Search results for ""carcanet press ltd""

Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Best First Collection 2017. Raking Light is Eric Langley's debut collection of poems. Characterised by his rigorous fascination with language's latent etymologies and semantic layers, Langley's poems take their cue from the art conservation technique of 'raking light', in which an oblique beam is thrown across the surface of a picture to expose its textures and overlays. Under raked light, paint reveals its damage and deterioration, its craquelure and canvas-warp, and discloses a backstory of abandoned intentions. With his attentiveness to resonance and echo, Langley picks up on lost meanings and buried contradictions in language, probing its abandoned significances. Finding traces of obscured sense or inarticulacy, his verse picks at words to test their efficacy and authenticity, feeling out their substance, proving their worth. These are poems - elegies, love lyrics - concerned with miscommunication, with intentions gone astray, with loss and the uncertainties inherent in interaction. They are excited and exciting, defusing and detonating by turns the 'hectic honeyed hand-grenades / in amongst your alphabets'.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakanyova, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.

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Written in the wake of Ireland's 2008 economic collapse, Thomas McCarthy's Pandemonium moves between lament and protest in search of a meaningful response in language. Many of the poems were written during a period of retreat along Ireland's south-west coast, a landscape that imbues McCarthy's politics with geological intensity. The Atlantic horizon 'where the sun lies down in the west to die' is mirrored inland by corruption and rot, a modern Ireland beset, in the poet's eyes, by financial and moral pandemonium. McCarthy's subtle satiric wit and understated lyricism preserve raw outrage as historical document. His poems register the moral ire of many during a pivotal era of Irish history, leading with the poet's only weapon, the word - 'the ink trail that pain makes on the page'.

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Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as 'a superb act of restoration'. Borges himself declared, 'Four of the best things in America are Whitman's Leaves, Melville's Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes - ' Mexico in My Heart is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.

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Dubbed 'an immaculate survivor' by Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth has remained steadfastly independent of literary fashions and cliques throughout a poetic career spanning fifty years. As When is the first selection of Raworth's writing to address the full range of his work, from the first poem he ever shared with anyone outside his family, 'You Were Wearing Blue', to his most recently published poem, 'Surfing the Permafrost through Methane Flares'. The book includes prose work and notational pieces that were intentionally left out of his Collected Poems (2003), along with poems that were only published in little magazines or as ephemeral cards and broadsides. Some pieces appear in correct, definitive versions for the first time.

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Peter Scupham's eleventh collection brings his customary elegance and skill to bear on themes as diverse as the "Battle of Arras", "Kilvert's Diary", and an unexpected encounter with his parents on holiday from the underworld. These parables and truthful fictions explore meeting points and intersections between 'is' and 'was', or 'is' and 'might be'. The centre of the book is a substantial sequence, "The Northern Line", where the poet's double, in his old guise as a National Serviceman, takes a journey by ghost train through the 1950s, that hinge of the century when the trouble of great wars gave way to the troubles of a patchwork peace.

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Ros Barber's second book forms a meditation on human loss; it is a more personal and autobiographical collection than her first, described by Neil Rollinson as 'an honest, unflinching and hugely satisfying debut'. Sarah Law described her as 'a 'traditional' contemporary poet along the lines of Larkin' and it is Barber's sure hand with rhyme and meter that gives the hard material of these poems (both personal losses and those experienced through others) their steady focus and makes them so readable. Throughout, the poetry remains strong, thoughtful and refreshing.

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Inspired by tombstones and their inscriptions, Mak Dizdar's rich and haunting poems in "Stone Sleeper", his most famous work, are a journey into the mysterious heart of medieval Bosnia. The poems form a three-way dialogue between the modern poet, the Christian heretics awaiting Judgement Day beneath their enigmatically-carved tombstones, and the heretic-hunters. Beneath the local and temporal, Dizdar explores universal issues: the value of resistance, though it might be futile; of faith, though it might be illusory; and, of life, though it ends in death. Francis R Jones' inventive and beautiful translations convey his deep understanding of Dizdar's purpose. In addition a penetrating analysis of "Stone Sleeper"'s historical, religious and spiritual background is given by the distinguished scholar Rusmir Mahmutaehajia, whose book "Across the Water: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar" is published by Fordham University Press.

