Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. In Squid Squad: A Novel we join Natalie Chatterley, Angus Mingus, Nerys Harris and friends as they make recordings of the doorbell, uncrumple their cash and fling their walnuts from the window. They contemplate the spaces between the spaces between things and compare the rhythm of rhetoric to the rhetoric of rhythm, while around them chickens feed on chestnuts, nuthatches nest in bicycle baskets, and budgerigars sulk themselves to sleep. The second half features shorter stand-alone poems. Here, poetic form is given a playful reworking: a poem to be spoken in a single breath, a poem made entirely of questions, a series of three poems in the form of university mark schemes, and poems that explore the possibilities of the list as a verse form.

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Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work. He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.

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A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection At the heart of In Her Feminine Sign, Dunya Mikhail’s luminous new collection of poems, is the Arabic suffix taamarbuta, `the tied circle’ – a circle with two dots above it that indicates a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. With a deceptive simplicity and disquieting humour reminiscent of Wisława Szymborska, and a lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail slips between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, tracing new circles of light.

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Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. This first anthology of 'Apocalyptic' or neo-romantic poetry since the nineteen-forties includes over 150 poets, many well known (Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham), and others quite forgotten (Ernest Frost, Paul Potts). Over forty of the poets are women, of whom Edith Sitwell is among the most exuberant. Much of the contents has never previously been anthologised; many poems are reprinted for the first time since the 1940s. The poetry of the Second World War appears in a new context, as do early Tomlisnon and Hill. Here readers can enjoy an overview of the visionary-modernist British and Irish poetry of the mid-century, its antecedents and its aftermath. As a period style and as a body of work, Apocalyptic poetry will come as a revelation to most readers.

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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020. Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

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A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation. In Discipline, her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn’t and is, as performance, as struggle, as change, as art, with penetrating wit, channeling the voices of outsiders, artists, misfits, and others. Discipline inhabits the space between the real and the surreal, a mash-up of deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery where novelty T-shirts and lady astronaut centaurs can coexist. The poems are triggered by videos, paintings and installations by contemporary artists, animals and city life. They bristle with striking details and observations. Imaginary landscapes converge with episodes from recent history: power, resistance and the structures of oppression are seen inexorably in operation. These miniature dramas perform their own autopsies: `Sweet, then sour. My lips the colour of Doubt’.

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Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. A Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendation. Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories. Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria gathers numerous stories and perspectives, such as the fragmented narrative of an Austrian woman who married a British soldier after the Second World War, and the voices of schoolchildren and immigrants. Strange discoveries are made: a grave for two dead goats; a lantern procession on the night of Epiphany; a baby abandoned by a river; a homemade frog-puppet. The poems are a collage of stories and histories, set in a variety of forms and registers. They are attentive to local detail, rich in the names of people and places - Marija, Omegepta, Eck 4 and the Loser Mountain. Mixing poetry and prose, image and narrative, German and English, Power's poems are a celebration of creativity in unlikely places. Against a disquieting backdrop of mild winters and memories of snow, they invite us to question what it means to feel at once a stranger and at home.

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`I was born in Belgium, I’m Belgian. / But Belgium was never born in me.’ So writes Leonard Nolens in `Place and Date’, which captures a mood of political and social disillusionment amid a generation of Dutch-speaking Belgians. And throughout this selection we encounter a poet engaged with the question of national identity. Frequently the poet moves into that risky terrain, the firstperson plural, in which he speaks as and for a generation of Flemings, embodying an attitude towards artistic and political commitment that he considers its defining mark. `We curled up dejectedly in the spare wheel of May sixtyeight’, he writes in the selection’s central sequence `Breach’. Nolens’ poetry is haunted by giants of twentieth-century European lyricism, by Rilke, Valéry, Neruda, Mandelstam and Celan, with whom he has arguably more affinity than with much poetry from the Dutch-language canon.

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Wales Book of the Year 2018. Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.

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Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose `heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us `in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. `Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, `where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb `birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby `in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. `Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that `flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: `a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.

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Ian McMillan is among Britain's most treasured living poets. His books of poems, stories and non-fiction have delighted audiences for almost forty years. To Fold the Evening Star gathers work from eight key collections, distilling an essence of McMillan's diversiform poetry and short prose. Hilarity and tenderness, gravity and light, are interwoven into a bountiful poetic fibre. Brought up to date by a series of new and previously unpublished work, To Fold the Evening Star will satisy both the curious newcomer and the familiar reader alike, providing an ample, lively assortment of the work.

