a skillful, evocative illumination of the relationship between life and poetry" —Anne Boyer, The New York Times"The ancient myth of Medusa is petrifying in itself — but a Hydra Medusa that sprouts snaky new heads when decapitated sounds like a metaphor for global capitalism writ large. . . The essays, poems and talks in Hydra Medusa testify to the heroic dream-work of literary resistance in its many forms." —Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post"Shimoda's book is a tour de force. . . a sometimes melancholic, sometimes incantatory meditation on the evil that people can do." —Gregory McNamee, 2024 Southwest Books of the Year"Brandon Shimoda is a mystic poet. Hydra Medusa is an otherworldly book. By that I mean it is wholly of this world… If you pick up one of his poems and turn it around in your hands, it will visit your dreams… The book is a medium, through which one alternately falls and is rebuffed, descends, meets death, transforms, transported to a realm of apparitions. It is a book that refracts and multiplies one’s sight, opens windows that lead onto other windows—around you, below you, through you, behind." —Sean McCoy, The Brooklyn Rail"Each stanza is a brief flicker of clarity, and every space between words a deep breath intended to make room in time for his readers to savor that clarity… To spend an hour with Brandon Shimoda is to spend an hour learning how to listen to the wind, how to listen close enough to hear the whisper of a ghost passing by. To spend a day with his words is to completely upend the way you move through time. Even, on occasion, to stop it." —Justin Duyao, Northwest Review"Hydra Medusa [is] not only unexpected but also wholly fresh, not least because it is inchoate and difficult to pin down. Poems yield to essays and vice versa; voices overlap and interject. The book is constantly seeking out its own ley lines, its own points of intersection. It is constantly teaching us the ways it means to be read." —David Ulin, Alta Online"Historical violence has a way of scattering narratives and people across time, space, and consciousness. Brandon Shimoda’s work acknowledges this and does something about it. As Hydra Medusa makes clear, the past is separated from the present and future only by “a thin buoy of breathing.” In this collection, Shimoda blurs boundaries in order to occupy interstitial spaces. He offers invaluable possibilities for living not only in the afterlife of violence but also in the here and now." —Hana Rivers, LARB"This collection is at once a memorial to the past and a survey of its aftermath. Any single section would alone form a strong book. In Hydra Medusa, Shimoda has created a cohesive work of great depth and power." —Sylee Gore, Harriet Books"Hydra Medusa is stunning. Written partly by dream, partly by death, and wholly by a clarity born of deep spiritual and political reckoning, it traverses the ethics of being conventionally alive and inextricably bound to the dead. This is the continuation of a work by a poet who gets out of the way for poetry, who steps fully into it and vanishes." —Solmaz Sharif"This work’s incendiary material is living. It lives in the afterlife of disappearances, catastrophe, and alongside and with ghosts/ed life. Then again it lives in newness and true wonder. This is a book of wisdom, of dream-language, of the kind that only arrives in that afterlife of terror where people are transformed by dying and self design. Still/and, things bloom, we exist, the dead refuse." —Dionne Brand"Brandon Shimoda knows his way around the dead. He has summoned them, followed their lead, faced their despair, soothed them. Or was it the other way around? The poems and essays in Hydra Medusa embody the irrevocable connection between the dead and the living, dreaming and wakefulness, past and present, writing and reading. Delicate and sharp, vociferous when need be, always incisive, these poems interrogate the proliferating terror of everyday life while veering, tenaciously and fiercely, even tenderly, toward the love, vigilance, and responsibility needed to keep our ancestors close and alive." —Cristina Rivera Garza"Hallucinatory, visionary, this is Brandon Shimoda’s 'anti-memorial' memorial to the ineluctable specter of Pearl Harbor over three generations of Japanese Americans. Poetry is the vital signs of a language, whatever the cultural climate. How else is one to meet the petrifying gaze of history, in the form of the Hydra Medusa? I am grateful for this human document." —Wong May"[Shimoda’s] is a book on ancestors and the dead and how and where responsibility lands; a cross-stitch of violence and memorialization, deserts and the spaces within which one not only occupies, but lives." —rob mclennan
£12.34
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Asking
Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. The Asking supersedes her earlier retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005).
