Poetry Books

Book SynopsisIn this long awaited second collection, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature.

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Book SynopsisThe Glimmer is a meditation on the time-span of life illuminated by many voices. In an artists’ colony in Mexico, a taxidermist tends animals in their after-life, contemplating what remains of us after death. Among the artists she encounters are a painter of miniatures, a war photographer, a light artist, a ghazal singer, and dancers from Tanzteater Wuppertal, as they reflect on the impulse to make work and meaning in a world where value is increasingly monetised. Within the extended narrative are self-contained poems ranging in form from syllabics and ghazals to OULIPO-inspired anagram poems, drawing on found text and verbatim speech to bring a choir of voices to life. The title work is followed by two elegies. The Glimmer is Shazea Quraishi’s second full-length book of poetry, following her debut, The Art of Scratching.Trade ReviewConstraint, precision and technical mastery characterise this compelling and generous narrative of collective artistic endeavour. If the ‘form is the measure of the obsession’ then this collection is a lifelong obsession with the truth-telling nature of art. -- Sasha Dugdale * on The Glimmer *Shazea Quraishi’s first collection, The Art of Scratching, reveals the poet’s flair for re-imagining and feminising historical texts, and for inventing her own edgy fables of family life and childhood. -- Carol Rumens * Poem of the Week, The Guardian *There is an intriguing collision between the archaeological and the lyrical in Shazea Quraishi’s series of poems, The Courtesans Reply… The props and rituals bestow on these poems an exotic otherness but the emotions they explore are timeless. -- Stephen Knight * Ten *Table of ContentsThe Glimmer 7 Elegy 93 How it begins 97 Notes & acknowledgements 101

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Book SynopsisGhost River invites readers to stare down blue-mouthed crevasses, venture into old growth forests, and peer beneath the floorboards of ancestral homesteads. In this lyrical and intimate portrait of America’s Pacific Northwest, wilderness and home are interwoven. But this is not Arcadia. Deep time is punctured by strip malls and freeways, wildfires and dams. Questioning the influence of the past on the present, the central sequence reimagines this landscape from the perspective of the British explorer, George Vancouver, who charted its waterways on an expedition to locate the illusive Northwest Passage. In their passage between America and England and the terrain of early motherhood, these poems of loss and renewal explore what it is to be home. Born and raised in America’s Washington state, Kris Johnson moved to the UK in 2007. Ghost River is her first book-length collection.Trade ReviewKris Johnson's Ghost River is a book full of water – from the beautiful and dangerous lakes from the landscape of childhood to the waterways mapped by George Vancouver in the late 1700s. Mapping – of space, place and connection – is abundant in these poems, which explore family history, birth and motherhood with extraordinary and tender precision of language. The natural world rises through Johnson's writing, both in real manifestations and as metaphor, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest forms the backbone of this collection, which is both wonderful and full of wonder. -- Hannah LoweKris Johnson offers a mythic sense of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, fuelled by a complex sense of belonging – and of the feminine dimension of place which lends her work a subtly erotic and immersive quality. The poems encompass both the lyric and the dramatic, and she has an exceptional ear for cadence and timing. While she renews and recalibrates the imaginative world we may glimpse in the work of James Wright, Roethke and Annie Dillard, she is also clearly possessed of an individual vision and song. What most excites me is the unity of thought, feeling and musicality. -- Sean O'BrienTable of Contents11 Bodies of Water 13 Rainier 14 Lake Americana 15 Yellow Jackets 16 Skinny Dip 17 The Desiccation 19 What I meant when I said goodnight 20 The Doe 22 He Is Risen 23 Nisqually Delta Blue 24 Ghost River 27 Blue PASSAGE 35 Theoretical Geographers 36 V is for Vancouver 37 The principled process of deduction 38 Church 39 Vancouver, dreaming 40 Pseudotsuga menziesii 41 Kulshan 42 Rainier 43 Having considered with impartiality the excellencies & deficiencies of the land 44 The burial rituals of the inhabitants 45 In the name of, and for, His Britannic Majesty, His Heirs and successors 46 Your America 47 Passage 48 The death of George Vancouver 49 I dream I am held 50 Indivisible 51 In the Discovery sloop of war 52 George Vancouver, you are not my father 55 Myth 56 We Have Kissed the Four-legged Gods Goodnight 57 Lunar Distances 59 Corona 60 Cottonwood 61 The Time of Lace 62 American Mustard 63 Cast of an Irish Deer 64 None of us is where we ought to be 65 As ash falls on my mother’s garden 66 What you hold 67 Tectonics 68 Tahoma 69 Northwest Passage 71 Gather 72 Notes

