Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Baroque in its extravagance of language, in its delight in the bizarre and the prodigious, Peter Davidson's collection is a cabinet of curiosities, a world of ruined palaces, ghostly gardens and the fragile marvels of a secret past. It moves between languages and continents, English and Latin, the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish America, the Mediterranean and the north. The title sequence evokes a half-known, half-fantastic, seventeenth century; a shorter sequence transforms contemporary England through the eyes of a spy. The collection ends with a group of elegies and epistles concerned with place and history in northern Scotland. Erudite and witty, "The Palace of Oblivion" is about remembering and inventing out of memory, and provides haunting visions of decay and splendor.

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Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry conjures what is half-known, at the limits of experience, in language fierce with a living glitter. The familiar world becomes richly disquieting, edged with danger: mute conjoined twins creating a violent secret world; Emily Dickinson's enigmatic letters to her 'Master'; a self-portrait of the poet 'with Her Hair on Fire'. "Soul Keeping Company" introduces Brock-Broido's poetry to British readers with generous selections from her three acclaimed collections: "A Hunger", "The Master Letters and Trouble in Mind".

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Does history tell stories? Yes, if the poet listens carefully. Elizabeth Jennings listens carefully, through spiritual, emotional and mental turbulence. She has created an abidingly popular body of poetry, using traditional forms with experimental vigour, keeping her spirit attuned to her art and language. Her vocation is praise, as a lover praises the things made, the makers and the maker. New Collected Poems incorporates her award winning 1986 Collected Poems, adding from the poems she wrote in the next fifteen years. In that time she found new themes and styles, exploring by means of the verse-essay, the extended sequence, the epistle and love elegy. When experience is extreme, poetry for her is never exorcism, always sacrament, a sharing, a way back form the edge, not over it. As a critic in Every Changing Shape she insisted on continuities in the language if poetry, its contingencies. 'Poets work upon and through each other,' she declared. Within her own work these continuities are brilliant are brilliantly in evidence.

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During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish and tackle fundamentals. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of "Some Trees" and the disjunctive, experimentalism of "The Tennis Court Oath", to the powerful mediations on subjectivity of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave", this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.

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The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops. Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poemsCollected Poems includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date."

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To catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

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Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness. That clear, passionate voice which she brought to her celebrated translations of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry is her own. She writes about love, loss, jealousy, the fear of abandonment. Her powerful rhythms flow down the page, seeking to draw a coherent shape out of the inner uncertainties. She also writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus. Hers is a poetry which can contain and welcome. The rare landscape poems are always peopled, and the considerable narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give urgency to her evocation of the classical figures of Dido and Eurydice. She has also found a poignant lyricism in writing of the inhabitants of her local streets and the ordinary pleasures of daily life. The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

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In this selection, which includes short poems and extracts from the longer ones, there is ample evidence of the quality of Cowper's faith and of his eye and ear for nature. Indicative of how his life was sustained by writing, these poems reveal his effort to engage in discourse with friends and with the natural world.

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A collection of essays in which the author writes of her own upbringing, her human and literary antecedents, and also dwells on lives and poems. The book includes writings on T.S. Eliot, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman.

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Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Her's is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.

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WINNER OF THE 2014 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize--even to envy--a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman's eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that "constrict like throats," every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

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Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue and teach each other lessons; work, love, and lose what they have loved. The central section of the book enacts Clare's own belief in the creative forms of nature itself: 'I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down'.

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From a fountain where 'all the roads in the village unite', concentric circles expand into the distance: the young and old, fields, a river, a mountain - the fountain's stone counterpart, where the roads end, human time superimposed on geological time. Renowned as a lyrical poet of austere intensity, in "A Village Life Louise Gluck" evokes a Mediterranean world with luminous precision. Her focus is on moments of speculation and reflection in a dreamlike present tense.

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John Ashbery's "Collected Poems 1956-1987" contains the complete text of the poet's first twelve books, from "Some Trees" (1956), selected for publication by W.H. Auden, to "April Galleons" (1987), and including "The Vermont Notebook" (1975) with the original artwork by Joe Brainard, and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1976), which won the Pulitzer Prize, together with a selection of more than sixty previously uncollected poems. To read Ashbery's work in sequence is to experience the magnitude of his presence in American poetry over these four decades, as innovator and influence. His poetry, 'an exuberant script for survival' (Marina Warner), 'light-footed and delectably irresponsible' (Alfred Brendel), fascinates with virtuosic complexity and delights with wry humour. A restless explorer of the modern world, alive to language and impression, Ashbery enlarges the possibilities of poetry. With a detailed chronology and notes on the poems, "Collected Poems 1956-1987" is an indispensable compilation of the work of one of the essential poets of our time.

