Search results for ""carcanet press""

"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing section which gives its title to the book. Fred D'Aguiar celebrates individuals and the histories embedded in places. He conjures up a sensuous childhood world of characters, stories, a loved particularity - a smell of bitumen, the local hero who comes last in a National Cycle Championship, a distant train's incantation of 'greenheart, mora, baromalli' - impressions so distinct and powerful that 'fumes - spin my head/Back whenever I catch a whiff from a car'. In D'Aguiar's Elegies for the thirty-three people who died in Virginia, that loss of unique and particular individuals is mourned, in a scrutiny of what civil and private life has become, and how, alongside grief, we may recover delight in the world. In his first full-length collection since "Bill of Rights" (1998), D'Aguiar celebrates how imagination and memory enable us to cope with violence and death. Love, above all, is the mainstay.

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In Mary O'Malley's new collection, the world's at a precarious tipping point; trust in language is breaking down. The poet gives voices to the wolf, the seal and shark, finding new language against peril.

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Frank Kuppner's new book consists of three hilarious, philosophical, existential sequences: The Liberating Vertigo of a Final Passage of Meaning, Not Quite the Greatest Story Never Told, and Not Quite a False Fresh Start.

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Coco Island is an integrous first collection from the Jamaican poet and novelist Christine Roseeta Walker, exploring the bittersweet effects of a postcolonial world.

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A collection of new and selected poems about life, love, and growing older.

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Come Here to This Gate is a three-part collection, focusing variously on caring for an alcoholic father with dementia, the personal and global conflicts that shape our lives, and what happens when imps, ghosts and boggarts have to reckon with the modern world.

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The September-October 2022 issue. Anthony Vahni Capildeo explores mourning. Stav Poleg travels between languages. Anthony Rudolf evokes being a life model for Paula Rego. Jeffrey Meyers reflects on W.H. Auden. Nicolas Tredell considers computers as poets. New to PN Review this issue: Kyoka Hadano, Fawzia Muradali Kane, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Kudzai Zinyemba. And more...

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In the title poem, the speaker sits at the window of a small hotel room. The room is a holding zone, a temporary stopping-place between memory and possibility. In the Quaker Hotel is full of questions about the world. Rooted in nature, the poems are fearful for it. They move out through identifiable landscapes (Merseyside, north Wales, Nova Scotia, southern France) to off-kilter, tilted places beyond our immediate reality. We are temporary guests in these places and in our own lives. Who will come after us, how will they see things: 'who will tend the bees / in the communal garden'? Helen Tookey experiments with form and theme, as in her earlier books Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize) and City of Departures (Carcanet, 2019, shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection).

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Alex Wong's first collection, Poems Without Irony (2016), was a book that took nothing for granted, that broke through to the particularity of things and experiences, distrusting and defying generality. Elaine Feinstein celebrated the 'extraordinarily new rhetoric for his love poetry' whilst David Morley commended his 'linguistic finesse'. Shadow and Refrain presses on, less coyly, with similar themes and a tenacious syntax that gorgeously persists until it has secured its quarry, the long sentences - sometimes running through several stanzas - asking to be read aloud to be secured. As the poet insists, 'These poems are designed to be read using the mouth' - for sensation even if not for fully voiced sound. This book, like the first, is troubled by the difficulty of frank expression in the more private nooks of day-to-day life, and is driven to find curious routes into the centres of experiences that resist simpler articulation. Some poems are imagined addresses to inaccessible friends, or engagements with significant places and objects. Intimacy is repeatedly probed, the processes by which it can be attained and lost, the preoccupations it brings with it and leaves behind.

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In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.

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As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.

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Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.

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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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Shortlisted for the 2020 Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group and the New York school. There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary. Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Zivojinovic; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with 'O', an openmouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet: '&'.

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Full of playful glitches and malfunctions, this debut collection from an alumnus of Carcanet’s New Poetries series and a recent favourite in the pages of PN Review is a poetry of misses and near-misses, distortions and uncertainties. The poems capture a feeling of déjà vu, a sense of something not quite right, out of place, though hard to put your finger on. They are filled with pop-cultural references and registers, responding with a collagist’s eye to music, painting, photography, television and film. Frequently funny and even more frequently fun, Bagnall’s poems cut across continents, memories, dreams and rooms.

