Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

The first literary experiences of John Clare (1793-1864) included the tales handed down by word of mouth in his native village, and as a mature poet he reworked them in his narrative verse. This edition, published for Clare's bicentenary, comprises the tales he wished to include in his third collection, "The Shepherd's Calendar" (1827), and previously unpublished poems which show the range of his narrative achievement. The detailed introduction traces the composition of the poems. Clare's own description of local customs, his previously unpublished draft essay on English pastoral poetry, and a full glossary are included. Clare's original spelling and punctuation are preserved.

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"Days Beside Water" is an ideal introduction to the poetry of Gregory O'Brien, one of the best younger writers (and artists) of New Zealand. The poems are set where sea, land and sky, past, present and future, meet in different lights and moods. There are lyrics, comic interludes, an imagined account of the marriage of Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missioner. The theme of spiritual marriage - a union of clements in imaginary or historical contexts - recurs in two sequences: an invented life of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and "The Milk Horse", about a foundling and the Mother Superior of an orphanage. The poems capture the permanent value in moments and emotions, chiefly love. O'Brien's involvement with the graphic arts and add richness to his imagery.

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The great English, Anglican and modernist poet and writer C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol a hundred years ago. This Reader draws on his poetry, fiction, translations, and his literary, political and religious essays. It justifies what his peers and critics said of him. Of the poems Donald Hall wrote in the New York Times Book Review that they 'move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France, they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through [ - ]; they move in love of the old lost life by which the new life is condemned.' Writing of his essays in the same pages Louis Simpson notes 'his fearless views'. 'Mr Sisson isn't afraid to say what he thinks. He isn't looking over his shoulder at an establishment as he writes.' Jasper Griffin in the Times Literary Supplement dubbed him 'one of the great translators of our time'. As a writer he was always starting anew, rejecting, he said, 'whatever appeared with the face of familiarity' and referring the present to those defining periods of English and European history and culture that tried humanity and languages most harshly: the seventeenth century, for example, and the twentieth.

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In this extended elegey for her mother, each poem written in couplets and contained within the space of sixteen lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love.

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A major new sequence by a bestselling Carcanet author pays tribute to a Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet.

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The author turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. This book also includes the 'asked for' and commissioned poems, and the Guardian spreads Clarke has written during her time as National Poet of Wales.

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Poems on death and mortality accompany memoirs of the poet's childhood between Yorkshire and Italy

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Stories of nature, folklore and Romani heritage by an award-winning poet, critic and teacher.

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This debut explores the histories of identity and place.

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The latest collection by an award-winning poet, editor and publisher.

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Sarah Kirsch (1935 - 2013) is recognised as one of Germany's most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry's free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes' translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch's writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch's poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes.

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In Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.

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Comic, cosmic: for Kuppner the terms are inseparable. In the three plaited sections of "The Same Life Twice", Frank Kuppner asks the essential, answerless questions about human existence: What are we doing here? Is it really here? And why here? 'Fortunately,' he writes, 'it is nearly always possible to take notes, even if these habitually contradict each other.' Here are Kuppner's fieldnotes from life in an unfathomable universe. A sardonic Virgil showing us a directionless "Infinity", Kuppner guides us through a reality in which we are just 'one more of the ignorant infinite dots / rather than the vast central vortex we must feel ourselves to be'.

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Chris McCully's Selected Poems includes work from 1993 to 2009, a representative selection which reveals his engagement with the precise crafts of language and poetic form. The book opens with the prose-poem 'Dust' from his 2009 collection Polder, a meditation on extinction: 'dust again the voices of the pages and the voices of the lovers'. Other voices follow, conversations in which civility, memories of friendship, art and literature respond to the desolation of dust, asserting what imagination can create from it. In translations from Old English, sonnets, villanelles and ballads, McCully's supple, sparing verse celebrates the fragile place in which we live, 'between space and space - / and both are dark'.

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This collection thinks about two main things: the efforts we make as individuals to find some form of connection between ourselves, and the efforts we make as a group to connect to the environment we live in.

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The poems in Near-Life Experience consider, above all, ideas of attentiveness: to art and experience, to nature and imagination; to the present moment as it happens, what it offers, leaves behind, and means.