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Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, by the language of journalism and spam emails, Philip Terry transforms Shakespeare's sonnet sequence into a celebration of the possibilities of language unleashed. Shakespeare's themes of fading beauty, posterity, immortality and death find their contemporary responses in the world of celebrity gossip, consumer products and the credit crunch. The results spark with energy, as disrespectful and anarchic as a cartoon - and as assured in their control of line. Philip Terry, an acclaimed translator of the poetry of Raymond Queneau, plays language games by the rules of Oulipo in his creation of a Shakespearean chimaera, the hybrid that takes on a life of its own.

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

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John F. Deane opted for a Selected and New rather than the tombstone of a Collected to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems (Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill, 2012) already exists. With substantial new work to share, it seemed timely to produce an essential volume, with compelling new work added to underline his witness. Deane's poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems' lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen. The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A 'rewilding' of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirit and Spirit occur. A new sequence, 'For the Times and Seasons', completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.

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Last Poems brings together the poems from Thomas Kinsella's five final Peppercanister pamphlets, originally collected as Late Poems (2013), along with a selection of new poems, fragments and revised work which the poet completed before his death in December 2021. An iconic figure in Irish literature, Thomas Kinsella was one of the great poets of the last century: his poems' concern with elemental questions, and a poetics which could be equal to them, is evident here in poems drawn from student publications, in his characteristically meditative sequences and in glittering late fragments. His work was compared to Joyce's by the New York Times for 'its sense of place [and] quest for coherence and meaning in a dark and precarious world': throughout, the poems face up to pressing concerns, age and mortality, the savage waste of war, the opposing ways in which religion and science frame the human predicament, and how the artist may creatively redeem and, in their work, 'offer the Gift onward'.

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'Partial Shade' is the common gardening term for plants that in fact need a measure of sunshine. In John Birtwhistle's poems, there is a continual play of light and shadow – and even glimpses of 'full sun'. This selection from his own work does not follow chronology. It is an entirely fresh ordering, in which poems converse and argue with each other across the years. Lines about politics, parenting, mortality, art (and love, 'that bookish theme') are plaited together, intimate yet distinct. Partial Shade is a new book for new readers. It makes available poems from out-of-print collections, as well as substantial new poems. The rhythm varies from lyric and narrative poems to 'haiku-like miniatures: agile, mobile and eventful' (Hugh Haughton). 'John Birtwhistle is a marvellously versatile intellectual gadfly of a poet. No sooner do we think that we know his manner, his theme, than he is off elsewhere, teasing, amusing, throwing out possibilities like sweets strewn along a woodland path.' (Michael Glover) The poetry is distinguished by deep feeling conveyed with visual precision, careful phrasing and formal clarity. Peter Jay writes of 'These lucid, witty, tender poems, full of felicitous surprises and unexpected turns of imagination', whilst Imtiaz Dharker finds them 'So rich in scope and style, with surprising shifts and echoes'.

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William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), like his friend Ezra Pound, never finished his magnum opus, a poem as impossibly ambitious as the Cantos, but richly invested in the present world. It was published over a period of a dozen years (1946–1958) in five books, the sixth left incomplete. The first book was welcomed by the great American poet-critic Randall Jarrell. He called it 'the best thing Williams has ever written' – 'how wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most delicate lyricism of perception and feeling with the hardest and homeliest actuality should ever have come into being! There has never been a poem more American.' He was disappointed with the books that followed. But he was expecting an American epic while Williams was delivering something more original, Whitmanesque, an evocation of a New Jersey community (Paterson), a great American river (the Passaic) that powered its mill wheels, a confluence of human and natural worlds in conflicts and harmonies. It is a great poem about humankind and the environment it finds, exploits but cannot dominate. The style has been called documentary, but that hardly does justice to its subtleties of tone and its American patterns of sound. Williams trained as a physician and practised as a doctor all his life. His double vocation produced a poetry different in kind from the erudite and culturally knowing and allusive work of his contemporaries. Its subtleties are of another kind.

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Winner of the Laurel Prize 2023. A Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The Irish Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year. To 2040 begins with question masquerading as fact: 'Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.' These visionary new poems reveal Graham as historian, cartographer, prophet, plotting an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant, 'the American experiment will end in 2030'. Graham exposes a potentially inevitable future, sirens sounding among industrial ruins. In sparse lines that move with cinematic precision, we pan from overhead views of reshaped shorelines to close-ups of a burrowing worm. Here, we linger, climate crisis on hold, as Graham invites the reader to sit silent, to hear soil breathe. To 2040 is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality - in the glass window of a radiotherapy room, in the first 'claw full of hair' placed gently on a green shower ledge. 2040 as both future and event-horizon: the reader leaves the book warned, wiser, attentively on edge. 'Inhale. / Are you still there / the sun says to me'. The title poem asks, 'what was yr message, what were u meant to / pass on?'

