Search results for ""carcanet press ltd""

An elaborate poetic weave of fact and fiction, rich in incident, enigma, wit and feeling - starting with a murder in China in the age of Confucius and ending with a sestina about a difficult family Christmas in front of the TV.

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Antony Dunn's second collection of poems glimpses "the other life" of things caught out of their own element. The poems in "Flying Fish" wrestle with our fascination with the sea, our helplessness in the face of love and loss, and our fear of age and all that lies beyond.

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Beginning in present-day St Petersburg, "The Russian Jerusalem" explores the landscape of twentieth century Russian literature. In this evocative autobiographical novel, distinguished poet, translator, novelist and biographer Elaine Feinstein moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva as her Virgil, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. These imaginary encounters are interspersed with new poems by Feinstein. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

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Presents a collection that meditates on personal and natural history, nation states and mental states, violence, religion and poetry.

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'The Humphrey Jennings Film reader' tells the story of his brief, varied life in his own words, using many previously unpublished letters, treatments and screen-plays. it reprints all of his unpublished critical writings on literature, painting and other subjects (most of them unavailable in book form since the 1930s), the texts of his radio broadcasts for the BBC, and a selection of his poems.

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Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was 50, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful bell tower and its nesting jackdaws turned to a cry in the air. The bricks go off to salvage and are lost in other streets but the poems remain. Ballads are bare and brief; tried by time. They salvage but they sing, stubbornly. Their stories are sure: a woman in the kitchen, Handel at his illicit feast, the Russian dog heading for space. Shakespeare stops for breath on the stairs. Mithras is the milkman. There are cats and wild cranesbill. The poems nudge us on.

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John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes moral, miniature movies out of the great scripts of old Persian sages, each of the one hundred sonnets returning a proverb to the particular lives, moments and places that made it. These little, colour narratives put Life back up there with its Meaning. Volume two has its mind on different things. If Beckett comes before Oort, and Fellini is next to the Unknown Soldier; if Alfred Schnittke can almost touch the muezzin who was a tape recorder, and William Bees VC is three steps away from a Mongolian marmot-killer, then it must be Excellent Men. Here are the lit-up males of a writer's heart, claimed by admiration, kinship, amazement, love, poetry and a good laugh. Each to his own.

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This sequence of poems takes the reader into the early 20th century, to Northern Germany where a group of artists founded a colony in Worpswede, a rural community near Bremen. Fascinated by the number of self-portraits, Sujata Bhatt imagines the painters' inner and outer worlds.

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Emerging from the practice, art, and magic of translation, this essay collection concerns itself with the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation--literary metamorphosis--extends this process. The syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, is offered as an example of the way visual experience can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet. Demonstrated is how, with a wealth of examples and close readings, poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realized though literary expression and technique. In these essays a major poet reflects on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.

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"Agenda" was established in 1959 by William Cookson in response to a suggestion by Ezra Pound. This anthology is divided into antecedents, modern poetry, criticism, memoirs and polemics.

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Shortly before his death in 1995, Donald Davie sent his publisher the poem, "Our Father". This ten-part meditation broke a seven-year poetic silence. This book contains a body of poems which extend the concerns of his late years, concerns with the "sacred", with England and with our age.

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A collection of poems set in three continents - Asia, Africa and Europe - evoking the peopled landscapes. Music is a central feature in the poems, which travel in time and space. The poems are also set at home in a world of disorderly domesticity with cats and ponies.

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This volume contains the shorter books and monographs of Hugh MacDiarmid, as part of Carcanet's "MacDiarmid 2000" programme. Other titles in the series include "Complete Poems", "Lucky Poet", "Contemporary Scottish Studies" and "Scottish Eccentrics".

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At the time of her death in 1999, Patricia Beer had been planning a collection of her essays. She liked the title "As I Was Saying Yesterday": it caught at once the speaking quality of the essays and the consistency of concern which runs through a body of work disparate in subject-matter.

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'I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.' In the poems collected in this book, Rowan Williams writes of many things. He visits the Holy Land, commemorates the deaths of parents and close friends, explores elements of ancient Celtic culture; poems are inspired by works of art, landscapes rural and urban, and historical figures from Tolstoy to Simone Weil. What connects poem to poem is the poet's vividly sensual language, his formal mastery, and how he can address, specifically and particularly, what matters most intensely. 'Earth is a hard text to read', writes Welsh poet Waldo Williams in a poem translated here. For Rowan Williams, this very reading is the task of the poet.

