Search results for ""enitharmon press""

The Heart’s Granary marks the 50th anniversary of Enitharmon Press. Compiled by Lawrence Sail, it is a personal selection from all Enitharmon’s publications. It also conveys the Press’s striking range and coherence – international in reach, while true to its Blakean vision. Including prose as well as poems, with more than 120 contributors, and with full colour illustrations by some of the many well-known artists who represent another facet of Enitharmon’s achievements, the anthology creates new contexts for writers, translators and artists, from Nobel Prize winners to emerging talents. The Heart’s Granary is memorable not only on its own account, but as a touchstone of the journeys undertaken by writers in a world that has changed radically since Enitharmon’s beginnings in 1967. Befittingly, this momentous publication marks the end of a much cherished poetry list.

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In fifty-five sonnets, Rilke plays an astonishing set of philosophical and sensual variations on the Orpheus myth. 'Praising, that's it!' he declares; nature, art, love, time, childhood, technology, poverty, justice - all are encompassed in poems that spark with insight and invention, amongst the joyful and light-footed that Rilke ever wrote. 'All poetry resists translation, and one poem may have many different versions in another language; what I look for first is clarity, and this version supplies that generously. With the presence of the German text and Crucefix's helpful notes, the English-speaking reader with little or no German will find in this version a welcoming entrance to the path which leads eventually to a full understanding - if a full understanding of this mysterious poetry is ever possible. This translation will have, and keep, a place on my shelves where all the poetry lives.' PHILIP PULLMAN

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'In the Orchard' is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from 'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like 'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears.

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These new poems by Martha Kapos represent an act of reclamation or capture: an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur ' - a thing is most itself when likened' Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing 'being most itself'. Most often the viewpoints are visual ones - making use of the phenomenon of perspective with its effects of hiddenness, distance or diminution. In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an example of the animating power of metaphor to reshape loss into presence.

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In "Voodoo Excess," Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members, shaping the raw material into memorable lyric poetry. This new volume is introduced by Mick Taylor, the musician who left the band only to rejoin it, to great acclaim, for their recent anniversary tour."

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Songs of the Darkness brings together a selection of poems for Christmas written over a period of more than thirty years. They are notable for their combination of a close focus and breadth, and for the way in which the seasonal is celebrated alongside the challenges of history and the beauty of the natural world. topographically the poems range from a Romanian convent to a Devon beach to an alpine cablecar. The finely drawn illustrations by Erica Sail, the writer's daughter, add their own note of precision and detail. Taken together with the poems, they help to create a perspective in which the darkness of winter really does yield up its music. All royalties from sales of Songs of the Darkness will be given to Trusts for African Schools, a registered charity which acts as a conduit for money raised in the UK to be sent out to some of the poorest schools in Africa. More information, and details of the ten individual schools currently supported by the Trusts, eight in Kenya, and one each in Uganda and Ethiopia, are available on the website www.trustsforafricanschools.org.

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Anna Robinson's first full collection, "The Finders of London", introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Her poems, set in and around the centre of London, depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window, in the earth beneath the author's feet, or in the flotsam washed up on the Thames beach. It's these working-class voices that lend strength to Robinson's own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city. The river Thames is never far away, its foreshore the setting for the long poem that provides the book's title: "The Finders of London", part-chronicle, part-modern fairytale, caked in mud, it challenges the morality of its Victorian counterparts while telling a simple and elegant tale of the toshers and the river they live and work under.

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"Behold" is Nicki Jackowska's seventh book of poetry. The title poem vividly evokes the history of the Holocaust with precise particulars and mundane details. Her European consciousness and working-class English roots give her writing an extraordinary spectrum of awareness. Many of the poems are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton Terrace and thence to Krakuw. John Berger writes of the collection that 'Its grief has penetrated its syntax, and when there's that kind of penetration - it changes the reader's breathing.'

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In her fourth collection, Exile and the Kingdom, Hilary Davies embarks on pilgrimage - poetic, religious, psychological. Using a dazzling interplay of narrative and lyric line, she travels through real and imagined territory in search of answers to the great questions which preoccupy us as human beings. In 'Rhine Fugue' the poet follows the river that both unites and divides Europe, conjuring an impressive sweep of history that includes the Wars of Religion, the Jewish tradition, the upheavals of the twentieth century, the hope for peace. Two lyric sequences evoke the spirit of the Lea Valley in London, where Hilary Davies lives, and the spirit of her late husband, the poet Sebastian Barker, while 'Across Country' and 'Exile and the Kingdom' chart the journey of the individual soul through darkness and confusion to a hard-won and complex faith.

