Search results for ""Bloodaxe Books""
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Writers Writing Dying
C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. In Writers Writing Dying, he retains the essential parts of his poetic identity - his candour, his compelling storytelling, the social conscience of his themes - while slyly reinventing himself, re-casting his voice, and in many poems examining the personal - sexual desire, the hubris of youth, the looming spectre of death - more bluntly and bravely than ever. In 'Prose', he confronts his nineteen-year-old self, who despairs of writing poetry, with the question 'How could anyone know this little?' In a poem of meditation, 'The Day Continues Lovely', he radically expands the scale of his attention: 'Meanwhile cosmos roars on with so many voices we can't hear ourselves think. Galaxy on. Galaxy off. Universe on, but another just behind this one - ' Even the poet's own purpose is questioned; in 'Draft 23' he asks, 'Between scribble and slash - are we trying to change the world by changing the words?' With this wildly vibrant collection - by turns funny, moving, and surprising - Williams proves once again that, he has, in Michael Hofmann's words, 'as much scope and truthfulness as any American poet since Lowell and Berryman'. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012
Penelope Shuttle is one of Britain's leading poets. This selection - drawn from ten collections published over three decades plus new work - shows both her consistency of voice and her energised openness to language and to life. Adventurous, searching, interested in the luminous instant of reality that dwells in the perpetual now of the poem, Penelope Shuttle is a poet who clearly shares Picasso's view that 'If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?' Not for nothing was one of her books titled Adventures with My Horse. The new poems of Unsent are communications to and with her husband Peter Redgrove, remembering their shared past with love, wit, paradox, exasperation and a lightness of heart towards ageing and sorrow. With these poems Shuttle concludes her triptych of mourning for Redgrove, and ceases 'to weep on the world's shoulder'. If a poet's work is her personal experience of the universe then this book takes us deep into that Shuttle-verse. In earlier collections her concerns are with language as a safety net from life's difficulties and a guide through widening regions of love and motherhood. Her themes range widely: personal life, that part of our 'secret working mind' which we call dreams, the landscape of Cornwall, myth and fairytale. And she has a passionate awareness of the many ways - sacred and profane, comic, sensuous, and joyful - in which we sustain ourselves through poetry, combining a provocative intelligence with uninhibited emotional power.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Day Hospital
Across one day in London, twelve elderly men and women sit in flats, walk, or wait, and speak about their histories, their hopes, their loves, their disappointments and griefs - and above all seek to express who they are and what their life has been. Most are immigrants - Irish, West Indian, Polish, Italian, and German, struggling with a feeling of rootlessness. Drawn from Sally Read's experiences as a community psychiatric nurse in central London, these twelve monologues are the voices of schizophrenia, dementia, depression, and anxiety. Authentic and moving, they form a vivid portrait of the capital - its richness and its sadnesses, its waves of immigration, and its living witness to the devastating effects of World War II. Four of the voices are Jewish refugees who arrived in London as children, leaving parents to die in Nazi-occupied Europe. Candid and vivid, these monologues make us privy to entire lives through a poetic voice that is at once brutally realistic, and beautifully realised. Above all, these poems give marvellous expression to people whose speech, memory, and coherence is often marred by illness. The result is a stunning insight into other people's stories, and how we may come to measure our own.
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd People Who Like Meatballs
"People Who Like Meatballs" brings together two contrasting poem sequences about rejection by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The title-sequence, "People Who Like Meatballs", is about a man's humiliation by a woman. Into my mother's snow-encrusted lap is about a dysfunctional mother-child relationship. Like all of Selima Hill's books, both sequences in "People Who Like Meatballs" chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Journeys to the Interior: Ideas of England in contemporary poetry: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures
In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Where and what is the England in which we imagine we live? How do we authenticate this never-to-be-finished project? What are its imaginative origins, and how do contemporary poets stand in relation to those predecessors such as Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Hughes whose imaginary Englands have left such an imprint on the culture? Journeys to the Interior considers the work of a range of contemporary poets, including Peter Didsbury, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Farley, Roy Fisher, Daljit Nagra, Jo Shapcott and George Szirtes, examining areas of dissent and signs of affirmation. Can England be seen as, in Langland's words, 'a fair field full of folk'? Is Englishness a matter of 'complicated shame', as Jo Shapcott put it? How do those born elsewhere who have made their homes here describe the experience of England? And if, as Auden said, 'all the poet can do is warn', what warning signs are poets receiving and transmitting in this period of doubt and anxiety?