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The November-December 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes the rediscovery of the poetry of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, close friend of Frank O'Hara, key figure in the New York School, with an introduction by Rosa Campbell; Sinead Morrissey celebrates Ciaran Carson; Miles Burrows's Postcard from Taiwan; A Song Atlas feature in the Reports pages: John Gallas translations of short lyrics from the corners of the earth and the whole span of poetic history; Anthony Vahni Capildeo on Fire & Darkness; new poems by Jane Yeh; and James Campbell on being spied upon. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.

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The May-June 2023 issue During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes new artwork Antony Gormley and Mary Griffiths; poetry from Gillian Clarke, Tara Bergin, Sheri Benning; wonderful anecdotes from Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Dan Burt, Rebecca Watts, Philip Terry, Jeffrey Wainwright, and Carol Rumens; tributes from Lorna Goodison and Bill Manhire; and an AI generated conversation between William Empson and Robert Graves. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox. https://pnreview.substack.com/

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The July-August 2023 issue. During 2023 PN Review is celebrating its jubilee. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes Jane Duran on her poet father and Spain; Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk in conversation with Sasha Dugdale, and a wide selection of her poems drawn from the conflict; Recovering the Welsh poet Iwan Llwyd; Tom Pickard’s Chapters of Memory; Introducing German poet Mara-Daria Cojocaru; and Jon Glover, editor of Stand, in conversation. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others. We'll be celebrating throughout the year: look out for announcements of our events in the autumn, and subscribe to our free newsletter to get choice morsels of archive straight to your inbox.

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Shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award (Poetry Book) 2023. Shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award (City of Saskatoon) 2023. Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award 2022. Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada. Sheri Benning's poems chart the ways in which a way of life collapses, the world of the family farm, even as the speaker suffers, too. The first poem in the collection, 'Winter Sleep', is a fever dream: the borders between past and present, between the unconscious and the real, break down. The poem reckons with the devastating social and environmental impacts of the agribusiness industry. The long elegy, 'Let Them Rest', takes its cue from the Dies Irae and the Latin liturgy of the Requiem mass to mourn Saskatchewan's many ruined farmsteads and razed communities. Throughout, the poems trace the still luminous contours of love - for family, for the land - in rendering the horrors of loss. The incantatory voice rises from dream into dark vision. The book also includes lyric poems that give voice to the affective consequences of loss brought on by climate change and factory farming and renew a sense of locality in the teeth of corporate farming practices. Benning has worked with her sister Heather Benning, who constructs large-scale, site specific installations which explore and extend these themes.

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John Birtwhistle has said that 'one writes each poem just to learn how to write it', and insists that he 'doesn't care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One's Own Voice'. The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice comes through. For all their variety of forms and ideas, his poems are consistent in their visual precision, their scrupulous phrasing and their formal clarity. These qualities are brought to everything he touches, whether it is a passing moment of childhood, a natural detail, a wryly stoic observation, or perennial emotions in the face of events from before birth (first foetal movements) to after burial (removal to an ossuary). Many scores of individuals are named or make their appearance in some way. If one poem is satiric, the next is unashamedly lyrical. Several reflect on the adequacy of art, and a feature is the stream of very short pieces by way of illustration or riposte, like the border of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wit and feeling are so interwoven in Birtwhistle's technique, that when it comes to the register of loss and death he is able to find what an otherwise hostile critic admitted 'can be a kind of bridled eloquence'. Word frequency analysis shows a high incidence of time, thought, light, morning, child, apple tree, painting and fossil.

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Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper,' following the example of the great elegists including Milton, to whose Paradise Lost she listened during the period of composition, also hearing the strains of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, of Alice Oswald and Marie Howe. The poem becomes a kind of kingdom, 'one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between'. As well as elegy, Chakraborty composes invocations, verse essays, and the strange extended miracle of the title poem, in which ancient and modern history, memory and the lived moment, are held in a directed balance. It celebrates the natural forces of the world and the rapt experience of balance, form and - love. She declares a marked admiration for poems that 'will write into being a world that already in some way exists'. This is what her poems achieve.