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For nearly half a century Philip French's writing on cinema has been essential reading for filmgoers, cinephiles and anyone who enjoys witty, intelligent engagement with the big screen. I Found It at the Movies collects some of the best of Philip French's film writing from 1964 to 2009. Its subjects are as various, entertaining and challenging as cinema itself: Kurosawa and the Addams family; Satyajit Ray and Doris Day; from Hollywood and the Holocaust to British cinema and postage stamps. I Found It at the Movies is an illuminating companion to the world of the cinema. I Found It at the Movies is the first of three collections of Philip French's writings on film and culture.

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At the age of fifty Linda Chase began to publish poems, to win prizes, and to develop her skills as a performer of her own work and a facilitator and impresario for others. "Not Many Love Poems" is a sensual celebration of the varied relationships that make up lives richly lived and imagined. Chase's imagination is stimulated by paintings (she was artist-in-residence at Manchester City Art Gallery, and produced ekphrastic work), by gardening, by memory and by love. A battle with cancer resulted in some of her most harrowing and healing work. Her style is insistently demotic: the poems carry her voice: gentle, sharp, wry, loving. The reader senses a generous honesty at work, and an insatiable curiosity. Linda Chase's wit and sharp eye for telling detail make "Not Many Love Poems" a collection in which the poet can express heartbreak, and the narratives of the everyday reveal unique moments of insight.

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In 2006 Tim Liardet's brother died at a young age in mysterious circumstances. The Storm House is a response to a mystery it knows can never be solved, a book-length elegy that is a grief-fugue and an exploration of the violent, loving, complex psychodrama of family. The two parts of the book form a powerful narrative of sorrow and anger, the events recollected in the first part retold, fragmented and illuminated by the sonnets of the second. Out of uncertainty, trauma and silence, the poet creates powerful poetry that finds catharsis in 'the spring and leap / of energy' of the creative life owed to the dead.

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"In Mortal Memory" is a collection of lyric poems, celebratory if often melancholy, both elegiac and ironic. Affirming that life is 'all becoming' McNeillie mourns what that means in terms of loss and sorrow at time passing. The sea is a powerful presence, its meaning drawn both from the northern landscapes in which McNeillie's work is rooted, and from the work of French poets, from Baudelaire and Hugo to Rimbaud and Corbiere. The poems pitch up and down across formalities, against the idea of purity, while sustaining a rhyming, singing line.

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A blacksmith creates a girl from fire. A hedgehog conquers a kingdom. How do you ride a Camargue horse through time? How do circus people live, when the glitterball has stopped turning? In these poem-stories David Morley reinvents the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel and making. Opening with a celebration of friendship, the poems tell the world into being. In myths of origin and the natural world, the terrible chronicles of history and the saving power of folk wisdom, the poet weaves spells of Romany and circus language, invents forms and shapes, drawing his readers into a 'lit circle' magical and true. Enchantment concludes a cycle of poems that began with David Morley's celebrated Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings.

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The November-December 2020 issue. Vahni Capildeo’s Letter from Quarantine and Andrew Fitzsimons’ poetry from ‘Bashō in Lockdown’. Essays by David Rosenberg and Ricardo Nirnberg on the effect and implications of Lockdown for poetry, literature, and the human imagination. Michael Freeman’s reflections on Boethius writing his great philosophical poem ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ while in “lockdown” in ancient times. New poetry by Andrew Mears, Victoria Kennefick, Wong May, and Maryam Hessavi. New to PN Review this issue: Andrew Fitzsimons, Jennifer Wong, and Nilton Santiago. And more...

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The November-December 2019 issue The celebratory 250th issue of PN Review Sinéad Morrissey's StAnza lecture exploring Denise Riley's 'A Part Song' Elaine Feinstein's last poems Richard Price creates a compelling sequence of Inuit tales New poems by Sujata Bhatt, Jane Yeh, Angela Leighton, and Parwana Fayyaz, winner of the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Poem New to PN Review this issue: Yu Xiuhua, Petrus Borel, David Hackbridge Johnson, and Bernhard Fieldsend and more...

