Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA SUNDAY TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF THE YEARIn this blistering anthology, poet, editor and DJ Kayo Chingonyi brings together a selection of exceptional Black British poets. This is his dream mixtape featuring a cross-generational span of current poets extending and inhabiting the spirits of the ancestors. Following in the tread of Lemn Sissay's The Fire People, More Fiya aims to lodge in the mind of its readers for a lifetime, radiating to touch the lives of many.Including work from: Jason Allen-Paisant, Raymond Antrobus, Janette Ayachi, Dean Atta, Malika Booker, Eric Ngalle Charles, Dzifa Benson, Inua Ellams, Samatar Elmi, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Joseph, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Vanessa Kisuule, Rachel Long, Adam Lowe, Nick Makoha, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Momtaza Mehri, Bridget Minamore, Selina Nwulu, Gboyega Odubanjo, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Kim Squirrell, Warsan Shire, Rommi Smith, Yomi Sode, Degna Stone, Keisha Thompson, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Warda Yassin, Belinda ZhawiTrade ReviewBrings together a wonderful array of poets whose linguistic flair and wide-ranging perspectives excite, inspire and challenge in equal measure -- BERNARDINE EVARISTO * * Guardian * *Kayo Chingonyi's celebratory selection here has something for everyone * * Sunday Times * *[P]assionately curated . . . The collection is rich for its array of imagery, lyricism and rhythm which brings to life ancestral homelands throughout the African continent and Caribbean isles while also highlighting what it means to be Black and British in the 21st century . . . More Fiya serves as a powerful reminder of what is possible when communities are given the opportunity to champion and celebrate themselves outside the confines of homogeneous understanding of poetrics -- Andrés Ordorica * * The Skinny * *

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Book SynopsisA joyous, gender-flipped retelling of Edmond Rostand's classic play. A big-hearted, irreverent queer-as-hell rom-com first performed by Melbourne Theatre Company, and a hit at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring to Park Theatre, London.

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Book SynopsisA hilarious and heartfelt play set in West Cumbria, about first loves, forging identities and the wild, wild hearts of teenage boys. First performed at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, in 2024.

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Book SynopsisAn explosive play about the fiendishly charismatic icon of children's literature, Roald Dahl. Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2024 and staged in the West End in 2025. Winner of the Olivier and Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Play.

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Book SynopsisByron concealed himself in various literary disguises, a process he called mobility. In this study of influences on Byron's verse and Byron's European impact, I explore these borrowings and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading. At issue is the very concept of romantic poetic voice. Framing himself in the tradition of the Irish yet cosmopolitan Thomas Moore, Byron adopted continental guises, imitating both Italian writers and political heroes, such as Dante, Machiavelli, and Tasso. In establishing an Italian identity, Byron relied upon the Italian writers he translated (Pulci, Dante), Thomas Moore's Fudge Family in Paris, and Shelley's Julian and Maddalo, as well as Goethe's Faust. This Europeanization of Byron should not conceal the fact that Byron adopted poses from his predecessors, such as Walter Scott, in order to fashion himself as a Scottish poet who also happened to be English. Byron became the writers he read: Moore, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, Foscolo, Lady Morgan, and Madame de Stael. Those who imitated Byron, particularly Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz, became the best interpreters of his literary example, and explained what it meant to be a Harold in Muscovite Cloak, or a Polish Byron, to be both delimited and emancipated by Byron's example.

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Book SynopsisFrom Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter – a marvellous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s ‘‘Love Misinterpreted’’ to Noël Coward’s ‘‘Mad About the Boy,’’ from May Swenson’s ‘‘Symmetrical Companion’’ to Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘‘Looking at Each Other,’’ these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

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Book SynopsisEating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people’s lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Poems of Food and Drink abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations – in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plath’s ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in ‘Blackberrying’ to D. H. Lawrence’s lush celebration of ‘Figs’, from the civilized comfort of Noël Coward’s ‘Something on a Tray’ to the salacious provocation of Swift’s ‘Oysters’, from Li Po on ‘Drinking Alone’ to Baudelaire on ‘The Soul of the Wine’, and from Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’, Poems of Food and Drink serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.

