Search results for ""Enitharmon Press""

Features Christmas poems from a range of years, in a range of styles.

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The playwright Christopher Fry received hundreds of moving and witty letters from his wife in 1940-45 while separated from her by war service. This title presents a selection of letters from the last three of those years, which gives an entertaining picture of civilian life in a rural Oxfordshire community during the war.

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"so both thrive both discovering bliss-real power is female it rises from beneath" These 81 brief poems from the 5th century BCE make up a foundational text in world culture. In elegant, simple yet elusive language, the Daodejing develops its vision of humankind's place in the world in personal, moral, social, political and cosmic terms. Martyn Crucefix's superb new versions in English reflect - for the very first time - the radical fluidity of the original Chinese texts as well as placing the mysterious 'dark' feminine power at their heart. Laozi, the putative author, is said to have despaired of the world's venality and corruption, but he was persuaded to leave the Daodejing poems as a parting gift, as inspiration and as a moral and political handbook. Crucefix's versions reveal an astonishing empathy with what the poems have to say about good and evil, war and peace, government, language, poetry and the pedagogic process. When the true teacher emerges, no matter how detached, unimpressive, even muddled she may appear, Laozi assures us "there are treasures beneath".

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This is the second poem to appear from among a small set entitled The Calendar. Each book relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. In Jerusalem Deleted a city, once thought broken, is to be expunged. It has become the solemn duty or keenest wish of each and all to capture and suffocate, to cremate and to inter, its "floating middle". The poem inks in super-suicessionary reruinations, a tune-kit packed to unfix the funerary signage.

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Since the 1960s, poetry in French has been understood in terms of two competing approaches: searching for 'presence' on the one hand, 'litteralite' - refiguring the everyday - on the other. Contemporary forms of both are found in this anthology, from the 'new lyricism' of Bonhomme and Maulpoix to the refracted politics of 'post-poetry' in Tarkos and Gleize. The dichotomy, however, quickly breaks down and many poets refuse to be categorised in this way: recent publications include the interdisciplinary and collaborative work of poets such as Alferi, Chaton, Game and Macher; the focus on formal constraint in Metail and Espitallier; Portugal's exploration of the impact of new technologies. 21st Century French Poetry features 18 key contemporary French-language poets alongside English translations by leading poets and translators, including Prof Keston Sutherland and Prof Joshua Clover. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been relatively little dialogue between French and British poetry. Featuring some of the leading Francophone and Anglophone poets of our time, this anthology looks to challenge that trend.

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"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters in Everybody's Weekly, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn't at school."For Duffy, pictures were and still are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence 'Burdsong'. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind's eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship's hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.

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This is a book of meetings. A mother meets her baby. A man steps into his childhood. An old man encounters Godfather Death. And in the persona of Harald Hardrada, a passionate man wrestles with his fantasies, and north meets south. Many of Kevin Crossley-Holland's beautifully wrought, often moving poems inhabit the crossing-places between actuality, memory and imagination; and invoking Orpheus and Atargatis, Pierre de Ronsard and Beethoven, they journey from Hades to a hellish warzone, and from the high Alps and to the creeks and saltmarshes of north Norfolk.

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Maureen Duffy's new collection centres on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to a vividly remembered childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Toulouse Lautrec, Ralph Vaughan Williams - bringing them lucidly and memorably to life. With their hallmark of compassion and fair play, Duffy's poems reflect her lifelong support for progressive social and political movements; they also display a beautiful lyricism and technical skill that grows out of her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, the city past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life-stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.

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Paul Muldoon has been interested in writing for music for at least twenty years, over which time he has collaborated with composers as various as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based musical collective of which he is a founder member. Songs and Sonnets brings together poems and lyrics from a writer who has been described by The Irish Times as 'a force of nature.'

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The poems in this volume were written in response to three anniversaries relating to three separate conflicts. Told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, the poem-film Out Of The Blue was commissioned by Channel 5 and broadcast five years after the 9.11 attacks on America. It won the 2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award. 'We May Allow Ourselves A Brief Period Of Rejoicing' (a quote from one of Churchill's post-war speeches), was also commissioned by Channel 5, and broadcast on the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day. The radio-poem "Cambodia" was commissioned by the BBC for "The Violence of Silence", a radio drama set in today's Cambodia thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

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The rediscovery of Edward Upward's work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published "The Mortmere Stories", "An Unmentionable Man" and a revised version of "Journey to the Border". The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the "Times Literary Supplement" has described as Upward's 'unique perfected style ...that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'A dying man finds affirmation in a career to which he had unsuccessfully given his life, a retired and cautious man finally has the courage to ask the woman he loves if she will come to live with him, a dying woman's dreams of revolutionary events seem to be coming true - Upward's stories give ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary. These five new, carefully rendered, quiet tales retain that unique mix of art and politics so crucial to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for which he and his circle were so famous.

