Poetry Books

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Book SynopsisHow can you say goodbye to the love of your life?In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like to have to say goodbye.All I can do, in what remains of my brief time,is mention, to whoever cares to listen,that a woman once existed, who was kindand beautiful and brave, and I will not forgethow the world was altered, beyond recognition,when we met.Trade ReviewBeautiful and deeply moving . . . a story of courage and the persistence of hope even in the darkest times -- Allan Massie * * Scotsman * *The darkest elegies can soar to the stars, transforming grief into luminous beauty . . . tender, devastating . . . This is the most moving book I've read this year, as full of courage as grace -- Bel Mooney * * Daily Mail, Poetry of the Year * *Reflecting on life and love and death . . . this is a very powerful collection . . . incredibly rich -- Cathy Rentzenbrink * * Monocle * *Michel Faber addressed these love poems to his wife after her death. They are lucid, tender and wise, and they pulse with this fine writer's intelligence -- Ian McEwanA thing of tender, painful beauty * * Stylist * *I was touched by the spirit of these poems, their vulnerably sober and steady way of addressing grief -- Christopher ReidHeart-breaking, tender, intimate, harrowing . . . this is a stunning testimony to love -- Mary CostelloSearing yet beautiful -- Richard HollowayA painful little treasure -- Christopher Brookmyre

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Book Synopsis‘There is a place in the hippocampus the size of an almond called the amygdale in which is stored our emotional memory. Anything in our history that is a stimulus to our emotions resides there... The kernel of Catherine is there for the picking - I am searching for the correct tool like at Christmas when the nutcrackers have been misplaced. A hammer will shatter it.’ Catherine is in a post-traumatic state and Simon, an eminent psychiatrist, is employed to help her recover her memory in time to give evidence in the trial of Joshua James - a young man accused of raping her. As the date for the trial approaches, Simon becomes absorbed with the workings of his patient's brain, as he grapples with his preconceptions of truth, memory and perspective.Trade Review[The writing] has a needle sharp clarity as it probes the allure of funding the irrational and ecstatic in our ordinary, well-behaved lives * The Guardian *... forceful, bone-shaking writing... it packs quite a wallop * Time Out *

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Book SynopsisSir Hector Benbow invites Cherry, a pretty shop assistant, to dine. Arriving home, he finds not only Cherry but Mrs Frush, to whom he has rented Thark, his niece’s Norfolk house. Mrs Frush complains Thark is haunted. To distract Lady Benbow's attention from Cherry, he suggests everyone go to Thark, which lives up to its spine-chilling reputation. A wild night, sinister butler and plethora of romantic mix-ups add to the lively proceedings.Trade Reviewthis farcical comedy provides moments of unalloyed comic joy * Telegraph *

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Book Synopsis'This book rests on a lifetime’s thinking about history. It helps us see Shakespeare in “a more realistic light”.’ Times Literary Supplement The seventeenth century saw the brief flowering of tragic drama across Western Europe. And in the plays of William Shakespeare, this form of drama found its greatest exponent. These Tragedies, Kiernan argues, represented the artistic expression of a new social and political consciousness which permeated every aspect of life in this period. In this book, Kiernan sets out to rescue the Tragedies from the reductionist interpretations of mainstream literary criticism, by uncovering the wider historical context which shaped Shakespeare's writings. Opening with an overview of contemporary England, the development of the theatre, and a portrait of Shakespeare as a writer, Kiernan goes on to provide an in-depth analysis of eight of his Tragedies – from Julius Caesar to Coriolanus – drawing out their contrasts and recurring themes, and exploring their attitudes to monarchy, war, religion, philosophy, and changing relations between men and women. Featuring a new introduction by Terry Eagleton, this is an invaluable resource for those looking for a new perspective on Shakespeare's writings.Trade Review[A] splendid Marxist exploration of Shakespeare’s work... Victor Kiernan was a historian to rank with Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. His approach to Shakespeare is based on a deep historical understanding of the contradictions of the period, which makes him deeply sensitive to what the plays reveal. * International Socialism Journal *Kiernan writes with passion and precision on the social and economic contexts of Shakespeare’s plays. * Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama *This book rests on a lifetime’s thinking about history. It helps us see Shakespeare in “a more realistic light”. * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIntroduction by Terry Eagleton Foreword Part I: Programmatic Part II: Introductory 1. The Condition of England 2. The Theatre 3. Shakespeare and Tragedy 4. The Tragic Road 5. The Others Part III: The Plays 1. Julius Caeser (1598-99) 2. Hamlet (1600-01) 3. Othello (1603-04) 4. King Lear (1605-06) 5. Macbeth (1606) 6. Timon of Athens (1606-08) 7. Anthony and Cleopatra (1606-08) 8. Coriolanus (1608) Part IV: Tragic Themes 1. The Hero 2. Villains and Revengers 3. Man and Superman 4. War 5. Political Shadows 6. Women and Men 7. Religion and Philosophy 8. Endings and Beginnings

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020 A startlingly radical and surreal poetic journey, RENDANG takes the reader from West Sumatra to Planet Mongo via Gray's Inn Road, alighting on Indonesian artefacts, gentrification, and citizenry. RENDANG is an urgent comment on what it means to be a person now, a dissection of and love letter to the histories, places, and things that make us. Through adept and complex language play, a ludic voice, and a masterful command of form, Will Harris creates a poetry that charts the ambivalences, difficulties, and voices of our contemporary landscape.