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Book SynopsisSerious, comic, brave, cowardly, engaged, disengaged, urgent, unurgent, chattering chiffchaff, talking horses, unpretentious, pretentious, all of God’s creatures are here. There’s also an almost – but not quite – dialogue between the poems and the laconic (and sometimes furious) musings of the passages which punctuate them. There are a series of fairytale poems, and others which give unfettered voice to Marcie, a character who has appeared in Mark Waldron's previous books. Behind the humour and playfulness, there is always something deeply unmeant, meant.Trade ReviewI get nervous for Mark Waldron's readers – I can hear them begin to laugh a little, becoming too comfortable too quickly, while reading a poem of his and I want to warn them. I want to yell at them to get out of the way, tell them that what's really happening is that they are about to get their hearts broken. Poor monkeys. -- Matthew DickmanClearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something. -- Sean O’Brien * Guardian, on Meanwhile Trees *His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language…. And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book. -- Carol Rumens * Observer, Poetry Book of the Month, on Meanwhile, Trees *He has since been publishing books steadily every few years and his latest, Sweet, Like Rinky-Dink, continues to develop his distinctive voice…. [an] accomplished and entertaining collection that showcases Waldron’s mercurial poetic voice. -- Kit Toda * TLS *Table of Contents11 Panic Room 13 Hippopotami at the Water Hotel 16 Swapping Clothes with a Friend 18 How a Poem Works 19 (Implacable doom-trod sky notwithstanding 21 A Feather in My Cap 23 Tender is the born 25 A Trap or a Net eleven grim poems 29 Blossom 30 The Garrulous Horse 31 The Bitten Ball 33 A Goodly Fly 34 gone off 35 The Traumatised Fox 38 The Woodman Prince 40 Fungi 42 The Piece of String 46 Little Men 48 The Princess and the Pea 51 Is it Honey 53 Burn Down 55 Contingency 57 In the wayward place 60 When you were dead 63 Puppetry 66 The Trees 67 No kind of cow 69 Quids in 71 We listened to the cows 73 I adore 74 I miss I am not a bad bird 77 Marcie says 79 Marcie says 80 Marcie says 81 Marcie says 82 Marcie says 85 Bluebottle Modus Operandi 88 Cadavre Exquis 89 Turkey Shoot 91 All your life is out 93 Henry 95 A Poisonous Midnight 98 Hôtel des Champignons 104 Crocodeelio 106 I don’t know 108 Bacon and Egg

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Book SynopsisSoul Feast is a companion anthology to Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times. This is a book to keep by the bedside or to keep with you when travelling.

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Book SynopsisBrenda Shaughnessy is one of America's most audacious and thrilling poets. In Tanya she weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems.

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Book SynopsisIn Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment.

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Book SynopsisMonster is a bold and lyrical exploration of the Black female body as a site of oppression and resistance. At its heart is a study of the world of Sarah Baartman, aka the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was displayed in freak shows in 19th-century Europe.

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Book SynopsisWhat is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? asks Kate Potts in this book. What can the imposter phenomenon a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another?

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Book SynopsisIn Imagined Sons, poet Carrie Etter reflects on the experience of a birthmother who gave up her son for adoption when she was seventeen.