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In 1927, a writer in the "Radio Times" declared it unsurprising that poets should write about radio, 'for the new magic, which pours the music of the concert room into the stillness of the cottage and brings the song of nightingales into the heart of Town, is of the very stuff of poetry.'That early fascination with the power of the invisible waves that transmit thoughts around the globe persists, and continues to draw poems from writers who find that the kinship of both forms as purveyors of 'pictures in the mind' remains a unique one in the constantly evolving development of electronic media.In 1998, poet and broadcaster Sean Street was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write his sequence "Radio - Ten Poems about Sound" as the network's contribution to National Poetry Day. This led to a collection based on the sequence, and ultimately to this book, beginning and ending in silence, and containing in between, the words and music, the images and ideas of a medium which - like poetry - is capable of a potent partnership between maker and 'tuner-in'. Here are poems which speak of the power of radio to pour hatred and dogma into the head and the heart, beside others which celebrate Test Match Special and The Archers. The favourite aphorism about radio is that 'the pictures are better because we collaborate in their making' remains true. After all, we may hear with our ears, but we listen with our mind.

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U. A. Fanthorpe was that rarest of literary beings, a poet who was hugely popular with the general public and at the same time very seriously regarded by fellow poets and literary critics for her originality, wit and humanity. Since her death, much of her work has been out of print. Selected Poems, chosen from over thirty years of Fanthorpe's distinctive and accessible writing by her partner R V Bailey, will delight all her existing fans as well as those who come to her poems for the first time.

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Over the last 15 years Keston Sutherland has gained the reputation of being at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry. This book collects all of his work into a single volume, including his recent "The Odes to TL61P." Among the previous works included are "Antifreeze," "Hot White Andy," "Neocosis," "Stress Position," and "The Stats on Infinity."

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U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: 'Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. No room for Cupid.""(...) The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In "Christmas Poems", UA felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky's the limit.'

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The novelist and short story writer Edward Upward (1903-2009) is famous for being the unknown member of the W. H. Auden circle, though was revered by his peers -- Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Spender -- for his intellect, high literary gifts and unswerving political commitment. His lifelong friendship with Christopher Isherwood was forged at school and university, with each regarding the other as the first reader of his work. At Cambridge they invented the bizarre village of Mortmere, which with its combination of reality and fantasy had an important role in shaping the dominant British literary culture of the 1930s. Upward, immortalised as 'Allen Chalmers' in Isherwood's Lions and Shadows, was an early influence on W. H. Auden and author of the influential political novel Journey to the Border, published in 1938 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. But his writing career faltered while he was devout member of the Communist Party. After leaving the party in 1948 he again wrote novels and short stories until shortly before his death at the age of 105. In this illuminating, meticulously researched biography Peter Stansky tells the fascinating story of Upward's conflict between art and life. At the same time he colourfully provides significant insight into English society during the twentieth century and explores the special nature of English radicalism.

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The Orchid Boat is a weave of stories: some personal, some historical, some real, some imaginary. Often these stories may co-exist in a poem just as they do in one's everyday mind, as a collage mirroring our own perception of the world. It is a mix that can include Alexandria or China or Brighton or North Wales. These interwoven stories insist on the acceptance of contradictions and complexity in people and in life; a recognition characteristic of Harwood's poetry and shaped by his acknowledged influences: Gide, de Montherlant and Cavafy, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. In Harwood's poems the richest material and tone is found in 'the ordinary', and in The Orchid Boat this focus is thrown into even greater relief as he explores the power and weight of memories.

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Sooner or Later Frank finds Jeremy Reed optimising his London quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail, Reed makes the capital into personal affairs. His characteristic love of glamour, rock music, seasonal step-changes, and a Ballardian preoccupation with the visionary render this new PBS Recommendation, in John Ashbery's words on Reed's recent work, 'a dazzling tour de force.'

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An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet, Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer, Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre - photometry.

