A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Poetry Wales Press The Black Place
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press Battery Rocks
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Pushkin Press Change Your Life
Book SynopsisRainer Maria Rilke developed one of the most singular poetic styles of the twentieth century. Visionary yet always anchored in the real world, his poems give profound expression to fundamental questions of love and death, of the chaos of the modern world as well as the spiritual consolation of art and nature. Change Your Life draws from across Rilke's career to offer a comprehensive view of his most essential poetry, featuring major selections from the great Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus alongside less frequently anthologised work. In these dazzling new translations by acclaimed poet Martyn Crucefix, Rilke's poems beguile with fresh insight and mystery.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd The Historians
Book SynopsisWinner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020. An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020. A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century. Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her 'edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history' ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: 'Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... Their hands are full of words.' Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: 'We will not leave you behind', a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.Trade Review'Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century.' - Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review
£10.44
Salt Publishing Robbergirls
Book SynopsisWritten during a residency with The Polar Museum in Cambridge, Robbergirls reimagines The Snow Queen as a Sapphic rite of passage. Offered in seven sections that echo the fairy tale’s form, these hot, tender and generous poems search for a lost other who is by turns friend, brother, son, lover, but ultimately an aspect of a fragmented self. In her formally playful and linguistically rich third collection, Benyon suggests that the ache for contact can be tempered by nature, even with disordered seasons. In striking poems that refuse to deny environmental breakdown, the poet holds space for the indigenous people of the Arctic as she considers the devastating impacts of climate change on their landscapes and lives.
£10.44
Salt Publishing Old Men
Book SynopsisPeter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a range of forms.
£10.44
Salt Publishing New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisNew And Selected Poems brings together a quarter of a century of exceptional writing.Julian Stannard started his career as a writer in the Italian port city of Genoa. He has written at length about Liguria and Italy in general. His work has been translated into Italian and he finds his place in a rich Anglo-Ligurian tradition. This gathering of poems from many collections infuses his love of Italy with a clear-eyed view of modern Britain.These are poems which can wrong foot and amaze. His satirical appetite draws on Rabelais, Gogol, Swift, and Lear. Stannard ultimately creates an unmistakable voice the commonplace is made strange and yet even stranger still.2010 Winner of the International Troubadour Prize 2024 Awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize
£10.44
Canongate Books The Flame
Book SynopsisTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR POETRYTHESE POEMS AND NOTEBOOKS ARE THE LAST WORD FROM THE LATE, GREAT LEONARD COHENThe Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, selected and ordered by Cohen in the final months of his life. The book contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen's lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who has plumbed the depths of our darkest questions and come up wanting, yearning for more.Trade ReviewThe last word in love and despair . . . Full of youthful spark, beauty and romance . . . Elegantly and posthumously published . . . Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end -- Kate Kellaway * * Observer, Poetry book of the month * *Cohen was a poet before he was a musician, and with this posthumous collection his career completes its circle. Encompassing poems and lyrics written in his last decade, as well as self-portraits and notebook extracts, the book is introduced by his son Adam Cohen * * Financial Times, Best Poetry Books of 2018 * *Cohen's enduring, beautiful bleakness is the draw here. His gift for understated melancholia is on each blackening page * * Daily Mail, Best Books of 2018 * *We'll be listening to Cohen - still smirking and smiling - for decades to come, with this collection as our companion * * Spectator * *For his final publication, he left almost nothing to chance . . . The Flame shows the emphasis that Cohen put on distillation . . . Included in various proportions are love, sex, death, regret, exaltation, piety and gentle fondness. The blending of the earthy with the spiritual would give John Donne and Marvin Gaye a run for their money * * Guardian * *The Flame is a gift . . . These poems and lyrics are as startling and stirring, as clever, funny and sorrowful as we came to expect from a poet/singer/songwriter . . . [A] treasure trove * * The Big Issue * *If you felt Leonard Cohen's death in 2016 as a personal assault, this book is a posthumous balm . . . All of Cohen's work has a raw, straight-to-the-heart intensity - reach for this the next time you need inspiration for a wedding toast that will leave them gutted, or any other moment you need a little sustenance for the soul * * Vogue * *Cohen's final volume shows his poetic soul. If you know the man only because of "Hallelujah" or "Suzanne," pick up The Flame and warm yourself within its pages * * Washington Post * *It's clear that Cohen remained sharp until the very end, and the book, a kind of farewell tribute by the poet-prophet, offers ample evidence of his abiding sense of humor . . . What Cohen offered his many fans and followers was the opportunity to partake of the kind of spiritual experience that makes it possible for us to feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone * * Los Angeles Review of Books * *A gorgeous collection of the late, great Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, it's an essential read for any fan * * NME * *
