Search results for ""two rivers press""

Loosely memoir-shaped and peopled by those close to the poet, Kate Behrens' second collection, Man with Bombe Alaska, travels between London, Turkey, Italy, Spain and the English countryside. The poems also map paths between states of mind and place or person, not to pin down experience with conclusions but for unexpected beauties, openings. Images are laden with metaphor but stand for themselves, at times with the kinds of heightened awareness arising from sudden shock. Behrens' language explores points of convergence where abstractions that seem to transcend the world merge with finely wrought detail in ways that release deep affect.

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The poems in Nothing's Lost, Ian House's second full collection, range from Reading's side streets to Moscow's Metro by way of a murderous Victorian baby farmer, Gogol's nose, and the Tardis outside an Oxford museum. They are linked by a concern with relationship - between individuals, past and present, mind and world, certainty and doubt. Sometimes bleak, sometimes joyous, always inspired by experience's detail and nuance, nothing is lost on them, a great deal gained.

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What are monuments for? and why are the inscriptions so often in Latin? What on earth is the point of communicating in a language so few understand? Peter Kruschwitz, a Classics scholar and specialist in the Latin language and its history uses these questions as his starting point in The Writing on the Wall: Decoding Reading's Latin Inscriptions. In it he reveals a fascinating range of texts chosen from the wealth of Reading's Latin inscriptions. Starting from the statue of King Edward VII outside the station, the reader embarks upon a journey of discovery through the remarkable and chequered history of this town, uncovering some of Reading's hidden treasures and recalling the individuals whoa have made the town what it is today. Whom or what should we remember? And why? Knowledge, true or false, that passes on from one generation to another, forms part of a tradition, of a legacy. We need to understand that legacy in order to preserve and appreciate the rich heritage we have been left.

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This second volume of John Froy's memoir, a sequel to his childhood story in 70 Waterloo Road, takes us from Italy to Reading University and Falmouth School of Art with many twists and turns between. The memoir chronicles the life of an art student in the 70s: a time of great experiment and change; the figurative/abstract divide in painting and sculpture; the new photography, film and Happenings. And in the gaps, while extricating himself from the family home, being a volunteer archaeologist in Assisi, an osprey warden in Scotland, a London bedsit and dead-end job, a Wiltshire valley idyll and landscape painting in a caravan through a Cornish winter. 'Things may come and things may go, but the art school dance goes on for ever.' (Pete Brown, 1970)

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Written by The Friends of Caversham Court Gardens this guide covers the history of all the houses built on the riverside site, starting with a 12th century rectory. This was replaced by a Tudor house, and this in turn was remodelled in the Victorian era. The site was bought by Reading Borough Council in the 1930s and the last house was demolished in 1933. In 2004 with Heritage lottery funding the council was able to reconstruct the site, restoring the footprints of the houses and the buildings remaining on the site. The richly illustrated guide covers the history of the houses that stood on the site, the families who lived there and the development of the gardens through the ages.

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Fair’s Fair, Susan Utting’s third full poetry collection has been described as `joyous, heartbreaking, ramm’d with life’. In these poems dead creatures (a stuffed bird, a taxidermist’s zebra) and people (a lovable, garrulous old man, a strange, moon-faced woman) come back to life. The graveyard dead join in the partying and after-hours drinking in the village pub; a lament becomes a celebration of life. Full of desires and ambitions – some fulfilled, some thwarted, from learning to read to reaching the moon, from shape-shifting to living without mirrors – poems are paired to speak to, or reflect each other. Themes and stories chain-react and echo throughout the book in Utting’s trademark rich vocabulary, strong rhythms and distinctive patterns of sound. Fair’s Fair continues to fulfil Adrian Mitchell’s description of Susan Utting’s work: `Her poems are musical, magical and have a clarity which goes straight to the heart.’

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Without polemic or rant, Kate Noakes explores the themes of environmental damage and renewal. She uses imagined narratives to suggest our options to repair the planet and relearn how to live in harmony with it. This is poetry of subtlety, rich in its song and imagery. Central to the book is a sequence retelling one of the stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses from a woman’s point of view.