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Book Synopsis'A brilliant and beautiful book which wrestles with the scope and ache of lineage, the origin and myth and making of ourselves' - Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions 'Unlike almost anything I've read - so alive it seems to squirm to the touch' - Will Harris, author of RENDANG, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection What does it mean to be a person of multitudinous countries and heritages? Amnion excavates migratory histories, colonialism and class, moving from England to France, the United States, Spain, Germany, Libya and the Philippines. In this chronicle of a family's history divided by geography and language, Stephanie Sy-Quia explores the reverberations that the actions of one generation can have on the next, through acts of bravery and resistance, great and small. Simultaneously mapping and undoing ideas of the self, everything here is contested. Undefinable in form, combining aspects of fiction, epic poetry and the lyric essay, and merging classical thought and contemporary life to show the joy in living and art, Amnion's broad intellect and undulating emotional landscape is a testament to the families we are given and those that we choose. A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION 'Kaleidoscopic... A powerful, hybrid song charged with ferocity and fragility' - the GuardianTrade ReviewAmnion is unlike almost anything I've read - so alive it seems to squirm to the touch. Couched as biography - with numerous family stories unspooling through time - it resists neat threads, continually unravelling and questioning itself [...] Here a non-white female artist comes of age, taking the European tradition and reshaping it to fit a polyglot, postcolonial experience. -- Will Harris, author of RENDANGA brilliant and beautiful book which wrestles with the scope and ache of lineage, the origin and myth and making of ourselves. -- Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the LionsSy-Quia's bold Künstlerroman mesmerisingly transports us across continents and through the longing of diasporas, arriving in England, a "deep bone-knowing country/Albion -- Sandeep Parmar, Books of the Year * New Statesman *Rich and fluid... brightened by a charming, breezy sense of humour * TLS *

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Book SynopsisThere are all types of bodies.If you're lucky you'll find someone whose skinis a canvas for the story of your life.Write well. Take care of the heartbeat behind it. Billy Letford's Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, 'poackets ful eh ma fingers', or stumbling from a bar 'like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free', the characters in Letford's poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. 'On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She's smoking a joint. It's not a surprise.' Letford's words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernity's unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, 'rotten with wonder', that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt's humble endurance. 'There's dignity there. Lay yourself open.'Trade Review'William Letford is his own man. His work is as utterly original and instantly recognisable as, say, Raymond Carver's or Billy Collins', though he's not like either. His last collection launched a brand new voice. This one, full of grit and tenderness, gives us many voices, places and stories.' Liz Lochhead; 'The pleasure I have gained from new Scottish genius William Letford's poems... will, I am confident, stay with me forever.' Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian; 'How Billy went from roofer to prize-winning poet' The Scotsman; 'While loving dirt is nothing new in poetry, Letford has his own unique take on it. Where he finds life blooming, he lives and lets live.' The Poetry School; 'William Letford belongs in the grand - and humble - tradition of Robert Burns. He has heart, a feeling for ordinary working people and enough Scottish spark to start a fire.' Kate Kellaway, The Observer

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Book SynopsisWinter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard's prize-winning sequence Lark & Merlin, an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of the poet's Northern-English homeland. Stotting clough and gill in sneaping winds, leaping burns by backlit larches, waves of sleek grass skiffing mist ...here, says the poet, 'the weather is overseer'. The borders between body and landscape, desire and object, blur in the mammal heat of pursuit, of a lover, of a self, insatiable and unresolvable. There follows a selection from the Fiends Fell Journals, a haibun or poetry-diary, composed over the decade Pickard lived alone on the wind-blown North Pennines. Short poems dedicated to friends and acerbic, satirical poems lend the second half of Winter Migrants a playful warmth and tonic mischief.As the collection draws to a close, the poems return to the familiar horizon of Solway Firth, the estuary 'where winter migrants gather in long black lines', and the world, cooled now both inside and out, quells: a curlew gifts its 'estuary echo'; gulls make a 'confetti flurry' above the shoreline; and clouds, once pale and flitting, pour purple and gold, 'a mercury whisper of tipped-in light'.' I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain.'Allen Ginsberg'Pickard uses local words and slang authentically. [...] But throughout his work he reaches into a need for a certain strenuous innocence, a resistance to intellectualising, another way of speaking directly to an audience.'Eric Mottram'In these days of technological wizardry it might be a safe guess to say poets have become rather thin on the ground. I mean to say that there seems to be a surplus of estate agents, bankers, media people, technocrats, lawyers, accountants etc...but the POET...the noble BARD appears to have almost slipped off the map.This is one reason why I'm terribly glad that Tom Pickard is alive and kicking, because in fact he is the living embodiment of "poetdom". [...] To try to describe Tom's poems would be pointless. They speak for themselves, in the most powerful and uniquely personal way.'Annie Lennox'With sharp vision Tom Pickard dissects his gut reaction and reminds us to appreciate the cool clear beauty of our own situation.'Paul McCartney'the linguistic ecstasy [...] slipped into the loneliness of the landscape the poet finds himself answering to instead of a lover [...] A lyric poet in profound correspondence with his home in the Pennines and with the erotic muse.'Ange Mlinko, PoetryTrade Review'I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain.' Allen Ginsberg;