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Anthony Hecht described Donald Justice as 'among other things, the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.' This memorial volume of his complete poetry testifies to his subtle and enduring brilliance. With painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance he endeavoured to make the local views which his titles often evoke - "Bus Stop", "Men at Forty", "Dance Lessons of the Thirties" - part of the literary heritage from which he so often took solace and inspiration.

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"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta - In these and other pieces, Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflections. She evokes the mirrors and doorways, dreams and night-time journeys that transform the familiar: entrances into a different reality. "Over" explores liminal places where ocean meets land, land drops to ravine, lives intersect in piazzas. The poems cross thresholds between what is finished and what is 'not over yet', between present and past and, in an extract from her new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl, between a sunlit garden and the mysterious landscape of the world to come.

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Walking the Animals is a sort of travel book: it brings together inner and outer landscapes, the wet skies of the Pennines and the drought of the South African lowveld; landscapes of loss, landscapes of longing. Carola Luther tracks journeys between disparate worlds, between north and south, earth and air, fantasy and fact, the future, the present. Her poems explore dislocation and search, and the importance of relationship in establishing a sense of place. In her first collection, Carola Luther makes a new kind of space in poetry, both impassioned and level-headed.

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Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness. Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations communicate and fail to agree.

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This text collects: all that Helen Thomas wrote about the poet Edward Thomas; the volumes "As It Was" and "World Without End"; her letters to Edward; and separate memoirs of her meetings with W.H. Davies, D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and W.H. Hudson. The book has been assembled by Myfanwy, Edward's and Helen's youngest daughter. She includes her own account of childhood with her father, and his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917. She adds an appendix of six letters from Robert Frost to Edward Thomas. Helen wrote "As It Was", the story of her courtship and early marriage, shortly after Edward's death, and "World Without End" a few years later. In the original editions and later reprints fictitious names were used for the protagonists. In this edition the actual names are restored.

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Tom Raworth's Collected Poems (2003) was acclaimed by the Times Literary Supplement as a milestone: thirty years' work by a major poet of English modernism gathered for the first time. Raworth moves on, radical, inventive and politically engaged. Windmills on Fire takes a vertiginous ride through the language landscape we inhabit. Poems fragment and distort, veer in unexpected directions, reconfigure. Playful, often funny, Windmills on Fire is fuelled by anger at the use of language as an instrument of political deceit and military aggression.

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'We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,' writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter of a century's worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction - to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici's ranging, pansophic attention rests. The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity. Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valery, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm. Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person.Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language's most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture.

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Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) once described herself as the most famous unknown writer, and although her novel "Nightwood" is celebrated, her poetry has been a well-kept secret. This selection contains work written between 1914 and the 1970s. Many of the poems in "The Book of Repulsive Women" first appeared in pamphlets and literary journals in New York and Paris. Published together for the first time, they throw new light on Barnes' development as a writer. The book reveals her as a poet of unique power, at once compelling and disorientating. Marianne Moore observed, "reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand". "The Book of Repulsive Women" includes previously unpublished and uncollected poems, and five illustrations by Barnes herself. Rebecca Loncraine provides an introduction to Barnes' poetry.

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Frank O'Hara (1926-66) composed poems 'any time, any place', collaborating with and inspired by a circle of artists, musicians and poets, immersed in the creative life of New York. For O'Hara, the city was a place of possibility, both disorientating and exciting, and his poems have an immediacy that draws its energies from the pace and rhythms of city life, and from the contemporary artforms of jazz, film and painting. It is this openness to experience that makes O'Hara an indispensable poet of the imaginative experience of the modern city. Reviewing this new selection in the Guardian, Charles Bainbridge wrote: 'Frank O'Hara is a wonderful poet - funny, moving, chatty, engaging, enthusiastic, risk-taking, elegiac, supremely urban - and anything that encourages people to read him is a good thing. His poems have a disarming intimacy, a kind spontaneous enthusiasm and his work proves, with tremendous elan and energy, that you don't have to adopt a solemn tone in order to write poetry of seriousness and purpose. As O'Hara himself says of the nature of writing in the brilliantly comic "Personism: A Manifesto": "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep'." '