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Homesick for the Earth
Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterised as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment. Moniza Alvi writes: ‘I have been making versions of Supervielle’s poems for several years, strongly drawn to his style of writing, while also finding coincidental parallels with my own life, such as his birth “elsewhere” on another continent. My aim has been to retain the spirit of the French poems, and as many of their implications as I can, while making a poem that has a life in English. I thought he was an enchanting, inspiring poet who deserved to be so much better known in this country.’
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Selected Poems
Gig Ryan's edgy, excoriating poetry takes the pulse of urban Australia, but her territory is as much the human rat-race and the hell of contemporary life as the particular lives she seizes upon with icy, ironic precision. Her range of reference brings together heroes, heroines and put-upon mortals of both ancient and modern times: slaves and moneygrabbers, pretenders and worshippers of ephemera and effluvia, for whom 'I continue my existence as a negative role-model / bathing in the blood of others / sitting in a cone of noise.'
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Countdown
The central theme of Carole Satyamurti's new collection is the shifting relationship between loss and gain. It explores the varied ways in which that relationship is played out in day-to-day experience. The poems range from personal to the political, the psychological to the scientific, many addressing the human cost of war and terror, most notably in 'Memorial', written after a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, the still desolate French village where six hundred innocent people were massacred in 1944. A sense of the transience and fragility of life runs through all the poems - whether it is life cut short prematurely, or the natural process of ageing. And under that is the profound mystery of time itself - how are we to conceive of it? How can we best live within its inexorable constraints? And how can we engage with it in language? The poems address these questions with both seriousness and humour, as well as bringing to bear a sharp eye for detail.
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Third World Girl: Selected Poems
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances were so powerful she was called a ‘one-woman festival’. Her poems are Caribbean songs of innocence and experience, of love and conflict. They use personal stories and historical narratives to explore social injustice and the psychological dimensions of black women’s experience. Striking evocations of childhood in the hills of Jamaica give way to explorations of the perils and delights of growth and change – through sex, emigration, motherhood and age. Introduced by renowned critic Colin MacCabe, the book brings together new poems with poetry and reggae chants from four previous collections: Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island and The Arrival of Brighteye. Many of the poems were included in two performances by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce at Leicester’s Y Theatre available by scanning QR codes printed in the book, along with an interview with Jane Dowson.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Imaginary Menagerie
Ailbhe Darcy's debut collection is a set of urgent dispatches from her point of origin, Dublin, and from her skirmishes further afield: London, Paris, Africa, Eastern Europe or the States. Driven less by metaphor than by wild conceits, semantic leaps, and startling juxtapositions, these are poems that itch and pluck at the pelt of what we think we know. Darcy is an exuberant and inventive new presence in the poetry world.
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd 77 Love Sonnets
'When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorise Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 29, When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast stateA" for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude' - Garrison Keillor.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Selected Poems
Kerry Hardie is one of Ireland's leading poets. Her Selected Poems covers work written over two decades and draws on five collections. Her poetry questions, celebrates and challenges all aspects of life and experience, but ultimately is concerned with the quiet realisation that 'there is nothing to do in the world except live in it'. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Rootling: New and Selected Poems
Katie Donovan writes about the hungers which haunt our flesh and our fantasies, the conjunction of myth and the physical world of body and earth. Her visceral poems render new sensations, landscapes and perceptions, taking a fresh look at family and history, with daring imagery interwoven with language by turns playful and elegiac. The need for role models, how to cope with loss, the way we interact with the natural world, the play of power between people, and how women cope with love and its aftermath are among the many topics she addresses in her poetry. This book draws on three previous collections, together with a whole collection of new poems, Rootling. Here Katie Donovan's lively sensibility explores motherhood, with the birth of her two children: from the blues to the pleasures of breastfeeding, she charts the shock of birth and the delights of watching her babies develop. Enmeshed in the familial and domestic, the death of her father prompts her to shuttle back to scenes of her own rural childhood, as well as mourning the passing of a remarkable man. The end of the collection dwells on her partner's courageous struggle with cancer.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Th Essential Neruda: Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda (1904-73) was the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. A prolific, inspirational poet, he wrote many different kinds of poems covering a wide range of themes, notably love, death, grief and despair. His poetry celebrates the dramatic Chilean landscape and rages against the exploitation of his people, for whom he became a national hero. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 for 'a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams'. This book presents fifty of his most essential poems in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a team of poets, translators and leading Neruda scholars who came together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems. Also including some previously untranslated works, this bilingual edition sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre. The Essential Neruda includes translations by Mark Eisner, John Felstiner, Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Jack Hirschman, Stephen Kessler, Stephen Mitchell and Alastair Reid, with an introduction by Mark Eisner and a foreword by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems
Grace Nichols’ poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some 25 years of her writing. Her later collections are not covered by this selection: Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), The Insomnia Poems (2017) and Passport from Here to There (2020).