£13.49
Flapjack Press Making Other Plans
Book SynopsisNigel Planer has been writing poetry for over fifty years. Now he has corralled many of his poems into one volume, Making Other Plans - as in 'poetry is what happens when you're busy making other plans.' This collection forms a poetic memoir, richly articulating humorous and serious observations on life, love, ageing, society and the human condition, recounted with emotional tenderness and warranted vexation.Trade Review"A unique piece of poetic time travel. Frequently funny, sometimes alarming, always honest and constantly surprising." -Tim Firth / "Intelligent, inventive and always engaging." -Henry Normal / "Planer's poetry is marked by a true emotional tenderness; he effortlessly weaves together profound insights into the journey of his life with his quick wit." -Shobna Gulati
£9.50
Currency Press Pty Ltd Wittenoom
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£14.44
Currency Press Pty Ltd Wayside Bride
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£14.39
Pushkin Press Duino Elegies
Book SynopsisThe captivating original English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West
£11.69
Copper Canyon Press,U.S. To 2040
Book SynopsisPulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2024 FinalistGriffin Poetry Prize, 2024 ShortlistPublishers Weekly Best Books of 2023Library Journal Best Books of 2023Guardian Best Books of 2023Financial Times Best Books of 2023Electric Lit Best books of 2023 It is rare to find in one collection an entire skyline burning and the quiet to follow a single worm, to hear soil breathe—in Jorie Graham''s fifteenth poetry collection, you do. Jorie Graham’s fifteenth poetry collection, To 2040, opens in question punctuated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.” In these visionary new poems, Graham is part historian, part cartographer as she plots 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 shows us our potentially inevitable future soundtracked by sirens among industrial ruins, contemplating the loss of those who inhabited and named them. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, these poems pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a worm burrowing through earth. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham asks us to sit silently, to hear soil breathe. An urgent open letter to the future, with a habit of looking back, 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. In poems that look to 2040 as both future and event-horizon, we leave the collection warned, infinitely wiser, and yet more attentively on edge. “Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me.” And, from the title poem, “what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?”
£16.19
Talon Books,Canada Uiesh / Somewhere
Book SynopsisWinner of the Prix des libraires, the Indigenous Voices award, the Prix littéraire des enseignant.e.s de Français, and the Coup de C?ur Renaud-Bray, and finalist for the Prix Alain-GrandboisDual-language editionThe poems in Uiesh / Somewhere are rooted in Innu Elder Joséphine Bacon?s experiences of moving between the nomadic ways of her Ancestors in the northern wilderness of Nitassinan and the clamour of the city. Wherever she is, Bacon is attentive to the smallest details of her environment, from the moon and the stars, the Northern Lights, and the falling snow, to the sirens of fire engines and the noise of a busy bar night. From her quiet centre, she listens to the voices of the Old Ones, whose stories are alive within her, and reflects on the beauty and the pain of her long life.
£13.72
Samuel French Ltd One Of Them Ones
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£10.99
Paul Dry Books With My Shadow: The Poems of Hilde Domin, a
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£15.99
Nick Hern Books Age is a Feeling
Book SynopsisYour life from the day you turn twenty-five through to your death. All the chances you get to change course and all the things you leave unsaid. Inspired by interviews with hospice workers, conversations with mystics and trips to the cemetery, Age is a Feeling is a gripping story that wrestles with the glorious and melancholy uncertainties of human life. A covert rallying cry against cynicism and regret, it's an uplifting exploration of chance, morality and living with verve. Haley McGee's one-person play was produced by Soho Theatre, directed by Adam Brace, and first performed at Summerhall during the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was adored by audiences, acclaimed by critics, and awarded several prizes including a Fringe First. It transferred to Soho Theatre, London, for several runs. Each performance was shaped by random selections made by the audience. This published edition, illustrated by Jason Logan, contains the full text of the play and offers readers a complete experience, as well as a blueprint for future productions.Trade Review'An astonishing dive into the future... a funny and wistful solo show that chronicles turning 25 and explores the decades ahead... as breathtaking as it is moving... heartbreaking and fascinating' * Guardian *'A tender, wise, wry, gut-wrenching monologue' * Telegraph *'Accomplished and poignant... a brilliant reflection of the suppleness of memory' * WhatsOnStage *'A gentle, loving, heart-breaking, and yet regularly funny affair: an audacious attempt to capture the full absurdity of the human condition' * Quintessential Review *'McGee makes distinctive and distinctively different theatre... her prose often has an assassin's sharpness... [this is] a show which knows exactly what it's doing and how it's doing it, and it is prepared to take its time so that it turns the screws before it pierces the heart. But make no mistake, it will make you weep' -- Lyn Gardner * Stagedoor *'Beautifully written... an immensely skilful exercise in storytelling... Half the audience is sobbing by the end' * The Stage *'A prodigiously wise, sad and beautiful contemplation of a life... a beautiful work that makes you feel every age in its protagonist's long life' * Time Out *'Cleverly conceived... a decades-long, fathoms-deep yarn about life and death, ambition and resentment, illness and ageing, and, well, just about everything that constitutes existence... a sensitive, smartly structured piece of writing, full of wit and an astonishing amount of wisdom' * Scotsman *