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Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable schooling and the drudgery of apprenticeship. He read and then wrote "medieval" poetry which he passed off as genuine. When the poems he wrote in his own name brought him some success, he went to London to seek his fortune as a writer. After six months' struggle, too proud to admit defeat, starving and alone, he killed himself in his attic room. He was seventeen. There is more to Chatterton than the romantic archetype. His poetry was admired by Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth; as Grevel Lindop says in his introduction, "Chatterton's work contains in essence the whole of Romanticism". This selection, with its detailed notes, shows the historical significance and unexpected range of Chatterton's poetry, and also enables the reader to enjoy it for its rich resonance and wonderfully memorable rhythms.

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Thomas Kinsella stands apart in modern Irish poetry. His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social commentary, from love and the enabling feminine to metaphysical speculation in a variety of earthly settings. Kinsella is a city poet. Born in Dublin in 1928, he attended University College, and entered the Irish Civil Service, but resigned from the Department of Finance in 1965 for a career in poetry in the United States. He published from the beginning with the Dolmen Press, later co-publishing his poetry and translations with Oxford University Press. His translations from the Irish include the Iron-Age prose epic "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900". He is editor of the "New Oxford Book of Irish Verse".

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William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock, Scotland, `beside the sugar house quays’ – a setting open to the sea. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruined tin-mine with its human echo. In the 1950s and 1960s he became a key member of the artistic scene in St Ives. A friend of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and many others, he could be demanding, but he gave back generously. A prolific letter-writer, he is first heard here in the passionate apprentice years, then writing from and of Fitzrovia, the Apocalypse, and his years in Cornwall after The Nightfishing (1955). We come at last to his apotheosis in the brilliance and wry wisdom of his late work. Dedication and commitment to his craft produced an extraordinary body of work during a life lived wildly and to the full. These letters (interspersed with poems and drawings) are a testament to the close intellectual and spiritual bonds with nourished his writing over many years.

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Louise Gluck's collection is a work of ends and beginnings. Her poetry comes in white-hot sequences of passionate intensity. "Vita Nova" is a sequence of poems which dramatises the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new life. Vibrant, at times anguished, but never resigned, the voices in this collection are a reminder of both the pleasure and pain which accompany all our relationships. Gluck manages an act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human Hope and the vast forces that shape and thwart it.

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The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, 'was the first word in the world', and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures - the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths are born where great rivers have their source high in the mountains. A bottle of spring water contains the mineral elements of life; we can read the earth's deep history in arctic ice. We share the rhythms of migrations in the pull of tides and seasons through rivers and estuaries. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.

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Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection 'At last the night surrounded me; / I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat'. In Louise Gluck's new collection, night takes on the dimensions of myth, becomes the setting for a sequence of journeys and explorations through time and memory, as the speaker of the poems moves backwards into childhood and forwards into 'the kingdom of death'. Gluck draws equally on the worlds of fairy-tale, of dream and of waking life, each poem a door into a narrative both haunting and compellingly beautiful.

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Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, "Watering Can" has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation.

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"Child: New and Selected Poems" 1991-2011 combines a generous collation of poems from Mimi Khalvati's five Carcanet volumes with previously uncollected sequences. She orders her work autobiographically, telling the stories of her life in four sections: childhood and early adulthood; motherhood; meditations on light; and love and art, circling back to childhood in her celebrated final sequence ("The Meanest Flower"). The figure of the child stands at the centre of the book, appearing in many guises: the poet as a schoolgirl on the Isle of Wight, or in half-remembered later years living with her grandmother in Tehran; her two children, now grown up; children in art; and, an enduring sense of oneself as a child that is never left behind. Here is the essential Khalvati: exquisitely nuanced, formally accomplished, Romantic in sensibility; rapturous and tender in response to nature, family and love. Her poems, David Constantine writes, "say what it feels like being human, the good and the ill of it, with passion, tact and lightness".