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Water Table
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Picasso, I Want My Face Back
Art, landscape and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The collection opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, "The Weeping Woman". The poems are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubistic manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Leaving Fingerprints
Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and now divides her time between Bombay and London. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings. "Leaving Fingerprints" is her fourth book of poems and drawings from Bloodaxe. In these poems, the only thing that is never lost is the Bombay tiffin-box. All the other things which are missing or about to go missing speak to each other - a person, a place, a recipe, a language, a talisman. Whether or not they want to be identified or found, they still send each other messages, scattering a trail of clues, leaving fingerprints.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Broken Sleep
Intimate and truthful, the poems in Sally Read's second collection move from the very earliest and most delicate stages of life, to the many adjustments of adulthood. Always startlingly honest, the pains of closeness and separation, love and mortality are dealt with in unflinching and transforming ways. "Broken Sleep" is a cycle of poems from a mother to her baby, moving from the uncertainty and awe at the discovery of a pregnancy, through the ecstasy of early motherhood. It charts, with tenderness, the child's development from fetus in the dark, to walking, talking toddler in a bewildering and exciting world. The poems comprise a hymn and an elegy to the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. The second part of the book, "The Glass Eye", moves swiftly into a world where loss, whether of a loved one, a breast, or simply innocence, is countered by extraordinary kinds of redemption. Whether conjuring angels, music, or lies these pieces offer a sometimes disturbing but always marvellous alternative to the unavoidable blackness behind the glass eye.
£8.21
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Being Human
Being Human is the third book in the Staying Alive series of anthologies. Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. Being Human is a companion volume to those two books – a world poetry anthology offering poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 'real poems for unreal times'. It was followed by a fourth volume, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (2020). The range of poetry here complements that of the first two anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about being human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. There are more great poems from the 20th century as well as many recent poems of rare imaginative power from the first decade of the 21st century. But this book is also rare in reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Such has been the appeal of Staying Alive and Being Alive that many people have written not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which have been important in their own lives. Being Human draws on this highly unusual publisher's mailbag, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by our readers.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Split World: Poems 1990-2005
Moniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In her early work, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are 'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal - this poet's third country' (Maura Dooley). Her less autobiographical later books are concerned not only with divisions between East and West but also with the interplay between inner and outer worlds, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual. "Split World" was published at the same time as Moniza Alvi's collection "Europa", and includes poems from five previous collections: "The Country at My Shoulder" (1993), "A Bowl of Warm Air" (1996), "Carrying My Wife" (2000), "Souls" (2002) and "How the Stone Found Its Voice" (2005).
£15.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005
Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011) was a much celebrated Palestinian poet whose work is driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination, disarming humour and unflinching honesty. Born in rural Galilee, Muhammad Ali was left without a home when his village was destroyed during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Out of this history of shared loss and survival, he created art of the first order. His poems portray experiences ranging from catastrophe to splendour, all the while preserving an essential human dignity. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Storms Will Tell
Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film "An Angel at My Table". Janet Frame called poetry 'the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem'. Its attraction is abundantly evident in her novels where her already 'poetic' prose - intensely lyrical, heavily metaphorical - is at times completely pared down to poetry. She published only one collection in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror" in 1967, but she never stopped writing poetry, allowing the manuscripts to accumulate in an old fibreglass bowl she'd originally used as a bath for her geese. Her second, posthumous collection "The Goose Bath" (2006) was compiled from this treasure trove, but not published outside New Zealand."Storms Will Tell" is a comprehensive selection of her beautiful and thought-provoking poems drawn from both those books. Her poems illustrate the shape of Janet Frame's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world, including her time in England; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; and, growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humour and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination. Also in 2008: Virago publish "Towards Another Summer", a previously unpublished, short novel by Janet Frame (written in London in 1963), and a new edition of "An Angel at My Table".