£18.70
Vintage Publishing Rapture's Road: From the author of All Down
Book SynopsisIn this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland'Hewitt’s words penetrate with Nerudian passion and force' GUARDIAN'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTERAs the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.Trade ReviewStunning... shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals * Observer *Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force * Guardian *Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire’s natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture’s Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction * RTÉ *An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of ShyA writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann Ní Ghríofa, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEAn extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by... beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous -- Fiona Benson, praise for TONGUES OF FIREGorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing -- Andrew McMillan, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEI fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems... A beautiful book and Seán Hewitt is an extraordinary writer -- Liz Berry, praise for TONGUES OF FIREThe best new work of non-fiction I've read in years -- Sarah Perry, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDEIntensely original... Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
£11.69
Vintage Publishing Food for the Dead
Book Synopsis**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD***SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 FORWARD PRIZE - FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism''A beautiful, necessary book''ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic''Every poem is a masterpiece''OLIA HERCULES, author of MamushkaWith this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context.Central to this book is a timeline of hunger', a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (death by hunger' in Ukrainian) Stalin's man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / runnin
£11.70
Cinnamon Press Mine
Book SynopsisThere is no such thing/as refuge or retreat' ends one of the poems after layering vivid image on image, leaving us changed for the experience of reading. And it happens again and againembodied, specific, clear images that deliver meaning that is integral to the experience yet surprising and new. And along the way the emotions build, not from being told or hammered home, but because we are allowed to sense them so deeply that we are able, also, to feel them: the loneliness and the tenderness, the sadness that is reflected back in the green eye of a piece of polished malachite, the loss that lurks in the corner of an office, the romance and the longing. This is a collection to savour, full of words that haunt, it pulls us back to find another layer of meaning, and another
£6.99
Cinnamon Press Shadowmouth
Book SynopsisPoems inspired by the life of Vitalie Rimbaud, mother of the radical poet Arthur Rimbaud.
£6.23
Intellect Books Remembering Paris in Text and Film
Book SynopsisThis new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris, through written texts and movies, from the outside, and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it. This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience, but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines. The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn, which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Paris at Midnight, which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. While it is driven by original research, notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity, it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership, including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time, it will also provide clarity and, importantly, make logical links between, for example, the past and present, myth and reality, poetry and history, and various schools and movements, including psychology, poetics, poststructuralism and critical theory, classical reception, feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science, who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses. Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire, the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision, tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity, but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated, received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond. Primary readership will be academics, educators, scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use. Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses, which combine historical, cultural, literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book, therefore, will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language, literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies, gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography. Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Remembering in Paris and Paris as Remembering 1. Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: Re-presenting Paris – Alistair Rolls 2. Baudelaire and the Classical Tradition: Virgil, Ovid and Sappho in Paris – Marguerite Johnson 3. Sappho in the Salons – Marguerite Johnson 4. Memory, Modernity and the City in Agnès Varda’s Paris Films – Felicity Chaplin 5. Looking (Back) at the Moon in Parisian Cinema – Alistair Rolls 6. Breathless in Paris – Christopher Falzon 7. As Sedate as Swans: The Parisian Side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée – Alistair Rolls 8. ‘La forme d’une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! […]’: Translation and the Changing Modes of Urban Cognition – Clive Scott 9. Paris, Capital of the Australian Poetic Avant-Garde: Christopher Brennan’s ‘Musicopoematographoscope’, John Tranter’s ‘Desmond’s Coupé’ and Chris Edwards’ ‘A Fluke’ and After Naptime – David Musgrave 10. Forms of Remembrance in the Sculpted Verse of Louise Colet, Anaïs Ségalas and Some of their Male Contemporaries – Daniel A. Finch-Race and Valentina Gosetti Contributors Index