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Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets, devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants. As John Kinsella writes in his introduction, 'she looked inwards into Australia, and in doing so made the local...universal'. A Human Pattern, a selected poems she prepared after she had abandoned writing poetry in order to devote her time to fighting for Aboriginal rights and conservation, presents her best work from 1946 to her last collection, Phantom Dwelling (1986). Australia, alive with human and natural history, is vibrant in this selection. She is, John Kinsella writes, 'a poet of human contact with the land'. She speaks directly to our perennial concerns.

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Longlisted 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.

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A Publishers Weekly and New York Times Book of the Year. Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 2023. Monica Youn's first UK collection is her fourth and most ambitious book. It ends with prose, or at least with paragraphs, the long lyrical essay 'In the Passive Voice', and the intense 'Detail of the Rice Chest', explorations of race, identity and belonging seldom so directly broached in poetry, though they are the unspoken theme of much of our silenced discourse. Monica Youn is an undefended poet, which is not the same thing as defenceless. On the contrary, the undefended poet speaks truths without defensive irony. When there is humour it disarms the reader, until we too are undefended and can confront some of the themes we are reluctant to speak of. The poems recast classical myth in the light of coloniality, otherness and desire, juxtaposing figures which elicit one another's deeper natures. There are metamorphoses, fables. In place of Wallace Stevens's blackbird, Youn proposes 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie', the two-hued bird with a bad reputation.

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Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book's occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child's future makes more urgent the environmental and political themes which have long been a concern for the poet. Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems 'Shore Gifts' and 'Shore Thefts', and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, 'He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.'

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In Tristram Fane Saunders' first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are 'trying to tilt toward love', but 'can't help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest’. They discover wry humour in that struggle.

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A 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?

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2023. Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 is two books in one: a representative selection from seven of Carl Phillips's innovative earlier collections and a complete new book of poems, providing a powerful introduction to European readers. A seemingly gentle but resolute attention to the things of this world evokes the joyful and painful elements in the contemporary human condition, characterised by loneliness and an unquenchable thirst for love. He is a poet who knows the rules and bends or breaks them, a master of syntax and prosody, avoiding convention and pursuing the lines of desire. In a starred review of this book, Publishers Weekly said, 'These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching [...] and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work.'

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Shortlisted 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.

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This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences. Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.

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Jee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain kinds of peace. Inspector Inspector is his second Carcanet book (Steep Tea was published in 2015 and chosen as a Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times), and it develops his earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice. Steep Tea dialogued with women poets from across the world; Inspector Inspector struggles with the legacies of fathers, personal, poetic and political. Threaded through the erotic poems and poems based on interviews with fellow Singaporeans living in America are thirteen palinodes in the voice of the speaker's dead father, which he answers when the father's voice falls silent. Jee Leong Koh's is an inclusive, generous and forgiving imagination, with an enviable mastery of traditional and experimental forms.

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Celia A Sorhaindo's engrossing debut, Radical Normalisation, writes back from the margins, bringing readers to her Dominican home. It adjusts perspectives on the universal questions about poetry as a resource and value in the present. Sorhaindo's wit and linguistic inventiveness are clear in her reflections on the art and the arts, her dramatization of the Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys's voice, and her reflections on the natural world—a natural world different from others but continuous with them. She records its changes and reckons with it in a series of poems that respond to the destruction visited on Dominica, most recently by Hurricane Maria. Her writing led John Robert Lee to hail, 'a new voice that speaks with sensitivity, maturity and assurance out of a horrendous experience'.