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd When Then is Now: Three Greek Tragedies: The Trojan Women, Medea, Antigone
"When Then is Now" brings together Brendan Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies: Antigone by Sophocles and Euripides' Medea and The Trojan Women. All three plays dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes. In his preface, Brendan Kennelly describes how writing these three plays helped him enormously at difficult times in his own life. "When Then is Now" gives living testament of his belief that 'listening to ancient voices can help us confront, understand and express many problems of today'.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Terrorist at My Table
An anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. The terrorist at my table asks crucial questions about how we live now – working, travelling, eating, listening to the news, preparing for attack. What do any of us know about the person who shares this street, this house, this table, this body? When life is in the hands of a fellow-traveller, a neighbour, a lover, son or daughter, how does the world shift and reform itself around our doubt, our belief? Imtiaz Dharker’s poems and pictures hurtle through a world that changes even as we pass. This is life seen through distorting screens – a windscreen, a TV screen, newsprint, mirror, water, breath, heat haze, smokescreen. Her book grows, layer by layer, through three sequences: The terrorist at my table, The habit of departure and Worldwide Rickshaw Ride. Each cuts a different slice through the terrain of what we think of as normal. But through all the uncertainties and concealments, her poems unveil the delicate skin of love, trust and sudden recognition. Imtiaz Dharker is an accomplished artist. Like all her collections, The terrorist at my table is illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of the book.
£12.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Dog in the Sky
"The Dog in the Sky" offers a view of the world that is skewed, vibrant and larger than life. Here, words turn into tiger-moths or laughing birds, the Minotaur finds his Ariadne and Pinochio's sister cuts loose from her strings. "The Dog in the Sky" is drunk on life, on love, on air thick with peach light, but also shows the flipside where you can't trust the earth beneath your feet. In her second collection, Helen Ivory takes you further into a world of illusions and transformations. Here are voices lost inside mental illness, divided and diverting selves, as well as sinister figures who control their madness and make things happen. She creates puppet shows in which larger-than-life forces pull the strings and write the scripts, drawing also from the darkly dramatic world of fairytale and myth.
£8.21
Bloodaxe Books Ltd University of Hunger: Collected Poems & Selected Prose
The Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-97) was one of the foremost Caribbean writers of the 20th century. Twice imprisoned by the colonial government of British Guiana during the Emergency in the 1950s, he became a minister in Guyana’s first independent government during the 60s, representing his country at the United Nations, but resigned in disillusionment after three years to live ‘simply as a poet, remaining with the people’. He was one of the first Caribbean poets to write about slavery, Amerindian history and Indian Indentureship in relation to contemporary concerns. Wise, angry and hopeful, Carter’s poetry voices a life lived in times of public and private crisis. Gemma Robinson’s helpfully annotated edition is the first Collected Poems of Martin Carter. The selected prose includes key essays on race, colonialism, political action and the role of the poet in a postcolonial society.
£15.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Cicada: Selected Poetry and Prose
Tatiana Voltskaia is one of Russia's leading poets, as well as a distinguished journalist and essayist. She belongs to the generation who began to write poetry seriously during the last decade of the USSR, reacting to the profound and disturbing changes of that time to emerge as the poets of the new Russia. Her subjects are the perennial Russian ones of love and death, and her work continues Brodsky's preoccupation with space and time as the vectors of our lives, echoing his vision of Russia as a crumbling empire. At the centre of her lyrical poetry there is a woman trying to escape from her condition of isolation, seeking communication through dialogue, conversations, reflections, shadows, echoes, letters and sex. Many of her poems are set in her native city of St Petersburg - often described as the Venice of the North - where water meets stone, reflections meet their images, and what is real is confronted at every turn by illusion. It is an 'artificial' city, built without native or vernacular architecture or culture: everything was borrowed and imitated to create a window on to the West, and this eclectic cultural mix where East meets West finds its reflection in Voltskaia's work. Her concern with the Western tradition of literature in Russian poetry places her firmly in the St Petersburg tradition of Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky and Kushner, characterised by strict verse form, intellectual themes including those from classical literature and myth, coupled with an intimate address to the reader. The same themes appear in all her work, but while in the prose Voltskaia sets these in the context of our lives and times, examining the implications they have for our society, in her poetry she explores their personal significance for the individual. Russian-English dual language edition.