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. In Farm by the Shore, Thomas A Clark continues his investigations into the landscape and culture of the Scottish highlands and islands. His brief notations and fragments embody the precarious balance between sea and land, wilderness and civilisation, while everything is played out in a context of weather. The spaces between the poems, which both link and divide them, are shades of quiet, indications of time or distance, or graphs of the vagaries of attention. In such a climate, to farm, or walk, or write, is to persist. You come to one thing and then another.Trade Review'With radical simplicity, Thomas A Clark's writing gives us the unfussy beauty of the natural world. There's not much that I ask of poetry that isn't present here.' - Matthew Welton

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Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinead Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon's horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.

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Book SynopsisGeorge Seferis's Complete Poems reissued as a Carcanet Classic. George Seferis is the great Greek poet of the twentieth century, a classic among classics. The formal and thematic versatility of his work, its decisively modern inflections, call Eliot's poems to mind: fastidious and expansive in equal measure. Like Eliot's deep-rooted Modernism, Seferis's never loses touch with the stones and inscriptions of the past. He writes for his and our time, poetically and politically alert: culture can free us or, misapplied, can trammel us. Aptly described as 'the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages', Seferis was for Peter Levi `one of the greatest writers in this century in any language. . . From Seferis it was possible to learn. . . what seriousness about poetry is.' And Archibald MacLeish wrote, 'if any contemporary poet can be said to be essential, Seferis is that poet, and this' - referring to an earlier edition of this book - 'is the true body of his work'.Trade Review'One of the greatest writers in this century in any language … From Seferis it was possible to learn … what seriousness about poetry is.' - Peter Levi

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Book SynopsisA collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak - bluntly, humorously - always alert for the fantastic. This is the first translation of Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.

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Book SynopsisIn this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity's engagement with the non-human. By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects - environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson - only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back. Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft's isolation and the world's irrepressible variety. Gloves on and gloves off, the poet's hands destroy and build, gather and scatter, caress and strike.Trade Review'Deceptively simple, quietly shrewd.' - Will Barrett, The Poetry School (on The Met Office Advises Caution)

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Book SynopsisSequel to the drama Llwyth. Aneurin has been trying to escape from his past but, unexpectedly, thanks to Grindr, he falls in love. When he and Dan decide to adopt a child, they feel fulfilled. But as he adapts to life as a father and turns away from his wild past, Aneurin''s darkest fears return.

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Book SynopsisAddressing the loss of the poet’s mother – as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death, and the natural world – Scenes from Life on Earth explores how we grieve and remember those we love. Simmonds continues to write through the prism of her faith, offering insights and wisdom on the circuit of life, of life’s endings, and the promise of reconciliation.Trade ReviewSome of her phrases are visceral. Others as delicate as silk. But they stick in our minds. Simmonds finds humour where we least expect it, beauty when we are looking into shadows. She observes life and death for us, as her imagination flies about her world - a world that becomes ours. Life could be so complicated as could death, but Simmonds simplifies it and welcomes us with open arms. Witty and charming. Her good grace, her good humour overcomes sadness. The humour draws us in and wraps its arms about us. -- Jon Wilkins * Everyone’s Reviewing *

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Book SynopsisJulian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is international in scope and tirelessly ludic. The poems engage with the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and personal loss. Stannard’s poems sing and weep in equal measure: a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre, mindful of lacerating loss and the redemptive power of strangeness, a special type of humour. They supply a feast of stories.

