Search results for ""carcanet press""

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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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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William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume II reissued as a Carcanet Classic. After 1939, William Carlos Williams had embarked on the great original experiment that led to his magnificent, faulted master-work 'Paterson', and the work in the second volume of The Complete Poems provides a luminous record of his developing strategies, the emergence of a firm sense of 'the variable foot', and of the unaffected, secular and democratic voice of a poet who remains the great American modernist. It includes the collections he published alongside Paterson - The Wedge (1944), The Clouds (1948) and The Pink Church (1949); the two books in which he developed his distinctive three-step line, The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955); and his final Pulitzer Prize volume, Pictures from Breughel (1962). As in Volume I, previously uncollected pieces are arranged chronologically and placed between the individual books. Williams's verse translations from four languages are also included. Williams remains challenging not because he is obscure but because he is so wonderfully direct. To reveal some of Williams's techniques of revision the editor prints some poems in earlier and later versions, and a few of the poems from the suppressed 1909 volume are included so that we can measure the extent of his growth. As in Volume I, there is a full editorial apparatus.

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The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with 'Deposition', a harrowing elegy in five parts: the beloved endures 'her Nile of pain'; the lover attends as she is treated, the last scene postponed until the two selves are quite differently refined. His editor has written, 'Dan Burt's poetry, like his prose, explores themes unusual in contemporary literature, using a language that is precise, nuanced and mordant. And he risks traditional forms, his sonnets and quatrains mastered and masterful.'

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Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies - loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction - that make up a life. The habit of foisting human agendas on non-human worlds is challenged. Must we still describe willows as weeping? In the twenty-first century, is it possible to be 'at one' with nature? The poems reflect on our desire to locate likeness, empathy and kinship with our environments, whilst embracing inevitable difference. As the narratives belonging to animal fables, Doomsday Preppers and climate change deniers are adapted, new metaphors are found that speak of both estrangement and entanglement. Drawing at times from her residency in the Amazon rainforest, Galleymore delves into a world of pink-toed tarantulas, the erotic lives of barnacles, and caged owls that behave like their keepers. The human world revises its own measure in the light of these poems.

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Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. `Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

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In Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, `Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and `Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond. Along the way there are homages to Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, Kurt Schwitters, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Cage and Tom Raworth. His poems do not break down into form and content but insist on a continuity between lyrical purpose and critical thinking. An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism, Milne’s Collected Poems captures the `skewed luxuriance’ (Guardian) of his eco-socialist poetics.

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For over three decades Harry Gilonis's poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time. Gilonis's work has a light, lucid beauty underpinned by formal and procedural invention, with lyrics written from love and landscape as well as poems made from the innards of language. There is collaged bird-song, experimental versioning from the ancient Chinese and text written by a `bot'. Borders between `original' and `translation' are straddled, or blurred, in intriguing and innovative ways. Objectivist after the fact, party without nostalgia to the British Poetry Revival, cognisant of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Gilonis's poems are aware of their shape on the page and the sound they make as they go past the ear. They insist on being themselves as fully and openly as possible. The versatility and range of Rough Breathing, its use of processes, transparent or opaque, make it - besides being a fine collection - a radical pattern-book to challenge teachers and students alike. An Introduction by Philip Terry offers biographical and critical context. `What becomes increasingly clear as one reads,' Terry writes, `is that this is a body of work of the highest ambition, and highest order.'

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There are all types of bodies.If you're lucky you'll find someone whose skinis a canvas for the story of your life.Write well. Take care of the heartbeat behind it. Billy Letford's Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, 'poackets ful eh ma fingers', or stumbling from a bar 'like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free', the characters in Letford's poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. 'On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She's smoking a joint. It's not a surprise.' Letford's words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernity's unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, 'rotten with wonder', that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt's humble endurance. 'There's dignity there. Lay yourself open.'

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To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware. In the 1970s Tom Wolfe located the apex of doubletracking as the art world, but today, it's a cornerstone of the middle classes, and a full-blown commonplace of contemporary life. At root, it's a state of mind born of an ambivalent relationship to privilege, that, when perfected, allows those with financial resources the economic benefits of leaning right, and the cultural benefits of leaning left. It curls around the vocal chords of private school alumni as they drop their consonants, sprays the can of legally sanctioned graffiti on the side of the pop-up container shopping mall, and tones the cores of sweaty executives attending weekly parkour classes, prancing about the concrete furniture of housing estates they do not live on. Comprising essays, fiction and art criticism, this is a merciless, witty satire of the middle classes - a venturesome, intelligent debut which cuts to the very core of our duplicitous lives.