£9.89
Milkweed Editions Meltwater: Poems
Book SynopsisA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.Trade ReviewPraise for Meltwater "Wahmanholm delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review“Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting… Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planet’s forecast”—Racket“Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva“Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is ‘a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.’”—Allison Flory, Arkansas International“Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.”—Monica Youn“In Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s ecology, and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything that is ‘us’: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that ‘you are grass,’ I know it.”—Éireann LorsungPraise for Redmouth“Claire Wahmanholm’s book, Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she ‘can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.’ There’s simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where ‘mountains have unraveled into sand’ to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang“Redmouth is singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: ‘I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me.’ This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.”—Shane McCrae“Redmouth is a book of lush privacies, of ‘lamb-lioned’ promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). ‘The doe [is] a torch in the garden,’ she writes at one point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.”—G.C. Waldrep“‘Let all / Headlong fall from this / song,’ Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems, Redmouth, which blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s absence, which ‘clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides.’ There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven ‘to the edge of a cliff’ and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, ‘crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws.’ But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: ‘If of sunflowers.’”—Nomi StonePraise for Wilder “Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going. And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making. As the speaker of one poem says, ‘We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.’ And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.”—Rick Barot“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”—MAYDAY Magazine “Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell “Wilder is a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journey—continuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.”—Sun Yung Shin“Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.” —Maggie SmithTable of ContentsO HungerYou Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill YouGlacierMeltwaterMIn a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I DiedMeltwaterMetamorphosis with Milk and SugarIn a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an AutotomistPoem That Cries WolfGlacierMeltwaterStarlingMore RabbitsPrimerThe Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the TreeMeltwaterThe New HorticultureGlacierApotropaeiIn A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting ItThe Sun, the ShipMeltwaterAt the End We Turn Into TreesGlossary of What I’ll MissThe New FearThe New LanguageGlacierMeltwaterPDeathbed Dream with Extinction ListIf Anyone AsksIn Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth ChildrenPoem With No Children In itMeltwaterThe FutureMeltwater:The Empty UniverseXYZ NotesAcknowledgments
£11.39
D Giles Ltd Riccio's Oil Lamp
Book SynopsisThe form of this extraordinary bronze lamp, the most elaborate of several produced by Riccio (Andrea Briosco), is based on a Roman sandal, and its surface is covered with intricate reliefs modelled with a goldsmith’s refinement and crisp detail. The subjects evoke the populace of classical art and poetry, including a Nereid and Triton, Pan, harpies and innumerable putti, along with goats, musical instruments, shells, masks and garlands. Inspired by the Roman half-boot, the lamp is designed as a bizarre shoe balanced on a pyramidal base, and, as Ian Wardropper discusses in his essay, it would have provided its owner with much pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Early in its history, the lamp is known to have belonged to a series of distinguished Paduan collectors. Paired with Wardropper’s essay is a beautiful poem by James Fenton.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments by Ian Wardropper; The World of Andrea Riccio by James Fenton; Riccio’s Oil Lamp by Ian Wardropper; Notes Notes; Bibliography; Index
£16.96
Cambridge University Press Reading Homer
Book SynopsisHomer's Iliad is the acknowledged masterpiece of Greek literature. Reading Homer makes it accessible to students who have only recently begun learning the language. It builds on their existing knowledge and enables them to appreciate the poem in its context.Table of ContentsList of illustrations; Preface; List of abbreviations; Notes for the reader; Introduction: A. Homer and the Iliad; B. The story of the Iliad; C. Reading Homer; D. Homer's language; E. Metre; Select bibliography; Iliad Book 16; Iliad Book 18; Vocabulary; Grammar index.
