Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dissects modern life and relationships with insouciant honesty and ruthless wit, and love poems that evoke feelings with. This book includes an extract from the opening chapter of the author's second psychological thriller, "Hurting Distance".

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A collection about war and its human cost by exiled Iraqi poet and a former literary editor of the "Baghdad Observer".

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A new and updated version of the 'Collected Poems of Eavan Boland', Ireland's pioneering premier female poet.

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'Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it?' At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the painter Jan Gossaert paints Danae, upon whom Jupiter descends in a shower of gold, as a plump nubile maiden, her face haunted, one heavy breast exposed. In a nineteenth-century asylum in Zurich, a woman writes endlessly to her husband, covering the same page over and over again until nothing is legible. In January 1947, Arnold Schoenberg suffers a heart attack. Brought back to life by means of injections to his heart, he writes his astonishing string trio, "Opus 45", shortly afterwards. The French poet, Francis Ponge is photographed standing at a window, looking out through a broken pane. Behind him, there is an empty room, devoid of furniture. Out of fragments of cultural history from the past four hundred years, Gabriel Josipovici has created a compressed, poetic narrative of solitude, love, illness and the ambiguous comforts of art. As clear and elusive as the arts it explores, this is the most beautiful and mysterious of Josipovici's books to date.

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Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. "Spirit Brides" combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.

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"Ice Memory" is the first book of poems by the German poet Joachim Sartorius to be published in English. A traveller between continents, cultures and eras, Sartorius is a poet of global reach, whose poems, full of sound and light, documenting the wealth and exhaustion of the world, are magnificently brought into English by translators from Australia, Britain and the United States. In memories and ruins, Joachim Sartorius shows how bridges can be built in a fragmented world. The book includes translations by Richard Dove, Robert Gray, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hulse, Christopher Middleton, Sibylle Schlsier, Andrew Shields, Nathaniel Tarn, and Rosmarie Waldorp.

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In her third book of poems, Sinead Morrissey builds on the achievement of her award-winning collection, "Between Here and There", by expanding the lyric into new territories and admitting new voices. The theme of imprisonment is variously addressed: in the actual prisons of eighteenth-century Europe; in the prison of our own limited perceptions of experience, particularly of other cultures when abroad; in the prison of the mortal human body itself. Alongside the intimate interiors of human relationships, the poems are also interested in broader discourses, particularly history, and range in scope from the Royalist convictions of a woman wearing a Scold's Bridle during England's interregnum, to the story of the number zero. Form and content, as well as the personal and the political, are blended throughout this collection with imagination and consummate skill. As in her previous two books, travel remains a source of inspiration: one exhilarating poem details, in nine 'chapters', a six-thousand-mile train journey across China in which the conflicting faces of a rapidly changing country jostle for space.The collection ends with a compelling act of ventriloquism, as Morrissey recounts, in the first person, the life and works of the great prison reformer John Howard, and details his vision for the moral regeneration of the corrupted human soul.

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Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-century. Yet as RG Collingwood observed in his last great inquiry into the nature of civilisation, a book written to the glory of Hobbes at the height of the London blitz, Nietzsche was himself a victim of the disease he diagnosed. In "The Good European" Iain Bamforth reports on fifteen years of "experimental living" during which his attachment to the old continent brought him from Berlin, in the week in which he saw the fall of the Wall in 1989, to Strasburg, heart of aboriginal Europe and the city of noses in "Tristram Shandy". Thrown into a deep identity crisis by Bismarck's victories against the French in 1870, pilot region for some of the modern state's most radical policies (health insurance, public relations), Alsace's divided loyalties have affected the nature of Europe itself. With his ear attuned to the complexities of culture and politics, Bamforth attempts to discover Europe through extra-diplomatic channels: he offers essays on writers and thinkers who have done much to define the small archipelago on the edge of Asia, including classics such as Kleist, Kafka, Roth and Benjamin, WG Sebald and Mavis Gallant. He provides a portrait of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a send-off for Bernard Pivot's classic literary chat-show "Bouillon de Culture", a scrutiny of philosophising media pundit Peter Sloterdijk, landscapes from Provence and Bavaria, reports from Prague and Geneva, Franco-German shibboleths, a sarcastic letter from 'Kakania', and an anatomy of the Alsatian humorist Tomi Ungerer. Europe often reeks of the terminally nostalgic and the curatorial: here a sceptical Scots intelligence reaches out to Musil, Heine, Gogol, Sterne, Montaigne, Rabelais and beyond the 'standard average European' to the gallant, helpless, hero-smitten Don, in the hope that they can help him find the way towards a more generous Europe.