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In 1487 Sir Henry Bodrugan, pursued for treason, leapt from a Cornish clifftop into a waiting boat and fled to France. Bodrugan’s Leap, as the clifftop has come to be known, lies close to John Wilkinson’s childhood home, and supplies the title for the central cycle of poems in My Reef My Manifest Array. That totemic image of exile feeds an interest in borders and partings that runs throughout the collection. The Cornish landscape of the poet’s childhood, loaded with new significance following the death of his sister, is Wilkinson’s primary locus, but he ventures – flees, perhaps – farther afield, to Portland (Maine), Chicago, Sydney and Busan. Combining extended sequences with brief lyrics, Wilkinson’s lines tie minuscule linguistic knots that give pleasure when unwoven. The reading becomes archaeological as layers and layers of meaning, of feeling, of reason are exposed.

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Errant, Gabriel Levin’s sixth collection, opens and ends with invocations: of Venus at dawn and Hesperus at dusk. The book’s day takes us on a three-part planetary journey. `What Drew Me On’ is inspired by Tamara Rikman’s free-floating works on paper and by Plato’s image of the music of the spheres. Ghostly pres¬ences are evoked in several poetic forms, including terza rima for the poet’s take on image-making down the ages. `First came sooty beings shinnying up walls.’ There are elegies to the cineastes Abbas Kiarostami and Chantal Akerman, as well as translations from Greek and (in villanelle form) from the Medieval Hebrew of Avraham Ibn Ezra. There are aubades, lyrics, and a sequence arranged in short-lined triads of psychic retreat in Jerusalem. The wanderer picks up where he left off in earlier books, striking out from home, conjuring Sa’adi’s Gulistan or Nasir-i Khursaw in Cairo; pocketing bits of obsidian on the island of Melos, paying homage to Yannis Ritsos in Crete.

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Miles Burrows is a poet always in love, and confused - as lovers tend to be - by the inconstant nature of 'the other'. In this, his second book of poems, published half a century after the first (A Vulture's Egg, 1966), he is also aware, merrily for the most part, of mortality. Eros and Thanatos tap at his funny bone. Does God exist? he asks. Will the nightingale, the one right nightingale, sing?The landscapes of these poems are drawn from the Far East, New Guinea and the Home Counties, where Burrows has served as a doctor, psychiatrist and a teacher. Thematically the poems build on Burrows's eccentric childhood in a vanished but vividly reimagined, even re-invented England, rich in voices, disappointments and epiphanies and always maintaining a dialogue - now mischievous, now outrageous - with the present. The reader gratefully turns the pages, hoping the conversation will continue well beyond the back cover.

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The poems in Breezeway move lightly between the everyday world, with its pleasures and absurdities, and the worlds of literature and art, with theirs. John Ashbery's poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing, the work of an old and always a new master with an uncanny understanding of our age, its fears and fragmentation, its fulfilments. Here is Mr Salteena and the station of the Metro, demystified Middle English mysticism and a peculiarly-paced samba, a drugstore, a supermarket, Batman and his dog Pastor Fido, all concluding in 'A Sweet Disorder', in which Herrick is decisively transformed: 'Pardon my sarong. I'll have a Shirley Temple.'

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A magnificent anthology of the finest works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, perhaps the premier American lyricist of the twentieth century. --This text refers to an alternate paperback edition.

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This collection travels many paths and by-ways, beside some of which lie burning cars, or a young man speechless on a forest floor, or girls lost far from home. And there is a lighthouse...Travellers pass along these ways, in the darkness, in transit, hoping for safe passage through unknown territory. All are imagined with what Sean O'Brien describes as Draycott's 'quizzical, exultant, exact music'. The Night Tree is Jane Draycott's second book of poems, following Prince Rupert's Drop, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation short listed for the Forward Prize in 1999, and two smaller collections, Tideway (Two Rivers Press, 2002, illustrated by Peter Hay) and No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop) short listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 1997.

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the greatest German language poet since Goethe, worked for a time as Rodin's secretary at Meudon. This title is a paperback edition of Stephen Cohn's celebrated translations and includes the complete German language text parallel with the English.

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William Hazlitt (1778-1830), that most engaging of English essayists, is provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays that spark with urbane wit and gossip. Characters from his world come alive: Wordsworth and Beau Brummell, street jugglers and coffee house politicians, the ladies' maid returning from Italy 'as giddy as if she had been up in a balloon' and the literary footmen who 'wear green spectacles' and 'are seen reading books they do not understand at the Museum and public libraries'.Gregory Dart's selection reminds us that Hazlitt is not only an important critic and polemicist, but also a reflective, wry, wise and humorous writer, a man who relished London life. Many of the essays included here are made available for the first time in paperback. A detailed introduction and notes set them in their context and clarify contemporary references.