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Book SynopsisFrom tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example: "Don't you fall now- / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Brontë's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

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Book SynopsisA remarkably diverse treasury of literary celebrations, Books and Libraries is sure to take pride of place on the shelves of the book-obsessed. Books have long captured the imagination of readers everywhere, commanding their love, earning their veneration. For Emily Dickinson they are frigates that 'take us Lands away'; for Wordsworth they are 'a substantial world, both pure and good'; Alberto Rios calls them 'the deli offerings of civilization itself'. This affection extends to the hallowed gathering places of the written word: libraries where one can best hear "a choir of authors murmuring inside their books," as Billy Collins has it; bookshops, especially second-hand ones, 'too small for the worlds they hold, where words that sing you to sleep, stories that stalk your dreams, open like windows in a wall' (Gillian Clarke). The poets collected here include Catullus, Horace, T'ao Ch'ien, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Marvell, Blake, Pope and Keats; more recent luminaries include Brecht, Cavafy, Gabriela Mistral, Dylan Thomas, Iku Takenaka, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Stevenson, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, John Burnside and Ian McMillan.

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Book SynopsisThese Spanish-English poems focus on the island nature of Venezuela's Caribbean coast. Its rich observation of physical island-scapes is realised in imagery that strikes both with its freshness and rightness, and its speculative concern with the nature of islands in the Western imagination challenges us to new points of view.

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Book SynopsisWhen the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga – Lensky’s fiancée – Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own making. Eugene Onegin – presented here in a sparkling translation by Roger Clarke, along with extensive notes and commentary – was the founding text of modern Russian literature, marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its predecessors and introducing the quintessentially Russian hero and heroine, which would remain the archetypes for novelists throughout the nineteenth century.Trade ReviewPushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, is the book that has most influenced my life. -- Vikram Seth

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Book SynopsisUniversally known for his groundbreaking prose – especially for the monumental novel Ulysses and its depictions of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century – James Joyce started off as a writer of lyrical poetry, a genre which he never abandoned in his lifetime and which informs and enriches the rest of his literary production. This volume, which includes Joyce’s first published book, Chamber Music, as well as his later collection Pomes Penyeach and several other uncollected poems, reveals a lesser-known facet of the great modernist’s artistic career and a glimpse into his poetical sensibility.Trade ReviewHis writing is not about something; it is that something itself. -- Samuel Beckett

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Book Synopsis‘Here is the city that we live in Notice that the city that we live in is alive Analyse our city and you’ll find that our city even has bodily features Our city’s organs function like any living creature Our city is a living creature And if you’re wise enough, you’ll know not all of us are blood cells… Some of us are viruses.’ An epic, lyrical journey through the pulsating heart and underground soul of inner-city London. Misty is an inventive blend of gig theatre, spoken word, live art and direct address, confronting the assumptions and expectations underpinning the act of telling a story. The play premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2018, performed by the author and directed by Omar Elerian. It transferred to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End in September 2018. Misty won Best Performance Piece at the 2019 Off-West End Awards. ‘Kene has a thrilling flair for language’ The Times on good dog ‘One of Britain’s most exciting young playwrights’ GuardianTrade Review'The hot topics of race and cultural stereotyping fizz and dart about this lively and innovative piece of work… surely destined to be a big popular hit' * Evening Standard *'Kene has a poetic gift and a powerful presence… his form of performance poetry is at its most vivid in his vision of modern London with its loft extensions, pavement traffic jams and yummy mummies creating "pramageddon"' * Guardian *'Brilliantly conceived... an articulate critique of humanity's internal intolerances, as the audience is entangled into a two-hour reflection on their own preconceived perceptions of others' * Broadway World *'Inventive, subversive, slightly surreal… it's bracing to see the question of who gets to tell stories – and how they might be circumscribed – tackled head-on here, with wit, exuberance and visual flair' * Time Out *'Pulsing and potent… at once a polemic, an essay and a poem' * The Stage *'Cuts to the heart of a pressing cultural debate… as fiercely thought as it is elegantly structured' * WhatsOnStage *'Witty, hard-hitting… a powerful meditation on how we tell stories and a raw, beautiful Odyssey through the heart of London' * The Arts Desk *

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Book SynopsisFrom Troy to Arcadia, on the high road to elsewhere and the low road to thereabouts, boarding a ferry 'cross the Mersey and hiking the Jurassic Coast, skating away on Duddingston Loch and dynamiting the frozen rivers of Siberia, lured to the summit and drawn to the edge - Alasdair Paterson plots a course at the cruising speed of the flaneur through the ruins of empires, dreams and good intentions. Though pavement cafes still play a part...

