Search results for ""poetry book society""
Poetry Book Society POETRY BOOK SOCIETY WINTER 2019 BULLETIN
The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Winter 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. WINTER SELECTIONS October, November, December 2019 Choice: TBC Recommendations: TBC Commendation: TBC Wild Card: TBC Translation: TBC
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Poetry Book Society Poetry Book Society Summer 2019 Bulletin
The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Summer 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. SUMMER SELECTIONS April, May, June 2019 Choice: Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky (Faber) Recommendations: Surge, Jay Bernard (Chatto) Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones (Seren) The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe) Hand & Skull, Zoe Brigley (Bloodaxe) Commendation: Whereas, Layli Long Soldier (Picador) Wild Card: The Half God of Rainfall, Inua Ellams (Harper Collins) Translation: The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, Lieke Marsman, trans. Sophie Collins (Pavilion Press)Pamphlet Choice: Lantern, Seán Hewitt (Offord Road)
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Carcanet Press Ltd Letters to America
The Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Choice. The fourth Carcanet collection from Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Tonight the Summers Over
The debut collection by a contributor to the acclaimed New Poetries V anthology. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Worple Press Like the Living End
'Like the Living End', an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Described as 'the finest poet of his generation' and 'the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, mome
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Random House Arrangements in Blue
Amy Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn't Forever, which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a Book of the Year in the Guardian, New Statesman and The Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At the Pond, Granta, the Poetry Review and elsewhere.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Eleanor Among the Saints
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.
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Carcanet Press Ltd New Poetries VIII: An Anthology
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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Carcanet Press Ltd The House of the Interpreter
A Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2023 BBC Poetry Extra's Book of the Month August 2023 This, Lisa Kelly's second collection, responds to the repression of British Sign Language (BSL) as its occasion and inspiration. Kelly develops the subject through extended sequences which attend to mushrooms and fungi, lifeforms that develop in secret, unnoticed, unappreciated, yet whose existence enriches everyday life. What can such hidden others teach us - if we attune all our senses?
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Carcanet Press Ltd Forms of Distance
This work is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. "Forms of Distance" is Bei Dao's second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, "Old Snow", as 'the work of one of the great poets of our time', and John Cayley wrote in the "Times Literary Supplement" that 'in a sense he is the only contemporary Chinese poet who is knowable for the non-specialist...we can hear the maturing poetic voice of a highly talented, individual Chinese writer.'
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Carcanet Press Ltd Leaf-huts and Snow-houses: Selected Poems
This title is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. In this generous selection of nearly half of Hauge's poetic work, Robin Fulton displays the range, variety and distinctive qualities of his poetry. Though deeply rooted in the West Norwegian landscape which he evokes so memorably, Hauge's poetry has a kinship in background and temperament with that of Robert Frost, while also sharing the wry humour and cool economy of William Carlos Williams and Brecht, whom he translated. Often epigrammatic, yet lyrical in impulse, his poems have a serenity which makes them unusually rewarding.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
Poetry Book Society Spring 2020 Special Commendation. A handful of writers defines the canon of postcolonial anglophone poetry in India. Srinivas Rayaprol has generally been omitted from the list, but his recently published correspondence with William Carlos Williams and publisher James Laughlin reveals an accomplished, complex and enigmatic figure torn between opposing forces. His Brahmin Indian background and his profession as a civil engineer in a newly independent country were at odds with his Western education, literary vocation and demonic impulses. Such contradictions are expressed in his intense poetry, here restored to print, providing insights into Anglo-Indian and American writing, and a unique contribution to international literary modernism.
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Faber & Faber Why Brownlee Left
Why Brownlee Left, a Poetry Book Society Choice and winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, confirmed Paul Muldoon's reputation as the most inventive voice of his generation when it was first published in 1980. The key figure in the poet's third collection is the enigmatic Brownlee; strong-willed and wayward, past shaky, future hazy, present whereabouts uncertain. There are many new departures here, but Why Brownlee Left also explores with increasing authority themes already apparent in New Weather (1973) and Mules (1977). It culminates in a retelling of 'Immram Mael Duin', a strange voyage of self-discovery by the poet's legendary ancestor.
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Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Living Option: Selected Poems
Karen Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, Pigeon, in 2010, and has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive and unsettling voices in Canadian poetry, a 'sublime singer of existential bewilderment'. Her poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, desire, and the eros of danger, constantly exposing the fragility of the basis of trust on which modern humanity relies. They are double-edged, tense and tender, an edgy blend of irony and guts, of snarl and praise, of sharp intelligence and quizzical ambiguity. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Bloodaxe Books Ltd Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF. Please, Do Not Touch This Exhibit is Jen Campbell's second collection, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).