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In the centre of Reading, stands a prominent stone obelisk supporting three bright lamps. It was built in 1804 at the expense of Edward Simeon, a director of the Bank of England, and designed by the great locally-born architect John Soane. It caused controversy and attracted criticism at first, and stood neglected and unlit in scruffy surroundings for many years, but after a full restoration it once again stands proudly and usefully in a worthy setting. Adam Sowan’s fifth local book traces the origins of the obelisk, the development of its design, and changes to its structure and surroundings over the last 200 years. It also chronicles Soane’s other Reading projects – some mooted, some built, some demolished and some mythical. The architect’s own drawings are complemented by newspaper photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

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This lovely but somewhat disturbing song from Love’s Labour’s Lost uses Shakespeare’s original spelling and is here illustrated with wit and imagination by Peter Hay. When daizies pied, and violets blue,And Lady-smocks all silver white,And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,Do paint the meadows with delight,The cuckoo then, on every tree ,Mocks marry’d men, for thus sings he,Cuckoo;Cuckoo, cuckoo, -O word of fear,Unpleasing to a married ear!

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After teaching in England for many years, Ian House taught in Eastern Europe. He lives in Reading. This is his first collection.

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Ian House’s writing begins in memory and experience, the variousness of living, and the tangles of thinking and feeling. As the poems acquire shape, detail and voice, they become celebrations of beauty and energy, examinations of cruelty and mortality. Ranging from Stevens’s blue guitar to a child drawing, from a medieval monk cataloguing saints’ bones to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the new work in Just a Moment: New and Selected Poems probes the transformations wrought by aging and poetic creation, exploring the nature of art through a central sequence on the paintings of Paul Nash. ‘Ian House’s new book is full of wry, thoughtful, fine lyric poetry. It concerns itself with absence and elusiveness, age and mortality but is never elusive or lacking in vigour. His poetic voice is fluent with anger, passion, hope and resounding clarity’—Sasha Dugdale From reviews of Nothing’s Lost (2014): ‘These poems invigorate the imagination, inviting the reader to join in their verbal aerobics. Like the peregrine, House can “strip life / to the bone like poetry”’—The North ‘House’s eye is clearly focused and his ear finely attuned. Like MacNeice he revels in “the drunkenness of things being various”’—London Magazine

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Downlandis a unique collaboration celebrating the landscape of the Berkshire Downs as seen through the eyes of artist Anna Dillon and poet Jonathan Davidson.

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The Colour of Rain is Susan Utting's fifth full collection, following her New and Selected, Half the Human Race. Here she demonstrates a new-found intimacy with the natural world, a closeness that leads her to become part of it. She 'becomes' a Willow Sister, joins an avenue of poplars, has conversations with bees. And while nature is joyfully celebrated, poems also lament its losses: felled trees. disappearing species, Rachel Carson's all too present 'Silent Spring'. The poet's trademark musicality and dancing rhythms are in evidence throughout the collection's four sections. Her fascination with language, its sounds and resonances, demonstrate reviewer Philip Gross's comment that 'Utting unashamedly loves language, and it seems to love her back.'

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Passionate and affirming, the poems in 'Love Leans over the Table' have at their heart an intense hunger for life, not only this side of death but after. Celebrating both human and divine love, they trace a path from personal loss to spiritual struggle and eventual epiphany, finding echoes in the vividly imagined experience of various mystics, including Rabia of Basra, John Donne and Simone Weil.

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The Retrieved Attachments in Peter Robinson’s new collection are to people and places, friends and loved ones, mentor poets and artists. Deploying the full range of his gifts, these poems are characteristically responsive both to fresh encounters and evocative returns. Presented in five titled sections they revisit the landscapes of his years in Japan, find a way to tell the story of a heartbreak, return to familial locations in an unvisitable Italy, elegize or re-encounter companions and friends, and, for the final section, recover intimate senses of a locality’s flora and fauna. Peter Robinson has been described as ‘the finest poet of his generation’ (PN Review) and ‘a major English poet’ (Poetry Review). Retrieved Attachments again shows why.

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'Some Other Where' is about steps and missteps, disconnection, and connection, both in relationships and between ourselves and the world. Matthews’s poems, which have been described by Bernard O’Donoghue as ‘life enhancing,’ embody those sudden jolts when we see our lives differently. Work here touches on the climate crisis, on how the ancient past speaks to our present lives, and on moments glimmering with the extraordinary and the sacred.

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The Star in the Branches, James Peake’s second collection, is an intense and heartfelt examination of memory, how it pains and consoles, deepens and shrinks, is both equal to, and less than, the objects and people who come to reside there. At either end of the book are the disappearances of loved ones: a parent succumbing to dementia, and a school friend lost to more voluntary forms of forgetting. Elsewhere are poems of erotic love, big city loneliness, and the boon and burden of family, poems of praise in which the spiritual and the tangible are not remote but intimate. From the ancient quarries of Naxos to the electronica of Aphex Twin, these highly distinctive poems celebrate the unique wherever they find it.

