Search results for ""carcanet press ltd""

When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic. As organising and generating principle for the essays he chose the alphabet, and the result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of topics from Aachen to Zoos, passing by Alexandria, Luciano Berio, Ivy Compton-Burnett, reflections on his own early works The Echo-Chamber and Flow, Langland's Piers Plowman, the idea of repetition in life and art, and much else. Josipovici reminds us that he has previously 'plundered episodes in my life to illustrate the intertwining of memory and forgetting, the desire to remember and the need to forget', and here he has someone say to him: 'You don't seem to be afraid of revealing a great deal about yourself.' 'I don’t think I feel it that way,' he responds. 'I can "reveal" precisely because it does not seem to be part of me. It seems to belong to someone else, a writer I have lived with, an immigrant I have known.' Loquacious, funny and incautious, this surprising book is in effect a kind of expressionist self-portrait as well as a meditation on a hundred days of the pandemic.

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The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends — pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record — they forced the people to forget. Against such injunctions, Paul Batchelor's poems rebel. This long-awaited second collection, The Acts of Oblivion, listens in on some of England's lost futures, such as those offered by radical but sidelined figures in the English Civil War, or by the deliberately destroyed mining communities of North East England, remembered here with bitter, illuminating force. The book also collects the acclaimed individual poems 'Brother Coal' and 'A Form of Words', alongside visions of the underworld as imagined by Homer, Lucian, Lucan, Ovid, and Dante. Intensely characterized, and novelistic in their detail and in their grasp of national catastrophes, the poems in The Acts of Oblivion vindicate Andrew McNeillie's description of Batchelor as 'the most accomplished poet of his generation'. Batchelor's first book, The Sinking Road (2008) was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize. He has also published a chapbook, The Love Darg (2014), and edited a collection of essays, Reading Barry MacSweeney (2013). He has won an Eric Gregory Award, The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation, and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. His poems and translations have appeared in several anthologies and in Granta, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.

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The Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021. In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer. During his months of recovery from three brain bleeds, a shattered right arm, multiple seizures and pulmonary bleeding, Lowery returned to writing poems, many of which address the strangeness, the disorientation, of his situation and that of the world in general. Lowery wrote these poems amidst reports of Government and health initiatives that suggested potential utilitarian sacrifices of 'the vulnerable'. Completed shortly before his death in May 2021, the fear and loss of the vulnerable and the voiceless haunt many of the poems. In the 'Crash Wake' sequence, Lowery adopted a twelve-line form. Twelve lines was as long as he could manage to sustain a poem at the time, due to repercussions from his head injury. The form also allowed him to take what Keith Douglas called 'extrospective' snapshots of the new environment in which he found himself: streets empty of people, an Italian village cut off by the army, a train in India killing migrant workers in their sleep. Recovery, nature and love fill the gaps in this changed world. Lowery's final book appreciates afresh landscape and wildlife, family and marriage, the importance and fragility of life.

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Australia's greatest and best-loved poet, Les Murray (1938–2019) was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at the nomination of Ted Hughes (1999) and won the T.S. Eliot Award among many other distinctions. He is a poet of deep environmental commitment: born and raised on the land, he died at his farm in Bunyah in New South Wales. Continuous Creation is his last major offering, compiled in his final years at Bunyah and found there after his death. 'There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational,' wrote Derek Walcott in the New Republic. This last book, like his earlier collections, is many-toned: he is a comic writer, a satirist, elegist and hymnodist. He is a celebrator. He is a rainbow.

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Longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.

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To mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and its commemoration in Derry in January 2022, Carcanet proudly publish a new edition of Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, with a prologue from the Saville Report, an epilogue from the Prime Minister's House of Commons apology, and a new author's note.

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The 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.

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Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around,' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.' Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political. As Malika Booker writes, 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'

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Collected Poems contains the previously published poetry of Rowan Williams, together with a significant body of new work. Also included are his celebrated translations from Welsh, German and Russian poetry. His earlier collections have included pieces prompted by the landscape and literature of West Wales, and a sequence of poems on the varieties of love in the plays of Shakespeare. This Collected adds a sequence commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, tributes to writers as different as Alan Garner and John Milton, and a reflection on sculptures by Antony Gormley. The book reflects the poet's wide range of interest and the variety of poetic mediums he has explored. His poems continue to respond vividly to the visual arts, and to the experience and imagination of 'pre-modern' cultures, as well as to the crises and tragedies of our time. He continues to read with uncanny clarity the signs that are manifest in nature and history. Imagination working through language brings us as close as we can get to our condition. 'I dislike the idea of being a religious poet,' he says. 'I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.'