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Shuntaro Tanikawa has been the most inventive modern Japanese poet, ever since he published Alone in Two Billion Light Years (1952), his first book, aged twentyone. Undamaged by Japan's post-War trauma, he took up the language and ran with it. He has continued running. When in 1968 his first Collected Poems appeared the critics noted at once his popularity and his refusal to compromise with the negative tones that dominated the poetic palette of contemporary Japan. He has published more than sixty books of poetry, lyrics, prose poems, narratives, epics and satires. He has experimented in form and theme, combining clarity with subtlety. This new selection supplements his original Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 1998.

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This seventh anthology in the series includes nineteen poets, new writers and some more widely known.

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"Yellow Studio", Stephen Romer's fourth book of poems, is furnished with the poems of that middle of the life where amorous bewilderment, rueful satire and the bitter-sweet memory conduct their urgent dialogue. Exploring the mystifying link between sacred and erotic love, Romer identifies the source of art itself, a place of creation and refuge, the yellow studio of the title poem. It is the lighted room of childhood, a vulnerable private place the adult tries to recreate. Formal acts of remembrance are attempts to identify what lies ahead as much as to preserve the shadows. Here Romer, with innocence and urbanity, takes stock of past and future.

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Nigel Forde is fascinated by things in the process of change: music, the momentary epiphany, the precarious balance of twilight rather than night or day. The poems, written over a period of years, meditate on memory and landscape: in the unremarkable and evanescent lives can find their greatest clarity. Two central sequences, 'A Map of the Territory' and 'Touchstones', express ways of remaking memories in language. 'Touchstones', a Hungarian sonnet sequence, explores the creative possibilities of strict poetic forms. 'A Map of the Territory' attempts both truth to events and to what distance has made of them. The collection maps a landscape and the mind that it has shaped.

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This is the second Oxford poetry anthology which represents works of the Oxford poetry list.

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By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging and exploratory, Fiona Sampson's poetry remakes the spiritual and physical metaphors by which we live.

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This second volume of extracts from Frederick Raphael's notebooks (never a diary) covers the first five years of the 1970s. It describes and analyses a variety of experiences which are always opportunities for the precise definition of people, places and events.

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The "Contes et nouvelles en vers" are the fruit of the author's wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccacio's "Decameron", Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso", Rabelais and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females, addled males, proved the inspiration for some richly inventive plotting.

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Some of the speakers in this poetry collection are ancient, some modern, and all ask questions dictated by their situations in life and history. The characters are for the most part stoical and pessimistic, but their pessimism is remote from the cynicism and irony of our age.

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From the author of "Time Signatures", this is a collection of love poems which explore the cultural and individual difficulties of desire and loss.

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These sometimes savage, sometimes wry and rueful, always inventive stories evoke the reality of the South Pacific Zealand and environs - with its "more market economy" tourists and its wacky national pride. Several of the pieces, first collected in "The New Land", won the 1990 Buckland Award for the best work of literature published in New Zealand. To "South Pacific" Bill Manhire adds new tales and other work. There's a do-it-yourself murder mystery, the story of an assassination attempt on the Queen, the hilarious account of a Writers' Congress in Kuala Lumpur, and an unsettling, futuristic tale set in 1999. A vein of satire runs through Bill Manhire's stories. Yet, rooted as many of them are in a particular place and time, the laughter they generate is anything but local.

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In his poem 'Modern Painters' Dan Burt looks at the twentieth century and its aftermath through the shattered lens of Ruskin's famous book and the work of certain modern painters. 'We look like this after things fall apart;/The painting is the autopsy report,' reflecting on two World Wars, stepping over the corpse of the Enlightenment. His poems are steady, hard, truth-telling in the way of the painters he most admires, and proof against sentiment. He matches the scale of his concerns with a substantial large- and small-scale poetic architecture, lyrical, philosophical, elegiac or satirical as appropriate. Dan Burt, a master of traditional forms, has published two chapbooks and an art book. This is his first full collection and includes poems, sequences and his celebrated prose memoir 'Certain Windows'.

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"Glass is Elastic" is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see - what do we know - in a world experienced through lenses and screens? 'Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing'. Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye's lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling. A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial. In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple every day, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world. Cover photograph Paul Maddern, Keel 14. Copyright A[copyright] Paul Maddern, reproduced by permission.