£23.49
Dover Publications Inc. Chamber Music Pomes Penyeach and Other Poems
Book Synopsis
£5.59
Andrews McMeel Publishing Maybe Today
Book SynopsisA tender homage to the journeys of growth and change that we all experience, told through the theme of the four seasons and the connection they have to our lives.Growing pains, societal pressures, loneliness, grief––all these things make it hard to see the positive moments life offers. Maybe Today, a new collection of poetry from SK Williams, reflects on these difficulties but paves a path of light and love while doing so. Through inspiration from nature and gentle yet stirring words, Williams proves that becoming the healthiest, happiest version of ourselves is possible––and worth it. Sometimes we just need a little help finding it.Titled “Fall,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer,” each of the four sections of the book detail varying yet relatable life experiences. The main voice of the book is enhanced through the addition of annotations from a tender perspective of a trusted friend, representing the gentler, affirming perspective we all deserve to hear.
£9.49
Texas Review Press GHOST :: SEEDS: Poems
Book SynopsisSet on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his “ghost,” the “girl-ghost” of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book’s expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.
£18.66
Faber & Faber The Letters of Seamus Heaney
Book SynopsisA marvellous book, lovingly edited, beautifully produced. . . and brimming with literary insights, much laughter, a sprinkle of gossip and the poet's insuppressible joie de vivre, even in adversity. Buy it, read it, and keep it to hand on to your children.' John Banville, GuardianAn epistolary cornucopia. . . contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent.' Patricia Craig, TLS Books of the YearEvery now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two . . .For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are given access as never before to the life and poetic development of a literary titan from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of a Nobel Prize and the years of international acclaim that kept him heroically busy until his death.Editor Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this story in the poet's own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic and deeply thoughtful, the letters encompass decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as showing an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Moreover, Heaney's joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership.Listening to Heaney's voice, we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence, when he lived, enriched the world immeasurably, and whose legacy continues to deepen our sense of what truly matters.
£34.00
Nightboat Books Tree Spirits Grass Spirits
Book SynopsisA collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito—part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito’s beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one’s life through the logic of flora. Ito’s graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life. Trade Review"Finding the humanity in the plant world, these evocative essays will take root in readers’ minds.”―Publishers Weekly“Ito’s vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections on what it means to be a human moving through the environment… Jon Pitt’s translation gracefully conveys Ito’s engaged yet casual tone while allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph in this book is a joy to read.” —Kathryn Hemmann, Contemporary Japanese Literature“Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits enchanted me. Ito’s prose, in Pit’s translation, is vivid, precise, and wholly sensory. This is nature writing at its most evocative, and is vitally engaged with the world.” —Jessica Lee"Ito’s vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections on what it means to be a human moving through the environment… Jon Pitt’s translation gracefully conveys Ito’s engaged yet casual tone while allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph in this book is a joy to read." —Kathryn Hemmann"These ambient poems about the flora of the California desert and Kumamoto, Japan are philosophical meditations on the peculiarity of human storytelling and naming practices… Ito’s poems suggest that the ways we humans look at plants contain information about how we produce both selves and others as well as narratives about death and transformation." ―Angela Hume"Hiromi Ito’s Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, beautifully translated by Jon L Pitt, is my new favorite book. Maybe my old favorite too. Because I feel like I have, all along, been dreaming about it: a travelogue into the intimate relationship—and the sympathetic oblivion—between the changeless yet always changing world of plants, the always changing yet changeless mind of a poet, and the nature of their disappearance into each other’s spirits." ―Brandon Shimoda"…Ito’s insightful prose addresses the connective space between the human and the more-than-human world. In her delicate style, full of wonder and memory, Ito’s botanical world becomes meaningfully entangled with preciousness and resiliency that may offer a clue to the common fate of all life on earth." —Obi Kaufmann
£14.24
Andrews McMeel Publishing The Music Was Just Getting Good
Book SynopsisSome good things must come to an end, for new things to begin. Poet Alicia Cook explores this grievous emotion in her latest and final mixtape collection, The Music Was Just Getting Good.Alicia Cook is back with the highly anticipated final tracklist in her poetry collection of mixtapes, The Music Was Just Getting Good. Following in the footsteps of her first two installments, Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately (2016) and Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back (2020), Cook is closing out her trilogy with a poignant and all too relatable look at the ebbs and flows of life. And why, even during our most difficult seasons, a better day can appear just around the corner. Spread across 184 tracks (92 poems and 92 blackout poems), each paired with an accompanying song, Cook returns to her evergreen themes of mental health, hope, and recovery, and reminds readers that grief is not reserved solely for death. We may grieve who we used to be, moments that never came to pass, physical places, and, of course, people; people who’ve died, but also those who left, and those we had to leave behind. A stunning closing number in a timely and necessary collection of work, The Music Was Just Getting Good is the balm your soul has been waiting for.