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'Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight...' With these words Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through – Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast – in the spirit of a flaneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety and mystery of human experience: the soup kitchens, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Latin Quarter, the refugees, works of art and areas of damage. The title poem pays a debt to Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, whose 'The Hotel Eden' discloses a stuffed parrot and other objects under glass. The eye – the poem – assembles them but cannot tell their intended story. It tells a story all the same. 'On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.' This is a book of revelatory indirections, of unexpected moons, creatures, passions, rituals and histories, of days rich in disclosures and in hints of revelation.

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Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the monstrous. This version renders the original in readable contemporary English but also keeps as close as it can to the older, alliterative metrical system, so that readers may experience something of the textures and formal properties of the original. An `Afterword’ explains the translator’s formal choices and explores the nature of this epic, with its emphasis on tribe, location and mortality. `McCully captures the special magic and power of the Beowulf poet’s word-pile and life-thoughts.’ (Martin Duffell, Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London)

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'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.

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Oli Hazzard’s Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. In `Graig Syfyrddin’ notes on hillwalking in the Welsh marches – the poet’s former home – alternate with found text taken from an online walking forum. `Blotter’ is a shepherd’s calendar of sonnets composed of Russian spambot script – a mix of lifestyle advice, gaming tips, authoritarian propaganda, bucolic fragments and apocalyptic messages. `Within Habit’ is a series of prose poems collaged from numerous sources. `March and May’ comprises parallel columns of verse. `Or As’ is a family of 81 seventeen-syllable poems, each one an erasure of the corresponding page in a different book the poet was writing alongside Blotter. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed: the working day, the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd’s calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a Twitter feed. The title, Blotter, connects these concerns, suggesting at once a police blotter, a journal, a thing for drying wet spots, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, or out of focus.

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Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. Grimspound is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a `wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary. Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack's second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the `I' of a poem with the `I' of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have `really' happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity. Serious questions of being and belonging, as well as frivolous themes such as the Marquis de Sade, Siberia, genitals, the Fates, and death, are picked up in play, prodded at, then put down in new and sparkling configurations.

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Alain-Fournier's poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses - and young love reaching out 'in the frightening dark, with timid fingers'. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier's verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman’s second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move. On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma’s Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where `selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar’. Sarajevo’s `neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete’ is twinned with the `church spires and rain-bright roofs’ of the poet’s former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book’s title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.

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Elaine Feinstein's poems are the harvest of a lifetime in literature. This selection, made by the author herself, gathers work from over half a century of published writing, and is completed by a section of new poems.The selection ranges from early poems of feminist rebellion and tender observation of children to elegies for the poet's father and close friends, reflections on middle-age, the conflicts in a long marriage, and meditations on the lot of refugees. In new poems Feinstein records her treatment for cancer, her feelings of dread in the clinic and unexpected moments of 'extravagant happiness'. The exploration of memory is at once a source of ironic amusement and an acknowledgement of human transience.

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A crackling, moving new collection from one of America’s greatest living poets. In over twenty-six original books, the poems of John Ashbery have long served as signposts guiding us through the delights, woes, hypocrisies, and uncertainties of living in the modern world. With language harvested from everyday speech, fragments of pop culture, objects and figures borrowed from art and literature, his work makes light out of darkness, playing with tone and style to show how even the seemingly frivolous stuff of existence can be employed to express the deepest levels of feeling. Commotion of the Birds showcases once again Ashbery’s mastery of a staggering range of voices and his singular lyric agility: wry, frank, contemplative, resigned, bemused, and ecstatic. The poet in this new collection is at once removed from and immersed in the terrain of his examination. Disarmingly conversational, he invites the reader to join him in looking out onto the future with humour, curiosity, and insight. The lines of these poems achieve a low-humming, thrilling point of vibration, a jostling of feathers before flight.

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Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Shortlisted for The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017. Poems without Irony is Alex Wong's first collection. In subject, tone and form it ranges widely. The book as a whole does not address any one paticular theme, but much of it is concerned with the experience of particularity, with the bounds of moral calculation, and with the need for precision - of thought and of speech - as an aim or obligation. Tensions between the 'natural' and the artificial, intention and expression, good faith and bad, are recurrently felt as the poems negotiate their various kinds of ambivalence. The style is governed by a desire for simplicity almost equal to the lure of extravagance, and by the tendency of its subtly differentiated voices towards an elusive playfulness in the face of serious matters. The poems are designed to be read aloud, or at least 'using the mouth'. Wong's patient and sympathetic listening to the sounds of English poetry in all periods has enriched the patterns of his own. The poems, therefore, enfold many memories of earlier styles - revived, or still vital, but also gaining new tonal energy in a functional strangeness.