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Book SynopsisStephen Fry narrates this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel. Orphan Becky Sharp and wealthy Amelia Sedley are best friends at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies. On leaving school, ambitious, social-climbing Becky looks for a rich man to support her, while the sweet-natured Amelia meets her old friend Dobbin, who is instantly captivated. Becky takes a job in the service of Sir Pitt Crawley, and uses her charm to hook his dashing son. However, marriage to Captain Rawdon of the Guards does not provide the fortune she seeks. Meanwhile, Amelia rejects the faithful Dobbin and becomes engaged to the handsome George Osborne – but destiny has some shocks in store for her, too. As time goes by, the girls' fortunes rise and fall. War, financial disaster and the ruin of her reputation leave the resourceful Becky undaunted, but Amelia finds it harder to bear fate's blows. It will be many years before their story is played out, and their futures finally decided... William Makepeace Thackeray's classic satire of passion and ambition, first published in 1847 and 1848, is a deliciously ironic portrait of English society and its mores. This engaging 2004 radio production, published for the first time on audio, features a distinguished cast including Emma Fielding as Becky Sharp, Katy Cavanagh as Amelia and Toby Jones as Jos Sedley. Duration: 5 hours approx

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Book SynopsisHow do we love, trust and create in the aftermath of trauma? How do we name and speak that love?In this powerful new collection from acclaimed poet and novelist Elaine Feeney, images andmemory circle and recur, and the journey from pain towards a place of greater safety is far from linear. All the Good Things You Deserve juxtaposes violence, hurt and the tyranny of shame with love, beauty and the transformative possibilities of art.

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Book SynopsisJean Sprackland is celebrated for her tactile, transformative poetry which makes the miraculous seem familiar and the domestic other-worldly. Her new collection is tuned to new and deeper frequencies. ‘Green noise’ is the mid-frequency component of white noise – what some have called the background noise of the world – and these poems listen for what is audible, and available to be known and understood, and what is not. Each poem is an attempt at location – in time, in place, in language. Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life. Others go in search of fragments of a mythic and often brutal past: the lost haunts of childhood, abandoned villages, scraps of shared history which are only ever partially remembered. A physical relic or a mark on the landscape seems briefly to offer a portal, where a sounding is taken from present to past and back again. Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.Trade ReviewSprackland likes to read the sign language of the natural world… These poems are exact and well made, their lightness of touch often given drive by a fierce vocabulary. -- Peter Scupham * Literary Review *Jean Sprackland’s Green Noise has a tangy, earthy smell about it. She is a snooper on the natural world, a conspiratorial poet who upturns things to find out what’s odd about them and, almost incidentally, explores her own lostness as she goes. -- Michael Glover * The Tablet *

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Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE 2020**From the winner of the Costa Poetry AwardA lone martian returns to Earth. He leaves behind him a hardened survivalist culture, its muddled myths and songs, its continued abuse of the environment that sustains it. During this journey back to the now-broken and long-abandoned mother planet, the martian begins to consider his own uncertain origins, and his own future.Cut off from his people, the martian's story is that of the individual: his duty at odds with his desire; the race of which he's still a part playing always on his mind, as well as the race that once was. This is the story of what life becomes when stripped of all that makes it worth living - of what humans become when they lose their humanity.The Martian's Regress is a brilliant, provocative, often darkly comic work that explores what a fragile environment eventually makes of those who persist in tampering with it.Trade ReviewA rippling, impeccable lyricism that’s delicious to read aloud, and a down-to-earth, deadpan violence that recalls Simon Armitage… If you haven’t discovered Morgan, this weird, unsettling trip is the perfect introduction. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Daily Telegraph *Poetry Book of the Month* *Startling... What it does exceptionally well is make clear what ecological catastrophe might feel like as well as look like... What a joy to read and re-read and re-read. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *[J. O. Morgan] has quietly established himself as a gifted writer of the long poem... The Martian’s Regress is an imaginative leap… In portraying the variously hopeful, hopeless, comic and bleak ways of apparent aliens, Morgan brings us closer to ourselves. -- Ben Wilkinson * Guardian *The Martian’s Regress is a powerful long poem… An interesting and always accessible variation on a dystopian theme… The story remains taut and reverberates…[and] draws elements of humour even from dark places. * Bookmunch *

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Book Synopsis‘It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads.The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.Trade ReviewA deliciously playful reminder that the greatest show on the planet is what happens in the skies and all around us. -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian *Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology...in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the senses. -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *Superb. -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie *The weather comes at you, page after page, with an almighty and unstoppable roar of terrifying magnificence -- Michael Glover * Tablet *Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology of disturbances and interruptions, in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the sense. -- Joanna Kavenna * Literary Review *