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Let Evening Come
The work of America's Jane Kenyon (1947-95) is one of poetry's rarest and most heart-breaking gifts. After fighting depression for most of her life, Jane Kenyon died from leukemia at the age of 47. Her quietly musical poems are intensely moving, compassionate meditations intently probing the life of the heart and spirit. Observing and absorbing small miracles in everyday life, these apparently simple poems grapple with fundamental questions of human existence. They are psalms of love and death, God and nature, joy and despair. Introduced by Donald Hall and Joyce Peseroff, Let Evening Come also includes an interview with Jane Kenyon, her thoughts on poetry, and her translations of 20 poems by Anna Akhmatova.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004
Familiar Strangers is Brendan Kennelly's own selection from over 20 poetry books written over five decades. This landmark volume replaces his earlier selections A Time for Voices, Breathing Spaces and Begin. But Kennelly has revisited his life work, re-scoring familiar and estranged pieces into new gatherings which reflect his preoccupations more powerfully, bringing together poems from different times - and adding many new, previously lost or uncollected poems - so that they speak in chorus like the generations of people they celebrate.
£27.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure and romance. This splendid new translation – by one of the world’s leading poets – has already been acclaimed in America. The original poem and W.S. Merwin’s modern version are comparable in stature and imaginative power to another medieval epic, Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney’s rendering. All Camelot is merry with Christmas revelry when an enormous green-skinned knight with brilliant green clothes rides into King Arthur’s court. This giant throws down a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever delivers the fatal blade must promise to take the same in a year and a day. When the young Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight grabs hold of his severed head and makes off on horseback. The poem follows Gawain’s adventures thereafter – shockingly brutal hunts, an almost impossible seduction, and terrifyingly powerful adversaries – as he gallantly struggles to honour his promise. Capturing the pace, impact and richly alliterative language of the original Middle English text – presented on facing pages – Merwin brings a new immediacy to a spellbinding, timeless narrative written many centuries ago by a master poet whose identity has been lost to time. Modern and Middle English parallel text edition.
£8.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Do Not Go Gentle
This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren’t sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death. Grief isn’t denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin’s famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered – all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Heavy Petting Zoo
Clare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girl’s natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance. In The Heavy-Petting Zoo, the male of the species is shown in all his preening glory, his growling and posturing exposed but also given marks out of ten. The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insider’s in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of today’s bright young things.
£7.60
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Lost Music
Katrina Porteous has been living and working alongside the fishermen of the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past thirty years. Half the poems in The Lost Music celebrate her love of the place and its people. Her first collection also includes some of her own drawings featuring both fishing and industry in decline as well the wildlife of North-East England. All her poems are strongly physical in character, written to be read aloud. They take as their starting-point the tensions between time and eternity, change and stillness. In language which is both passionate and controlled, they express the endless struggle to discover new forms of order. The fishing poems develop these themes within a microcosm of the wider world. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, Katrina Porteous traces the identity of the community in its common memory and working practices, finding with the passing of the old ways of life a loss of spiritual direction. The poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd The Honey Gatherers: a book of love poems
The Honey Gatherers takes its title from a phrase in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler, a poem which describes the need to be marked, and marked out, by love. The search, the sweetness, the sting and the death of love, are all to be found in this anthology. Wide-ranging in its inclusiveness, The Honey Gatherers celebrates the great passions of John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, Keats, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the beloved Anon, whilst con?rming the extraordinary gift to this headlong debate of 20th century poets. Pablo Neruda, Lorna Goodison, Brian Patten, Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Parker, John Montague, Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Sharon Olds are just some of those who meet in these pages. Here are poems about romantic love, the ideal of love, the hurt of love, lost or unrequited love and parting – all you might expect to ?nd in such a gathering – but here too are poems of friendship, surprise, celebration and consolation. This is a book which explores Raymond Carver’s big question ‘And what did you want?’ and offers some answers: ‘To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.’ – Raymond Carver: ‘Late Fragment’ Most love poetry anthologies only cover the classics. This one includes modern poets and erotic poetry as well.