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Book SynopsisNamed after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato?s themes are manifold but particularly focus on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm. In the narrative of transformations that unfold, the invocation of Erato also carries with it a sense of errata and erasure. As stories and ideas are repeated, and recurring imagery -- of fires, bees, birds ? is continually reframed, we are asked to replay, rethink, rename. How do we step out from the ?perpetual loop? of trauma? And how do we find a way of processing painful change? Here, bewilderment in the face of ongoing historical tragedy is countered by the Rees-Jones?s close and careful attention to immediate or remembered experience, and the importance of the body, whether this is lying awake at night with a sleepless child, the felling of a backyard tree, walking in Paris observing the encampments of refugees, or the dreamlike conversation she has with the radio about bombs and the use of drones. Erato includes elegies for family members and close friends, including an impressive and moving long poem ?I.M.?. Also included here is the autobiographical ?Caprice? in which Rees-Jones explores with musical abandon ?the scribble-mess? of self, and the ?grainy, atomized emotion coursing through in middle age?.Throughout Erato there is a compelling sense of continued curiosity, of thoughtful questioning, of questing for truths. The author?s background in the classics, her immersion in modern poetry as well as a deep interest in modern art, all combine to influence the essential quality of this work. Erato is Deryn Rees-Jones? fifth collection of poetry for Seren.

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Book SynopsisRachael Clyne?s You?ll Never Be Anyone Elsepresents a voice that is direct and assured, and that considers what it takes to reconcile being different. Through her alter-ego ?Girl Golem?, Clyne explores Jewish and lesbian identity, tracing childhood and coming-of-age through to experiences of ageing.

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Book Synopsis'ZHE' (pronounced zee) is a gender-neutral pronoun – not he or she. Traveling from idyllic Harare, Zimbabwe to London’s gritty inner city; from the playfulness of childhood to the pain of adolescence; from the desire for forgiveness to self-acceptance, this humorous yet haunting drama encompasses the multiplicity of our cultural, gender and sexual identities and takes a fresh look at what makes us who we are.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021. Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.Trade Review'Bird is a master of bleak humour interlaced with wry social commentary' - Poetry London; 'Bird is irrepressible; she simply explodes with poetry. The work erupts, spring-loaded, funny, sad, deadly - you don't know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word BANG on it.' - Simon Armitage; 'Caroline Bird puts us on the inside looking deeper in, under the glittering skin to the place where laughter begins, where mothers are children, where people feel pain and speak in tongues, where tongues are knives and 'Someone still has to stay here and die'.' - Imtiaz Dharker

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Book SynopsisWhat is a city for? How long do the vibrations persist from an economic shock wave, or a guitar chord? Is anything really permanent? The ‘meanwhile site’ is a place where change becomes a design feature, and Pete Green’s remarkable debut collection commemorates the transient and the marginal – from the emergency housing made of shipping containers to crumbling coastal paths and sea stacks; from the villages left isolated by railway closures to the predicament of the new generations disenfranchised by the march of neoliberalism. With the temporary comes hope of renewal, though, and alternatives to a disrupted, rootless culture might emerge in a Neolithic stone circle, or a circle of friends. Keenly observed, deft and humane, these are poems for our age of precarity.

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Book SynopsisThe Death Poems: Songs, Visons, Meditations explores death in a range of forms – celebratory, visionary and contemplatively, using subject matter as varied as the dust heaps of remains that accumulated in 19th century London to the environmentally toxic ship graveyards at Alang in India. Formally dazzling, Beirne’s complex and textured meditations are sobering, spiritual and, in the end, sustaining.