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Granta Books Life Without Air
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020 WINNER OF THE SCOTTISH BOOK AWARDS' POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE "Whip-smart, sonically gorgeous" - Rae Armantrout, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Versed When Louis Pasteur observed the process of fermentation, he noted that, while most organisms perished from lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive as 'life without air'. In this capricious, dreamlike collection, characters and scenes traverse states of airlessness, from suffocating relationships and institutions, to toxic environments and ecstatic asphyxiations. Both compassionate and ecologically nuanced, this innovative collection bridges poetry and prose to interrogate the conditions necessary for survival.
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Carcanet Press Ltd The Long Beds
A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.
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Faber & Faber Kingdomland
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE Kingdomland is the debut poetry collection of Rachael Allen - a writer of rare vision and flair. The world she creates is suffused with surreal images and uncanny incidents. Unexplained violences and strange metamorphoses take shape in the 'glowering dusk'. And yet, all too clearly, we recognise life here on earth, its everyday griefs, dysfunctions and injustices. Where distinctions between murder and bloodletting, corruption and consumption are blurred. Where a pet tarantula or mimic octopus might find itself beside glands and processed meats. Landscapes shift and identities dissolve: 'the red bricks of the day' exist 'in a woman's chest', a human presence is 'embedded in the walls'. All appears changed, but familiar.Intercut with oblique verse fragments and a series of linked sequences, Allen blends elements of fiction and ekphrasis to create a haunting and unforgettable debut.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Afterwardness
A 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019. Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible. She has created in this unprogrammatic series, mixing memory, history, daily life, all her intersecting geographies and cultures, a self-portrait in all her moods, anxieties and delights. The sonnet form is stretched in all sorts of fruitful directions. Just as she adapted the ghazal form to English use, here she puts the Petrarchan sonnet to striking, unfamiliar use, widening the possibilities of the form. The poems are rich with Khalvati's personal history, her Iranian origins, her long years in Great Britain. The poems play between cultures, ancestral and acquired.
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Vintage Publishing No Map Could Show Them
* A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2016*'When we climb aloneen cordée feminine,we are magicians of the Alps –we make the routes we followdisappear'The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen Mort’s position as one of the finest young poets at work today.
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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.
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Penned in the Margins Notes on the Sonnets
Winner of The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021 Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.' - Caroline Bird A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
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Penguin Books Ltd Calling a Wolf a Wolf
A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2018I could not be held responsiblefor desirehe could not be held at allTracking the joys and pains of the path through addiction, and wrestling with desire, inheritance and faith, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the darkly sumptuous debut from award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar. These are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life.'The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love, is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection'FANNY HOWE'Compelling . . . strange . . . always beautiful' ROXANE GAY, AUTHOR OF BAD FEMINIST AND HUNGER'Truly brilliant'JOHN GREEN, AUTHOR OF THE FAULT IN OUR STARS'A breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature'PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)
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Carcanet Press Ltd In Her Feminine Sign
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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Carcanet Press Ltd Like a Tree, Walking
Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize The Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2021 Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree, Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to 'stillness exercises' recording microenvironments - emotional and aural - around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation. Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.
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Carcanet Press Ltd The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx
Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in 'Mask', are both 'themselves and strangers'. 'That's all they wanted.'
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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.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018
A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation. Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker's engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman's call for `an internationality of languages'.
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Carcanet Press Ltd All Under One Roof: Poems
The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018. The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder’s brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag’s most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the `Sprachpulsate’ (pulses of language): `Evelyn Schlag’s poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.’ Leeder’s selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.
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Faber & Faber Quiet
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO POETRY PRIZEWINNER OF THE JOHN POLLARD INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZEPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION'In Quiet, Victoria Adukwei Bulley advances a poetics of balance. The poems collected in these pages mix a technically assured, sonically resonant, surface with a profoundly evocative, scrupulously integrated core. This book is a seismic event; its vibrations will be felt for a long time to come.' Kayo ChingonyiVictoria Adukwei Bulley's debut collection, Quiet, circles around ideas of black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, playing at the the tensions between the impulse to guard one's 'inner life' and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, 'your silence will not protect you'. The poems teem with grace and dignity, are artful in their shapes, sharp in their intelligence, and possessing of a good ear, finely attuned to the sonics that fascinate and motivate the writing 'at the lower end of sound'.
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Pan Macmillan Whereas
'I was blown away by Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS.' Maggie Nelson, author of The ArgonautsWHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPECIAL COMMENDATION.'In what is clearly a golden age for American poetry, Layli Long Soldier has to be out in front – one of the best collections of the century.' Andrew McMillan
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Bloodaxe Books Ltd Mappa Mundi
The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's new poems are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveler's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each is a journey, open-ended and surprising, giving glimpses of the Middle East, the Pacific North-West, or a Europe of lost spas. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love aging, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart, and mind. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Salt Publishing The Missing
Winner Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for PoetryShortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2009Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised – ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives – raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.
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Carcanet Press Ltd FURY
Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, Fury is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer'.