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In Arcimboldo’s famous seventeenth-century Mannerist portraits, the sitter’s face is composed of organic matter. In subordinating a mixture of elements into an unrelated whole, imagination can transform the medium of expression itself. Tim Liardet’s Arcimboldo’s Bulldog: New and Selected Poems spans nine of his ten award-winning collections and adds new poems, fresh produce, reconfiguring his life’s work to date. The book draws on his two T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collections The Blood Choir (2006) and The World Before Snow (2015). Vivid images, large abstractions, symbols, allegory, elegy, provocation, confession and lyric find a necessary place in his work. Arcimboldo’s Bulldog records achievement and includes a promissory note towards his next collection.

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Herne the Hunter is the sixth collection from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore. In McDonald's poetic treatment of the legend, opposing forces are held in tension: body and soul, present and past, possession and desire, death and life. The collection's two-part structure causes the poems to reflect and distort in a version of what Yeats called 'a troubled mirror': a sequence of Petrarchan sonnets is set against a Shakespearean sonnet sequence; stanzaic poems, shorter pieces, and longer compositions also meet their own images across the book, resulting in a complex symmetry of forms. Subjects in these poems stretch from game animals to Japanese swords, and from tree-catalogues to the constellations. The volume draws energy from struggles between irreconcilable imperatives, especially the need for pursuit and the desperation for escape, and the intimacy between the hunter and the hunted.McDonald's Herne - not quite man, nor spirit, nor beast - opens up a world in which time is felt 'passing through blood', in which one might listen to 'the cries of stones', where 'the weather is the news, and like the news / it has no meaning'.

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Launched as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, PN Review in A4 paperback format began quarterly publication in 1976 and has appeared six times a year since PN Review 21 in 1981.Each issue includes an editorial, letters, news and notes, articles, interviews, features, poems, translations, and a substantial book review section. Poetry Nation was founded by Michael Schmidt and Professor Brian Cox at the Victoria University of Manchester. Cox and Schmidt were joined on the editorial board by Professor Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson. The magazine has been under the General Editorship of Michael Schmidt since his colleagues retired some decades ago.Through all its twists and turns, responding to social, technological and cultural change, PN Review has stayed the course. While writers of moment, poets and critics, essayists and memoirists, and of course readers, keep finding their way to the glass house, and people keep throwing stones, it will have a place.

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• PN REVIEW PRIZE: featuring the winning and commended poems; • Peter Scupham at 85: celebrating a great poet, humourist and long-time contributor; • Poet, translator and MPT editor Sasha Dugdale in conversation; • Vahni Capildeo on sexual violence; • More on the controversy surrounding Rebecca Watts’s essay in PNR 239 on the Twitter poets; • New poems in English and translation by Marilyn Hacker, Samira Negrouche, Angela Leighton, Ned Denny and others

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'Petrol' is a prose poem disguised as a novella of adolescence in Co. Cork, Ireland. It is a unique work and a remarkable departure for a writer whose poetry is widely appreciated for its humour and uncompromising depiction of rural Ireland.

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Peter Dale combines intimacy of address and a personal colloquial idiom with remarkable skill in formal verse. He is interested in bringing his subjects - love, relationships, memory, all kinds of daily exchange - directly to the reader, without fuss and with thoughtful craft and conviction. The precision of his writing matches its intensity of feeling. "Diffractions" begins with new poems and ends with a collection of lively and entertaining epigrams. Between these, his published collections appear in chronological sequence. The whole assembles 50 years of elegant, incisive and moving work by a leading British poet of rare skill.

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Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, 'located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance.' Over the years he has published five collections of poetry. As he once wrote, 'I have tried not to avoid what has happened in poetry and psycho-politics during this [20th] century. 'In his essay which is appended to this collection, Dick Davis analyses the special and uncommon qualities of Mead's poetry, concluding 'His tone is unmistakable, and once encountered it is never forgotten.'

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Ruth Silcock's third collection continues in cheerful vein about often less than cheerful subjects. She has the knack of combining jaunty traditional forms with sometimes startling or even grim subject matter. Her poems focus on the lives of ordinary people - children, vicars, orphans, nurses, grannies, social workers at a dance, old people in residential homes - and she treats their stories with compassion and humour.

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A striking performer of her own poems, Ros Barber has the gift of recreating her voice - and the voices of others - on the page. The poems in this debut collection demonstrate her wide range in form and subject and her skill in highlighting the extraordinary within the commonplace. With their leavening of dark humour and their formal dexterity, her poems charm, entertain and provoke.

