Search results for ""Two Rivers Press""
Two Rivers Press The Dancers of Colbek
From the medieval dancers of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne to Wesley, Tennyson, Lawrence and John Clare, William Bedford's The Dancers of Colbek explores his own early years among the market towns and seacoasts of Lincolnshire. There are prize-winning poems from his family's history of farming, and a sequence of poems voicing John Clare's experience of poverty and dispossession during the enclosures. The decline of rural ways of life is shown against a background of the arrival of American forces in the 1960s, their nuclear weapons dominating the landscapes where medieval dancers once celebrated pagan rites in midnight graveyards.
£9.99
Two Rivers Press Reading Abbey and the Abbey Quarter
Reading's Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I of England, was huge, wealthy and important until Henry VIII's dissolution in 1539, after which it declined over the years into the picturesque ruins that grace the north bank of the Kennet today. This history of the Abbey and the Abbey Quarter relates the motive behind its foundation, the relics that made it a famous destination for pilgrims from all over Europe, the part it played in royal and parliamentary life, the story of its downfall and its continuing influence on the geography and buildings of our town. With detailed descriptions of the Abbey buildings and their layout alongside features on monastic life and the Abbots, the book brings to life the role of the Abbey in the town both before and after its dissolution. A walking tour (with map) of the Abbey Quarter provides readers with an opportunity to discover the clues history has left behind; it indicates where some of the Abbey stone has ended up, and allows readers to connect directly with the past and understand the legacy we are left with today.
£9.99
Two Rivers Press Botaniphoria: A Cabinet of Botanical Curiosities
Take a fresh look at the world through the lens of a self-confessed nature-obsessed artist. Asuka Hishiki possesses not only a sense of profound awe and wonder at the intricacies of the natural world, but also the talent to communicate it through her paintings. Recalling the Wunderkammer (literally, 'wonder rooms') of 16th and 17th century European collectors, Asuka Hishiki's Botaniphoria: A Cabinet of Botanical Curiosities encompasses subjects as diverse as rotting vegetables, endangered species, mundane weeds and backyard insects - all treasures to her and transformed into objects of intense and fragile beauty through her skill with watercolour. Her work is held in prestigious collections such as The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, California, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pennsylvania. One of the first people to appreciate her work said about it, 'your work is not to hang upon a wall in a bright living room, but to put in a drawer in the study. Then, alone in the middle of the night, to take out and ponder upon.' In the best traditions of Wunderkammer, this book is an artfully arranged collection intended to be pondered upon. From the interactions of the objects within the paintings, to the quirky choice of subjects and the realism with which they are portrayed, they will bear revisiting again and again. As Asuka admits, painting is her language. She is an extremely adept communicator in it.
£17.99
Two Rivers Press Just a Moment
Ian House’s writing begins in memory and experience, the variousness of living, and the tangles of thinking and feeling. As the poems acquire shape, detail and voice, they become celebrations of beauty and energy, examinations of cruelty and mortality. Ranging from Stevens’s blue guitar to a child drawing, from a medieval monk cataloguing saints’ bones to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the new work in Just a Moment: New and Selected Poems probes the transformations wrought by aging and poetic creation, exploring the nature of art through a central sequence on the paintings of Paul Nash. ‘Ian House’s new book is full of wry, thoughtful, fine lyric poetry. It concerns itself with absence and elusiveness, age and mortality but is never elusive or lacking in vigour. His poetic voice is fluent with anger, passion, hope and resounding clarity’—Sasha Dugdale From reviews of Nothing’s Lost (2014): ‘These poems invigorate the imagination, inviting the reader to join in their verbal aerobics. Like the peregrine, House can “strip life / to the bone like poetry”’—The North ‘House’s eye is clearly focused and his ear finely attuned. Like MacNeice he revels in “the drunkenness of things being various”’—London Magazine
£9.99
Two Rivers Press Reading's Bayeux Tapestry
Embroidered in 1885-1886, Reading's version of the famous Bayeux Tapestry is a faithful, full-length replica of the original except in a few beguiling details. True to the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, its Victorian makers in the Leek Embroidery Society, matched their materials, colours and techniques to those of the eleventh century nuns thought to have created the original. The result is an extraordinarily vibrant reproduction, important in its own right and on permanent display in a purpose-built gallery in Reading Museum. Scene-by-scene, read through the story of the succession to the English throne by first Harold and then William the Conqueror. Find out why the Duke of Normandy had a claim to be King of England and what the original purpose of the tapestry may have been. Discover how Victorian society's values affected the replica and how it came to reside in Reading, so fittingly close to the ruins of the Abbey built by William's youngest son, Henry I.
£14.99
Two Rivers Press Botanical artistry: Plants, projects and processes
Get up close to the beauty and detail of nature through the artwork of award-winning UK artist, Julia Trickey. See how ordinary and sometimes overlooked subjects, such as leaves and fading flowers, can be centre stage and come to life in this beautiful showcase of some of Julia's best-loved botanical watercolours. Having been a tutor of botanical art for many years, teaching as far afield as Moscow and New York, Julia loves to help others explore the potential of watercolour and to discover the keys to a good botanical portrait. In this book she shares some of these insights as well as the motivation behind her favourite projects, together with some of the processes and watercolour techniques involved. Take inspiration from these glowing, contemporary watercolours in a book that is both beautiful and useful.
£15.99
Two Rivers Press The Rilke of Ruth Spiers: New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and Others
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as 'excellent' and 'the best' by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print.This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs' translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke's Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet's extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.
£12.99
Two Rivers Press The Whole Story: Painting more than just the flowers
Discover a whole new realm of botanical painting - the natural life forms that coexist with flowering plants, revealed in exquisite detail. Traditionally, botanical art has focused on the flowers, leaves and form of plants. They are depicted in solitary glory on a page, divorced from the life forms that live alongside them in nature. But award-winning UK botanical painter, Christina Hart-Davies, believes passionately that flowers are only part of the picture and loves to explore the different stages, related species, habitats and associated creatures that provide their setting in the wild. She looks at plants and other life forms from all angles - scientific, aesthetic and cultural - to tell The Whole Story. Showcasing examples of her most popular works, The Whole Story draws on Christina's long and parallel careers in both art and illustration. Take inspiration from her enthusiasm for the details and beauty of all aspects of the natural world and benefit from her experience as she shares techniques for painting moss and insects as well as advice on composition and lettering. This book will transform your perspective and inspire you to look beyond the flowers.
£15.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Night Tree
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.
£11.99