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Enitharmon Press In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos
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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Carcanet Press Ltd For the Unnamed
For the Unnamed was originally entitled 'For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Pico's Sarco and Sepulveda's Black Swan in Los Angeles, in 1852'. That title provided the full narrative in a nutshell: we know the names of the owners of the two horses, we know the horses' names, the place and date of the race. But apart from his colour, and his victory, we know nothing about the jockey who made the whole thing happen. Fred D'Aguiar's new book recovers and re-imagines his story. It was the most publicised race of its era with numerous press notices but he remained unnamed. We are given several perspectives on the action – owner's, trainer's, the horse Black Swan's, the jockey's lover, the jockey himself. But one crucial element of identity is forgotten, and that forgetfulness speaks eloquently about the time and the freed man's circumstances in the mid-nineteenth century. Fred D'Aguiar's previous collection, Letters to America (2020), was a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice and a White Review Book of the Year.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Joy
Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale’s fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. `Joy’ is a monologue in the voice of William Blake’s wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it `an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing’. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto `silent’ dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the `maligned and misaligned’.
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Pan Macmillan The Tradition
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRYThe Tradition by Jericho Brown, is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.A Poetry Book Society Choice'To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius.' Claudia RankineJericho Brown’s daring poetry collection The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex – a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues – testament to his formal skill.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Venus as a Bear
The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice. Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance. They tend toward, and tend to, the inanimate and non-human, tenderly disclosing their forms of sentience. We have feelings for creatures, objects and places, but where do these affinities come from? How do things, as things, affect us, remain mysterious while making themselves known? For Capildeo answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm; exploring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; criss-crossing the British Isles with the Out of Bounds poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales. Many of the poems respond to real places, objects and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications. They dwell on bodies and dwell in the body, inviting ardent, open forms of reading, in the spirit of their composition.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Seasonal Disturbances
Second Place winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds (`technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an `activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'.
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Carcanet Press Ltd Discipline
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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Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Shadow of Sirius
US Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Bloodaxe published his Selected Poems in 2007. At 82, Merwin produced ‘his best book in a decade – and one of the best outright’ (Publishers Weekly), and a collection which has won him his second Pulitzer Prize in the US and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK. The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in his latest collection. ‘I have only what I remember,’ Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound-the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and ‘our long evenings and astonishment’. In ‘Photographer’, Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by ‘someone who understood’. In ‘Empty Lot’, Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Kids
Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of ‘The Kids’, the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race – and their fundamental intersection with education – are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach. The Kids – a Poetry Book Society Choice – won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
£10.99
Carcanet Press Ltd On Balance
Winner of the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Literary Award. Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2018 Pigott Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2018 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinead Morrissey's sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland - the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane - celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in 'Articulation' we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon's horse, Marengo, 'whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz', suspended in time 'for however long he lasts before he crumbles'.
£10.33
Liverpool University Press How To Wash A Heart
Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020.Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.
£12.69
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Mama Amazonica
Mama Amazonica is set in a psychiatric ward and in the Amazon rainforest, an asylum for animals on the brink of extinction. It reveals the story of Pascale Petit's mentally ill mother and the consequences of abuse. The mother transforms into a giant Victoria amazonica waterlily, and a bestiary of untameable creatures - a jaguar girl, a wolverine, a hummingbird - as she marries her rapist and gives birth to his children. From heartbreaking trauma, there emerge luxuriant and tender portraits of a woman battling for survival, in poems that echo the plight of others under duress, and of our companion species. Petit does not flinch from the violence but offers hope by celebrating the beauty of the wild, whether in the mind or the natural world. Mama Amazonica is Pascale Petit's seventh collection, and her first from Bloodaxe. Four of Pascale Petit's previous six collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Winner of the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, Mama Amazonica won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2018 - the first time a poetry book has won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018, and was the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2017.
£12.00
Faber & Faber Postcolonial Love Poem
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYSHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZEPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONPostcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book, an anthem of desire against erasure. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a thigh's red-gold geometry, the emerald tigers that leap in a throat. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Natalie Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now - how we might learn our own cures and 'go where there is love'.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Life for Us
Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan just before her family fled to Iran. She returned home at the age of five, but when she was 14 the Kurds were attacked with chemical weapons, and her family were forced back into exile. Her poems chart lives of displacement and terror, repression and the subjugation of women, family love, flight and survival. Life for Us is a book of great warmth and passion, which explores both the struggle of a people not represented on the world map and the pains of exile. It shows the human spirit triumphing over adversity. Intertwining political and personal struggle in a quirky, sometimes humorous way, Choman Hardi’s poems draw upon dual memories – like fireworks and gunfire – as well as different realities for different sexes: the father’s political struggle and loss of books, the mother’s silent labour and weeping for others. Life for Us (2004) was Choman Hardi’s ?rst English collection, and was followed by Considering the Women (2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
£9.95