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"Letters to Ted" is a remarkable collection of poems in memory of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, with whom Daniel Weissbort struck up a friendship, both literary and personal, during their student days in 1950s Cambridge. Swift-moving, by turns contemplative and dramatic in their narration, these spare, poignant, often diary-like poems conjure up a rich history of incidents and memories, creating a moving portrait of a great poet and a lasting friendship.

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In the title poem, set in Rome, a chance meeting with the dying Rudolf Nureyev strikes the poet, himself a dancer, as hallucinatory. Along with the poems prompted by his mother's death, it is one of several unsettling poems in this collection. Yet a celebratory strain runs through the book, providing a counter-balance: there are poems which celebrate active life, vigorous sexuality, and the subtle steps of the tango. The result is a characteristically robust and varied collection which continues the vein of subtle dandyism for which Howell is renowned.

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Longlisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize. 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.'

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A travel book, a memoir and a discursive essay on family life, love, deep sea diving, swimming in the Mediterranean and the underwater sound-systems of hotels around the world, this title is a paean to the south of France, taking the reader by way of the trenches of WWI and the Rainbow Warrior bombing to the experiences of diving off Menton.

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Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. `In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the `girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

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A sequel to Dante's Inferno (Carcanet, 2014), where Dante was relocated to the University of Essex, here the action shifts from Dante's island of Purgatory to Mersea Island in Essex.

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Boland's ground-breaking essays and interviews, first collected in Object Lessons (2006), are enhanced by essays and major later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry, the poet, and Ireland.

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The glowing, painterly poems of Jenny Lewis' first collection take soundings in the depths: of the layers of the pasts that create a life, of the sources of self and creativity, of the structures beneath the surface. It is a region of loss and of recovery, the realm where memories are stored and poetry is made. Ghosts appear. An unknown father, the 'young South Wales Borderer' who died when Lewis was a few months old, bequeaths an irrecoverable sense of incompleteness to his child. Poems about being sent away to a Masonic school, aged seven, reflect the shadow that loss casts, while a later sequence suggests how the missing pieces may be recovered from the depths. "Fathom" is an intense and textured collection that leads the reader from surfaces to the heart of things. In the end is a sense of affirmation, where self is made whole.

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"Essays on Departure" is a gathering of 25 years' work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English, work from eight books, including a generous excerpt from the electrically erotic verse novel "Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons", and new work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire. Often unabashedly narrative, at once witty and elegiac, this is a poetry in open dialogue with its sources, as close at hand or as surprising as Donne , Akhmatova, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth or the Algerian Kateb Yacine. In the past decade, this exchange has been informed by Hacker's widely-published translations of contemporary French poets, and for the first time a selection of this work is included with her own poems. Marilyn Hacker's poetry has been - and will be - acclaimed for its keen observations of the poet's two cities, New York and Paris, its fusion of precise form and demotic language, its music, its memory, its confrontations with mortality and its stubborn delectation of life.

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Drawing on themes of magic, dreams and the nocturnal, Grevel Lindop's new collection of poems ranges in subject from the hidden histories of words to the folklore of yew trees, and in place from a haunted English library to a derelict Australian funfair and the streets of Mexico City. Including 'Shugborough Eclogues', a twenty-firstcentury take on the country-house pastoral, and sequences on the darker and brighter aspects of love, Luna Park deploys an original viewpoint as well as a wide range of traditional and modernist skills in verse. The book ends with 'Hurricane Music', Lindop's prose memoir of a visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

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The poems in "Jilted City" inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission', McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.

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W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English - 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' - fresh and unfamiliar here in their original forms and contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading - and revaluing - one of the great modern poets.

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Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to political satire and social commentary. This representative selection of the poetry he has published from 1956 to 2006 invites readers to explore the range of his poetic world.

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Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much loved husband - sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous - to invoke his solid presence; it is the man rather than her grief which is the centre of the book. Many lyrics recall the closeness of their last months together; others confess the ambivalence of a long marriage. Theirs was never an easy relationship, and she is not afraid to register the differences between them. With wry humour, she questions her own life before their meeting, and looks steadily at a future without him. As she imagines that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets and her dependence on friends and children. Always in complete control of rhythm and tone, these beautiful lyrics explore the most intimate thoughts with a clarity and tenacity Ted Hughes once described as 'unique'. It is Elaine Feinstein's most passionate book of poetry.

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