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From his first wartime collection evoking a generation's experience of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the 'vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar', to the consolatory wisdom of the Last Poems of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poet of the familiar and ordinary made extraordinary. Mundane details, observed with Fuller's tolerant humour and acute eye, reveal depths and dissonances from which a civilised life may be created: the unremarkable year 'of painting the shed ...Is also that of harmonies / That have made one's life and art for evermore off-key'. On the centenary of Fuller's birth, this generous selection, introduced by John Fuller, the poet's son, and with an afterword by Neil Powell, Fuller's biographer, brings to a new generation of readers the work of one of the essential twentieth-century poets.

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"Cold Eye" is a collaboration between an artist and a poet to examine the creative process. The work yokes ten images with ten poems and in so doing one explores the other: text uses apposition to excavate image and its genesis, and image illuminates text and its content. Image and text share a sense of doubt which permeates the work and its subjects. The drive to present a clear, cold view of them is always paramount.

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Archimedes enjoyed from childhood a natural communion with Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and protector of his city-state. This book takes us on a pilgrimage to Eleusis, to Thermopylae, and to Alexandria and the Egypt of the Ptolemies. It demonstrates that the wisdom of the ancients is central to the search for truths about ourselves and our cosmos.

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Constellations, Ian Pindar's second collection, begins with a celebration of sunlight, but ends with the appearance of the moon, the coming of winter, snow and 'perpetual night'. There are as many poems as there are constellations in the celestial sphere, although Pindar never abandons what he calls 'the Plane of Matter'. In poems of haunting beauty the poet takes us from a summer love affair by the sea to the coming of war and its aftermath. The work as a whole is a profound meditation upon sex, love, parenthood, the power of dreams and memory, and the passing of time, as well as being and mortality, literature and language, and the place of poetry in the modern world.

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Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. 'Do you mean to say you've married / an apprentice fitter and come all this way?' an official asks the poet's grandmother who, trusting to luck, emigrates to a new life in South Africa after the First World War. An ironic and grateful presence, Powell observes the lives that he inherits. Perspectives shift with time: an old photograph shows his mother 'more beautiful and happier than I remember her', his father 'looking for once the statesman he should have been'. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by Powell's grandmother of her life in South Africa: a feckless husband, a 483-mile trek with horse and covered wagon, violence and poverty. There's also a shorter, teasingly fictional narrative and a sequence about the life of a grand piano. Other poems deal with childhood, leaving home and first love; a park in Kent and a wood in Suffolk; an old photograph of the Strand and Louis Armstrong's first solo; the London bombers of 2005; and, finally, two old friends recalled in very different elegies. Meditative, wry, melancholy and celebratory, this is Neil Powell is at his most versatile and memorable.

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"Eye of the Hare" affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of "The Psalms", John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towards the planet and the needs of society. Deane revives the language of sacrament and celebration with raw and tender grace; in sonnets, narratives and lyrics Eye of the Hare advances towards redemption. In the book's final section. Deane honours the places and landscapes of Achill, that beautiful, demanding island off the west coast of Ireland.

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Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age shaped by the Suez crisis and the Cold War. The barbarities of the twentieth century haunt the shadows; there is comfort in the graces of domestic life, in friendships and long memories, in cats and gardens and eccentricities. A sequence of poems honours the life of a scholarly father-in-law who fought in the Great War. In a parallel autobiographical sequence, 'Playtime in a Cold City', three undergraduate years in the 1950s become a touchstone for a lost pastoral, before the 'fields of youth' fade to memory, 'the lit faces of dead friends, /laughing'. Generous, witty and shrewd, Borrowed Landscapes affirms Scupham's belief that when a 'murderous crew' of sorcerer's apprentices 'turn is to was', there is 'only a pen to turn was to is'.

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Clive Wilmer's New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Hagia Sophia', where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer's poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer's work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred's Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which - conversational in tone and formal in composition - make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer's translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

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Emporium, Ian Pindar's first collection, is stocked with curiosities, jokes and horrors. Step through the door and discover Big Bumperton on his bicycle, Mrs Beltinska in her bath, Monsieur P. on holiday, a transfixed girl in blue jeans, a wasp, two lascivious figs and a god who wanders shopping arcades 'enhaloed in black flames of longing and dread'. A chain letter travels across centuries of poetry, from Langland to Maxine Chernoff; deep in a snowy forest, seen only by wolves, a mysterious machine is resonating - Pindar maps a surreal hinterland where the dark humour of absurdity lies in wait.

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The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across 'all the empty places' of the world.