£11.69
Olympia Publishers Things We Say In the Night
Book SynopsisIn this anthology of poems, Misty Barber, a native of Gold Coast, Australia, looks to express and share the experiences many of us have in our attempts to fit in with those around us and find someone who makes us feel truly special, however hard this might be. She draws inspirations from the movies and books she experienced throughout her childhood with the goal of creating her own stories for people who are less frequently written about and for. Delving into the very deepest parts of her emotional expression, Barber can conjure up poems that will speak to anyone who is looking for a reassuring hand that will let them know that they are not alone in their experiences - those anxieties that crop up are universal ones, and ones that are expressed with beauty within this book.
£8.54
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Doctor Faustus: With Related Texts
Book SynopsisThis new edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus offers the complete 1604 A-text with embedded selections from the 1616 B-text. Its innovative format will make it easier for readers to note differences between these texts and to consider what is gained and lost in viewing them both separately and together. A full Introduction to the play, notes, and a rich selection of related texts further enhance the value of this edition to students of Renaissance drama, Reformation theology, magic, and occult philosophy.Trade Review“This most recent edition of Doctor Faustus is guaranteed to appeal to a fresh, widespread audience of students and scholars. Uniquely combining the full A- and B-texts of the play, the edition offers new possibilities for analysis and interpretation. In addition to a generous introduction, replete with crucial data, the edition supplies readers with a bibliography, notes, and an abundant selection of related texts, including the Faustbook. The range of valuable information will surely attract not only Marlovians and all those interested in Renaissance drama and related, historical contextual matters, but anyone interested in accounting for how Doctor Faustus has achieved its enduring fame.” —Robert A. Logan, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Hartford
£13.49
Pan Macmillan ISDAL
Book SynopsisSusannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry and the author of four pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018), bloodthirsty for marriage (2020) and Oh! (2022). Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, The TLS, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland Review, amongst others. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by poets under the age of thirty. Susannah is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020), and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK and Penguin Ireland.Trade ReviewA poet of tremendous imaginative range, artistic vision, and accomplishment -- Kayo Chingonyi, author of A Blood ConditionSusannah Dickey’s bloodthirsty for marriage made me think of Alice Notley in its urgency and playfulness. But Dickey is more surreal, more vivid; there are more dead gerbils. These are poems that scorch the earth with their originality and then write out of the ashes. -- Will HarrisA rare talent, and certainly one to watch. * The Sunday Times *Using the real-life case of an unidentified woman’s body found in Norway as a jumping off point, this brilliantly realised first collection by the novelist Susannah Dickey is a multilayered investigation into the ethics of the true crime genre * The Guardian *[ISDAL pushes] the boundary of how we might think about form and genre . . . Dickey brings a singular voice and a unique complexity to her investigation -- Tara Bergin * PN Review *
£11.69
WW Norton & Co The Iliad
Book SynopsisThe greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our timeTrade Review"Wilson’s translation runs as swift as a bloody river, teems with the clattering sounds of war, bursts with the warriors’ hunger for battle" -- Charlotte Higgins - The Guardian"Wilson’s Iliad is clear and brisk, its iambic pentameter a zone of enchantment. " -- Ange Mlinko - London Review of Books"Superb... [a] beautiful, fluent, memorable translation" -- Rowan Williams - New Statesman"Seduce[s] with its crystalline clarity, elegance, sensuality, sometimes breathless pace and above all emotional clout." -- Edith Hall - The Guardian"A triumphant new translation of the Iliad... It's a poem you read with your heart in your throat. " -- A. E. Stallings - The Spectator"A propulsive road... an excellent translation" -- Natalie Haynes - BBC Culture"Sing, goddess, of the skill of Emily [Wilson]." -- Robbie Millen - The Times"Vitally urgent" -- Judith Thurman - The New Yorker"For the Greeks, Homer was the universal poet. He was likened to the ocean, circling the world, from which all cultural rivers flowed... Two thousand years later, those rivers still flow. Wilson can take much pride in her successful contribution to this mighty stream" -- Peter Jones - The Times"Emily Wilson’s superb rendering of the Greek epic resounds with Miltonic echoes" -- The Telegraph"Emily Wilson's translation of the "Iliad" brings Homer's great war story to rousing new life....propulsive....buoyant and expressive. " -- Natalie Haynes - The New York Times Book Review"In Wilson's hands, the poem sings with the clash of bronze, the