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Book SynopsisArguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST******AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen'OBSERVER'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it.Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'Trade ReviewIn Balladz, Sharon Olds proves triumphantly evergreen: a woman who still steps across prudishly conventional lines as playfully as a child absorbed in French skipping... Remarkable. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *Perhaps the most accessible poet of her generation. * Telegraph *Her voice is easy and intimate, almost alarmingly charming, and so you will follow wherever she leads... Olds's artistic signature - what really makes Sharon Olds Sharon Olds - is a kind of aggressive intimacy: a willingness to write. * New York Times *Sharon Olds is a force of nature. It seems phenomenal that, at 81, she produced this collection about sex, love and the landscape of the body that seems to have been written with the fearlessness of youth. * Observer, *Books of the Year* *A brilliant and fearless poet. -- Joyce Carol Oates, author of Black WaterAlways fearlessly focused on the body and sensual experience, Olds getting older just finds new worlds of taboo to conquer... Astonishing. * Sunday Times *Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I'll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson, author of EphemeronDrawing on an unflinching interrogation of the self, these poems pulse with energy. * Guardian *Balladz showcases the range of Sharon Olds... The whole collection follows the fragility of life, the acceptance of aging, and the reckoning of America. * Electric Lit, *Favourite Poetry Collections of 2022* *

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Book SynopsisCharting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm Muller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on Muller's poems. The poems here become an "assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe..." and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.

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Book SynopsisAward-winning poetry pamphlet from the author of My Body Remembers.

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Book SynopsisIn this prize-winning, lyrical debut full collection, we encounter poetry that is both delicate and powerful. Yvonne Baker writes in the liminal space between the interior and exterior world, illuminating both with grace and precision.

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Book SynopsisGrief runs through these poems, most beginning with an epigraph from a diary entry by Emily Brontë, whose first loss was her mother when she was just three years old. We are in an interior world in this sequence, thoughts and feelings pouring through these elegant poems, but always anchored in the body, in the physical. It's in the daily round of kneading the bread that anger is transferred from body to dough till both are transformed; it's in the intricate feathery leaflets/sweet chrysanthemum-like scent' of yarrow that refuge is experienced; it's in the imagination of an island's sun' that dark thoughts (a crepe-winged crow') find respite. The poems move between the quiet daily life of a woman who loses those she loves over and over again and Emily Brontë as an extraordinary writer. And in that movement, emotions so earth-shattering, so veined with yearning, so unspeakable in their grief that they challenge death itself, find their form. Liliana Pasterska brings to life a soaring spirit in lucid images that leave us in awe.

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Book SynopsisThere is a density of imagery in Cusp that speaks to an exuberance of spirit and a lively mind. The poems sing off the page, create worlds and make leaps of imagination. We find ourselves unsure of what world we are in, yet always in safe hands. An original collection, full of perspectives that give us pause. We are asked to engage, to think, to upend expectations, to delve as deeply into our unconscious. We are asked to care. In this liminal space on the Cusp, it's a challenge we should rise to.

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Book SynopsisIn Rhondda Burning paintings and poems mirror one another, reflecting on life in the eponymous valley or in the area around Cardigan Bay, with its wide horizons. Havard looks at his native environments with the eyes of both one who belongs and a wanderer whose long association with Spain impressed on him the kinship between the sister arts and the benefits that come when poets and painters breathe the same air. Growing up in a steep-sided valley set Havard’s visual DNA. Ten miles daily to school and ten back, upstairs in a double-decker bus with outcrops of rock and slag flashing by, left its mark. Watching his father at a window, craning his neck to scour the mountain for a break in the spillaging mist… These images were processed slowly and this depth of observation shines through both image and text. Elegant, deft and vital, this collection is an embodiment of people, places and communities that invite us to listen and see.