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Book SynopsisDeparting from Virgil’s Eclogues, The Pastoraclasm is an urgent environmental address to humans, nature and vegetable gardens. During pandemic lockdowns, poet John Kinsella realised that he would have to garden not because he enjoys it but because his family, who live ‘in the bush, would need whatever he could grow. Fierce summers, fire danger, and only having access to rainwater tank water — refusing to drain the aquifer further by using one of the two bores at ‘Jam Tree Gully’, reinforced the realisation that gardening needs to be a careful negotiation with the limitations of time, place and conditions of presence. What developed was a set of dialogues with the garden, and with the endemic plants and animals that surrounded it. Searching for a decolonising antipastoral ‘eclogue’, the poet continues his decades-long practice of investigating the nature of ‘pastoral’ and its failure to translate into the Australian environment/s. Writing to a poet in Wales, Kinsella said: ‘We’re in regional lockdown here, and trying to grow veggies in drought conditions. Lot of silvereyes, thornbills and gerygones out there today – overcast, which is unusual at the moment (still very hot), and that has them vigorous with hope, I guess... but no rain predicted. On emergency water supplies now.’ In this cycle of eco-eclogues, a counter-pastoral of responsibility emerges – one that acknowledges the toxic impact of colonialism, and which seeks to address human rapacity through challenging consumerism and industrialism and offering an ‘alternative’ way of living. As garden and gardener, soul and self, all speak with each other, they are conscious of how close fire and other catastrophes are, and together they try to evoke a healing and a path through to justice for the biosphere. Known for his wide variety of poetic approaches and techniques, this collection is very much about utterance, place and a belief that there are no easy garden metaphors, that garden’s are also spaces of responsibility.

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Book SynopsisDavid Briggs' new collection offers a midlife counterpart to the Oedipus complex exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality.

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Book Synopsis* A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2016*'When we climb aloneen cordée feminine,we are magicians of the Alps –we make the routes we followdisappear'The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen Mort’s position as one of the finest young poets at work today.Trade ReviewA highly intelligent, yet very accessible collection and an interesting addition to the ongoing discussion of where our culture is with gender identity… There is something which feels very necessary about this collection and there are moments throughout where it feels like a worthy successor to The Feminine Gospels and The World’s Wife. * Huffington Post *Wonderfully playful... In the crowded field of mountain literature, this precise, sparky and constantly surprising book more than holds its own. -- Roger Cox * Scotsman *A perfect response to the chauvinism face by the earliest female mountaineers… This precise, sparky and constantly surprising book more than holds its own. -- Roger Cox * Yorkshire Post *Superb young Sheffield poet. -- Horatia Harrod * Financial Times *Mort’s assurance keeps us on edge, but trustful. One could say she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Her style is spare, showing bone without too much flesh… This is a strong, fierce collection. -- Peter Scupham * Literary Review *

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Book SynopsisA fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons, unravelling the millennia of myth woven around girls. 'A sensual exploration of two female archetypes' Guardian'One of our most gifted poets ... This is tender and exquisite poetry' Mona Arshi, author of Small HandsIn Girl, Ruth Padel presents a triptych of interlocking sequences. A moving retelling of the Christian story transforms the Virgin Mary into a girl in a Primark T-shirt, facing a life shaped by divine will. Unearthed from the Cretan labyrinth, a prehistoric Snake Goddess is reshaped at the hands of a male archaeologist. Between these evocative figures, myth turns personal. Delicately crafted lyrics, sometimes taking adventurous shapes, explore snapshots from the poet's own life blended with archetypes from India, European fairy tale, ancient Greece and Urban Dictionary: girl as soul, girl as creative energy, girl as the sacred power of nature, vulnerable but unstoppable. Listening to the snowmelt / of the patriarchy', Girl is an urgent, revelatory work for today. **A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation**'Dazzling' Kim Moore, author of All the Men I Never Married'Beautiful' Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvedge

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Book SynopsisJay Hulme is an award-winning transgender poet, performer, educator and speaker. In late 2019, his fascination with old church buildings turned into a life-changing encounter with the God he had never believed in, and he was baptised in the Anglican church. In this new poetry collection, Jay details his journey through faith and baptism during an unprecedented world-wide pandemic. As he finds God in the ruined factories and polluted canals of his home city, Jonah is heckled over etymology, angels appear in tube stations, and Jesus sits atop a multi-story car park. Cathedrals are trans, trans people are cathedrals, and amidst it all God reaches out to meet us exactly where we are. Jay’s poetry explores belief in the modern world and offers a perspective on queer faith that will appeal not only to Christians, but young members of the LGBT+ community who are interested in faith but unsure of where to start.Trade Review'Jay's work not only gives voice and movement to his own story but also to our collective experience. It also, at times, made me laugh my tea down my nose.' -- Kate Bottley'The living God works miracles today, and touches people today. As the pandemic filled the world, Jay found life everywhere, in God. He celebrates life everywhere, and he looks plainly and unafraid at death, and he lives in the mystery of things. These will be the gifts of this book to you. Life everywhere, the miraculous life of the living God who will touch you, too, through this man's words.' -- Paul Bayes

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Book SynopsisI like a dog at my feet when I read,whatever his size or whatever his breed.A dog now and then that will nuzzle my handAs though I were the greatest of men in the land,And trying to tell me it's pleasant to beOn such intimate terms with a fellow like me.'The Dog' by Edgar A. GuestThe relationship between us humans and our dogs has inspired many of the world's greatest poets. Sometimes funny, sometimes moving, the poems in this beautifully illustrated anthology are a true celebration of the faithful, affectionate, delightful dog. The perfect gift for dog lovers.

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Book SynopsisLove, like the stars, is an eternal theme that poets have cherished since humans first expressed their emotions in writing thousands of years ago.Whether depicting love that is eternal, romantic, sensual, or tragically doomed, poets have captured our most profound emotions in their verses, expressing feelings we often find hard to put into words. This collection features poems that delve into every facet of this powerful emotion, including some of the most renowned love poems ever written.The Pocket Love Poems consists of a moving and timeless collection, including the work of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickenson, John Donne, and Christina Rossetti.Gemini PocketsFrom little guides to soothe your soul to all-access passes to the lives of pop icons, and from quizzes and puzzles for literature lovers to books on food, nature, fashion and more, Gemini Pockets are the perfect fit for your life and interests.

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Book SynopsisBlending theatre, storytelling and killer moves, spoken word artist Maria Ferguson explores her relationship with the F-word (food) with the help of her first love (dance). Questioning how we all look at size, Fat Girls Don’t Dance takes us in to the world of performance, where three meals a day is up for compromise and skinny sells well. NB: There will be cakeTrade ReviewStunning. * Ed Fest Mag ????? *Candid and disarming. * The Stage *Funny... painfully sad at times... incredibly relatable with a lot of vulnerability. * Emma Gannon *

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Book SynopsisLucid, lyrical and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness.Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 'For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**Trade ReviewThe absence of rest, and its physical and mental impacts, is made tangible... Burnside deftly provides some light within this gloaming. -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty. -- Cressida Connolly * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *A masterful storyteller... I'm in safe hands whenever I pick up a book by him. -- Jen Campbell * The Times, on ASHLAND & VINE *As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye... Never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, on STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE *Few writers manage distinction in even one form. John Burnside has achieved it in two [poetry and fiction]... A Burnside narrative stays in the mind like a half-broken dream; it's often hard to pin down just why it is so compelling... 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, on ASHLAND & VINE and STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE *

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Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021***A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world. The poems in Ransom display all the lyrical beauty and metaphysical ambition for which his work is acclaimed, but with a new urgency, a ragged edge to what the Independent described as his 'dazzling elegance'. At the heart of this new book are three powerful sequences - one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude - that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical. The idea of 'ransom' is turned and turned again, poem by poem, seen through the lenses of personal grief and loss, cinematic scenes of kidnap and release, narratives of incarnation and atonement. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.Trade ReviewWonderfully atmospheric. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Daily Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisDISCOVER THE AMAZING POWER OF POETRY TO MAKE EVEN THE MOST F**KED UP TIMES FEEL BETTERA beautiful little book of short, simple, classic and contemporary poems to dip into, to make life feel better.From Shakespeare and Shelley to Lemn Sissay and Kate Tempest, poets have always been the best at showing us we're not alone, however sh*t things might seem.Funny, reflective, romantic and life-affirming - here is an anthology of poems to remind you to keep on looking at the stars: from that first 'what the f*ck' moment to empowering you to do something about this sh*t and ultimately realising that life is still beautiful after all.Rediscover old favourites and find some new treasures - you might be surprised just how much poetry can help. For fans of The Poetry Pharmacy, The Reading Cure and The Emergency Poet.

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Book SynopsisIncluding such gems as Why Are You in The Shower With Me? Our Love is Tested in Traffic and What Time Should We Leave for the Airport? John Kenney's poems are packed with funny, wry observations about the reality of life once the initial shine of a relationship has dulled. From parental gripes to dwindling sex lives; from less-than-romantic gifts to irritating personal habits, it's all covered.____________________Are you in the mood?I am.Let's put the kids down.Have a light dinner.Shower.Maybe not drink so much.And do that thing I would rather do with you than with anyone else.Lie in bed and look at our iPhones.

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Book SynopsisOpening a conversation with paintings and sculptures from the 16th Century to the present, this second collection by Nigel Hutchinson displays all his hallmark wit and insight. Artists as diverse and Brueghel (elder and younger), Lautrec, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth and Cezanne find themselves taking a skewed but searching view of the points at which life and art rub together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes with greater friction. Humane, wry, always spirited, Do Not Enter Alarmed Area is a testament to the power of both words and images.

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Book SynopsisResponding to the fragile borders between climate change and mental health to evolve into conversations around trauma, change, care and the natural world, The Chalk Butterfly explores images of home and the paradoxes around our simultaneous care and un-care for nature and language. Working backwards through the butterfly's life cycle, each phase examines the tipping points, vanishing or fractured boundaries between our environments (internal and external), reflecting on the damaging ways we step on both the earth and humanity. Yet in these precise, exquisitely realised prose poems there is also celebration of the overwhelming urge to adapt and help life thrive, a turning away from the despair that would accept we might 'just about manage' or even fail in favour of moments of transformation.Trade ReviewJane Monson is a dedicated, gifted practitioner of the prose poem as impressively cinematic montage. The Chalk Butterfly carries us on poignant winds through disruptions of the external as internal, and vice versa-how what lies within us is the key to saving creatures whose lives we're enmeshed with, 'whose lessening measures our story and the ways we refuse to live'; and how we might instead imagine 'what we could be inside the colours of open hands'. - Khairani Barokka; Each of Jane Monson's quietly immersive prose-poems is a light cast on the different facet of a vulnerable, interdependent world. Inanimate things are as charged with sensation and volition as the human minds and bodies that respond, sometimes painfully, to their disorder. This writing leaves us with no choice but to see more clearly; it enables us to care a little more. - Philip Gross; These extraordinarily vivid prose poems take us deep inside the tangle of our relationships and our disturbed yet resilient interior lives, while tracing their narrative out into the failed politics of our time and back again. Images, characters, fragments of stories, recur so that the whole reads together as a kind of gripping thriller. In writing that is sometimes reminiscent of Anna Kavan, The Chalk Butterfly sweeps us irresistibly into those situations and states of mind in which we so often find ourselves damaged and nightmarishly trapped, yet this collection also startles us throughout into realising moments of hope, tenderness and light. Situations which may seem at first to have no connection prove to be intimately and vitally related. It is only by recognition and reconciliation of these connections that we may be able to 'defy boundaries and survive'. - Ian Seed; Jane Monson is a witness poet, looking and having to look, painstakingly counterpointing our wilful blindness. The collection itself keeps pace with chronology, structured around the stages of the lifecycle of the butterfly - only here the predictable sequence we thought we knew is told backwards and eclipsed by new irregularities and uncertainties. In its preoccupation with blindness, windows, touch and breakdown, I'm reminded of Tacita Dean's landscape film of Antigone in the wilderness, leading the blind and bandaged Oedipus between two stories. Likewise, these poems are a narrative of little exposures only revealing the distance they've taken you once the whole is realised. These poems may be about the climate breakdown, but they are invested in the human despite our damaging, destructive ways. - Alice Willitts; Reading Jane Monson’s The Chalk Butterfly is like entering a strange and beautiful world where language takes on alchemical properties and butterflies tattoo human skin with their pollen. These poems are full of walls, but rather than barriers, the walls act as invitations to leverage the ingenuity of Monson’s imagination and the narrative possibilities of the prose poem to transcend them. I found myself enthralled. — Donna Stonecipher