£18.71
Carcanet Press Ltd Latch
Book SynopsisA London Review Bookshop Book of the Year. Rebecca Goss' fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.Trade Review'This collection collapses the boundaries between land and lineage, is filled with portent, vestige, longing. I don't know how it's possible for these poems to be so intimate, yet vast. They beat fiercely with bird-animal-human hearts.' - Tishani Doshi; 'Latch brings us an evocation of the past which avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality or nostalgia. Instead here is something sharp, joyful and interrogating: a bright, taut view of a rural English childhood. Her astute eye lets nothing through as the latch of memory and the blacksmith's making become a vehicle for a poised engagement with the shifting roles of motherhood across time.' - Deryn Rees-Jones
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Goddamned Selected Poems
Book SynopsisA collection of new and selected poems about life, love, and growing older.
£15.29
Carcanet Press Ltd Ambush at Still Lake
Book SynopsisCaroline Bird's new collection charts marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery: the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness, after the happy ending.
£10.79
Carcanet Press Ltd Heirloom
Book SynopsisThis first collection from a Caribbean-born writer examines how violence shapes four generations of women and how each generation resists the dysfunction, tyranny, and terror inherited from the previous one.
£999.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Guaracara
Book SynopsisThe poet traces their ancestral legacy over the centuries through the history of 'King Sugar'.
£11.69
Carcanet Press Ltd Before Violence
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£11.69
Profile Books Ltd Kit
Book Synopsis'raw as well as wrought ... a novel of spaces and gaps ... like life poured into art' - Anthony Cummins, The Observer 'In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy [...] Kit reaches places other books don't.' - Max Porter 'An extraordinary experience ... It is work and voices like Megan's we have to fight for.' - Maxine Peake Megan and Kit met in their early twenties. Their friendship was intense, wild and true. Years later, when Kit becomes desperately unwell, Megan tries to pull her old friend back from the precipice, navigating the difficulties of revisiting a relationship conceived in the great freedom of youth, whilst attempting to remain fully present in the messy beauty of her family life. Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication - and precariousness - of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end. Told in a spare, winding prose-poem, with a voice reminiscent of Max Porter, Elizabeth Smart, Kae Tempest and Rebecca Watson, Kit is a splintered, powerful work of empathy, friendship and unconditional love.Trade Review'Raw as well as wrought ... a novel of spaces and gaps ... like life poured into art.' -- Anthony Cummins * The Observer *An extraordinary experience. The richness, rhythm and power of the language pulls you in, down and along. Megan's voice is totally unique: ethereal, yet completely relatable and grounded. It's a mirror to a female existence. You feel deeply connected to the narrator's journey, but it's also a challenging piece. Completely invigorating. It is work and voices like Megan's we have to fight for. * Maxine Peake *Kit is a visceral, heartfelt paean to the wildness of friendship and unconditional love. -- Fiona Sturges * The Guardian *In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy, it searches for a loving root system and finds it working away beautifully in our everyday wreckages [...] Kit reaches places other books don't. * Max Porter *This beautiful, unflinching book asks us what it might mean to truly confront loss - its shame, its intimacies, its clarifying horrors, the ways it forces us to relearn how to live. * Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass *Megan Barker's Kit is a timeless classic, the language is compelling and succinct, there is tenderness captured in here and a fierce heart too. This book is so exquisite and so daring - I loved every page. * Salena Godden *'Kit is love and pain distilled: a book of extraordinary force. It left me reeling for days' * Tom Bullough, author of Addlands *Extraordinary [...] It is a "poultice of words" - something that brings feeling to the surface. It bears witness to death, and how the living live with it. * Pádraig Ó Tuama, editor of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World *If I put it down for a moment on almost every page it was only to steady myself, or to savour, or marvel, and occasionally (thank God) to laugh. I can't wait to read it again. * Sue Peebles, author of Snake Road *
£11.69
Y Lolfa Cerddi David William Lewis the Poems of David
Book SynopsisA collection of poems embodying the thoughts and views of David Lewis, native of Pontypridd and a contemplative man who lived at the end of the 19th century and turn of the 20th century. The poems comprise keen comments and personal experience of social history which, with humour and solemnity, provide the reader with a lively and colourful portrayal of life at the time.