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Book SynopsisConcrete Poetry : A 21st century Anthology presents a selective yet wide-ranging anthology of concrete poetry edited by curator Nancy Perloff and dedicated to singling out the most distinctive and significant works of this influential, interdisciplinary movement. Perloff's choices exemplify poets whom she believes are especially important, and who represent the real strengths of the movement. She includes works by the little-known Japanese concretists and the Wiener Gruppe - groups that, together with the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos and the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, have engaged with the most subtle possibilities of language itself - while also incorporating key examples from Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin and others and including contemporary contributions by Cia Rinne and Susan Howe. Perloff's anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that have formerly been dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts. This substantial new collection redefines what the concrete poetry movement means today.Trade Review'This new anthology is to be welcomed. It features a wide range of international poets who contributed to the movement, and displays prime examples of their poetic output in its original setting. Nancy Perloff offers personal commentaries on the individual poems, and provides a historical introduction which also conveys her belief in the enduring legacy of the movement.' - Stephen Bann CBE, Emeritus Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol, and editor of 'Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology' (1967) 'This wonderfully rich anthology reveals the experimentation and internationalism of concrete poetry and its continuing significance. Nancy Perloff's fresh selection, including the work of poets from Austria and Japan, offers scholarly insight alongside helpful notes to each poem.' - Andrew Nairne OBE, Director, Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge 'Perloff's lively style and tone in this book help to give new life to old forms, conveying something of the sense of adventure felt among those of us still young enough to remember being part of this post-war cultural movement. Written in a highly accessible way, with a fine choice of accompanying poems, it's a book to generate new interest as well as to inform existing initiates.' - Hansjoerg Mayer, poet, typographer and publisher 'This groundbreaking book finally legitimizes one of the most important - yet most neglected - strains of contemporary poetic practice. By rigorously framing concrete poetry within a critical discourse, Nancy Perloff forcefully positions concrete poetry as essential to understanding our digital world. More than a mere history or a survey, Concrete Poetry's landmark achievement signifies an essential reshuffling of the historical deck.' - Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Pennsylvania, founding editor of UbuWebTable of ContentsPREFACE INTRODUCTION AUGUSTO DE CAMPOS GERHARD RUEHM IAN HAMILTON FINLAY BRAZIL AUSTRIA JAPAN UNITED KINGDOM SWITZERLAND GERMANY, FRANCE UNITED STATES AND CANADA CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHIES REFERENCES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Book SynopsisNow available in paperback, Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works, including the little-known Japanese concretists, the Wiener Gruppe, Augusto de Campos, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Henri Chopin, Cia Rinne, Susan Howe and many others. Perloff's anthology presents individual poems, reproduced in their original languages, together with lively commentaries that explicate and contextualize the work, allowing readers to discover the intricacy of poems that some have dismissed as simple, even trivial, texts.Trade Review"Beautifully produced. . . . Whether you leap in and buy it or consult a library copy I think it's well worth your time. A book for poets, readers, and art lovers. Your own formally composed verses, on the still white page, ought to be ruffled, alarmed, and if not fully converted, at least have the 'look' of them excitingly challenged."-- "High Window Review" "Instead of simply reprising 'Concrete Poetry's Greatest Hits, ' Perloff's anthology covers a wide range of formal approaches and aesthetics, and we are introduced to work from throughout Europe and North America, as well as important poetry from Japan, and especially, Brazil, where the poets associated the Noigandres group, among other innovations, made poetry by 'pursuing an analogy between musical instruments and components of language.'"-- "California Review of Books" "Perloff's lively style and tone in this book help to give new life to old forms, conveying something of the sense of adventure felt among those of us still young enough to remember being part of this postwar cultural movement. Written in a highly accessible way, with a fine choice of accompanying poems, it's a book to generate new interest as well as to inform existing initiates."--Hansjoerg Mayer, poet, typographer, and publisher "Perloff's new anthology presents a wide sampling of what is known as concrete poetry. Through the book's rich introduction to the nearly 200 color and black-and-white illustrations and the commentary below each, readers learn much about this postmodernist poetic genre. . . . Recommended."-- "Choice" "This is an exciting and engaging summary of an important and still misunderstood field, the value of which lies in the intelligence and sensitivity of Perloff's close readings."-- "Burlington Contemporary" "This new anthology is to be welcomed. It features a wide range of international poets who contributed to the movement, and displays prime examples of their poetic output in its original setting. Perloff offers personal commentaries on the individual poems, and provides a historical introduction which also conveys her belief in the enduring legacy of the movement."--Stephen Bann CBE, emeritus professor of history of art, University of Bristol, editor of "Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology" "This wonderfully rich anthology reveals the experimentation and internationalism of concrete poetry and its continuing significance. Perloff's fresh selection, including the work of poets from Austria and Japan, offers scholarly insight alongside helpful notes to each poem."--Andrew Nairne OBE, director, Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge "What is undoubtedly valuable about the book is the way that it carefully arranges, in a beautifully printed hardback, a selection of concrete poetry's keystones. The first half of Perloff's selection triangulates Brazil, Austria and Scotland through the work of three key figures: Augusto de Campos, Gerhard Ruhm, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. For the anglophone reader, she glosses the foreign words involved, prising apart the heavy punning that sparked the concrete imagination."--Jeremy Noel-Tod "Times Literary Supplement" "Most of the poems in Concrete Poetry fill a full page (and sometimes two). Under each is Perloff's critical gloss, never more than a few sentences long, and often brilliant . . . These glosses by Perloff set a new higher standard for the critical reading of avant-garde poetry, whether concrete or visual. The two pioneering critics of avant-garde poetry, Dick Higgins and Bob Grumman, would have loved them, as do I."-- "Rain Taxi Review of Books" "Perloff's Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology offers a present-day perspective on the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s through to the 1970s. The curator takes us back to that defining period, which most scholars identify as the heyday of concretism, with the aim of establishing a sort of 'canon' of the most interesting and enduring contributors to the movement. Here is a body of work . . . which deserves a wider audience and greater critical attention."-- "Fortnightly Review" "This groundbreaking book finally legitimizes one of the most important--yet most neglected--strains of contemporary poetic practice. By rigorously framing concrete poetry within a critical discourse, Perloff forcefully positions concrete poetry as essential to understanding our digital world. More than a mere history or a survey, Concrete Poetry's landmark achievement signifies an essential reshuffling of the historical deck."--Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Pennsylvania, founding editor of UbuWebTable of ContentsAUTHOR'S NOTE PREFACE INTRODUCTION AUGUSTO DE CAMPOS GERHARD RUEHM IAN HAMILTON FINLAY BRAZIL AUSTRIA JAPAN UNITED KINGDOM SWITZERLAND GERMANY AND FRANCE UNITED STATES AND CANADA POSTLUDE BIOGRAPHIES REFERENCES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Book SynopsisEvery person has a story. Each has their own impressions of life and expressions of how they tell their story - mine is through poetry. In every experience may it be about the weather, a lesson learnt, a prayer or just a thought - I jot it down. I then put the words together - somehow they connect until it becomes a full story to tell. I usually write at night or at dawn - which explains the moon, the stars and wishing wells and the love of art of any form. Poetry is a hobby and I'm still learning the ropes of writing - learning to put words together like a proper writer should. The aspirations, inspirations and moments of each day - I learn. I discover more of ME and who I am as the journey continues. I discover who I have become. While my hobby keeps me on my toes, let me share this hobby (and this journey) with you. As you go along, please let me say "Thank You" for stepping into this journey with me ... the glimpse of who I am.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Recommendation. Bill Manhire's Wow opens with the voice of an extinct bird, a song from anciency, and takes us forward into the present and the darkening future of other extinctions. For Manhire, the reach of the lyric is long: it has the penetration of comedy, satire, the Jeremiad, but also the delicacy of minute detail and the rhythms of nature's comfort and hope, the promise of renewal. In the title poem the baby says 'Wow', and the wonder is real at the world and at language. But the world will have the last word. Writing of Manhire, Teju Cole declared, 'Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: he's unquestionably world-class. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.' Bill Manhire was New Zealand's first poet laureate. He established and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. This is the ninth of his Carcanet books in 30 years. They include a Selected and a Collected Poems.Trade Review'Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: he's unquestionably worldclass. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.' - Teju Cole , Boston Globe

