Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

'Borel was the sun,' said Théophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

Read more less

Winner of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2023 by the American Literary Translators Association. The Poetry Book Society Spring 2022 Translation Choice. Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets. In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator. C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English. In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe - not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.

Read more less

Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life—into manual work and 'dolce far niente', into ancient vernacular craft traditions and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians and flavours into the world of Zest—how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. He has written extensively about medicine. He is, more than just a widely travelled European, a world traveller: his work as a hospital doctor and general practitioner has taken him to every corner of the planet, working as a public health consultant in various developing countries, especially in Asia. 'Zest' itself occurs in the South of France, with Tobias Smollett, as picaresque a writer and character as Dr Bamforth himself. He is provoking, digressive and often droll. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle—'the art of living'.

Read more less

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' which take us from Codon to Coda via a number of -ines (Glycine, Asparagine, Tyrosine etc). The complex exercise grows out of George Herbert ('What though my body run to dust?') and administrative duties at a genomics conference in which the language spoken, the terms used, find their way into the organising imagination and prosody of a formidable, witty verse craftsman, with serious contemporary concerns. Aliquot, John Clegg's second Carcanet book, is storm-spooked and jumpy: haunted by jaguars and lynxes, its uneasy silences broken by the retort of punt guns, lightning strikes, and floodwater breaching defences. Among these stretches of foreboding are moments of calm, especially arising out of the joy and rowdy peace of parenthood. These poems are themselves aliquots, of a realised, restive and unique individual world.

Read more less

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023. Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices.

Read more less

There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot', the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature – birds, plants, weathers – comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.

Read more less

The title poem of this collection, Robert Wells's first since the Collected Poems and Translations of 2009, revisits in memory the site of the once great Etruscan city of Veii. There as a child the poet discovered an incised potsherd: 'Was that the day when antiquity / – The place where all is over and done – / Took ineluctable hold of me?' The poems return to familiar places and themes from a later 'now', a revised perspective: memories are real, perhaps more vivid than before, but further off, measuring time and age. Ancient coins abound. In 'The Coin Cabinet' they are conjured in their variety by means of a series of epithetic evocations, so that one does not doubt their reality, or the complex mythology they evoke and the economy rooted in long traditions and rich in known, shared narratives. 'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through,' Thom Gunn wrote, 'there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed.'

Read more less

Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how an individual relates to others. All the poems are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known - or half known - past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.

Read more less

Winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Ireland) Book of the Year 2021. Martina Evans's eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore. As happens often in her poems, new and invented experiences throw into relief Evans's own intensely lived experiences: the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes. And we revisit places her readers have encountered before, especially Burnfort, County Cork, with its bars and gossip and childhood complications, a subject of her lyrics. And, in the wake of the success of her 2018 book-length sequence, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, she gives us a new long poem, 'Mountainy Men', which re-imagines family trauma through the prism of classic American cinema... American Mules is two books and two or more worlds in one. Evans's English makes different musics in the imagining of Ireland, England and America, but the same wise, wry, inventive mouth speaks them all.

Read more less

Book of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the popular pilgrimage route, or 'Camino' to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of those encountered along the way, combining a multi-voiced soundscape with vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture. The possibilities and contradictions of a twenty-first-century pilgrimage are revealed: inevitably informed by tourism and technology, yet offering new kinds of fellowship and connection in an age of individualism and rootlessness. Book of Days can be read as a travel memoir, a meditation on community and solitude, on friendship and sisterhood, and on spirituality. What pilgrims seek on setting out and what they discover as they go prove to be complementary. Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2022. Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of the major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home. As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations, informed by (among others) Dylan Thomas, George Herbert and W. B. Yeats, explore the ways in which poetry bears witness to what is and what might be, presence and transcendence in a threatened world. The meditations precede a journal that runs from January 2018 to December 2020, concluding with a poem entitled 'Winter Solstice' - three years of living close to animals, mountains, and (in particular) trees, in human intimacy and lockdown. 'Listen! They are whispering / now while the world talks, / and the ice melts, / and the seas rise. / Look at the trees!...' This is necessary work. As she declares in 'Why I Write', the first meditation in Roots Home: 'Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten - the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds.'

Read more less

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation. Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. 'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.' Her poems have always found voices for the voiceless and shown another side of history. Her new book zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood. Sister Iggy, as the boys called her, ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys. There she mentored many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, including the brilliant trombonist Don Drummond. Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood (Mahfouz) was a strikingly beautiful dancer of Lebanese descent, who became Don Drummond's lover. The poems in Mother Muse move boldy and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; notable women such as Mahalia Jackson share pages with the less well noted - women like Sandra Bland, Windrush victims and two of the last enslaved women to be set free.