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Book SynopsisTonally beautiful with a quality that bridges exterior and interior worlds, Light Still, Light Turning is full of exquisite phrases and lucid images. Shifting with ease from lyrical narrative poems to contemplative pieces that never become abstract, Yvonne Baker writes with a light touch, that belies the skill and control at work in every poem. There is not a false note here. Form and content support one another and we are immersed in a world that aches and delights and carries us on its rhythms of loss and love and its bittersweet acknowledgment of change. This is a finely-honed collection, at once elegant and searching.

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Book SynopsisAfterlives sees John Barnie engaging with images once again, as he did in his book A Year of Flowers. Here, Barnie deploys his skills of perception to respond to a group of paintings in Peter Lord’s art collection. These are images that have been familiar to Barnie for years, yet he approaches them with characteristic freshness and humanity. There are no mere descriptions here. Rather, Barnie inhabits the images, speaking from within or engaging with their subjects as a persona just outside the frame. And as he does so, we are taken on a narrative journey, gaining insight into not only how poetry and art interrogate one another, but how each image, peered at ‘through thick cracking varnish’, reveals layers of history and the mores that accrete into hierarchies, prejudices, injustices and the inability to read one another across cultural gaps. The poems in Afterlives reverberate with the ghosts from the pictures, whose roles are still being played out in the divisive echo-chambers of today’s insiders and outsiders. Rich with social commentary, delivered with wit, and sometimes a hint of mischief, there is a serious intent at work here: the voice of those who know ‘whose tragedy they are in’—‘their own’. And who know also that they: ‘will defy anything / that gets in their way’.Trade ReviewIt is rare that I read a poetry volume at one sitting. But I did so with this one. Indeed, in its delicacy and wit, and in Barnie’s deeply appealing pleasure in his book’s subject-matter—something that radiates from it throughout—I am left wondering if A Year of Flowers might just be the best piece of work that he has given us so far—Matthew Jarvis, reviewing A Year of Flowers in Poetry Wales

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Book SynopsisAn Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. In Collected Poems one of Ireland's best-loved contemporary poets brings together poems from her six principal collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (1907), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019) - more than three decades' work - a poetry of individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery. The immediacy of our response to the beauty of our exploited planet inspire many of Moya Cannon's poems. The perfection of very early cave art she sees as testimony to the centrality of art in our evolution as humans. Geology, archaeology, history and music figure as gateways to a deeper understanding of our relationship with our past and the natural world. 'Whatever inspiration is,' she quotes Wislawa Szymborska as saying, 'it is born from a continuous 'I don't know',' from the confusion of adolescence to the very different confusions of adult life. There are dark confusions and those which are luminous and filled with joy - desperation and rapture are their extremes. Each poem makes a space in which the readers share experience and discover something uniquely their own as well. She regards herself as fortunate in having developed in a culture rapidly changing, in which the poetries of the world were becoming available, in which the situation of women was radically changing. She was at once a beneficiary and an agent of change and these poems retain that enabling agency.Trade Review'These wonderful poems lay down not just a landscape and a history, but a music which is all their own, through which the reader can enter a unique dialogue between elegy and celebration.' - Eavan Boland