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Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2022. Gregory Woods is the leading British critic and historian of gay literature. He has published five previous Carcanet poetry collections, the first being We Have The Melon (1992). Ten years in the making, Records of an Incitement to Silence revisits many of the original themes, but here Woods brings them closer to the endgame. The sequence of stripped-down, unrhymed sonnets, and the longer poems that accentuate it, suggest a missing narrative: the growth of the individual in a world of upheaval, the search for and loss of love, the formation of memories, the limits of what can truthfully be said, the traces we leave and the chance of their survival. 'One of my creative habits,' Woods writes, 'is the wringing-out of a single form until it's bone dry: the unrhymed sonnets; the monosyllabic syllabics of the long poem "Hat Reef Loud"; the incompatible yoking-together of iambic pentameter and dactylic trimeter in the long poem "No Title Yet".' His formal stringency intensifies the poems' emotional and erotic charge, their celebration and their plaint.

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Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

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

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John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness mark every page.

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Shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing 2021. A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, 'counting silently towards infinity'. Graham's essential voice guides us fluently 'as we pass here now into the next-on world', what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us 'to the last be human'.

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Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021 A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020 An Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year 2020 Sinead Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017). There is throughout Morrissey's work a civic dimension: her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery.

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Sweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.

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We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture. Moving from the fear of Alzheimer's to invocations of 'Remember the Holocaust' and 'Remember Kosovo' by unscrupulous demagogues, from the burial rituals of rural societies to the Berlin and Vienna Holocaust Memorials, from eighteenth-century disquiet about the role of tombs and inscriptions to the late poems of Wallace Stevens, Josipovici has produced, in characteristic style, a small book with a very big punch. Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

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Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021. Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

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A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020). Among Mina Gorji's poems in New Poetries V (2011) was one about Houdini entitled 'The Art of Escape' which returns here as the title poem. This colourful and vivid first collection continues the course of Mina Gorji's meticulous explorations of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformation of an armadillo into music. These poems shift by degrees until new patterns and sounds emerge, transforming the familiar into unexpected configurations. Art of Escape is a wonderful casting off into the complex waters of adult life, in which change has become the constant.

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Nineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.

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Notes from the Dream House is a `best of’ selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musicals – the hits and the misses, the good, the bad and the ugly. French takes on films as disparate as The Gospel According to St Matthew and Ted, The Remains of the Day and Caligula. His reviews are personal, witty, and sharply perceptive. Time and again he reveals not only an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema but also an erudition, an enthusiasm, and a boundless curiosity. Taken together, they form an illuminating commen¬tary on modern culture; but above all they are a distillation of one man’s lifelong love of cinema, a worthy memorial to one of the most respected and beloved of modern critics.

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The first volume of this two-volume edition of MacDiarmid's "Complete Poems" reprints the texts of the Penguin edition (1986), which was based on the first edition of 1978, which MacDiarmid himself saw through the press. Additional poems discovered since the first edition of 1978 are included, and the additional text revised. MacDiarmid insisted that his "Complete Poems" should be books of poetry, uncluttered by editorial annotations and notes. Michael Grieve, the poet's son, and W. R. Aitken, his bibliographer, have carefully followed his instructions, and compiled an extensive glossary based on the earlier collections.

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Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale’s fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. `Joy’ is a monologue in the voice of William Blake’s wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it `an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing’. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto `silent’ dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the `maligned and misaligned’.

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Winter 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, Poetry

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Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020. Winner of an English PEN Award. Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laabi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laabi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from 'beyond the borders of what is human', as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are 'the only weapon we've left'. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is 'right here / inside me / like a second body', and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that 'epic of silence'. These poems, Laabi's 'bitter fruits of the murderous twilight', renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet's duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laabi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laabi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.