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The January-February 2021 issue.; Editorial considers the British Library's controversial Printed Heritage Provenance Research report and its negative impact on their welcome anti-racism policy.; Jason Allen-Paisant considers blackness and landscape.; Vahni Capildeo on trees and the poetry of ecology.; John Clegg's 'Marianne Moore Buys Some Bananas'.; Jonathan E. Hirschfeld sculpts Czeslaw Milosz (illustrated).; New poetry by Tara Bergin, Miles Burrows, and Nina Bogin.; New to PN Review this issue: Colm Tóibín, Daisy Fried, Alexey Shelvakh, and Camille Ralphs.; And more...

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The July-August 2020 issue. Robyn Marsack celebrates Edwin Morgan's centenary. Frederic Raphael's polemic about the pandemic. Kirsty Gunn on Lockdown. Interviews with the great American poet Douglas Crace, with Forward Prize 2020 shortlisted poet Caroline Bird, and the major Irish poet John McAuliffe. New poetry by Sean O'Brien, Jane Draycott, and John Birtwhistle. New to PN Review this issue: Rachel Spence, Edmund Keeley, Maya C. Popa, and Hugh Haughton. And more...

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The May-June 2019 issue. Memoirs of Brodsky in Leningrad and Ginsberg in Prague; News: Colombia arrests man for trafficking in poetry; Andy Croft deconstructs the poetry industry; East meets West in `A New Divan’; Vahni Capildeo considers shipwrecks; New poetry from Lisa Kelly, Sean O’Brien, Joe Carrick-Varty and others; New to PN Review this issue: Charles Bernstein, Jennifer Edgecombe, Michael Farrell and Samira Negrouche; and more...

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Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur `A.C.’ Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK. A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the `right language’, which `exists somewhere / Like a country’. His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual’s struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.

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stack is a book-length poem, and the début Carcanet title of one of the UK’s rising poetry talents. Described by its author as a document of `minimalist interventions’, the small descriptions that make up stack capture seemingly – and actually – everyday scenes, `found’ images from walks, tabletops, cafés, bus stops, and the conveyor belt of still-lives that is the poet’s imagination. Following in the footsteps of minimalists such as Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier and Robert Lax, Davies has dedicated much of his life as a writer so far to finding innovative ways of saying less. Resisting the poetic trend of showing why ordinary things are magical, his writing shows why ordinary things are ordinary: a packet of beef, the roof of a shed, computer stuff in a computer bag. Yet there is a philosophical aspect to stack. The uncanny precision of its images, the tiny disruptions in grammar and syntax, feel like symptoms of language’s attempt, and failure, to reflect the world. Each time words move in to capture it, reality slips: something is added, or something is lost. stack can be read as a list of discrete compositions, a series of connected images, or a set of modular combinations. What binds the poem is Davies’s flair for slow, disinterested inspection. The result is a poem that invites its readers to linger, to dally – a welcome curative for our rapid-fire world.

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The centrepiece of 'Silent Highway' is the title-poem which celebrates the role of the river Thames in the life of London. It is written as a sequence that looks at history and the present: from Pocahontas's voyage to the arrival of the 'Windrush' bringing immigrants from Jamaica, the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi and the 'Marchioness' disaster, via the Fire of London and many incidents in which the river has been spectator or participant. Howell's mix of verse styles and skill with cameos ensures that interest never flags. In other poems he demonstrates his pleasure in avoiding the predictable and in writing on a wide variety of subjects. Among the many poems of place, in which he excels, are some disturbing descriptions of modern Britain; in the final section, poems inspired by a winter spent in Brazil, he has surprises in store, such as the witty (and true) poem 'In Praise of Shopping'.

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Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks 'What is worthwhile?' His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they 'at least promise to be about the important things in everyone's life.'

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Gabriel Levin's fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ('The Fathers are Watching') navigate between the depredations of war and the mind's need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

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'Les Fleurs du mal' (1861) was the first great modern work of poetry and one of the few books of poems to become an international bestseller. This edition contains all of Baudelaire's poetry in verse with Francis Scarfe's scrupulous and inventive prose translations at the foot of the pages. Together with his detailed and authoritative introduction, this presentation makes an ideal edition both for the student and for the general reader who wishes to tackle the French original with a reliable prose guide at hand. The companion volume, 'Paris Blues', contains Baudelaire's prose poems ('Le Spleen de Paris' or 'Petits Poemes en prose') and the short novel 'La Fanfarlo' (1847), a charming extravaganza written in his early twenties.

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