thundering of hooves, the savage holler of war-cries. Her use of iambic pentameter imbues it with irresistible pace and rhythm. It flows like music – exhilarating, tragic, beautiful and stirring" -- Jennifer Saint - the i newspaper"Wilson is at her best when writing of the battlefield. As others have noted, she has a knack for the consonantal sounds of warfare… Wilson’s Iliad is always to the point." -- Kate Maltby - Financial Times"Wilson's translation is vivid, lucid, pacy... For those yet to encounter this violent, charming, disturbing, beautiful poem, now is the time." -- Katherine Backler - The Tablet"Excellent... [Wilson] achieves a fluid and consistent vision." -- Philip Womack - Spectator World"Wilson has forged a poetic style in English that captures the essence of Homeric Greek….Readable, relevant and from the heart, this is the “Iliad” we have all been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.”" -- Naoíse Mac Sweeny - The Washington Post"We should be grateful for Emily Wilson's luminous new translation of the Iliad... Wilson's edition should be compulsory reading for every statesperson and politician—especially those seeking to make cheap capital out of our current tragedy... Read and be awed—and afraid." -- Lyndsey Stonebridge - New Statesman"[Wilson] captures so brilliantly the fire and dread and bewilderment and rage of the poem. She wears her erudition beautifully: she matches it with such wit, precision and flair." -- Katherine Rundell"Emily Wilson's muscular and moving new translation is truly what it claims to be - a version for our time" -- Andrew Motion - The Spectator"[An] acclaimed translation of The Iliad... [Wilson] breathes fire and clarity into the Greek poet's darker work" -- Gwendolyn Smith - the i newspaper"Achilles was back in the bestseller lists, thanks to Emily Wilson's acclaimed Iliad" -- Tristram Fane Saunders - The Telegraph"Wilson's elegant translation of Homer's epic tragedy deepens our understanding of this bruising song of love and death." -- Colin Grant - The Observer"Filled with spirit and exuberance... a version rendered in iambic pentameters that are by turns barnstorming, bleak and beautiful. " -- Rishi Dastidar - The Guardian"Wilson brings a rare combination of academic rigour and the lyricism of a born poet to one of Europe's most important texts, making ancient battles vivid and visceral and the language of Homer sing like few translators before. If you are buying for a classicist or even for someone who's been meaning to get around to the classics, you won't go wrong with this one." -- Charlie Connelly - The New European"A magisterial translation of the Iliad... The story of the battle between Hector and Achilles in the Trojan War, of a city under siege, of innocents caught up in conflict, has never been more resonant or necessary." -- The Mail on Sunday"In her new translation of The Iliad, Emily Wilson finds a fluid and readable idiom to depict the heroism, violence and vaingloriousness of Homer's Trojan War. Her rendering is more supple than sonorous, and both gods and men squabble, sulk, huff and puff with the breath of life, until it expires. " -- Michael Prodger - Country Life
£27.00
OR Books The Tale of Ahmed
Book SynopsisTale of Ahmed is a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching from Afghanistan to the southeast coast of England. His home in Kent is close to where small, frail boats arrive bringing refugees on the last lap of their 6,000-mile journey from Kabul and the Hindu Kush. Meeting and talking with refugees, Henry became aware that even they themselves rarely understand the heroic nature of their odyssey. The journey's never-ending risks have become second nature to them. For most other people, they are simply unknown. Correcting such misperceptions is one of the objectives of this powerful story.Written in the form of an epic poem and richly illustrated by the author, Tale of Ahmed describes how its eponymous hero gets help from fellow travelers an
£16.14
Batsford Ltd A Poem to Read Aloud Every Day of the Year
Book SynopsisA handsome anthology of 366 poems from around the world and throughout history, all especially selected for reading aloud, with one glorious poem for every day of the year. Everyone benefits from reading aloud, whether it's a bedtime story with Dad or Granny, an intimate moment with a loved one, or a performance to a group of people. When spoken, the poet’s words hit us more powerfully and meaningfully, and what's more, it's good for our health: mindfully reading aloud helps with relaxation, improves working memory and aids vocabulary acquisition. With a wide and diverse range of poets including the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz and Mary Oliver in the 21st century, old favourites such as Emily Dickinson and more recent voices such as Lemn Sissay, the obvious classics such as Wordsworth’s Daffodils and slightly more offbeat fare like Spike Milligan, there's something for everyone in this book: poems that are funny, sad, consoling, uplifting and everything in between. Whether you're a teacher enthralling a class of children or a carer entertaining a group of pensioners, if you're looking for a reading for a special occasion or a powerful piece for a performance, you'll find everything you need here. It's the perfect book to dip into daily to share a poem with anyone, to hear the true beauty and rhythm of words and the magic they can weave.