Read more less

Theophilus Kwek's first UK collection is concerned with the individual and the collective stories that become history. The poems set out from formative moments in the poet's memory, to pivotal moments in the colonial past of Southeast Asia, and finally the political upheavals of the present. Hospitality, precarity, migration – these are some of the themes that recur as the poet makes his own journey from Singapore to Europe and back again. Moving House moves on a big time and space map, from Icelandic tales to the Malayan Emergency, and more contemporary dramas. From the perspective of a Chinese Singaporean shaped by the collective traditions and histories described in this book, writing in Britain, the poems model a sense of openness on the space of the page.

Read more less

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

Read more less

This second collection by Northern Irish poet Adam Crothers, whose first book won the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, includes sonnets and prose poems, anxiety and swagger, confession and nonsense.

Read more less

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism and theology, she received numerous awards, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems. This New Selected Poems comes forty years on from her first Carcanet Selected, which it honours by retaining her original choices while adding a substantial number of poems from her several later collections. Edited by Rebecca Watts, whose debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Prize, this book is a new take on a poet whose human sympathy and religious faith are transferable and timeless.

Read more less

This sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

Read more less

William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume II reissued as a Carcanet Classic. After 1939, William Carlos Williams had embarked on the great original experiment that led to his magnificent, faulted master-work 'Paterson', and the work in the second volume of The Complete Poems provides a luminous record of his developing strategies, the emergence of a firm sense of 'the variable foot', and of the unaffected, secular and democratic voice of a poet who remains the great American modernist. It includes the collections he published alongside Paterson - The Wedge (1944), The Clouds (1948) and The Pink Church (1949); the two books in which he developed his distinctive three-step line, The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955); and his final Pulitzer Prize volume, Pictures from Breughel (1962). As in Volume I, previously uncollected pieces are arranged chronologically and placed between the individual books. Williams's verse translations from four languages are also included. Williams remains challenging not because he is obscure but because he is so wonderfully direct. To reveal some of Williams's techniques of revision the editor prints some poems in earlier and later versions, and a few of the poems from the suppressed 1909 volume are included so that we can measure the extent of his growth. As in Volume I, there is a full editorial apparatus.

Read more less

The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with 'Deposition', a harrowing elegy in five parts: the beloved endures 'her Nile of pain'; the lover attends as she is treated, the last scene postponed until the two selves are quite differently refined. His editor has written, 'Dan Burt's poetry, like his prose, explores themes unusual in contemporary literature, using a language that is precise, nuanced and mordant. And he risks traditional forms, his sonnets and quatrains mastered and masterful.'

Read more less

Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies - loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction - that make up a life. The habit of foisting human agendas on non-human worlds is challenged. Must we still describe willows as weeping? In the twenty-first century, is it possible to be 'at one' with nature? The poems reflect on our desire to locate likeness, empathy and kinship with our environments, whilst embracing inevitable difference. As the narratives belonging to animal fables, Doomsday Preppers and climate change deniers are adapted, new metaphors are found that speak of both estrangement and entanglement. Drawing at times from her residency in the Amazon rainforest, Galleymore delves into a world of pink-toed tarantulas, the erotic lives of barnacles, and caged owls that behave like their keepers. The human world revises its own measure in the light of these poems.

Read more less

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. `Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

Read more less

Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

Read more less

In Darkest Capital gathers all of Drew Milne’s poems up to 2017, including two major uncollected sequences, `Blueprints & Ziggurats’ and `Lichens for Marxists’. A Scottish poet working out of the modernist avant-garde, through pop and art rock, Milne moves between Beckett and Brecht, through punk and beyond. Along the way there are homages to Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, Kurt Schwitters, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Cage and Tom Raworth. His poems do not break down into form and content but insist on a continuity between lyrical purpose and critical thinking. An ark of ecological resistances to late capitalism, Milne’s Collected Poems captures the `skewed luxuriance’ (Guardian) of his eco-socialist poetics.