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Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun. This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.

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Sir Walter Scott is the great poet of the Scottish people, their history and land, yet he wrote at a time when Scottish culture and landscapes were changing rapidly under English pressure. Introducing this selection, James Reed, an authority on ballads and the Border tradition, sets Scott in context as both a European Romantic and a Scottish folk poet. He also illuminates the political and cultural context of his work. This selection, which includes early love poems, songs from the novels, landscape poems from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "The Lady of the Lake", and the complete narrative poems "William and Helen" and "Marmion", reveals Scott as a poet who speaks for a people. The selection contains notes on the text, suggestions for further reading and a glossary.

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'Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying ...mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day - who is Pessoa?' asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) answers that question. It is an essential introduction to the work of one of the most original European poets of the twentieth century. It includes translations of a broad selection of his poems and his extraordinary prose, and some of his original English writings. A major introductory essay by Octavio Paz, a critical anthology, two posthumous 'interviews' and illustrations from the Pessoa archive are also included, to reveal the world of Pessoa in all its richness.

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It is William Tyndale who gave the English people their first New Testament, translated from the original Greek, and half of the Old Testament, from the original Hebrew. This is a collection of his work.

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The prize-winning Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag has one of the most distinctive and subtle voices in contemporary German-language writing. Among her most recent poems are the Summer Elegies, published to much acclaim in Austria in 2002. These, with selections from her earlier work, are included, with an introduction by Karen Leeder and a full interview with the poet. Schlag uses the term 'elegy' in the same spirit as Ovid does; it is a mode which includes the themes of love, of place, and of the passing of time and the urgencies it induces. Schlag has developed a rapid, nuanced, unpunctuated style which involves the reader in various creative ways. Her world is as emotionally opulent as her beloved Tsvetaeva's, with whom she shares an impatience with faint-hearted love, and her tones can be as volatile and various as hers. Most of her poems secrete narratives, and those narratives are linked to her life in its widest sense. Her landscapes and the creatures, human and otherwise, that inhabit them are unforgettable.

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This selection from the most productive Christian pen of the 19th century is also an introduction to one of its most compelling and troubled minds. John Henry Newman (1801-1891) was a dominant figure in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches. His writings and his human presence in Oxford and elsewhere had an abiding impact on both communions and contribute still to the spirit of ecumenicism. This bok concentrates on Newman's life and work up to 9 October 1845, the mid-point of his life and the moment be became a Roman Catholic. He was a prolific and subtle writer, a great prose artist whose sermons, tracts and polemics, together with a talent for organization and an ability to inspire others to faith and action, launched the Oxford Movement and the controversies that still follow from it. The 12 years between 1833 and 1845 are among the most important for English Christianity, and they were shaped for the most part by the pen and energy of Newman, a rather shy, quiet Oxford don, whose enduring legacy was to restore to the Church of England its Catholic heritage. Newman was complex and sometimes contradictory as a man, and even in his most formal writings the man is present, responding to social and political pressures of church and state. A great communicator, with a need for self-disclosure, he is nonetheless revealed "and" concealed in his writings.

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A collection of poems produced by Brian Cox since his retirement as a Manchester professor, which portray scenes from his own life and convey a sense of ending and losing a role.

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In this collection, Jon Stallworthy and Peter France introduce Blok's poetry into English, retaining as much as possible his distinctive form and tone. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experience, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler.

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Thomas Blackburn was a haunted and difficult man. His childhood was tormented by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin colour, and an overaffectionate mother. The moral and sexual uncertainties of this period were to form the core of his later poetry and prose. Influenced by Yeats, his work in the Fifties and Sixties dramatized the conflict between faith and sexuality, drawing on myth, Christian imagery and Jungian tropes, he produced a spare and challenging body of work. Although his life was interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he continued writing through the early Seventies, his work becoming more intimate and confessional. He was an influential teacher and friend of many artists in London during the 1950s and 1960s, his daughter recalling a scene in which her father, wearing a white linen suite, danced cheek to cheek with a black leather-clad Francis Bacon.

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