£20.00
World Poetry Books The Slow Horizon That Breathes
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£17.09
Orion Publishing Co The World of Oscar Wilde
Book SynopsisStep into the world of the Irish wit, poet, and dramatist Oscar Wilde. Spot scenes from all across his works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Happy Prince, alongside key figures from Wilde's life as you learn about his incredible creativity and the tragic life story that has made him an LGBTQ+ icon.1000-PIECE PUZZLE that measures 48.5 x 68 cm (19 x 27 in.) when completed.INCLUDES A PULL-OUT POSTER so you can spot all the characters and read their stories.'THE WORLD OF...' JIGSAWS are a fun way of celebrating the lives and works of creative greats. Also available in the series: The World of Frida Kahlo, The World of Jane Austen, The World of the Brontës, The World of James Joyce and more.PUBLISHED BY LAURENCE KING - Laurence King has been capturing imaginations and inspiring creativity in new and unexpected ways for
£16.31
Milkweed Editions Ballard Spahr Prize 2023 Winner
Book SynopsisSelected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tas
£11.39
Faber & Faber Joyces Women
Book SynopsisI love fire. Fire is the colour of genius.In this audacious new work, Edna O'Brien gives voice to the women who were central to the life of James Joyce.James Joyce had been my ultimate hero for sixty years, but to paint the canvas of his life was daunting. Therefore I decided to depict him as seen by the key figures in his life - Mother, Wife, Mistress of a fleeting moment, his patron Harriet Weaver and his beloved Daughter Lucia, of whom he said her mind was but a transparent leaf away from his.'Written to celebrate the centenary of Ulysses, Joyce's Women premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2022. This revised edition includes changes made by the author during rehearsals and previews of the play''s first production.
£9.49
Nick Hern Books Orlando
Book Synopsis'Nothing is any longer one thing.' From a teenage encounter with Elizabeth I, through infatuations, voyages and even a change of gender, Orlando lives out five centuries of life and love before they finally find the courage to truly be themselves. Neil Bartlett's sparkling adaptation of Virginia Woolf's famous fantasy finds powerful contemporary relevance in her vision of equal rights to love for bodies of every kind – and brings it to life on the stage with a kaleidoscope of theatrical styles, overseen by the haunting figure of Woolf herself. It premiered at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End in November 2022, in a production directed by Michael Grandage and starring Emma Corrin in the title role. Written for a diverse ensemble of nine or more actors, this adaptation will appeal to any theatre or company looking to entertain their audiences with a bold new take on this iconic tale of love and transformation.Trade Review'Radiates gleeful intelligence, rampaging heart and tremendous fun. It couldn't feel more timely, and it's glorious' * Guardian *'Theatre to make the heart leap... this vivid, glittering drama achieves not just the improbable, but the almost impossible: it captures the brilliance of Woolf's mind, the daring of her transgressive vision and the lush gorgeousness of her prose, and refracts it on the stage in an exquisite rainbow of prismatic colour... a play that is at once a delectable queer fantasia and a freewheeling intellectual joyride through the intertwined complexities of life, literature, identity and the creative process... a blazing beacon to progress, to possibility, to freedom and the power of imagination' * The Stage *'Neil Bartlett's fleet-footed, wildly imaginative but wonderfully disciplined adaption shines literal and metaphorical light on contemporary ideas of identity... an outstandingly original theatrical pleasure' * Variety *'Joyful and groundbreaking... a triumph' * Independent *'Neil Bartlett's adaptation captures all [the novel's] sexiness and spirit... it's splendid in every sense: passionate, camp as Christmas and as warmly celebratory, too' * iNews *'An adaptation full of joy and hope and sense of possibility for the future' * WhatsOnStage *'Neil Bartlett's funny but moving adaptation... a frisky romp, wittily engaging with today's debate about gender fluidity... a joyous ode to freedom' * Daily Mail *