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Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been - to the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge back to the familiar, and the widow Mary snaps us back to reality when she purchases an acre of woodland from the Archbishop of Canterbury, signaling the end of the wild wood. The second book from Anna Robinson builds upon her acclaimed debut The Finders of London, leading us further into a London that we have never seen

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In this welcome centenary edition of C. Day Lewis' poems, Jill Balcon has substantially extended her husband's own Penguin selections of 1951 and 1969, including not only his last collection "The Whispering Roots" (1970), but also vers d'occasion written when he was Poet Laureate and a number of the Posthumous Poems. This broad retrospective allows the reader a proper view of the technical variety and range of Day Lewis' work, from the pastoral lyrics of his youth, inspired by Hardy and Yeats, through the political verse of the 1930s, to the reflective and more personal poems of his later years. Day Lewis was fond of quoting Robert Frost's dictum that 'a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom'. This could equally well describe his own development as a writer: idealistic, sincere and psychologically acute, he bears witness in his poetry to a lifelong commitment to serving literature and its makers.

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Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.' Jack Kerouac. Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel "On the Road", Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form's essence. He incorporated his 'American' haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings.In this edition, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. The result is a compact collection of more than five hundred poems that reveal a lesser known but important side of Jack Kerouac's literary legacy.

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As one of the key figures in the first generation of British conceptual artists and a crucial force behind many of the Young British Artists, Michael Craig-Martin has dedicated a career to complicating the practice and reception of drawing. Often considered the 'high priest of the everyday', he is engaged with the methodical exploration of those objects and design classics that are so often taken for granted: the tap, the clothes hanger, the petrol pump, the Anglepoise lamp. For Craig-Martin, those objects that we value least, simply for their ubiquity, are often the most extraordinary. His is a world of revelation.

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Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book's contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite 'writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present - and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.'

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This remarkable collaboration had its origins when John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets who had long admired and enjoyed each other's work, discovered by chance that the new poems they were working on shared a preoccupation with the sea. Marine brings together those poems and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers, with people's relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic; the two poets' highly distinctive voices, while drawing on a dazzling variety of forms and sources, complementing each other in a powerful counterpoint.

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Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry gleaned from ephemera, correspondence, and notebooks housed at numerous archives in the USA and UK. From Dorn's first Beat poems in 1952, to visionary juvenalia from his study at Black Mountain, to the long poems that were central to the development of the British Poetry Revival, and to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, the transatlantic roots of Dorn's anti-capitalism are here fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote of Dorn that "No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political". Whereas Dorn's Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes in the diverse forms of the lyric, the pronouncement, the mock-epic, and the epigram. Recovering four lost books, Derelict Air significantly expands Dorn's oeuvre, including impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children's book, "confetti poems" meant to shower the 1968 DNC, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties "stock ticker". Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.

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The poems of Ancient Sunlight range in theme and space from the inner East End of London - where the poet has lived for over thirty years - with its complex richnesses of cultures and the often brutal pains of its regeneration, to great European cities such as Prague and the Italian mountains of his family origins. It is a poetry that marries personal acuity with deep communal awareness, reflecting his work as a poet in schools, hospitals, galleries, drop-in centres, urban and moorland fastnesses, and the wilder places of the human heart. This is a generous, passionate poetry of affirmation and anger for those excluded by, or on the margins of, our drunkenly material literature and society.

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Myra Schneider's new collection brings a fresh sense of reality to some well-known images. Colour is the keynote of the book, moving through Matisse, Hockney, Chagall; sound too, in Mahler and Beethoven. Often we find skin-deep assumptions turned around: the gold of ancient Crete is not its jewellery but olives; a postbox's bright exterior conceals menace; a major twentieth-century artist only started painting by chance at the age of twenty; and the long poem 'Minotaur' makes it clear that the Minotaur is no monster, Theseus no hero. Myra Schneider's tenth full collection is 'worth getting hold of if you like your poetry emotionally vulnerable, richly allusive and superbly poised between past and present.' Poetry London

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"I Have Found a Song" is a fascinating collection of poems and images published to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. It originated in a commission from Arts Council England for 12 poets to write on the theme of enslavement, which has resulted in a richly diverse selection of new poems. Interspersed with these are elaborate and exciting visual contributions by five artists invited by "Enitharmon Editions" to produce work on the same theme. The de luxe edition of the book is accompanied by a portfolio of signed original prints, and each artist has also contributed additional sequences of images reflecting on enslavement in its many forms. The poets include Patience Agbabi, Polly Atkin, Valerie Bloom, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Fred D'Aguiar, Helen Dunmore, Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Farley, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Iain Sinclair, Hugo Williams, and Benjamin Zephaniah. The artists include Sonia Boyce, Hew Locke, Shanti Panchal, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Paula Rego.