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These are tough poems, full of love and harm, good and damage, rage and compassion. They show us dealing well and also very badly with our kind and with the rest of the living planet. They are made of the rough substance of real lives. Their hallmark is loyalty: a steadfast, clear-sighted, unsentimental loyalty. Their truth is a 'being true to'. And they are a beautiful answering back against the worst. Maureen Duffy reminds us how funny people are, how vulnerable, lovable, bizarre and heroic. Her own voice is umistakeable in every line. And every poem is a sort of fighting between two lines: 'Mortality's at best a dodgy state' and 'It's not over yet; rejoice.'

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"The Cut of the Light" draws extensively on Jeremy Hooker's poetry written over a period of forty years. It shows the development of a poetry concerned with nature and history and the spirit of place, and comprises both formal variety and the 'art of seeing' which relates Hooker to a vital tradition of British and American poetry. The book contains early, previously unpublished poems and some new versions of later work. It represents the best of a consistently exploratory poet whose work is celebrated for its power and delicacy.

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An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library's removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including "Break of Day in the Trenches", "Dead Man's Dump", and "Returning, We Hear the Larks" by the poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg's mentor. After his death as a private soldier on the Western Front on 1 April 1918, Isaac Rosenberg, now regarded as a major poet of the First World War, was largely forgotten, and only the devotion of his family and the support of his fellow poets rescued his work for posterity. Binyon and another older poet, Gordon Bottomley, encouraged and corresponded with Rosenberg until his death, and then edited his poems and extracts from his letters for publication. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg's complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister Annie, Whitechapel librarian Morley Dainow, schoolteacher Winifreda Seaton, and patron Frank Emmanuel. All are published here, most for the first time. At first overshadowed by the more acceptably English war poets, Rosenberg's poetry did not fit the poetic ideals of the time, just as he, an East End Jew born of immigrant parents, did not present the accepted public image of the heroic soldier poet. The originality and strength of his poetry were rooted in the struggle with the opposing elements of his life, which did not follow the conventions of any role he played: East End Jew, poet, painter or soldier. In one unpublished letter from the trenches he reveals his difficulties, 'I don't suppose my poems will ever be poetry right and proper until I shall be able to settle down and whip myself into more expression. As it is, my not being able to get poetry out of my head & heart causes me sufficient trouble out here.' (Letter to Bottomley, postmarked 11 July 1917)

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"Pearl" is one of the greatest English Medieval poems, a dream vision that is both a profoundly personal elegy for the dreamer's lost daughter and a subtle theological debate about the most difficult existential questions. In this parallel text edition the original poem is printed opposite a modernised version which retains all the formal features of the original - its elaborate musical schemes of alliteration and rhyme, and its rich vocabulary. Words unfamiliar to the contemporary reader are glossed alongside the modernisation so that the poem can easily be read by anybody not familiar with its idiom. In her introduction (almost the last piece of writing completed before her death) Kathleen Raine discusses the poem's celebration 'of all that the anima means and has meant throughout human history and as the inspiration of so much of the greatest poetry'.

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'Death could drop from the dark as easily as song - But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand, By dangerous tides, Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides' - from "Returning, We Hear the Larks' Selected Poems & Letters". Isaac Rosenberg's poems, such as "Dead Man's Dump" and "Break of Day in the Trenches", have been included in every significant war anthology and have earned him a place in Poets' Corner.He studied at the Slade School of Art at the same time as Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler, showing great promise as a painter. His poverty, education and background made him an outsider, yet it was just that experience which equipped him to cope with the horror of war in the trenches: 'I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting.' Inexplicably for such a major figure, Rosenberg's work has been out of print for many years. In this "Selected Poems and Letters", his biographer Jean Liddiard has made a substantial selection of his finest poems and most revealing letters, providing also an authoritative introduction and a detailed chronology.

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'These new stories give strong support to the claim that their author is 'one of the very few left-wing imaginative writers of literary ability who have not betrayed their principles'...Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future. We should be grateful that a devoted artist has lived so intensely through so much' - From the Introduction by Frank Kermode.The first four of these new short stories by Edward Upward, now in his 99th year, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies "The Railway Accident" and "Journey to the Border", both also published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, "Fred and Lil" is straightforwardly realistic and humanly sympathetic, while "With Alan to the Fair" deals with love, hate and political extremism in serious and in highly comical episodes.