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One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of poetry. This selection of his letters, spanning Morgan's full career as a teacher and writer, enables readers to track the development of his ideas, his friendships and his creative collaborations. At the same time it provides a superbly engaging portrait of a man with a boundless interest in the fast-changing world around him.

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Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2017 East Anglian Writers 'Book by the Cover' Award. There are two kinds of Collected Poems, one of which presents an author's work exactly as it first appeared volume-by-volume. This is the other sort. Neil Powell has re-examined his poems of the past fifty years, arranging them as nearly as possible in chronological order of completion while adding a rather larger handful of hitherto uncollected work. The resulting book is, on one level, the narrative of a lifetime in which certain themes, seen in changing lights, recur: landscape and seascape, music and poetry, friendship and the deaths of friends. Ranging from the playful to the elegiac, these poems are now able to resonate with each other in new and unexpected ways.

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For Rod Mengham sculpture and painting exist in the world the way poems do. He invokes the Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who believes that sculpture must be understood as part of the world around it. In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. 'Poems should be finished, but be still hot to the touch, giving a vivid sense of the thinking and feeling that went into their creation,' he says. Drew Milne speaks of the poems' 'beautiful, belligerent laconicism'. While the lyric is central to his work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these prose poems, a species of modernist fable.

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Lish's latest work of exquisitely crafted fiction sees a narrator - variously Gordon, I, He - approaching the precipice of old age. White Plains is Lish at his sharpest, tackling his perennial subject - the memory of memory itself - with spellbinding mastery.

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This is a short, powerful novel dealing with the complicities and accomodations of power within Italian politics.

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Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet and the champion of the Cubist painters, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his 'calligrammes'. Subtle and complex, yet often direct, his poetry is still fresh and memorable.

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Memory, love, history and ideas: Thomas McCarthy has a uniquely direct and engaged approach both to the private and the public, which are inseparable in his poetry. His special blend of wit and lyricism is shown to the full in this selection which draws on his five previous books and adds a large group of new poems.

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Returning from Brazil, Bazilio tells his cousin Louisa of the brave new world. His revelation leads to a evastating conclusion. O Primo Bazilio has a far deeper tragedy than Madame Bovary wrote Roy Campbell, because the girl involved is ... a most loveable character. One of the most tragic novels of the nineteenth century.

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There is an Anger That Moves is written by a poet from the Caribbean.

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The poems in Tara Bergin's debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous energy, a troubled state of mind: 'I am unwell, little crow, / I am unwell and far from home / where longing lives in my house'. In This is Yarrow Bergin gathers language from a wide range of sources and places to create a music and vision entirely her own.

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The Collected Poems of a remarkable modern poet is reissued to celebrate his centenary.

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Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.

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The poems in Gillian Clarke's The Silence begin during lockdown, whose silences Clarke listens so attentively that other voices emerge.

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Nina Bogin’s Thousandfold is a journey through seasons and landscapes, a journal of ordinary life punctuated by extra-ordinary people and moments – the births of grandchildren, the physical decline of a husband, relationships with family and friends. Her poems connect the unknowable past of ancestors to the equally unfathomable future of descendants, between which there fluctuates a present that is no less elusive, even as the poet gives it a structure in language. If life is full of uncertainties, our world at once threatened and threatening, then what brings constancy, hope, solace? Bogin’s intimate, exploratory poems take on greater poignancy as the author faces the subject of her husband's dementia and begins to find her way into a life both with and without him.

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Two decades ago a critic characterised Marius Kociejowski as a poet `whose imagination prowls the geographical boundaries of western culture'. He has a Polish name, was born in Canada, and lives in London where he collects other exiles, listens to their lives and writes them up. God's Zoo (Carcanet, 2014), Evan Jones describes as `a world journey through London's exiled and emigre artists, writers, poets and musicians'. He likes middle-length forms, less the lyric than the epylion, the epistle, dramatic monologue and eclogue. One of his tutelary spirits is the great Leopardi. Music is everywhere, notably Chopin and George Sand: music seems to propose some of the forms he chooses and how he modulates them. `All parts give meaning to the whole,' he says, and proves it again and again. Kociejowski has produced over the last five decades a fine, refined body of work which this book celebrates.