£7.99
Troubador Publishing Life Behind the Pen
Book SynopsisWHAT IS ALL THAT RABBLE? What are they rabbiting on about? Disturbing my nap. My parents started reading to me before I was even born. I first entered a poetry competition at the age of 5, and 7 years later... My Life behind the Pen has just begun, A life that started with a wonderful dream. The sun is here, the moon is on the run. I'm 5, po'try fills my head, as it seems. Pictures become words, and words turn to rhymes, Various poems inside can be read, Anywhere, any which way; the good times! There is no right or wrong it can be said. Collection of pieces, written for you, This is my book; I really hope you like. Read and learn poetry then you can do and write, it's easy as riding a bike! The power of poetry - this is it. You may have noticed, you've read a sonnet.
£6.39
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC A Fire in My Head
Book SynopsisA powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak. In our times of crisis The mind has its powers This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems. Some of them, like 'Grenfell Tower, June 2017', are already familiar. Published in the Financial Times less than ten days after the fire, it was played more than 6 million times on Channel 4's Facebook page, and was retweeted by thousands on Twitter. 'Notre-Dame is Telling Us Something' was first read on BBC Radio 4, in the aftermath of the cathedral's near destruction. It spoke eloquently of the despair that was felt around the world. In 'shaved head poem', Ben Okri wrote of the confusion and anxiety felt as the world grappled with a health crisis unprecedented in our times. 'Breathing the Light' was his response to the events of summer 2020, when a black man died beneath the knee of a white policeman, a tragedy sparking a movement for change. These poems, and others including poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barack Obama, Amnesty and more, make this a uniquely powerful collection that blends anger and tenderness with Ben Okri's inimitable vision.Trade ReviewPRAISE FOR BEN OKRI: 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali Smith. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' -- Marlon James on The Freedom Artist
£7.99
Luath Press Ltd Diverted to Split
Book SynopsisDiverted to Split is Hugh McMillan's new poetry book, his sixth from Luath. As before, his poetry ranges widely in subject matter, from his friends and family to his travels and his politics, and deals with life's great issues, love and mortality.Andrew Greig has noted that McMillan's poetry finds the universal in the microscopically personal, a platform, a verge, a wake, a train ride. As ever, humour plays a large part, sometimes bleak, sometimes wholehearted, but you're never laughing so much you lose sight of the human story, its triumphs, its ultimate failures.This poetry collection will not only be a hit with fans of Hugh McMillan's work, but any poetry lover that is seeking for warmth and the wit of humans during these turbulent times.
£9.49
Fitzcarraldo Editions Joy Is My Middle Name
Book Synopsis
£11.69
Wild Goose Publications This Heart
Book SynopsisPoems that arrive like gentle reminders that life is happening right now, right here and it's trying to tell you something.Martin's work bridges the spiritual and the secular with the grace of someone who's not trying to win an argument it just tells the truth beautifully and often makes you laugh along the way.