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This is a rich harvest from a renowned translator, an elegant survivor. In 1996, in his eightieth year, David Gascoyne was awarded the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in recognition of his profound contribution to French literature and art. This collection includes some of his best work - early translations, recent unpublished translations, and a substantial section of translations printed in journals over the past twenty-five years.Translations by David Gascoyne of: Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Rene Char, Xie Chuang, Rene Daumal, Yves de Bayser, Robert Desnos, Andre du Bouchet, Paul Eluard, Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Follain, Benjamin Fondane, Andre Frenaud, Eugene Guillevic, Maurice Henry, Friedrich Holderlin, Georges Hugent, Edmond Jabes, Max Jacob, Pierre Jean Jouve, Valery Larbaud, Giacomo Leopardi, Stephane Mallarme, Loys Masson, O. V. de L. Milosz, Benjamin Peret, Francis Ponge, Gisele Prassinos, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Reverdy, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Arthur Rimbaud, Gui Rosey, Philippe Soupault, Jules Supervielle, Jean Tardieu, Georg Trakl and Tristan Tzara.

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'This exhibition is not a jubilee, it's an account of my work. I demand help - not the glorification of non-existent virtues. That's what we are talking about, comrades, and not about glorifying private persons.' Mayakovsky was a poet, playwright, artist, director, actor, diarist, producer of agitprop posters and advertisement slogans, and writer of articles, essays and speeches. The inherent conflict of his status as an avant-garde communist writer working within the steadily narrowing cultural conditions of early Soviet Russia runs vividly throughout his work, and was a significant contributing factor to his suicide at the age of thirty-six. This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky's key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky's work to date - an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky's cultural and political representation in the western world. Edited by Rosy Patience Carrick

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"Saint Billie".

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A hundred years ago Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras (April 1917). The reputation of his poetry has never been higher. Edna Longley has already edited Thomas's poems and prose. She now marks his centenary, and adds to the growing field of Thomas studies, with this close reading of his poetry. Longley places the lyric poem at the centre of Thomas's poetry and of his thinking about poetry. Drawing on Thomas's own remarkable critical writings, she argues that his importance to emergent 'modern poetry' has yet to be fully appreciated. Thomas, as a leading reviewer of poetry in the early 1900s, was deeply engaged with the traditions of poetry in the English language, as well as with contemporary poetry. Under the Same Moon takes a fresh look at Thomas's relation to the Romantic poets, to Great War poetry, to Robert Frost, to W.B. Yeats. By making detailed comparisons between their poems, Longley shows how the aesthetics of Thomas and Frost complement one another across the Atlantic. She argues, perhaps controversially, that we should think about Great War poetry from the perspective of Thomas as 'war poet' and critic of war poetry. And she suggests that to focus on Thomas is to open up poetic relations in the 'Anglo-Celtic' archipelago. Under the Same Moon is also a study of lyric poetry: its sources, structures and forms; the kinds of meaning it creates. Longley asks what exactly happened when, in December 1914, Thomas morphed from a prose-writer into a poet; and she approaches the lyric from a psychological angle by comparing Thomas with Philip Larkin.

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The poems in Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. Lucy Newlyn adapts the tradition of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places - Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.

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Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke's Duino Elegies. These luminous new translations by Martyn Crucefix make it marvellously clear how the poem is committed to the real world observed with acute and visionary intensity. Completed in 1922, the same year as the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land, the Elegies constitute a magnificent godless poem in their rejection of the transcendent and their passionate celebration of the here and now. Troubled by our insecure place in this world and our fractured relationship with death, the Elegies are nevertheless populated by a throng of vivid and affecting figures: acrobats, lovers, angels, mothers, fathers, statues, salesmen, actors and children. This bilingual edition offers twenty-first century readers a new opportunity to experience the power of Rilke's enduring masterpiece.

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David Jones's In Parenthesis is the greatest poem to emerge from the First World War, and indeed one of the greatest to emerge from any war. It could have been written only by someone who had not only experienced the war in all its horror, but who was himself soaked in both poetry and history and for whom that war deepened his understanding of both. Thomas Dilworth's biography takes us through the intellectual development of a patriotic young Welshman from the London lower- middle classes who joined up at the beginning of the war, served throughout on the Western Front, and learned, through living through the sodden misery of the winter of 1915-16 and the nightmares both of the Somme and then of Passchendaele, that war could be not only terrible but also, through the comradeship it brought with it, deeply fulfilling. This was this strange paradox that lies at the heart of In Parenthesis. Anyone who seeks to understand that poem should first read this book. But so should anyone who seeks to understand how David Jones's generation endured the Great War. Professor Sir Michael Howard, OM MC Accompanying the biography are photographs of Jones and his wartime sketches and drawings, many previously unpublished. The quickly drawn sketches of infantrymen, landscapes, ruined villages and still-lifes bring the story to life as works of documentary realism.