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Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. A The Irish Times Book of the Year. In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are sensitive to anxiety and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink - of reading and writing.

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A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Autumn 2022. [To] The Last [Be] Human collects four extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, PLACE, fast, and Runaway—by Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience. Graham's poems are turned to face our planet's deep-time future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when "the future / takes shape / too quickly", when we are entering "a time / beyond belief". They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form... Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a "whirling robe humming with firstness". To read these four twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book: The earth said remember me. The earth said don't let go, said it one day when I was accidentally listening

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A The Tablet Book of the Year. Last Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells. Its intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. To John Schlesinger, '"Fuck 'em all dear," you used to say. And God knows, you did your best.'; Ludwig Wittgenstein saying 'What do you know about philosophy, Russell, what have you ever known?'; Cyril Connolly to William Somerset Maugham who was complaining about his lack of true lovers, '...then although the room was chilly, no one cared to poke poor Willie'; 'You bloody fool,' the first words said by a venerable professor to George Steiner. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a 'prosopography'. Raphael's own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah.

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A The Spectator and Observer Book of the Year. The NB column in the Times Literary Supplement, signed at the foot by J.C., occupied the back page of the paper for thirteen years. For a decade before that, it was in the middle pages. That's roughly 60,000 words a year for twenty-three years. The purpose of the initials was not to disguise the author, but to offer complete freedom to the persona. J.C. was irreverent and whimsical. The column punctured pomposity, hypocrisy and cant in the literary world - as one correspondent put it: 'skewering contemporary absurdities, whether those resulting from identity politics or from academic jargon'. Readers came to expect reports from the Basement Labyrinth, where all executive decisions are made, and where annual literary prizes were judged and administered. These included the Most Unoriginal Title Prize - for a new book bearing a title that had been used by several other authors (eg, The Kindness of Strangers); the Incomprehensibility Prize, for impenetrable academic writing; the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, and the All Must Have Prizes Prize, for authors who have never won anything. Readers of NB by J.C. will find an off-beat guide to our cultural times. The book begins in 2001 and proceeds to 2020. The substantial Introduction offers a history of the TLS itself from birth through the precarious stages of its adaptation and survival.

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"Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Glück's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. "Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow." The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. "It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know." Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

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We are still here on earth. With a troubled sense of wonder, Jeffrey Wainwright's new book witnesses to that earth's ordinariness, profusion and mystery. The collection begins with his beginning, a poem that evokes his own birth: 'Here I Come'. He concludes inevitably with 'Here I Go'. In between are poems that describe and contemplate on the variety of life, ranging from a fleeing mouse to geology and gravity. History features, as so often in his poetry, with the earth's transition from inanimate matter to the fearsome and various place we know. There is a sequence on contemporary Manchester, another on the domestic and wider presence of coal, and a series on the iniquities of the British Empire – histories that connect and contend with one another. Describing this last sequence, Shirley Chew notes the poet's 'preoccupation with words and history', his 'self-reflexive wit' and the 'wry look' he takes at the poet's art itself. He is a master of tones of voice, of registers, of patterns and rhythms, and his characteristic inventiveness is everywhere to be found in this book which touches on so many timely and timeless concerns Here on Earth.

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In Poppy, Joseph Minden explores how the totems of remembering are always, also, sites of suppression. The poems in this debut collection take in a research trip to the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme, an ill-fated visit to Penang, rumours of the Opium Wars, fragments of family myth and a fear of familiar vampires – all grimy with the trash of establishment British history. In these pages, Adlestrop meets 'Robin Hood / bewitched by a leg of tandoori chicken' and drunk Brits stumble around the Menin Gate with 'Lest We Forget' stitched into their polo shirts. Sometimes accompanied by the historian, Jason, and perpetually haunted by an old flame, Mina, the protagonist of the poems tries to separate memory from nostalgia and empire from heritage. Longing is enmeshed in old ideas and historical material from which it must be torn away. Minden makes disturbing rhythms out of the detritus he finds around him, using documentary evidence, personal testimony, dream narrative, prose, rhyme and the soft hammer blows of repetition to craft a haunted, memorable music.

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A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021. In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear and hope. For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D'Aguiar was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer. Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events, which trouble and alienate D'Aguiar from community, place and body. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, drawing on music and on poetry, D'Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from distinct cultural perspectives - his Caribbean upbringing, London youth and American lifestyle - D'Aguiar's beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease. In his first work of non-fiction, D'Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the quotidian to the lyrical, from the personal to the metaphysical. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.

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Winner of A Somerset Maugham Award 2023. Winner of An Eric Gregory Award 2023. Winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023. By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.