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Dennis O'Driscoll is among the finest and most popular poets of his generation. "New and Selected Poems" shows him to be a poet of humanity and wit whose observant, rhythmically supple poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary life. One of the book's highlights is The Bottom Line, a multi-voiced and multifaceted portrait of business managers and bureaucrats. Closing with a generous selection of previously unpublished work, "New and Selected Poems" - which follows Dennis O'Driscoll's acclaimed "Exemplary Damages", chosen as a Book of the Year by Seamus Heaney in 2002 - makes for a compelling collection, wide in its appeal and yet imbued with a distinctive and often startling world-view.

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This work is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. "Forms of Distance" is Bei Dao's second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, "Old Snow", as 'the work of one of the great poets of our time', and John Cayley wrote in the "Times Literary Supplement" that 'in a sense he is the only contemporary Chinese poet who is knowable for the non-specialist...we can hear the maturing poetic voice of a highly talented, individual Chinese writer.'

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When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out "The Axion Esti", first published in 1959, as 'one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems.' It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of eternal Greece, his vision of the war and its aftermath, and his concluding celebration of human life, Elytis is a true voice of our age A- a deeply personal lyric poet who speaks for humanity at large.

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A lively and inventive anthology of new poetry.

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Nigel Forde's poems explore those feelings, memories and landscapes, glimpsed and momentary, that haunt us with an insistent need to be questioned or commemorated. In monologues and elegies, reflections on art, intimate domestic lyrics, love poems and jokes, "The Choir Outing" meditates on surfaces and depths with technical assurance and a delight in the moment's gift.

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A collection that travels among places strange and familiar: from the shaping memories of an upbringing in rural County Fermanagh, to a Belfast reinventing itself in a new century and the exhilarating novelty of America. It also engages with the poet's experience of his native Northern Ireland.

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Sasha Dugdale's poems explore the mysterious solitudes of individual lives with tender, unsparing lucidity. The book opens with a sequence written at the Pushkin family estate. The great Russian poet, setting out to St Petersburg, turns back when a hare runs in front of his horse: the superstitious act saves his life. Such chance or fated moments where paths cross are at the heart of the collection. A boy on a train, passing a gold chain through his fingers, sparks a buried childhood memory in a watching passenger; lovers reach out to touch in the dark, while, a dying soldier holds to the sight of house martins swooping over a pool. In fragmentary meetings, Dugdale finds a source of hope and art.

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A selection from the poems Grey Gowrie has written since 1958. This work draws on the best part of a year spent in hospital when the author, dying of a virus on the heart, was jolted back to life and writing by the surgical gift of a heart from a living donor.

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Includes poems which inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: supermarkets, airports and parking garages; the illusory communities of celebrity and the digital universe.

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Edwin Morgan's verse play translation of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh brings an ancient story to life in a supple, vigorous idiom that moves easily between ritual, comedy and moments of intense beauty. Here a god-king, a great city builder, learns the timeless truth that the only immortality lies in what will be remembered and recorded of his actions. Gilgamesh's quest takes him, and the audience, on a journey through a world that is both mythic and familiar, inhabited by terrifying demons and 'disappeared' political prisoners, by gods and singing transvestites and a Glaswegian jester--and by Enkidu, the beloved child of nature who dies of a virus in the blood, through whom Gilgamesh learns to understand the meaning of loss. Received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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"The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troubled 1970s, is developed and transformed by the book's other strands: poems on the contemporary Middle East, and poems drawing on Greek and Latin sources (including translations of Pindar and Virgil) build together into a moving and complex meditation on personal and historical loss. McDonald is one of the most widely-known (and most controversial) critics of modern British and Irish poetry; his poetry builds into itself the critical intelligence and anger of that context, along with the visionary intensity of an original, and impassioned imagination. "The House of Clay" creates a new and uncompromising kind of Irish poetry, in which the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Northern Irish Protestant, find a piercingly clear register.