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A delightful anthology of poems sent by many contemporary writers as Christmas cards. From Advent to the New Year, these poems encompass the nativity, the natural world, weather and time's passing, religious and secular celebrations at home and abroad. Wendy Cope welcomes the Christmas life into the house, Seamus Heaney remembers holly-gathering. Gillian Clarke cradles a newborn lamb, and Edwin Morgan tabulates a computer's Christmas card.... Here are eighty poems with a variety of Christmas messages - hopeful, cautionary, joyous, full of wonder.

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What happens in an old farmhouse when the farmers have left? Perhaps only a poet-historian-storyteller can say. These traditional work centres were established centuries ago, sometimes in the village street, often far away in their own fields. But the pattern of the toil was the same. This quietly vanished a few years ago. Ronald Blythe describes the going of it in his celebrated Akenfield. Some years before this his friend John Nash had rescued an already abandoned farmhouse in the Stour Valley from total dereliction. It was called Bottengoms. Nobody knows why. John Nash called himself an Artist-Plantsman. Behind both artist and writer there existed many generations of farmers and shepherds. Old houses will always have their say. For Ronald Blythe at Bottengoms Farm it was in the form of a meditation on past and present. He found that the ancient place asked more questions than it gave answers, and was challenging, and was energetic rather than spent. It must have been part of a prehistoric settlement in a stony valley and also a farm seen by the young John Constable, whose uncles ground its corn. For they were Bottengoms neighbours, and were known to the artist as the Wormingford folk. Ronald Blythe himself knows what the old farm is talking about. Its great days and routine days, its seasonal labour and play, its faith and despair. Its land was both poor and rich in snatches, flint fields and mossy pastures, vast trees and weeds and high skies. Once Queen Elizabeth arrived to hunt below where the Stone Age people lay in their circular graves. Inside Bottengoms there are telling handprints and footprints everywhere, and this is their tale. It is a tale told by a true countryman who has looked and listened all his life. And mostly in his native place.

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Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a very distinctive, unique atmosphere - graver here than in her previous collection. "Supreme Being" is both a huge hymn of praise for 'life', for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss - the loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the poet's own 'experiencing': themes as grave and profound as can be imagined. These are the substance of religious feeling and - without overt religious referencing - "Supreme Being" earns its bold title.

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This is a major collection of more than seventy essays, critical pieces, biographical sketches, and memoirs by the renowned poet, translator, and essayist. It includes long-inaccessible contributions to journals and magazines together with previously unpublished material. Included are essays on Carlyle, Parchen, and Novalis, memoirs on Dali and Durrell, reviews of Miller, Ferlinghetti, and Watkins, and a number of pieces on Surrealism.These works reflect Gascoyne's continuing engagement with the changing context of his times, and his close involvement with and response to luminary figures in twentieth-century art and literature. The subjects include: Eileen Agar, Louis Aragon, W. H. Auden, George Barker, Andre Breton, Thomas Carlyle, Leonora Carrington, Rene Char, Salvador Dali, Lawrence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Vincent van Gogh, Geoffrey Grigson, S. W. Hayter, Friedrich Holderlin, Humphrey Jennings, Pierre Jean Jouve, Man Ray, Henry Miller, Novalis, Kenneth Patchen, Roland Penrose, Francis Picabia, Jeremy Reed, Elizabeth Smart, Tambimuttu, Graham Sutherland, Julian Trevelyan, Vernon Watkins, and, Antonia White.

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Kevin Crossley-Holland’s name will be familiar to readers of all ages for his historical novels, his re-telling of the Norse myths and his many volumes of poetry. Previously published by the late Enitharmon Press, he is a very welcome newcomer to Arc with his twelfth collection – his first for six years – inspired by the “heavenly squelch” of his own north Norfolk where “the word on the tip of your tongue may be sacramental”. As Ronald Blythe puts it: “His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint.”

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