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022. Awarded the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022. Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A Guardian Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Dublin) Book of the Year 2021. A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it. Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.'

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Ireland) Book of the Year 2021. Martina Evans's eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore. As happens often in her poems, new and invented experiences throw into relief Evans's own intensely lived experiences: the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes. And we revisit places her readers have encountered before, especially Burnfort, County Cork, with its bars and gossip and childhood complications, a subject of her lyrics. And, in the wake of the success of her 2018 book-length sequence, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, she gives us a new long poem, 'Mountainy Men', which re-imagines family trauma through the prism of classic American cinema... American Mules is two books and two or more worlds in one. Evans's English makes different musics in the imagining of Ireland, England and America, but the same wise, wry, inventive mouth speaks them all.Trade Review'A subtle, challenging writer with a wonderfully destructive approach to the pieties she describes.' - The Irish Times

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Book SynopsisSwimming Between Islands, Charlotte Eichler's first collection, has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other – despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies. 'Read Charlotte Eichler's poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they're astonishing,' said Laura Scott, responding to Eichler's poems in New Poetries VIII. Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised her first pamphlet as 'modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric'. Swimming Between Islands gathers this work with a substantial collection of new poems. In Eichler's poems, the first person singular is relational, social; it refuses to mark one consciousness neatly off from another. The poems’ perspective is often plural, a 'we' which is one minute a couple considering marriage, the next, childhood friends divining the future from ladybirds and four-leafed clovers. The reader is invited to come close, and then right into the centre of the poem; the book progresses towards ever wilder, more isolated places in Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, where 'we are found: / the gannets are white flares / hitting the water / under a fishbone sky'.Trade Review'Read Charlotte Eichler's poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they're astonishing,' - Laura Scott

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Book SynopsisThe probing essays collected in American Originality scrutinise the terms we use to think about recent American poetry, its antecedents (not just Whitman and Dickinson but Ovid, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Keats) and its future, questioning how we distinguish between work that is unique and work that is original, carefully delineating the allure of both 'shared traditions' and 'the cult of illogic'. Attentive always to risk and danger, Louise Glück illuminates how the poet at work moves between panic and gratitude, agony and resolution. Essays on specific writers and on the larger themes of American literature introduce the terms by which she reads and celebrates ten younger poets whose work she has advocated. Studded with brilliant insights into her own practice and the work of her contemporaries, this is an essential book for any interested reader of new poetry.Trade Review'Gluck speaks to our time in a voice that is onstage, but heard from the wings' - Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023. Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices.Trade Review'A stream of fun, juxtaposing disorientating pictures to form an abstract map of everything it means to fall in and out of love.' - Belinda Stiles, Stand Magazine; '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; 'Her poems burst with linguistic energy' - TLS