£10.44
Renard Press Ltd Building Bridges
Book SynopsisBuilding Bridges is a poetry anthology that seeks to provide a platform for stories and voices that have been marginalised, and to celebrate the great diversity and rich variation in the identities and communities of people from around the world and from a huge cross-section of walks of life.
£11.47
Canongate Books Goldenrod
Book SynopsisA powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life - a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son''s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road - Maggie Smith reveals the magic of the present moment.The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.
£9.49
Olympia Publishers A Female Voyage of Temporal Transitions
Book Synopsis
£16.20
Troubador Publishing The Greatest Story
Book SynopsisA short story, encased in 6 poems, which gives a highly personal but also universal take on the Christian story.
£8.54
Out-Spoken Press Somewhere Something is Burning
Book SynopsisAn examination of solitude and absence, the poems within this collection grapple with the reality and taboo of loneliness pitted against an anxiety of connecting. Exploring human relationships, breakdown in communication, and silence – self-inflicted or otherwise – the poems give voice to the fears and experiences that shape us, and interrogate the ways in which we process and avoid. Frecknall’s leaps of surreality, extreme empathy and vivid imagery make Somewhere Something is Burning a compelling joyride of a read.
£9.50
Flapjack Press Pig's Ear, Dog's Dinner: A COVID-19 Poetry Diary
Book SynopsisWritten daily throughout the UK’s restrictions to combat coronavirus, Pig’s Ear, Dog’s Dinner picks up directly from Volume 2, Can of Worms. Covering the period from the introduction of the ‘Three-Tier System’ through to the anniversary of the first lockdown, Paul’s third volume is filled with humour and compassion, and is a reflective documentation of the nation’s wellbeing. Illustrated by Korky Paul.Trade Review“A book that future historians will want to read; it will tell them what it was like to live in turbulent times through a poet’s eye. If journalism is the first draft of history, then here is the second: life shaped, structured, described, annotated.” – Ian McMillan, poet & broadcaster; “In these strange times, every day should have a Paul Cookson moment – keep him by your bedside for emergencies.” – Simon Mayo, broadcaster & author; “A poem a day may not keep the pandemic away, but Paul’s pithy, moving, amusing and occasionally heartbreaking coronavirus verse diary is a must read memento of these challenging times. A succinct, modern take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. Brilliant.” – Paul Ross, journalist & broadcaster
£9.50
Out-Spoken Press Caviar
Book SynopsisAssociative, sensuous, and unstable, Caviar explores the line between decadence and depravity. In Fletcher’s third pamphlet, investigations of power and violence are no longer limited to the domestic and romantic. She interrogates all dark spheres of influence: ‘A word. A woman hit. A nuclear bomb.’ Language is ‘consumed and mated’, a ‘divine bistro’ that shows her mastery over form. With winking intelligence and playful sleaze, this pamphlet is a circus of swans, slapped faces, and the snottiest, most expensive delicacy in the world.