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"In a Hotel Garden" is the strangest and most enigmatic of Gabriel Josipovici's many strange, enigmatic novels. On the surface it is a simple story of the growing obsession young Englishman with a Jewish woman he meets on holiday. Gradually it reveals itself as an exploration of power of memory and imagination, also raising vividly the question of how far it is possible for non-Jews to understand Jews, however intrigued by them they may be. In a haunting play of echoes the novel presents us not with hotel garden but two, embedded respectively in the stony landscape of Tuscany and in the forested mountains of Alto Adige; not one story of erotic obsession but two, played out in Italy in the 1920s, the other in present-day London. A great walk over a mountain in the Dolomites forms the mysterious centre of this book. Behind the story looms our dilemma of coming to terms with the destruction of European Jews.

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Poetry pamphlet by Jay Gao, whose debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet Press, UK, 2022) is a winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award.

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The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Bulletin features a wide range of exciting new poetry publications, reviewed by expert poet selectors Sandeep Parmar, Vidyan Ravinthiran, George Szirtes, AB Jackson, Degna Stone and Anthony Anaxagorou. AUTUMN SELECTIONSJuly, Aug, Sept 2019Choice: Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Picador)Recommendations: Mary Jean Chan, Flèche (Faber)Peter Sirr, The Gravity Wave (Gallery)Seni Seneviratne, Unknown Soldier (Peepal Tree)Anthony Anaxagorou, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins)Commendation: Carmen Bugan, Lilies from America – New & Selected (Shearsman)Wild Card: Dunya Mikhail, In Her Feminine Sign (Carcanet Press)Translation: Manuel Forcano, Maps of Desire (Arc)

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Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Summer 2010Arc 'Visible Poets' translation series, no. 29My soul is like these threads of spider silk tensed criss-cross between two apple treesRooted in an ancient folk song tradition, Kristiina Ehin's poetry is both universal and deeply personal; her language is direct and simple, yet she expresses herself so vividly that her joys and sorrows become the reader's own. These poems, beautifully translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and selected from her most recent collection, were written over two years, beginning shortly before the birth of her son."Here is a generous, honest imagination: visceral, shamanistic and wise. Kristiina Ehin is a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirts and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life. There is a refreshing lightness and originality to her poems, which are nonetheless poignant. She is able to express strong emotions without being sentimental. Her work has truly haunted me; it has entered the deepest layer of my being with its rare combination of directness and subtle nuances, ancient traditions and modernity." Sujata Bhatt"Ehin's poems are deeply personal, but not in a way that excludes the reader: quite the opposite, they draw the reader in, so that Ehin's life feels like our own, a fascinating glimpse into a different, simpler life lived close to nature. Reading these poems is like a holiday of the best kind: eye-opening, relaxing and different. Ehin's work is rooted in Estonian folk tradition, and music permeates both the forms and the language. I particularly relished her poems about parenthood, for their beauty and tenderness."StrideKristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She received an M. A. in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from Tartu University in 2004. She has published five volumes of poetry in her native Estonia and has won a number of prizes there, including Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for her fourth volume, written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. She has also published a book of short stories and has written a play as well. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007. Her other books in English translation are Põletades pimedust – Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, 2009), A Priceless Nest (short stories, Oleander Press, 2009), Päevaseiskaja – South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik – New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, 2007). She is often invited to take part in international arts and literary festivals and her work, poetry and prose, appears regularly in English translation in leading Irish and British literary journals. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. Kristiina's reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival (July 2010) was one of the highlights of the Festival.Ilmar Lehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin's The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English. His own poetry has appeared in Estonian and Irish literary journals.Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, and grew up in Pune, India and in the United States. To date, she has published seven collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. The recipient of numerous awards, such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and the Cholmondeley Award, her latest collection, Pure Lizard, was short-listed for the Forward Poetry Prize and received the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, in 2008. She has translated poetry from Gujarati and German into English. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a frequent guest at literary festivals throughout the world. Currently, she lives in Germany with her family.

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