Search results for ""author jane draycott""
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Cleopatra's Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen
Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Mark Antony, was the only member of the Ptolemaic dynasty to survive after her parents were defeated by the future Roman emperor Augustus at the Battle of Actium. Paraded as a prisoner in a Roman triumph, then brought up in the household of Augustus’ sister Octavia, she would marry a North African prince, becoming co-ruler of the Roman client-state of Mauretania. Jane Draycott recreates the life and times of a woman who became a powerful ruler in her own right at a time when most women were marginalised, and whose remarkable life shines new and revelatory light on Roman politics, society and culture in the early years of the Empire.
£12.99
£15.86
Carcanet Press Ltd Over
"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta - In these and other pieces, Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflections. She evokes the mirrors and doorways, dreams and night-time journeys that transform the familiar: entrances into a different reality. "Over" explores liminal places where ocean meets land, land drops to ravine, lives intersect in piazzas. The poems cross thresholds between what is finished and what is 'not over yet', between present and past and, in an extract from her new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl, between a sunlit garden and the mysterious landscape of the world to come.
£10.31
Carcanet Press Ltd The Kingdom
The Kingdom of Jane Draycott's fifth collection is clearly a world we know, altered a little by Draycott's distinctive, prismatic lyricism, whose loving attention to place and our moment is skewed in a way that opens the world afresh. Here are England's towns and countryside, roads and ports and sushi chains, yards and herbs, an airport and a columbarium, and poems that consider art in a time of plague by way of meditation on Titian, Apollinaire and Derek Jarman.
£11.99
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
Two Rivers Press Tideway
A long-awaited re-issue, beautifully redesigned, of Jane Draycott's 'Tideway', a mesmeric sequence of poems about London's working river in a time of transition, with paintings by Peter Hay specifically created for the first edition as companion pieces to the poems. The River Thames can be a dangerous place to work: powerful tides, strong winds, difficult bridges and paralysingly cold water. At the turn of the millennium, Jane Draycott spent several weeks with the London watermen on the city's tugs, barges, and salvage vessels - a community of highly skilled men and women watching their working landscape and their futures change around them week by week: docklands transformed, slipways built over, warehouses converted to luxury apartments. 'Tideway' brings the poems written during that time together with Hay's light-filled paintings and the transcribed words of the watermen themselves. "What Draycott manages in two sentences contains a world. It isn't just the concise audacity of the imagery created here that is persuasive... [her] confidence secures the registers and makes a fine, clear lyric. Moreover, she makes significance out of insignificance. Say it out loud; you'll want to sing it in time. Time's the theme." David Morley
£9.99
Carcanet Press Ltd Pearl
Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: `my pearl, my girl’. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, `an event of great significance and excitement’, an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.
£10.33
Two Rivers Press Christina the Astonishing
Saint Christina the Astonishing was born into a poor Belgian family in 1150. She 'died' aged 22 but at her requiem she rose from her coffin and flew away like a bird, wanting to escape the smell of sinful humanity. This was the first of many mad, disobedient exploits in her long and remarkable life. Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders retell - through their own poems as well as brief extracts from medieval religious writers - Christina's story as a woman's search for selfhood. The book includes artworks from Peter Hay, which he created for the original edition in direct response to the poetry. First published in 1998 and long out of print, this new edition makes Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders' sensual and exhilarating poetic collaboration available once more. 'Ascetic and excessive, exasperating, sometimes absurd, the life of the little-known St Christina provokes fantasies and questions. Was she a wonder worker? Or an anorexic, fuelled by hatred of the flesh? Or a powerful woman whose legendary flights set her free from her time and her place? Rather than offering pieties or diagnoses, Lesley Saunders and Jane Draycott, invite us to a feast of soul food. Their two distinctive voices meet the voices of the Middle Ages in an extraordinary blend of the sacred and the profane, the rapt and the irreverent, playful, sensual and deeply felt.' Philip Gross 'Poetry as exciting as this is rare: fusing an earthy sensuality with the spiritual, it lets us hear Christina's voice ringing clearly from the rafters.' Robyn Bolam
£12.00