Read more less

For over three decades Harry Gilonis's poetry has milled cheerfully in the literary avant-garde: Rough Breathing is the first substantial gathering of his poems. Most previously appeared in small-press publications or little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; some are published here for the first time. Gilonis's work has a light, lucid beauty underpinned by formal and procedural invention, with lyrics written from love and landscape as well as poems made from the innards of language. There is collaged bird-song, experimental versioning from the ancient Chinese and text written by a `bot'. Borders between `original' and `translation' are straddled, or blurred, in intriguing and innovative ways. Objectivist after the fact, party without nostalgia to the British Poetry Revival, cognisant of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Gilonis's poems are aware of their shape on the page and the sound they make as they go past the ear. They insist on being themselves as fully and openly as possible. The versatility and range of Rough Breathing, its use of processes, transparent or opaque, make it - besides being a fine collection - a radical pattern-book to challenge teachers and students alike. An Introduction by Philip Terry offers biographical and critical context. `What becomes increasingly clear as one reads,' Terry writes, `is that this is a body of work of the highest ambition, and highest order.'

Read more less

There are all types of bodies.If you're lucky you'll find someone whose skinis a canvas for the story of your life.Write well. Take care of the heartbeat behind it. Billy Letford's Dirt revels in the fallow, the tainted, the off , and the unloved. The poems embrace a good life stitched together with bad circumstances, bungled chances, missed callings. Whether loitering on the street corner, 'poackets ful eh ma fingers', or stumbling from a bar 'like a monkey in the jungle of traffic, stinking, wild and free', the characters in Letford's poems deliver one thing in spades: heart. 'On Friday I visit my seventy-seven-year-old granny. She's smoking a joint. It's not a surprise.' Letford's words are lightly worn yet carefully measured; they move between English and Scots, lyrical and concrete, accumulating what the poet has described as an array of textures. Resisting modernity's unearthly glare, it is a life with grain, with grit, 'rotten with wonder', that Letford seeks. The poems dig for a grace within dirt's humble endurance. 'There's dignity there. Lay yourself open.'

Read more less

To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware. In the 1970s Tom Wolfe located the apex of doubletracking as the art world, but today, it's a cornerstone of the middle classes, and a full-blown commonplace of contemporary life. At root, it's a state of mind born of an ambivalent relationship to privilege, that, when perfected, allows those with financial resources the economic benefits of leaning right, and the cultural benefits of leaning left. It curls around the vocal chords of private school alumni as they drop their consonants, sprays the can of legally sanctioned graffiti on the side of the pop-up container shopping mall, and tones the cores of sweaty executives attending weekly parkour classes, prancing about the concrete furniture of housing estates they do not live on. Comprising essays, fiction and art criticism, this is a merciless, witty satire of the middle classes - a venturesome, intelligent debut which cuts to the very core of our duplicitous lives.

Read more less

"In a Hotel Garden" is the strangest and most enigmatic of Gabriel Josipovici's many strange, enigmatic novels. On the surface it is a simple story of the growing obsession young Englishman with a Jewish woman he meets on holiday. Gradually it reveals itself as an exploration of power of memory and imagination, also raising vividly the question of how far it is possible for non-Jews to understand Jews, however intrigued by them they may be. In a haunting play of echoes the novel presents us not with hotel garden but two, embedded respectively in the stony landscape of Tuscany and in the forested mountains of Alto Adige; not one story of erotic obsession but two, played out in Italy in the 1920s, the other in present-day London. A great walk over a mountain in the Dolomites forms the mysterious centre of this book. Behind the story looms our dilemma of coming to terms with the destruction of European Jews.

Read more less

The title of Kelly Grovier's third collection, The Lantern Cage, conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement, the burning soul and the material body. The poems it brings together are fascinated by a universe whose meaning flickers dimly across the walls of our experience. Prompted by scenes that occur in life's everyday spaces - city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains - these are poems that seek to shine a warm light on the mysteries that underlie our existence. This is a world of 'undeciphered sands', 'lost cathedrals', 'buried books', and 'bone machines' - a land where substance and shadow blur. By turns lyrical and philosophical, romantic and playful, The Lantern Cage is a collection located on the margins of vision, where the invisible calculations of being ('algorithms of rain'; 'the long divisions / of suffering') remain unsolvable - a realm whose secrets are kept 'under lough and quay'.

Read more less

"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and dazzlingly strange. Poems materialise from a palimpsest of twenty-first-century cities "Paris and New Orleans, Oxford, Milan" where declarations of faith and disbelief clash and blur. Here, the stars 'think themselves into existence', the bones of Giotto jangle, and the 'hairs on a dandelion fizz'.

Read more less

Presents OxfordPoets anthology who are from a diversity of backgrounds and traditions, spanning ages, experiences and purposes, and discuses a commitment to the truth of their experience and an excitement with the possibilities of poetry.