£9.95
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Classical Women Poets
Fragmented and forgotten, the women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long been overlooked by translators and scholars. Yet to Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD, these were the 'earthly Muses' whose poetic skills rivalled those of their heavenly namesakes. Today only a fraction of their work survives - lyrical, witty, often innovative, and always moving - offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships through love affairs and marriage to motherhood and bereavement. Josephine Balmer's translations breathe new life into long-lost works by over a dozen poets from early Greece to the late Roman empire, including Sappho, Corinna, Erinna and Sulpicia, as well as inscriptions, folk-songs and even graffiti. Each poet is introduced by a brief bibliographical note, and where necessary her poems are annotated to guide readers through unfamiliar mythological or historical references. In an illuminating introduction, Josephine Balmer examines the nature of women's poetry in antiquity, as well as the problems (and pleasures) of translating such fragmentary works. Classical Women Poets is a complete collection for anyone interested in women's literature, the ancient world, and - above all - poetry. It is a companion volume to Josephine Balmer's edition Sappho: Poems and Fragments, also published by Bloodaxe.
£8.21
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Censored Poems
Romania's comic genius Marin Sorescu was so popular during the worst of the Ceausescu years that his readings had to be held in football stadiums, and his books sold hundreds of thousands of copies. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the regime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he did not dare publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the riskier secret poems censored by the author.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Cromwell
Buffún is wracked by the living nightmare of Irish history. His torments are surreal but no less frightening than the awful truth. When Oliver Cromwell turns up, the hapless buffoon can't cope. This Cromwell is a cocky tyrant who wants to run a football team, or start a taxi business. Enter the Belly, the IRA, an Irish giant, and Billy of the Boyne: 'William of Orange is polishing pianos / In convents and other delicate territories, / His nose purple from sipping turpentine.' Kennelly's Cromwell delighted and scandalised readers in Ireland when it was first published by a small Dublin press in 1983. This extraordinary, extravagantly Irish act of revenge has retained its power to shock.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Selected Poems
During the Stalin years Russia had four great poets to voice the feelings of her oppressed people: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. The first two survived the terror, but Mandelstam died in a camp and Tsvetayeva was driven to hang herself in 1941. This comprehensive selection of Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work. It also includes additional versions ascribed to F.F. Morton which first appeared in The New Yorker: these rhyming translations are actually the work of Joseph Brodsky (who lived at 44 Morton Street in New York).
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Broadlands
The poems of Matt Howard's Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present.
£12.00
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Collected Poems
Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.
£31.50
Bloodaxe Books Ltd A Change in the Air
Jane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world. A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke's widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019).
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Hot Sauce
Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize In her award-winning debut collection Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape. Raging with vivid, smoky lyricism and full-blooded imagery, Kaycee Hill’s poems are both a beginning and a continuation. Reflecting on her life and those in it, as well as first-times, underground scenes and the female body, she looks towards what is unflinchingly personal, and also outwards: towards family and strangers, nature and place, and a world that shapeshifts before us. Hot Sauce is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp.
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Burning Season
Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick’s mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season. Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature’s vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city. Yvonne Reddick’s first book-length collection builds on the achievement of her pamphlets Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Fool
When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing? The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know? A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being. Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Pit Lullabies
These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of 21st-century living are explored here in poems by turns lyrical and earthy, yearning and angry. They mine gold from the darkness and seek luminescence in the deepest oceans. Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd Fairoz
Fairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. The book’s fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz’s thoughts, and pieces of dialogue. A folkloric representation of God and the devil acts as a wry counterpoint, touching on questions of morality. Fairoz is a powerful portrayal of human vulnerability.
£10.99
Bloodaxe Books Ltd I walked on into the forest: Poems for a little girl
Tua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. I walked on into the forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (2012/2015), the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty (2003), published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006. In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, her new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.
£10.99