£8.55
Canongate Books The Fire People: A Collection of British Black
Book SynopsisWinner of the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Poetry First published in 1998, The Fire People celebrated the rising stars of the time, many of whom have since become established names. Edited by the number one bestselling author and poet Lemn Sissay OBE, this seminal anthology takes inspiration from roots, reggae and hip-hop. Including work from: Chris Abani, Patience Agbabi, Malika Booker, John Citizen, Salena Godden, Lorraine Griffiths, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Parm Kaur, Shamshad Khan, Cheryl Martin, Raman Mundair, Bunmi Ogunsiji, Koye Oyedeji, Mallissa Read, Vanessa Richards, Khefri Cybele Riley aka KA'frique, Roger Robinson, Joy Russell, Kadija Sesay, John Siddique, Labi Siffre, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Andria Smith, SuAndi, Tricky, Akure Wall, Marie Guise Williams.Trade ReviewThis collection forms a milestone of great significance . . . The Fire People marks the breaking of a new wave of British writers . . . the groundbreaking anthology * * The Times * *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books The Snail House
Book Synopsis'I saved lives and I got rewarded and I'm bloody well not going to apologise for it.' Sir Neil Marriot had a 'good pandemic', becoming familiar to millions from his TV appearances as a government medical advisor. His service even earned him a knighthood, and he is now rewarding himself with a lavish birthday party. But, amidst the oak panelling, the champagne and the silver service, his family are at one another's throats again, and he thinks there's something familiar – and somehow unsettling – about one of the catering staff... The Snail House is a play about how the past impacts on the present, and how overconfidence can have disastrous consequences. Written and directed by Richard Eyre, it premiered at Hampstead Theatre, London, in September 2022.Trade Review'A classic family drama... written and directed with unimpeachable skill' * WhatsOnStage *'Well-crafted' * The Times *'An honourable, polished play with a fine grip on the contemporary moment' * Observer *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books James IV: Queen of the Fight
Book Synopsis'You're a wonder. You're a window into a wide world.' Scotland, 1504, seen fresh through the eyes of new arrivals Ellen and Anne, two Moorish women who were expected to take their place at a royal court… but not this one. Both women now have to fight to find and keep a place in the dazzling, dangerous world of the Scottish court of James IV. It's a world where war is never far away, words of love and promises of peace are not what they seem, and where poets might turn out to be more dangerous than any assassin. Rona Munro continues her journey through an uncharted period of Scottish history with James IV: Queen of the Fight, which was first presented in 2022 by Raw Material and Capital Theatres in association with National Theatre of Scotland, and directed by Laurie Sansom. It follows the spectacular success of Munro's plays about James I, II and III, which were first performed by National Theatre of Scotland, transferred to the National Theatre, London, and were named Best New Play at the Evening Standard Awards.Trade Review'Epic and intimate... abounds with curious, colourful characters... Scotland's answer to Shakespeare's cycle of history plays. The similarities are there in the scope of [Munro's] script, the cross-section of courtly society she presents and in the flashes of humour that illuminate the evening. Most of all, they are in the play's questing contemplation of royal and national identity, then and now... a fun and fascinating riposte to Shakespeare' * The Stage *'Explosive and chilling' * Guardian *'Passionate and timely... hilarious and shocking, with some killer put-downs... Munro skips so nimbly between tones and ideas that you barely notice the expansive ground she's managing to cover. In shining a bright new light on diversity in late medieval Scotland, it's a revelation. More than that, though, it reminds us of some profound questions about tolerance and power that are very much still with us today' * Arts Desk *'Ambitious and admirable... a history play that says a great deal about modern Scotland' * Financial Times *
£10.44
Nick Hern Books Notes from a Small Island
Book Synopsis'So, if you Americans already have cornflakes and Woolworths, what brings you to England?' It's 1973, and a young man from Des Moines, Iowa, has arrived on the ferry at Dover. He intends to conquer the whole of the island, like Caesar attempted before him. But Caesar didn't have to deal with counterpanes, kippers, Cadbury's Curly Wurlies, or Mrs Smegma the landlady's eccentric house rules. As Bill travels the length and breadth of Britain, through villages with names like Titsey and Little Dribbling, something strange starts to happen. Can it be true? Is he really starting to feel at home? Bill Bryson's smash-hit memoir Notes from a Small Island spent three years in The Sunday Times bestseller list, sold over two million copies, and was voted the book which best represents the UK. Tim Whitnall's hilarious stage adaptation was first produced at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, in 2023. Written for an ensemble cast of seven (but suitable for a cast of dozens), it will appeal to amateur drama groups as a glorious celebration of one of the nation's most beloved books, and a brilliant dissection of the enduring quirks of our small island.Trade Review'A comic pleasure... has a revue-like charm... abounds in nostalgia and warmth' * Telegraph *'A thoroughly enjoyable piece of theatre... With more than 80 characters and incorporating almost as many cities, Tim Whitnall's adaptation [is] a hugely ambitious project... it manages to capture the spirit of the novel... This tour of Britain has been lovingly recreated... with a strong, diverse ensemble, gradually building up a picture of Britain over the decades... hilarious' * The Stage *'A pilgrimage of delight... Delicious fun... wonderfully vivid cameos, to great comic effect and always affectionate rather than simply caricature' * WhatsOnStage *'A whirlwind of adventure... lovingly evokes images of Britain in times gone by... ignites an unexpected surge of patriotism' * West End Best Friend *
£999.99
Nick Hern Books Red Like Fruit
Book Synopsis
£10.44
Nick Hern Books The Gathered Leaves
Book Synopsis
£11.69
Nick Hern Books Clarkston
£10.44
Nick Hern Books Period Parrrty
£10.44
Everyman Beat Poets
Book SynopsisThis rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.