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John Ashbery's new collection of fifty-one poems ends with the substantial piece that gives the book its title. Composed in stanzaic prose, it is a fine specimen of his distinctive courtship mode, wooing the language with language, teasing it and teasing out of it a Protean lover that loves Protean him back: a you, an I, in a wild variety of registers and postures. Throughout "Where Shall I Wander" the effable and ineffable are in dialogue; time ('then' and 'now') and the stable moments of the poem are within earshot of one another, but cannot ever quite touch hands. There are ghosts and presences, some unexpected like Ali Baba, Arabia Deserta (down to the turning spit and braised goat) and Mrs Hanratty's apron; others like Holderlin are more insistently entertained, in a poetry that fractures and reinvents syntax, cadence and our sense of beauty, this tribute informed by the terror of Holderlin's later world in which it is impossible not to share.

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Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the 20th century, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of 88 lyrics which, to gain their full effect, must be read as a whole. Halcyon is a "solar diary" of a summer spent in Tuscany, part of the time with the legendary Eleanora Duse. The poems evoke specific times and places; more importantly, they conjure up emotions, memories and myths associated with each place. Beginning in early summer, they move through the seasons, changing in verse-form and mood, always delighting in the sensuous qualities of language. J.G. Nicholls's translation makes the richness and subtlety of d'Annunzio's poetry accessible to the English-speaking reader, and his introduction illuminates the complex themes and structure of the work. He provides a full glossary of places and references.

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"Eyes To See Otherwise" is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. W.S. Merwin writes, "In his early books, it was immediately clear that Homero Aridjis was a poet of great vitality and originality ...[his] range grew with astonishing vigour in one book after another ...Poems of his have been published in English translation for decades but it is more than time to have a large, widely representative selection of his poems available in English". Charles Tomlinson recalls, "When I first met Homero Aridjis, he was a youthful poet. He has carried that sense of youth with him throughout his life and it has left a mark on all his work. Born in a Mexican village, near which the monarch butterflies swarm yearly after their flight from Canada, he experienced early life in a profound relationship with the cycles of nature. This lies at the root of his two principal concerns, poetry and ecology. He not only writes of the whale, but has long fought for the protection of its breeding places in Baja California". Kenneth Rexroth calls him "a visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces". He adds, "These are words for a new "Magic Flute"".

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New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's gathering from the full range of his poetry, from poems of the 1960s to work from Taller When Prone (2004) and new poems yet to appear in a collection. Les Murray is one of the finest poets writing today; endlessly inventive, his work celebrates the world and the power of the imagination. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential works: an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those new to it.

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Unreeling like a series of film clips recorded during a stroll through Paris, Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets is wickedly funny. It is also a bittersweet meditation on the effects of time and memory. Hitting the Streets is Queneau's love letters to Paris - a Paris that is always in the process of becoming obsolete. This lively, idiomatic version is the first complete translation available in English.

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In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the 'quennet' is reworked and refigured in response to three perimiter landscapes. The first sequence, 'Elementary Estuaries', is inspired by a series of walks along the Essex estuary, the poems' appearance on the page suggesting the landscape's expansive esturine vistas, its pink sail lofts and windswept gorse, beach huts and distant steeples. In the second sequence, written after a series of walks around the Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, the form changes to reflect the physical, almost bodily tension of the wall as an architectural and social obstruction. The final sequence, 'Waterlog', retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, and here the quennet's newely elongated shape and ragged margin evoke the region's eroding coastline, its deserted piers and power stations, electric fences and waterlogged fields. Terry's project is bold in scope, his poems subtle in effect, a mix of sign and song, concerete and lyric, Oulipo and psychogeography.It is a work about boundaries, political, social, and natural, and about the walk as a critical apparatus through which these fields are shown to connect.