Read more less

The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the days immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents' wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child's future growth. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the worlds that Delanty moves among: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial, to evoke the subtle interconnections of past, and future, people and places. Greg Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult world that the child is entering, while affirming the sustaining continuity of life.

Read more less

Celebrates the distinctiveness and diversity of poetry in English. This book looks at eleven poets who are variously rooted in Europe, America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Australasia; who write with the imaginative energies less of world travellers than of world citizens.

Read more less

In her third collection, one of South Africa's finest poets explores public and personal histories, confronting her nation's continuing, painful dialogue with its own past in poems of poignancy and thoughtfulness.

Read more less

This is the third anthology in the series from Comma Press.

Read more less

This is an experimental short-story anthology featuring Alan Bennett, Jeremey Dyson and Paul Farley.

Read more less

John Gay (1685-1732) was part of the "association of wits" that included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. But though Gay's exposure of weakness and folly is no less acute than theirs, his wit is characterised by a benign and ironic sense of the fallibility of humankind. Gay is a great master of parody and pastiche, and the quality of Gay's poetry, as Marcus Walsh points out in his introduction, lies in its "sense of verbal play". The ironic appreciation of "life as it is" that makes his "Beggar's Opera" enduringly popular is present in his poetry. "Trivia", which Gay's biographer called "the greatest poem on London in English literature", teems with the chaotic energy of the 18th-century city, while "The Shepherd's Week" is a pastoral of comic realism. This selection enables Gay's poetry to take its place alongside his drama as one of the most distinctive reflections of his age.

Read more less

A unique opportunity to examine the apprenticeship of a great writer, this selection of poems composed between 1785 and 1790 reveals a precocious and remarkably accomplished early talent and shows that even in his earliest work, Wordsworth was already preoccupied with the themes that would later be explored fully in "The Prelude,"

Read more less

This is a comprehensive selection of poetry written over seven decades. Dawson Jackson's style emphasises belief in a unity between inner and outer worlds, between subjective and objective, between the poetry, the philosophy and the private life of the poet. This celebration of this world in verse has a clarity and purity with an uninsistent but subtle drama.

Read more less

Hugh MacDiarmid hailed William Dunbar (1461?-1520?) as "in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets". His verve, wit, metrical skill, malice and elegiac power made him one of the great poets of the 15th century, and a defining Scottish poet of all time. Although he was a priest for most of his adult life, Dunbar saw himself as a professional writer and took an outspoken pride in his craft, never failing to remind the king, his employer, of the unwisdom of neglecting to reward poets. Close to the European traditions of Francois Villon and troubadour lyrics, and inheriting the vigorous rhythms of Piers Plowman, Dunbar revitalised the conventions of medieval poetry, excelling in his mastery of the short satirical and lyrical poem. He can be bawdy, savage and romantic. Above all, more than any other poet of his time, Dunbar speaks directly in a voice that is vivid and challenging. This fully annotated edition makes the richness of Dunbar's language accessible to the modern reader.

Read more less

An anthology of Portuguese writer Tamen Pedro's work, here translated into English by Richard Zimmler.

Read more less

This collection opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice. This is the first of 12 narratives in the book interspersed with lyric moments such as one involving Samuel Beckett's telephone, a narrative ending with two blue dogs, "The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Deer", and a metaphysical narrative bringing a Christmas message from the Vatican.

Read more less

Collection by Iain Crichton Smith begins as a holiday in Italy and is transformed into an exploration of the founding myths of Classical Rome, the poems explore the violence and cruelty of Roman society and contrast it with the world of nature.

Read more less

This selection from the first thirty years of Donald Davie's poetry reveals an impassioned spirit advancing from Augustan reserve towards the treacherous, rewarding risks of modernism. As a critic, Helen Vendler writes, "he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language. The mapmaker, in this case," she adds, "is a notable locus on the map." His poetry is an abiding source and a resource for readers and other writers."

Read more less

Published to mark C.H. Sisson's 80th birthday, this collection of his work provides summary insights into the nature and meaning of the mental and physical worlds.

Read more less

Certain Windows is Dan Burt's second chapbook collection. It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among others, the poet's father comes alive here and in the poems, a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action. Dan Burt is a master of traditional forms, memorable lines, which continue accruing sense and pleasure with each reading. The scale of his concerns is matched, in the sequences, by a substantial formal architecture, and an answerable narrative informs each poem. In Certain Windows the dominant notes are elegiac and philosophical and he is rigorously unsentimental in his retrospects and unillusioned in his sense of the natural and social worlds.

Read more less