£10.80
Everyman Border Lines: Poems of Migration
Book SynopsisPoets from around the world give eloquent voice to the trials, hopes, rewards and losses of migration.Each year, millions join the ranks of intrepid migrants who have reshaped societies throughout history. Most recently, Middle Eastern and African people have risked their lives to reach safety in Europe, while central Americans have fled north seeking asylum. But whether they are refugees from war or violence, political exiles or immigrants in search of education, opportunity and freedom, these travellers share the challenge of adapting to being strangers in a strange land.Border Lines brings together more than a hundred poets representing more than sixty nations - Imtiaz Dharker, Ruth Padel, Bernadine Evaristo, Derek Walcott, Mahmoud Darwish, 'Dreadlock Alien', Dunya Mikhail and Hédi Kaddour, to name but a few. Their poems tell moving stories of displacement and new beginnings in the UK, France and Germany, Canada and the United States and challenge us to reexamine our own society from a new perspective.
£10.80
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Mortality
Book SynopsisThe sixth collection of this profound dialogue between two major poets from opposite sides of the world takes on mortality. Provoked by near fatal accidents, family crisis, rising temperatures and forest fires in Western Australia, these poems confront the reality of death, and celebrate the arts of mortality in exquitite dialogue.
£11.69
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Ground Provisions
£10.44
Birlinn General The Poems of Norman MacCaig
Book SynopsisThis collection of Norman MacCaig's poems is offered as the definitive edition of his work. It has been edited by his son, Ewen. A prolific writer, MacCaig left about 600 unpublished poems after his death; 99 have been selected for inclusion here. The aim of the selection process was to sustain the overall quality of the 1990 Collected Poems, which was compiled by the poet. Unusually, MacCaig's creativity did not decline with age, and most of the unpublished poems date from his seventies and early eighties, adding significantly to his published work from that period. Insight to the writer's life and work is provided in an appreciative introduction by author and critic Alan Taylor, focusing on MacCaig's life and times, and in a collection of MacCaig's words on his own and others' writing.Trade Review'Norman MacCaig is an indispensable poet, and his Collected Poems is a wonder-book which will give years of pleasure' -- Douglas Dunn'I have always loved the mixture of strictness and susceptibility in Norman MacCaig's work. It is an ongoing education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry . . . He means poetry to me' -- Seamus Heaney'Magisterial' * The Herald *'Deeply lyrical yet crystal clear in its language, MacCaig's poetry is a must-have' * Sunday Herald *
£22.50
Birlinn General The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman McCaig
Book SynopsisFirst published in 2010 to mark the centenary of Norman MacCaig’s birth, The Many Days aims to strike a balance between representing the much-loved poems that any reader would expect to find in a selected MacCaig, and other less familiar verses. The collection is arranged to show the range of the poet’s work in all its variety, from his love of nature and the landscape of the North West Highlands to his life in Edinburgh; from his care for animals and human friendship, to his moments of joy and grief, creative delight and occasional creative dread. Time and again MacCaig returns us to that good place we know as the world, but hardly ever seen so clearly as we do in these marvellous poems. Trade Review'He said so much in so few words… He’s perfect poetry to me' -- David Linklater * Boom Saloon *
£12.34
Alma Books Ltd The Complete Collected Poems
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£8.99