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The University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets. Many of them were members of staff (for instance, Geoffrey Hill), some were students (Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Jeffrey Wainwright, Ian Duhig), others creative writing fellows (James Kirkup, John Heath-Stubbs, Thomas Blackburn, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, David Wright, Pearse Hutchinson and Wole Soyinka among them). The poetry archives in the Brotherton Library are extensive and valuable. The Academy of Cultural Fellows has included Helen Mort, Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo, Zaffar Kunial and Matt Howard. Its long association with the magazine Stand continues. The Brotherton Poetry Prize is the University's latest expression of commitment to poetry as a living art.

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Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize The Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2021 Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree, Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to 'stillness exercises' recording microenvironments - emotional and aural - around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation. Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.

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Jane Duran's new book of two striking sequences takes readers into other worlds – 'gridlines', in which the life and paintings of Agnes Martin are interwoven, and 'miniatures of al-Andalus' inspired by the illuminated Cantigas de Santa María and the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia. The simple gridlines of Duran's couplets recall Martin's square canvasses, her precisely rendered grids and luminous stripes. Responding to individual images and to Martin's own biography, discovering lovely breaths of life entering the 'grey rectangles', the poems' intricate interlockings and brilliant images seem almost to escape the poems' formal enclosures, so that Martin's 'The Peach 1964', 'gave me back // only beige, graphite, / ink, sanity // and orchard after orchard'.

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A The Scotsman Book of the Year 2021. In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is 'brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy': precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture. Here we learn of 'Sedna the Sea Goddess' and 'Kiviuq the Hunter', the central protagonists of the book's remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna's world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from... well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. 'The Old Woman Who Changed Herself into a Man', a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.

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Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture is divided: two languages, two histories entailing exile, a central theme of his poetry. His divided perspective sharply delineates the tyranny of history and religion, of the cramped life of small communities; it gives him a tender eye for the struggle of women and men in a world defined by denials. Deer on the High Hills: Selected Poems includes forty years' work and proves that big themes - love, history, power, submission, death - can be addressed without the foil of irony and acquire resonance when given a local habitation and a voice that risks pure, impassioned speech. Editor John Greening provides indexes, a preface and an essay on the life and work of this important poet.

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Ian Pople is a man of the world. He has travelled and taught in the UK, Greece, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His poems explore England, the larger world, and how changing perspectives readjust the sense of England and of home. They deal with borders, crossings, closing boundaries. They are about transitions in space and time, the ways life and relationships change and adapt to illness, love, estrangement and loss. The traveller changes identities as he moves, responding to different surroundings, and the early poems collected here provide a varied retrospect, moving through Africa, Europe and Asia – so that we read the more recent work from a different perspective. The travel poems explore the range of reactions, appropriations and misappropriations as physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. More recent writing responds to music and the visual arts, using assemblages or bricolage to convey the painfully familiar experience of displacement, dislocation. There are poems that answer back to figures from jazz history, Roland Kirk, Dupree Bolton and Pat Metheny among them. It is wonderful to encounter such an accomplished and varied body of work which shares with us its vivid spaces and tones. Pople, a lucid critic of modern and contemporary – especially American – poetry, is an original artist in his own right.

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Winner of the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021. Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion - spatial, verbal and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.

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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Carola Luther's new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it? At the centre of the collection are three sequences, 'Letters to Rasool', 'Birthday at Emily Court' and 'The Escape'. On the Way to Jerusalem Farm moves through the world, seeking and finding not answers, but sometimes, a means of continuing. The speaker in 'Letters to Rasool' travels onward through scarred and depleted landscapes, and searches for a lost beloved. The ageing residents of Emily Court celebrate a birthday and dance. Spring of a kind still comes. And in 'The Escape' there are colours to be found in the distant sea: 'A whole translucent geology, / cross-sections of light and water'. Poetry for Luther is a way of finding a way, of making connections and sharing our complex lives in an interdependent present. The roles of lover and beloved become - almost - interchangeable in these richly visualised poems.

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Swimming 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'.

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Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland's most distinctive contemporary writer - a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.

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A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.

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Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020. An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020. A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century. Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her 'edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history' ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past. Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: 'Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... Their hands are full of words.' Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: 'We will not leave you behind', a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.

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