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Book SynopsisSalvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. The citation declares, 'his lyrical poetry with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time'. Jack Bevan's authoritative translation of Quasimodo life work fills a great gap in our knowledge of twentieth-century European poetry. 'The poetry is textured like shot silk, yet the elegance and syntactical lucidity with which Jack Bevan has worked to bring these poems to English readers enables them to stand as poems in their own right,' wrote Peter Scupham of Bevan's translation of Quasimodo's last poems, Debit and Credit. Quasimodo's strong and passionate writing continues to testify to the human – and inhuman – realities which have created our modern world. The Italian critic Giuliano Dego wrote, 'To bear witness to man's history in all the urgency of a particular time and place, and to teach the lesson of courage, this has been Quasimodo’s poetic task.'

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Book SynopsisMarina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile. When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to her lover Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.Trade Review'Tsvetaeva's simple, clean language follows the track of the nerves. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false. Reading her poems one feels cleansed and sharpened.' - Ted Hughes;'Marina Tsvetaeva was the first of the modern Russian poets whose greatness really came clear to me, thanks to these translations. Feinstein has performed the first, indispensable task of a great translator: she has captured a voice.' - Alan Williamson, Threepenny Review

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024. The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023. A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year. Jason Allen-Paisant's debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, 'Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past - and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.' The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us. Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.Trade Review'This indispensable collection explores Shakespeare's pernicious archetype, observing how "the Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body". Yet Allen-Paisant makes the historical impasse an occasion for deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families... Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance.' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian;'In Jason Allen-Paisant's Self-Portrait as Othello we take a deep dive not only into the formation of a literary self but also into a compelling narrative of the body and its visual history. Brilliantly insightful and strikingly lyrical, it accrues significant emotional heft in its movements from Othello to self and back. But underlying it all is a rich seam of commentary on Othello's subtexts that makes you constantly reconsider who might be the exploiter and who might be the exploited. Exhilarating - I recommend it highly.' - Roger Robinson;'A rich and twisty linguistic collection that finely balances the inner and outer space of black embodiment... a fine, fine accomplishment.' - Raymond Antrobus;'Part I of Self-Portrait as Othello is a tour de force of language slippage in a journey from Jamaica to Paris (the allure of 'French' and Europe, focalising later in the book around Venice). In a fusing of modes of irony and almost painful recollection, Allen-Paisant lets language suggest language, just as conditions suggest conditions... His method is to know language, remake it, call it out, shift into different streams of articulation.' - John Kinsella, Poetry Society

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation 2023. A Sunday Times Book of the Year. In Child Ballad, David Wheatley's sixth collection, he explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and by wolves. He maps a rich territory of rivers, trees and mountains. Also present are histories, some evidenced, some no longer visible and yet to be inferred. Stylistically, Child Ballad is multifaceted, drawing on influences from the Scottish ballad tradition and the Gaelic bards, on French symbolism and on the American Objectivists. Wheatley is an Irish poet living and teaching in Scotland: as a cultural corridor, his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, different traditions held in dynamic balance and fusion. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he does, Wheatley develops an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alert to questions of memory and loss, communicating the ache of the here and now. He sees through the eyes of young children and the world looks very different in its gifts and threats. Wheatley provides intimate descriptions of parenthood as well as of a Northern Scottish natural world. He deploys an ambitious range of poetic styles and forms. His poems put deep roots down into history and geology, and with translation into other languages. Themes of migration and politics are never far away. Child Ballad sings of midlife, of resettlement and marriage as well as of parenthood.

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Book SynopsisThe highly anticipated second collection from the winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022.

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Book SynopsisFrank Kuppner's new book consists of three hilarious, philosophical, existential sequences: The Liberating Vertigo of a Final Passage of Meaning, Not Quite the Greatest Story Never Told, and Not Quite a False Fresh Start.

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