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"Nothing Like Love" is a collection of love poems by one of Britain's most popular and highly acclaimed poets. Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of "Warning", her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny Joseph was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of forms - new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories - she has always written what she things of as 'songs'. For this new book she has brought back some of the best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph's ability to convey the experiences of a 'thinking heart' is in no way diminished.

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"This Is How You Disappear" is Jeremy Reed's most autobiographical book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life as a poet.

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On 26 April, 1986 at 1.23 am, in the cool dark of an early Saturday, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex exploded. "Heavy Water" is based on eyewitness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster. Petrucci takes up the challenge confronting society in every age: to attempt the difficult task of exploring its most terrible events. His poem unites the concerns of artist, humanitarian and historian at a common source: the desire not to forget. This poem stands to remind us that those who have been exposed to the invisible should never become so.Each segment paints an intimate picture: some elements of everyday life remain unchanged, others are profoundly altered. The collection's recurring motifs of black and white signal how all are silenced, reduced to anonymity - which in turn engenders fierce solidarity. Meanwhile, men and machines toil side by side to tackle the insurmountable. Petrucci's use of scientific and medical terminology makes his descriptions chillingly precise. In contrast, we hear, from a deeply personal angle, the simply expressed accounts of real people who struggle to cope with the enormity of the disaster. This poem is at once deeply shocking yet pervaded by an uplifting beauty.

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Gathers together the finest of Ruth Pitter's poems.

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Simon Armitage - poet, playwright, broadcaster and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University - has been commissioned by 14-18 Now to write a sequence of poems in response to photographs (aerial, oblique and panoramic) of areas associated with the Battle of the Somme, which took place on the Western Front between July to November 1916.

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Edward Thomas ranks as one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century, both in his own poetry and in his influence on subsequent poets. 'He is the father of us all,' asserted Ted Hughes.This book combines the story of his life until his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917 with numerous illustrations, including photographs, printed material and original letters, many of which have never been published before. The book will add to what is already known of Thomas and his family before and after his death by putting his biography into a visual and historical context.

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The poems in Nancy Campbell's first collection transport the reader to the frozen shores of Greenland. The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. We hear the stories of those living on the ice edge in former times: hunters, explorers and settlers, and the legendary leader Qujaavaarssuk. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. In the final sequence, Jutland, we reach the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.

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Winner Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill-health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos's epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but, at the same time, freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given - the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas - have an irresistible potency.

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When David Gascoyne celebrated his seventeenth birthday in Paris in 1933, he already had a poetry collection and a novel to his name. He spent much of the next few years in the French capital associating with Eluard, Dali, Ernst, Breton, Peret and other surrealists. By the age of 20 he had firmly established himself within the movement with the publication of his groundbreaking A Short Survey of Surrealism and the poems of Man's Life Is This Meat. In 1938 Holderlin's Madness marked his move away from surrealism in 'a renewal of vision', followed by his milestone collection, Poems 1937-1942 (1943). After the war Gascoyne revisited Paris, publishing A Vagrant and other poems in 1950 and Night Thoughts, the acclaimed BBC radiophonic poem for voices and orchestra, in 1956. Despite several breakdowns he continued to write, particularly during the latter years of his long life, producing few poems, but many translations, reviews and literary criticism, memoirs and obituaries. Even so it was his contention that he was 'a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad'. This self-deprecating judgement could not be further from the opinion of those who knew him and valued his achievement. As his fellow poet and lifelong friend, Kathleen Raine, wrote on Gascoyne's 80th birthday: You are the chosen one To speak the words of blessing In this time. This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne's friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne's poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth-century literature, and its continuing relevance.

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Features Christmas poems from a range of years, in a range of styles.

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The playwright Christopher Fry received hundreds of moving and witty letters from his wife in 1940-45 while separated from her by war service. This title presents a selection of letters from the last three of those years, which gives an entertaining picture of civilian life in a rural Oxfordshire community during the war.

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"so both thrive both discovering bliss-real power is female it rises from beneath" These 81 brief poems from the 5th century BCE make up a foundational text in world culture. In elegant, simple yet elusive language, the Daodejing develops its vision of humankind's place in the world in personal, moral, social, political and cosmic terms. Martyn Crucefix's superb new versions in English reflect - for the very first time - the radical fluidity of the original Chinese texts as well as placing the mysterious 'dark' feminine power at their heart. Laozi, the putative author, is said to have despaired of the world's venality and corruption, but he was persuaded to leave the Daodejing poems as a parting gift, as inspiration and as a moral and political handbook. Crucefix's versions reveal an astonishing empathy with what the poems have to say about good and evil, war and peace, government, language, poetry and the pedagogic process. When the true teacher emerges, no matter how detached, unimpressive, even muddled she may appear, Laozi assures us "there are treasures beneath".