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Book SynopsisWinner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2008, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise. Her first book, "Almanacs", was a traveller's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. "Nigh-No-Place" is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world. Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across Canada with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway line from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of gravel road, ending in the Arctic oiltowns of Inuvik and Tuktoyuktuk. But it is in Shetland that she becomes acutely aware of her own voice - her fluency and tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath. "Nigh-No-Place" reflects the breadth of ground she's covered. 'Ten-minute Break Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory. 'Paternoster' is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse. 'Prenatal Polar Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded by tundra.Trade Review'A zestful poet of the road, a beat poet of the upper latitudes, Jen Hadfield conjures poems and prose-poems of great spirit and imaginative daring from the northern landscapes. Lively, youthful and full of the joy of language, Almanacs is the most refreshing debut for ages' - Kathleen Jamie. 'There's barely a poem that does not contain a treasurably offbeat image...the vivid exuberance of her language wins you over' - Sarah Crown, Guardian. 'Fresh, original, perceptive' - Anne Donovan, Scotsman (Books of the Year) 'A quick mind abroad alone in the ever-changing natural landscape. The language country-rooted, specific, of clear observation: a sophisticated, refreshing country brew'- Tom Leonard.

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Book SynopsisThe play that gave birth to the smash-hit film - a wonderful comedy about growing up in multiracial Salford. The six Khan children, entangled in arranged marriages and bell-bottoms, are trying to find their way growing up in 1970s Salford. They are all caught between their Pakistani father's insistence on Asian traditions, their English mother's laissez-faire attitude, and their own wish to become citizens of the modern world. Ayub Khan Din's play East is East was first performed at Birmingham Repertory Studio Theatre in October 1996 in a co-production by Tamasha Theatre Company, the Royal Court Theatre Company and Birmingham Repertory Company, before transferring to the Royal Court, London. It was later adapted into a feature film, with a screenplay by the author, that became one of the most successful British films ever made. East is East won the John Whiting Award in 1996 and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 1998.Trade Review'A bona fide classic' * Guardian *'First plays don't come much better than this... full of intelligence, irresistible laughter and serious promise' * Sunday Times *'A hugely entertaining, highly involving, emotionally tender, politically inflamed family drama' * Time Out *'An explosion of a show that feels surprisingly, joyously, fresh, a quarter of a century on' * Guardian (2021) *'Khan Din's play is bitterly and wickedly funny... Its explorations of identity, race, relationships, power, gender dynamics and familial aspiration ensure it still has as much to say to audiences of 2021 as it did 25 years ago' * Whatsonstage (2021) *

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Book SynopsisA tried-and-tested stage adaptation of Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel for a Knave, about a troubled young boy who finds and trains a kestrel. Billy, a disaffected young boy, has problems at school and at home: he's neglected by his mother, beaten by his brother and bullied on all sides. He adopts a fledgling kestrel and treats it with all the tenderness he has never known. Slowly, he begins to see for the first time what he could achieve – if only he tried. Lawrence Till's adaptation of Barry Hines' 1968 novel retains its gritty charm and popular staying power. Kes was first performed at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1999.Trade Review'Laurence Till's skilful adaptation... offers a series of sure-fire scenes... Hines' story retains an undeniable emotional pull' * Independent *'Sensitively scripted and stunningly staged, Kes is essentially about a community which fails its young' * The Times *