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Skies is Alison Brackenbury's ninth Carcanet collection. In these poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and love, joy and sadness, summer and winter. Starting out as the first trees 'chatter into leaf', the poems cross through July's 'dripping amber' to January's 'false thaw'. The seasonal shift is reflected in the poet's larder, its variegating hues and tastes: honeycomb, parsnips, apples, broad beans, sprouts, jams and spices summon an air of harvest. But it is also the seasons of life that concern Brackenbury here: the poet's irrecoverable past, her youth 'which I can never visit, like a star', is at the same time the thing that never stops revisiting: in an unexpected letter from an old lover, in a half-remembered playground song. The poems in Skies are attuned to this musicality, to time's echoes and refrains, the old errors that still 'flower and flower'.Finally, it is the poet's quiet conviction to savour life, to take seriously its succulent variety, that defines this collection: the poems attest to the special privileges of age: wisdom, self-sufficiency, a deepening patience with the world; the ability to be, as the poet says of an apple, 'self-sweet'. The communal warmth of the kitchen finds its double in the exquisite loneliness of rising early, of hearing the barking of town foxes at dawn, or in the contemplation of a garden in autumn, its rows of hips swelled by rain, a rose 'whose name I think means happiness'.

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This is an enchanting selection from one of Europe's richest traditions of folk literature. The vitality of Popa's chosen material is wonderfully conveyed in this adaptation by Andrew Harvey and Anne Pennington.

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"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. The collection remains one of the most significant poetic achievements of our time.

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In 1822 William Hazlitt, forty-four years old and married, was both tormented and enchanted by Sarah Walker, his landlady's nineteen-year-old daughter. "Liber Amoris" is the chronicle of that obsession, an extraordinary fragment of Romantic autobiography that explores the unstable nature of what individuals perceive as 'truth', the unknowability of others, and leaves the reader unsure of who is victim, who seducer in this haunting relationship. Gregory Dart sets "Liber Amoris" in its context of Hazlitt's other writings from 1822-3, and provides a wealth of fascinating notes that take us deep into the period and the writer's imagination.

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Chinua Achebe is one of the founding fathers of African literature in English, a writer of world stature whose novel Things Fall Apart is one of the essential works of the twentieth century. This Collected Poems draws on his three collections of poetry, and includes seven previously unpublished poems; it reveals a lifetime of poetic engagement with politics, war and culture, inherited wisdom and the making of new futures. Achebe's poems are ironic, generous and tender, drawing deep on the Igbo traditions of his African roots, confronting the continent's harsh realities of violence and exploitation.

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This book is a complete edition of the authentic poems, English and Latin, of the Elizabethan priest, poet and martyr S. Robert Southwell, offering new texts based on the very manuscripts which were circulated in secret among English Catholics in the years after the poet's death. This edition, by drawing its texts directly from a complete re-examination of these contemporary manuscripts, makes these poems more than items of literature; it allows them to regain some of their original purpose of communicating forbidden theologies and doctrines amongst a criminalised and near-silenced readership of secret, persecuted groups. These are the poems of those Catholics who did not or could not flee the country as the Elizabethan State bore down upon their faith in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Southwell's new visions and visualisations in English bear their fruit a generation later in the works of Donne and Herbert. His rare Latin verses (here widely available for the first time, accompanied by a new translation) show also that that the Augustans, even Milton, owe him a creative debt.

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Charles Olson (1910-70) believed that poetry exists in an 'open field' through which the poet transmits energy to the receptive reader. Olson's influence on the development of British and American poetry through his writing and teaching is immense. His work encompasses myth, history, scholarship and politics, grand theories and delight in the particular variousness of life, all marked by the curiosity and openness to experience that he asked of his readers. Olson grew up and returned to live in the seafaring town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was from the life and language of its citizens that his poetry drew its strengths. "The Reader" includes extracts from the full range of Olson's poetry and prose, including letters, interviews and the full text of the key essay 'Projective Verse'. Ralph Maud, a colleague of Olson's from 1963-5 and the editor of Olson's letters, has supplied an introduction, supporting illustrations, notes and bibliography to this essential resource.

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Body language and the body of language - from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers - are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since The Guest from the Future (1995), described by Poetry Review as 'snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories ...and some of the storytelling inspired'. The centrepiece of the book is 'Skyhorse', an ambitious poem that finds the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through three millennia of English history.

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The lyric and satirical muses have kept busy with Les Murray. Subhuman Redneck Poems, awarded the 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize, Dog Fox Field (1991), Translations from the Natural World (1993) and Conscious and Verbal (1999) are added to his expanded and corrected volume, bringing the first 60 years of his life into memorable focus. 'It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives', Joseph Brodsky said. And Derek Walcott: 'There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.'

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