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Naming of the Bones touch on Christian values and work towards a significant faith, at the same time focusing on the wonders of an evolving cosmos. The poems delight in the things of the earth, suggesting a secular Christianity. They hope justice will overcome human greed and violence, while they assent to the seasons developing of our landscapes and the beauty and dangers of our place in creation. The sequence 'Like the Dewfall' works with the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen and his double piano masterpiece, 'Visions de l’Amen', a suite of seven pieces for two pianos, composed in 1943 during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Other poems connect the 'landscape, sea-scape and sky-scape' of the Achill of Deane's formative years to the 'wonders of the Christian faith' with a sacramental awareness that is a striking feature of many of the poems. Fiona Sampson wrote in the Financial Times, 'The poetry here is always beautiful, and always high stakes because infused with spirituality.' And the theologian Cyril O'Regan comments, 'if Deane is not a prophetic poet by most modern standards – that is, we have to strain to hear denunciation – nonetheless, precisely as a poet he understands himself to be a witness: Poetry tells the truth that we would not tell, lifts the veil on the human condition that we would prefer not to be lifted.'Trade Review'a true cosmic poetry for all of us, in all time.' - Patricia McCarthy

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Wales Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023. A Marginal Sea is written from the vantage point of Ynys Mon/Anglesey, which is both on the edge of Wales and in a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean - the island is imagined here as a site of archipelagic connection with other places and histories, where the spaces of dream and digital technology are interwoven with the everyday. Skoulding's poems take their readers into new worlds: we come to terms with the oystercatcher's 'muscle of belonging'; we chart the cross-cultural coordinates of 'Newborough Warren with Map of Havana' ('and it's this way to the Malecon /to look out over the Menai Strait'); elegy and song overlap in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember: 'it's my voice // deepening with others that won't let themselves / be buried.' ('Anecdote for the Birds'). A Marginal Sea is inventive, exhilarating in its soundscapes, and brilliantly awake to otherness, in language, and in the animal and natural world.Trade Review'Zoe Skoulding's magisterial new book A Marginal Sea offers us a pentathlon of innovative forms in which we find expressionist typography, haibun, calendrical prognostications, a poignant soliloquy by the bird-haunted Odysseus, and striking passages of sheer lyric beauty. This is a book that makes you feel, as it lengthens your wingspan, glad to be alive.' - Forrest Gander

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2023 BBC Poetry Extra's Book of the Month August 2023 This, Lisa Kelly's second collection, responds to the repression of British Sign Language (BSL) as its occasion and inspiration. Kelly develops the subject through extended sequences which attend to mushrooms and fungi, lifeforms that develop in secret, unnoticed, unappreciated, yet whose existence enriches everyday life. What can such hidden others teach us - if we attune all our senses?Trade Review'First thing I love about Lisa Kelly's work is her incredible imagination - she tells the truth (about oralism, discrimination, injustice) but tells it in a way that's so lyrical it's instantly memorable. Which is to say: Kelly invents her own style. The second thing I love about The House of the Interpreter is that this manifesto for D/deaf culture, shimmering with music and lyric abandon, is unafraid of discovery...' - Ilya Kaminsky; 'Kelly's words are a sensory joy. We are taken through time, space and dimensions - almost quantum leaping through her observations, whilst she remains rooted to the Earth and attunes "to life's vibrations" and nature.' - Sophie Stone; 'In Kelly's second collection the speaker delves deeper into the nuances of Deaf culture, finding compelling connections (and networks) between the outer and inner worlds of deafness, BSL and between-ness.' - Raymond Antrobus; 'Her's is a magic that turns language into deep, moving, restless flesh.' - Jason Allen-Paisant

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Highland Book Prize 2023. In her first Carcanet collection, Lesley Harrison looks north to the sea, the heat of the land at her back. In inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison meditates on whale hunts, lost children, cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia.Trade Review'A book of poems, a book of voices. A book that is also a map, an almanac, a report - of histories, of stories, of lands and waters. A book of poems made and arranged in such a way as to create harbours and enclosures: the contained order of narrative brought to a wild scattering of events; a careful arrangement of whale bones on a gallery floor to tell the tale of that great singing creature now stilled to silence.' - Kirsty Gunn; 'This is a book of precise and uncompromisingly beautiful writing about northern place: Orkney, Iceland, far seas of the imagination. A few words, brilliant and disquieting in choice and cadence, transport the reader to distant islands and their weather. As you read, you are alone in a remote stone house at nightfall, with the wind rising from the sea below the windows.' - Peter Davidson; 'A great poem consists of alternate measures of words and silence; and in the greatest work the silence is as important as the words to which it gave birth. Lesley Harrison is a writer of consistent brilliance, who with just a handful of words can conjure song from silence. These are warnings, elegies and celebrations... Kitchen Music is a meticulously crafted Northern Hymnal - a brilliantly conceived orison to the flora and fauna of the higher latitudes. This collection is essential reading for anyone keen to understand why poetry remains a unique force for change on this planet.' - John Glenday

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