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The Windows of Graceland gathers the cream of the crop from Martina Evans's five previous collections of poetry, brought up to date by a selection of new and unpublished work. The earliest poems date back to 1998 and Evans's expatriation from Ireland. A complex nostalgia for her Catholic childhood establishes a central and enduring thread in the writing, the bloody shadow of sectarian conflict commingling with a child's pastoral of pleated mustard kilts and corduroy paisley dresses, the 'sighing country roads', the 'blue Burnfort evening'. The later poems, written from London, develop a fascination with Americana as the poet's own cultural displacement takes on substitute forms, the Irish traveller Elvis O'Donnell finding his unlikely double in that other Elvis, of Graceland. Early poems on childhood come full-circle across the selection's twenty-five year span in more recent poems on motherhood. When the poet's teenage daughter returns home missing a shoe, 'I don't share her grief. / I feel relief / as if the shoe is a coin / paid to the wild / for her safe return.' From story-teller to free-verse fili, memoirist to satirist, daughter to mother, The Windows of Graceland distils Evans's full poetic range and power.

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Seated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in- / fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely present, spots of time which vivify him and his past. Through memory and poetry he experiences revelation of a Christian depth. England is a familiar yet now a foreign country: the author having written for years in French. 'English becomes / a strange tongue echoing readily with names / gainrising with the new-born world they name.' Distinct recollections open into one another, restored and changed in language. Music and painting, too, are evoked as windows on this world. The book includes ninety poems organised into thirty sections, each with three poems which are free-standing yet connected, speaking together. His English takes its bearings from the stress patterns of Anglo Saxon prosody. Not only the poet but his language itself returns to its beginnings.

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In this career-defining book, the poems of Dennis O'Driscoll are gathered together for the first time. Beginning with Kist in 1982 and ending with the posthumous Update in 2014, the selection was made by O'Driscoll himself before his death in 2012 and includes revised, authoritative versions of some older poems as well as thirtythree hitherto uncollected: the definitive poetic ouevre.

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In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different challenges of freer verse. Spark's poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark - and light - music beneath the mundane.

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'I have put this book together, not as a prose narrative is usually constructed, but as a poem might be. In turnings and returnings. In parts which find and repeat themselves and re-state the argument until it loses its reasonable edge and hopefully becomes a sort of cadence.' In "Object Lessons" Eavan Boland meditates on womanhood in the specific places and times of her life. She engages, in a scrupulous and evocative prose, the issues of nationhood as well, clearing a space within Ireland where to be a woman and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. The book functions in her work as Wordsworth's "Prelude" does in his, though Boland does not allow herself the luxury of rapture: to say no more or less than she means, she focuses on particulars, on 'obstinate details' that contain and represent larger meaning, connection and force. The autobiography here is not of a confessional kind: the facts which connect with other voices, other lives, matter. What the London Review of Books called Boland's 'radical but undoctrinaire feminism' informs all the related meditations in "Object Lessons", an enabling document of our time.Unease with Modernism, a concern with the erotic in time, and at every point a sense of continuities, mark the book as a portrait of a critical imagination of deep integrity finding a way among history's obstacles, finding itself in and through the lessons of the objects - particularly artifacts and poems - that it encounters.

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Frank O'Hara (1926-66) is among the most delightful and radical poets of the twentieth century. He is celebrated for his apparently unpremeditated poems, autobiographical and immediate ('any time, any place'). This is not the whole O'Hara: he may have scribbled poems on serviettes, but others he worked on with intense concentration, creating sequences that are inexhaustibly nuanced, full of surprise, heartbreak and laughter. There are analogies between his work and that of the painters he championed, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning among them. He is resolutely metropolitan, and his metropolis is New York City. He brilliantly captured the pace and rhythms, quandaries and exhilarations, of its mid-twentieth-century life.

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'June 18. Began my ghost story after tea. Twelve o' clock, really began to talk ghostly. [Lord Byron] repeated some verses of Coleridge's Christabel, of the witch's breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.' (from the Diary of Dr John William Polidori, 1816). So John William Polidori (1795-1821) records one of the most famous storytelling evenings in English literature, the stormy night at the Villa Diodati that was the source of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his own tale "The Vampyre", as well as his Gothic novel "Ernestus Berchtold". Polidori's still compelling works, included here in full, created figures of seductive evil that continue to exert a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. In addition, this collection makes available some of Polidori's fascinating lesser-known works such as his medical thesis on nightmares, his pamphlet on the death penalty, his poetry and diary. Many of these have not been republished since the nineteenth century. Now Polidori emerges from the shadows, an impetuous, sensitive writer with a sometimes fierce talent.His encounters with Byron, Shelley and their circle contributed to his fame and notoriety, and to his neglect, since they outshone him. Here he can be read by his own mysterious taper. Franklin Bishop's introduction describes the context in which The Vampyre was written and deepens our understanding of Romanticism and the Gothic.

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