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Petronius lived during the reign of the notorious emperor Nero, a writer in a decadent empire, and in Frederic Raphael he finds a translator who brings his words vividly alive. Petronius' Rome is not the noble civilisation of classical ideals; his Romans are lascivious, amoral and stylish, inhabiting a louche world of ostentatious, nouveau riche extravagance and flirtation with the seductive menace of the Roman underclass. In Raphael's hands, the "Satyrica" becomes a modern novel, Petronius a contemporary. Freed of the weight of classical decorum, the "Satyrica" is racily subversive, scandalously entertaining. This work, writes Raphael, has always been excluded from the curriculum: it offers no improving pieties. Petronius' - and Raphael's - ancient Rome is recognisably the city of Pasolini and Fellini as much as of Virgil.

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The Instruments of Art uses poetry to explore the lives and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and others, the personal sacrifice involved, the singular vision and inspiration that set them in motion. God's creation, some argue, is a work of art, and Christ's life and death an expression of it. Deane follows this thread in a series of sonnets based on the Stations of the Cross. Another series of poems takes John the Evangelist, 'the one whom Christ loved', as the voice of a poet expressing the hard love and personal commitment demanded by Christ; Deane conducts this exploration experimentally, contrasting and complimenting it with his personal experience of faith through suffering and love. The Old Testament story of Jacob's search for meaning is retold through the poet's own memories of family and becomes an emblem of the universal search for truth and peace. This is a collection written by the light of faith yet shadowed by doubt; it develops an instinctive approach to art that offers an understanding in terms of the highest reaches of suffering humanity.

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A collection of poems exploring the interdependence of earthly things and heavenly mystery.

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Approach places, times and states of mind in a mosaic of knowledge, invention, memory and entertainment with this collection of poems. The personal and the public interact in many poems and others address personal histories and their creative consequences, alongside mythological motifs.

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Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in A Place in the World are about home and antipodes, identity as a shibboleth and institutions as leviathans, Pacific islands and raised beaches, Edens and new Jerusalems, the critical spirit and the need for continuity. Cradling Scotland's stony myths in his palm, the poet sets off for Europe, an old civilisation that can barely reconcile itself to having become a colony of its own Utopia. In his pocket is a battered copy of the civil philosophy, also out of Scotland, that lends the book its punning title. Somewhere in the looming shadow of the cities is the poet, still looking - like the Greek philosopher - for human beings. A Place in the World, Iain Bamforth's fourth collection, is his most lyrical, challenging and considered work to date.

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"Book Of Stones" is very much made out of the things around the author - living in the new South Africa, being part of a continent and its life and history and processes.

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This famous cross between poetry and philosophy follows Lucretius' enquiring, scientific mind as he investigates the workings of mirror images, thunderstorms and magnetism, and the significance of sleep. The poem's power lies in the tension between the brief, sensuous richness of life and Lucretius' overarching belief in an empty universe of eternally recurring elements.

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Sidney Keyes was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. He was 20 years old. With Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis he is one of the oustanding poets of World War II. His dramatic monologues, his poems of landscape, of the weird and macabre, his mastery of blank verse, set him apart.

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Edward Lear set out to administer mirth to thousands. Jeremy Over is an heir of the nonsense tradition, genially assaulting everything that "appears" to be fixed and serious. His poems celebrate surprise and synergy, discovering new forms of order in the riotous disorder of the world. Anarchic pleasures: he makes mischief, running words off their expected tracks until they come to rest in new postures, pleasures, meanings. The book opens in Lorca's New York and ends on the road to John Clare's Essex. Nostalgia for home, for a lost time and place shadow the collection, as does an undertone of grief, corrected by slapstick and sharp wit. The poems are restlessly acquisitive, gathering curiosities like old sideboards and closets crammed full of birds, beasts and fruit, and visited by an unlikely cast of walk-on characters, including Walt Whitman, Dante, Mata Hari and the Pope. "A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese" is a gallivant through an absurd, abundant world, reminding us of the pleasure and happiness to be drawn even from the most makeshift constructions and in the face of negative emotions.

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Edwin Morgan returns to the stage with an examination of the life of Jesus as a man among men. Jesus is portrayed as a human figure in an inhuman time. A declaration of love from his closest disciple, John, described in his own Gospel as the "Disciple who Jesus loved", comes to the fore in Morgan's efforts to explore the character of the real man.

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Number 20 in Thomas Kinsella's series, "The Familiar" is a sequence of poems concerning the solitary but connected passions of lovers. It includes several prints of Celtic engravings.

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