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Book SynopsisA darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks' play Topdog/Underdog tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future. Topdog/Underdog was first performed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York, in 2001. Its UK premiere was at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2003.Trade Review'[The] speech is quick and rhythmically suprising. Parks' dialogue is funny and distinctive and black... a great play, well worthy of its Pulitzer Prize' * Financial Times *'A vibrant, gritty, lyrical play full of striking moments' * The Times *'Exhilarating, funny but also devastatingly sad, presenting a vivid microcosm of both family relationships and the black experience in America today' * Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisRichard Eyre's high-profile adaptation of Ibsen's famous 'problem play' about a headstrong woman's determination to control those around her. Arriving home after an extended honeymoon, Hedda struggles with an existence that is, for her, devoid of excitement and enchantment. Filled with a passion for life that cannot be confined by her marriage or 'perfect home', Hedda strives to find a way to fulfil her desires by manipulating those around her. Richard Eyre's adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler was premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2005. Included in this volume is an introduction to the play by Richard Eyre.Trade Review'A triumph... Eyre's dialogue is forceful, clear, with just enough idiomatic dash' * Observer *'Hedda is often regarded as the female Hamlet. But Eyre reminds us that it is a great polyphonic play as well as a commanding title-role' * Guardian *'Hedda Gabler still has the power to shock' * Independent on Sunday *'Thrilling... re-administers, as if for the first time, the devastating shock and the sheer affront of Ibsen's drama' * Independent *

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Book SynopsisA complete and annotated edition of Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, including the sonnets, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece".

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Book SynopsisThere are many anthologies of love poems but friendship has proved a more elusive theme. Yet it is no less important. Like the Everyman Love Poems and Erotic Poems, to which it is a companion, the present selection draws on the literature of many periods and languages to illuminate aspects of friendship, ranging from social acquaintance through personal devotion to estrangement and antipathy. The tone ranges from comic to elegiac and there is certainly something here for everyone. The volume is divided thmatically into sections: What are Friends?; The Pleasure of Friendship; Good Neibours; Social Life; Dumb Chums; Portraits; Poets Together; Strangers; Absent Friends and Looking BackTable of ContentsWhat are friends?;the pleasures of friendship; good neighbours; social life; dumb chums; portraits; poets together; strangers; absent friends; looking back.

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Book SynopsisMany cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

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Book SynopsisDistinguished editor T.W. Craik makes an independent and balanced examination of the many textual problems of Henry V, providing many new emendations. "Craik's commentary is particularly ample and detailed, with careful attention to the play's language, textual problems, the interpretation of stage directions, and Shakespeare's handling of source materials...he builds up a distinct though traditionalist reading which, critically sympathetic and undogmatic, finds the play at once simple and subtle." John Jowett, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Survey, 1997 'With the exceptionally thorough Arden notes, and the extensive editorial coverage, including recent stage history, this Henry V is the one to have.'Times Higher Education Supplement'Craik's commentary is exemplary in its thorough treatment of critical concerns, glossaries and explanations, theatrical matters, and source material.'Barry Gaines, University of New Mexico, Shakespeare Quarterly

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Book SynopsisBEFORE THEM, WE is an anthology that explores the lives of migrant grandparents and elders from Africa, unpacking the intimate details of their lives before the families they went on to establish: who they loved, where and why they migrated, why they had families. A collaborative act of sharing by poets of African descent, bringing their personal stories into conversation with each other, BEFORE THEM, WE is a multi-layered meditation on how we engage with the practice of memory. Featuring a mix of commissioned writers, and poets who responded to a call-out, ranging from Gen Z to mature voices, BEFORE THEM, WE's 24 contributors include: multi-disciplinary artist, poet and playwright Dzifa Benson; Nigerian-born, award-winning poet, playwright and performer Inua Ellams; Zimbabwean literary and sound artist Belinda Zhawi; queer non-binary Nigerian/Togolese writer and performer Michelle Tiwo; Ghanaian-British producer and writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes, who has won acclaim as a children's author, poet, broadcaster and novelist; Hodan Yusuf, a writer, actress, multimedia journalist and trainer in conflict resolution; Somali digital cultural archivist and independent researcher Ibrahim Hirsi; and Ola Elhassan, a Sudanese poet and electrical engineer.