£10.44
Andrews McMeel Publishing Softening Time: Collected Poems
Book SynopsisFrom beloved yogi, teacher, and artist Elena Brower comes the writer’s debut collection of poetry: a lyrical exploration of grief, self-compassion, and learning from the past to navigate life’s challenges with grace.Softening Time is both autobiography and self-help, poetry and inspiration. Drawing on events in her own life, particularly her experiences as a mother, daughter, sister, and friend, Brower writes poignantly on themes of love, loss, healing, and rebirth. Punctuating her work with themed quotations from a wide variety of celebrated writers and thinkers, Brower guides the reader along an intimate journey of both deepening and “softening” self-awareness.
£11.39
University of Akron Press Something about Living
Book Synopsis
£14.41
Makina Books Dust Sucker
Book SynopsisDust Sucker is a remarkable new book-length poem by writer and translator Jen Calleja. Clear-eyed, expansive, and intoxicating, this exhilarating work deftly blurs disparate themes including time and mortality, communication and translation, intimacy and infertility. Presented as a deluxe bilingual bookwork, this 'contemplation of dust' explores the pollution of our environment - both at home and in nature - and the shoring of mental detritus. With unquestionable poignancy and flashes of sardonic wit, Calleja excavates her English-Irish-Maltese heritage, inherited anxieties, and ambivalence towards childlessness during climate crisis. Ultimately, Dust Sucker is triumphant proof that even when feeling dusty with despair, there exists a compulsion to find other means to traverse and communicate experience. This edition includes a German translation by award-winning Austrian poet Carolina Schutti; a companionable doppelganger befitting of a poem that finds connection across languages and in translation.
£7.60
Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand To My Love
Book SynopsisI remember us, my loveWith plans so young and freeOur faces flush like springtimeWhen it was just you and me. A stirring poem of the partnership during parenthood that will give you all the feels. From bestselling author and poet Jessica Urlichs with gorgeously illustrated by Sarah Reinhardt. Also available You Hung the Moon: 'Jess has an incredible way with words' - Meg Mansell 'Another beauty that I'll treasure forever.' - Caroline Foran 'The most beautiful book.' - Zoe MarshallTo My Love is a beautiful gift for yourself or to give your beloved
£11.04
Oxford University Press Collected Verse
Book Synopsis''The wind is rising!... Let us try to live!''One of the preeminent intellectuals of modern French culture, Valéry is widely considered one of the country''s greatest poets of the twentieth century. Following a flurry of sonnets in his late teens, he abruptly abandoned verse for twenty years. If the publication of The Young Fate in 1917 won him immediate and immense acclaim, his status as the outstanding poet of the era was firmly consolidated with the Album of Early Verse and Charms with its beautiful meditation on mortality, ''The Graveyard by the Sea'', considered one of the finest poems in French. A classical voice in an era of avant-garde modernism, Valéry''s often sensuous work was inspired by mysticism, myth, the Mediterranean, and above all passionate love. This bilingual edition brings together for the first time the complete verse with many unknown and previously unpublished poems taken from his abundant correspondence, which offers intimate insight into a private side of the
£9.49
Faber & Faber Boys on the Verge of Tears
Book SynopsisWild, thrilling, brutally honest and beautifully tender. This is a truly extraordinary new play. Lucy KirkwoodWINNER OF THE VERITY BARGATE AWARD 2022A father waits for his son. Kids hang around skipping school. Fights break out after nights of drinking. Set inside a men''s public toilet, Boys on the Verge of Tears is a bold, kaleidoscopic tale of violence and vulnerability.Sam Grabiner''s play premiered at Soho Theatre, London, in April 2024.
£10.44