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'Borel was the sun,' said Théophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

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Winner of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2023 by the American Literary Translators Association. The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice. Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe - not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.

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Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life—into manual work and 'dolce far niente', into ancient vernacular craft traditions and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians and flavours into the world of Zest—how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. He has written extensively about medicine. He is, more than just a widely travelled European, a world traveller: his work as a hospital doctor and general practitioner has taken him to every corner of the planet, working as a public health consultant in various developing countries, especially in Asia. 'Zest' itself occurs in the South of France, with Tobias Smollett, as picaresque a writer and character as Dr Bamforth himself. He is provoking, digressive and often droll. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle—'the art of living'.

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The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' which take us from Codon to Coda via a number of -ines (Glycine, Asparagine, Tyrosine etc). The complex exercise grows out of George Herbert ('What though my body run to dust?') and administrative duties at a genomics conference in which the language spoken, the terms used, find their way into the organising imagination and prosody of a formidable, witty verse craftsman, with serious contemporary concerns. Aliquot, John Clegg's second Carcanet book, is storm-spooked and jumpy: haunted by jaguars and lynxes, its uneasy silences broken by the retort of punt guns, lightning strikes, and floodwater breaching defences. Among these stretches of foreboding are moments of calm, especially arising out of the joy and rowdy peace of parenthood. These poems are themselves aliquots, of a realised, restive and unique individual world.

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Longlisted 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.

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There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot', the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature – birds, plants, weathers – comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.

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The title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: 'Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?' The poems return to familiar places and themes from a later 'now', a revised perspective: memories are real, perhaps more vivid than before, but further off, measuring time and age. Ancient coins abound. In 'The Coin Cabinet' they are conjured in their variety by means of a series of epithetic evocations, so that one does not doubt their reality, or the complex mythology they evoke and the economy rooted in long traditions and rich in known, shared narratives. 'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through,' Thom Gunn wrote, 'there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed.'

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Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how an individual relates to others. All the poems are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known - or half known - past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.

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Winner 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.

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Book of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the popular pilgrimage route, or 'Camino' to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of those encountered along the way, combining a multi-voiced soundscape with vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture. The possibilities and contradictions of a twenty-first-century pilgrimage are revealed: inevitably informed by tourism and technology, yet offering new kinds of fellowship and connection in an age of individualism and rootlessness. Book of Days can be read as a travel memoir, a meditation on community and solitude, on friendship and sisterhood, and on spirituality. What pilgrims seek on setting out and what they discover as they go prove to be complementary. Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.

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Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2022. Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of the major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home. As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations, informed by (among others) Dylan Thomas, George Herbert and W. B. Yeats, explore the ways in which poetry bears witness to what is and what might be, presence and transcendence in a threatened world. The meditations precede a journal that runs from January 2018 to December 2020, concluding with a poem entitled 'Winter Solstice' - three years of living close to animals, mountains, and (in particular) trees, in human intimacy and lockdown. 'Listen! They are whispering / now while the world talks, / and the ice melts, / and the seas rise. / Look at the trees!...' This is necessary work. As she declares in 'Why I Write', the first meditation in Roots Home: 'Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten - the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds.'

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A Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation. Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world.

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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. 'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.' Her poems have always found voices for the voiceless and shown another side of history. Her new book zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood. Sister Iggy, as the boys called her, ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys. There she mentored many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, including the brilliant trombonist Don Drummond. Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood (Mahfouz) was a strikingly beautiful dancer of Lebanese descent, who became Don Drummond's lover. The poems in Mother Muse move boldy and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; notable women such as Mahalia Jackson share pages with the less well noted - women like Sandra Bland, Windrush victims and two of the last enslaved women to be set free.

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Theophilus Kwek's first UK collection is concerned with the individual and the collective stories that become history. The poems set out from formative moments in the poet's memory, to pivotal moments in the colonial past of Southeast Asia, and finally the political upheavals of the present. Hospitality, precarity, migration – these are some of the themes that recur as the poet makes his own journey from Singapore to Europe and back again. Moving House moves on a big time and space map, from Icelandic tales to the Malayan Emergency, and more contemporary dramas. From the perspective of a Chinese Singaporean shaped by the collective traditions and histories described in this book, writing in Britain, the poems model a sense of openness on the space of the page.

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Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

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This second collection by Northern Irish poet Adam Crothers, whose first book won the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, includes sonnets and prose poems, anxiety and swagger, confession and nonsense.

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Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism and theology, she received numerous awards, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems. This New Selected Poems comes forty years on from her first Carcanet Selected, which it honours by retaining her original choices while adding a substantial number of poems from her several later collections. Edited by Rebecca Watts, whose debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Prize, this book is a new take on a poet whose human sympathy and religious faith are transferable and timeless.

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This sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

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