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This is the second poem to appear from among a small set entitled The Calendar. Each book relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. In Jerusalem Deleted a city, once thought broken, is to be expunged. It has become the solemn duty or keenest wish of each and all to capture and suffocate, to cremate and to inter, its "floating middle". The poem inks in super-suicessionary reruinations, a tune-kit packed to unfix the funerary signage.

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"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters in Everybody's Weekly, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn't at school."For Duffy, pictures were and still are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence 'Burdsong'. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind's eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship's hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.

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This is a book of meetings. A mother meets her baby. A man steps into his childhood. An old man encounters Godfather Death. And in the persona of Harald Hardrada, a passionate man wrestles with his fantasies, and north meets south. Many of Kevin Crossley-Holland's beautifully wrought, often moving poems inhabit the crossing-places between actuality, memory and imagination; and invoking Orpheus and Atargatis, Pierre de Ronsard and Beethoven, they journey from Hades to a hellish warzone, and from the high Alps and to the creeks and saltmarshes of north Norfolk.

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Maureen Duffy's new collection centres on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to a vividly remembered childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Toulouse Lautrec, Ralph Vaughan Williams - bringing them lucidly and memorably to life. With their hallmark of compassion and fair play, Duffy's poems reflect her lifelong support for progressive social and political movements; they also display a beautiful lyricism and technical skill that grows out of her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, the city past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life-stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.

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Paul Muldoon has been interested in writing for music for at least twenty years, over which time he has collaborated with composers as various as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based musical collective of which he is a founder member. Songs and Sonnets brings together poems and lyrics from a writer who has been described by The Irish Times as 'a force of nature.'

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The poems in this volume were written in response to three anniversaries relating to three separate conflicts. Told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, the poem-film Out Of The Blue was commissioned by Channel 5 and broadcast five years after the 9.11 attacks on America. It won the 2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award. 'We May Allow Ourselves A Brief Period Of Rejoicing' (a quote from one of Churchill's post-war speeches), was also commissioned by Channel 5, and broadcast on the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day. The radio-poem "Cambodia" was commissioned by the BBC for "The Violence of Silence", a radio drama set in today's Cambodia thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

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The rediscovery of Edward Upward's work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published "The Mortmere Stories", "An Unmentionable Man" and a revised version of "Journey to the Border". The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the "Times Literary Supplement" has described as Upward's 'unique perfected style ...that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'A dying man finds affirmation in a career to which he had unsuccessfully given his life, a retired and cautious man finally has the courage to ask the woman he loves if she will come to live with him, a dying woman's dreams of revolutionary events seem to be coming true - Upward's stories give ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary. These five new, carefully rendered, quiet tales retain that unique mix of art and politics so crucial to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for which he and his circle were so famous.

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In 1927, a writer in the "Radio Times" declared it unsurprising that poets should write about radio, 'for the new magic, which pours the music of the concert room into the stillness of the cottage and brings the song of nightingales into the heart of Town, is of the very stuff of poetry.'That early fascination with the power of the invisible waves that transmit thoughts around the globe persists, and continues to draw poems from writers who find that the kinship of both forms as purveyors of 'pictures in the mind' remains a unique one in the constantly evolving development of electronic media.In 1998, poet and broadcaster Sean Street was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write his sequence "Radio - Ten Poems about Sound" as the network's contribution to National Poetry Day. This led to a collection based on the sequence, and ultimately to this book, beginning and ending in silence, and containing in between, the words and music, the images and ideas of a medium which - like poetry - is capable of a potent partnership between maker and 'tuner-in'. Here are poems which speak of the power of radio to pour hatred and dogma into the head and the heart, beside others which celebrate Test Match Special and The Archers. The favourite aphorism about radio is that 'the pictures are better because we collaborate in their making' remains true. After all, we may hear with our ears, but we listen with our mind.

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U. A. Fanthorpe was that rarest of literary beings, a poet who was hugely popular with the general public and at the same time very seriously regarded by fellow poets and literary critics for her originality, wit and humanity. Since her death, much of her work has been out of print. Selected Poems, chosen from over thirty years of Fanthorpe's distinctive and accessible writing by her partner R V Bailey, will delight all her existing fans as well as those who come to her poems for the first time.

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Over the last 15 years Keston Sutherland has gained the reputation of being at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry. This book collects all of his work into a single volume, including his recent "The Odes to TL61P." Among the previous works included are "Antifreeze," "Hot White Andy," "Neocosis," "Stress Position," and "The Stats on Infinity."

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U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: 'Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. No room for Cupid.""(...) The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In "Christmas Poems", UA felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky's the limit.'

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