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

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Book SynopsisPoetry Book Society Recommended Translation Summer 2010Arc 'Visible Poets' translation series, no. 29My soul is like these threads of spider silk tensed criss-cross between two apple treesRooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Kristiina Ehin's poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader's own. These poems, beautifully translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and selected from her most recent collection, were written over two years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son."Here is a generous, honest imagination: visceral, shamanistic and wise. Kristiina Ehin is a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirts and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life. There is a refreshing lightness and originality to her poems, which are nonetheless poignant. She is able to express strong emotions without being sentimental. Her work has truly haunted me; it has entered the deepest layer of my being with its rare combination of directness and subtle nuances, ancient traditions and modernity." Sujata Bhatt"Ehin's poems are deeply personal, but not in a way that excludes the reader: quite the opposite, they draw the reader in, so that Ehin's life feels like our own, a fascinating glimpse into a different, simpler life lived close to nature. Reading these poems is like a holiday of the best kind: eye-opening, relaxing and different. Ehin's work is rooted in Estonian folk tradition, and music permeates both the forms and the language. I particularly relished her poems about parenthood, for their beauty and tenderness."StrideKristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She received an M. A. in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from Tartu University in 2004. She has published five volumes of poetry in her native Estonia and has won a number of prizes there, including Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for her fourth volume, written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. She has also published a book of short stories and has written a play as well. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007. Her other books in English translation are Põletades pimedust – Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, 2009), A Priceless Nest (short stories, Oleander Press, 2009), Päevaseiskaja – South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik – New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, 2007). She is often invited to take part in international arts and literary festivals and her work, poetry and prose, appears regularly in English translation in leading Irish and British literary journals. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. Kristiina's reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival (July 2010) was one of the highlights of the Festival.Ilmar Lehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin's The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English. His own poetry has appeared in Estonian and Irish literary journals.Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, and grew up in Pune, India and in the United States. To date, she has published seven collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. The recipient of numerous awards, such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and the Cholmondeley Award, her latest collection, Pure Lizard, was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize and received the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a frequent guest at literary festivals throughout the world. Currently, she lives in Germany with her family.

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Book SynopsisThe Emma Press Book of Beasts rustles and roars with the voices of animals and humans, co-existing on Earth with varying degrees of harmony. A scorpion appears in a shower; a deer jumps in front of a car. A swarm of snowfleas seethes through leaf litter; children bait a gorilla at the zoo. The poems in this anthology examine hierarchy, herds, power, and the price we pay for belonging.

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

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Book SynopsisFrom our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other. As we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others: cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries.The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In ‘Approaching Sixty’, the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair: ‘so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist’. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.Trade ReviewBurnside can describe the material world with astonishing deftness… but here, as so often in his writing, the observable facts undergo a series of transformations: into a meditation on separateness, from this to the end of a relationship, and then on to the nature of our eat-or-be-eaten world… Musical and memorable, this is echt Burnside. He is the poet who more than any other writing today sees the material world and the world of thought and ideas as two sides of the most fragile of membranes. Few could make the colour blue such a sensuous symbol of slippages of atmosphere or mood… Still Life teems with the variety of the world… If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both. -- Fiona Sampson * New Statesman *In John Burnside’s latest collection of poetry Still Life with Feeding Snake… nothing stays still for very long and every image wrought onto the page is alight with life and movement… His signature style and themes are present in his latest work Still Life with Feeding Snake, along with a dose of humour… Burnside blends words the way a baker kneads dough – he rolls them up, scrunches them together, stretches a string of them to breaking point then folds them into each other to create something else entirely, all the while never moving from that same meditative spot where a little flour has been sprinkled across the table… A soulful and meditative collection, Still Life with Feeding Snake is already a 2017 literary highlight. -- India Doyle * Culture Trip *As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye… The joy of his poems – and part of what makes them moving – is that he does know and never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *These poems haul you back to the time when you first realized how alone you were (and are), all the time wondering what to become and how. Burnside’s genius is to makes some sense of this pain, for himself and for the reader. This is poetry acting as a scalpel, cutting the heart in order to heal. -- Bel Mooney * Mail *The world is such a mess. These poems concentrate on stillness, on time that isn’t haste. They deliver a zen remedy of calm alert. -- Jeanette Winterson * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisJacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

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Book SynopsisCaldebroc introduces a range of characters from the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders and beyond, including the Brontes at their naughtiest, and crazed millionaires who try to ban January and pimp their filing cabinets. The title is an old English word for a Manchester district and the book includes a sequence about a friend murdered there in 2013. “Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried histories, public and private… Channelling influences such as Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project uniquely his own to rework history in these ‘measures against outrages’. These are formidable sequences, scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.” Scott Thurston “It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives poetic language and, in doing so, uses the full artistic palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.” James Byrne

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Book Synopsis

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