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James Harpur entered a boy's boarding school in the 1970s and survived to tell the tale. His sequence of poems is a searingly honest and compelling account of his five-year journey, from leaving home for the first time and sleeping in a dormitory in which enemies appear like shadows, to his sadness at his parents' separation and the death of a father figure from a bomb. For as well as Prog Rock, flared trousers and industrial strikes, this was the era of the Troubles. An introvert in an extraverted world, Harpur took refuge in Homer and the magical world of Troy, and found that school could be a haven, and even fun: a sex education lesson that backfired; a rare sighting of girls at a dance; a scary ride on his brother's illegal motorbike; a surreal trip to Covent Garden. Powerful, poignant and humorous, The Examined Life re-creates a 'vale of soul-making' that, with its tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains, is like a microcosm of life itself. 'A quite marvellous work...an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' -From the foreword by STEPHEN FRY

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The ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Paris Scenes) section of Les Fleurs du Mal contains eighteen poems which record a twenty-four-hour tour of the city: a type of Joycean journey from the point of view of a dandy Odysseus. Many of the poems in the sequence possess the sharpness and intensity of a dream, a dédoublement, enabling us to contemplate life in a manner that merges the fantastic and the sordidly realistic. These new translations are accompanied by artist Sally Castle’s responses prompted by the work of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s favourite ‘painter of modern life’. ‘These unblinking translations by Ian Brinton offer us a revival of Baudelaire’s offense against public morals. Hand-in-hand with the poet’s unquiet ghost, Brinton reminds us of the transparency of our contemporary mores so that we see through to Baudelaire’s genius, to his insistent sense of mortality in its Romantic eroticism and corruption. To understand the poet “tranced in envy” at the antics of these corpse-like erotics is to glimpse a form of compassion, of pity for the human condition. This strange and haunting quality is there at every turn of Brinton’s Baudelaire.’ — KELVIN CORCORAN

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The geology of the Thames Valley provides little good building stone, so the towns are made very largely of local brick. Reading is particularly rewarding for the brick-fancier, thanks to the variety of colours available and the inventive patterns that Victorian bricklayers loved to make. Illustrated throughout with photographs of surviving examples, Bricks and Brickwork in Reading gets back to basics with bonding, tells the 100-year story of a successful Victorian brick maker, pays homage to Alfred Waterhouse and revels in the delights of air bricks and crinkle-crankle walls. A walking tour gives the reader the opportunity to see the more notable examples of Reading's brickwork for themselves.

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`Jean Watkins ... illustrates a particular gift for concrete detail with poems so rich in the senses that they seem to lift off the page ... This collection also includes a number of poems which have a sparkly `stand alone' quality' - The North `Watkins works our imaginations through our senses and, as with the best short poems, the story is rich in what Roland Barthes called blind field, the white area around a photograph, the world around a poem' - London Grip `Watkins' sense of detail is sharp, whether describing nature, an urban scene in Reading or family matters. ... Make no mistake, these are poems crafted as carefully as the artefacts and heirlooms they sometimes describe ... and I am left wanting more' - The Interpreter's House

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Marking the 800th anniversary of the Forest Charter, award-winning botanical artist Christina Hart-Davies celebrates our long relationship with trees. Since pre-historic times they have provided us with shelter, fuel, medicine, food and even the air we breathe. They have tanned leather, dyed cloth and made everything from cathedrals to clothes-pegs. We have told stories about them, admired their magnificent beauty and woven them into our spiritual lives. Following A Wild Plant Year, which recorded the folklore and cultural history of our native wildflowers, in The Greenwood Trees Christina looks at the history, folklore and virtues of our native trees - and a few well-known introductions too - all illustrated with her exquisitely detailed watercolour paintings. We have relied on trees throughout our history. We still do, and we always will. Touch wood. * Which tree provides a talisman supposed to protect against lightning? * Which firewood burns best, even when green? * Which tree should you plant by the dairy and the privy to deter flies?

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Written as a poet’s view of the world’s oceans and islands from a small boat, these are poems concerned with human vulnerability and ecological anxiety. John Froy’s second collection is filled with love, hopes and fears for his family and friends and for the natural world, from Costa Rica to Japan, Somerset to Cumbria, to Antarctica and the oceans. There is loss, both personal and global – the death of a father, a stepfather – and environmental loss, the damage and havoc we continue to inflict on our planet, habitats and species despite all warning, and the urgent need to protect them. But there is also joy, humour, gratitude, admiration and love. Simple, direct and unconfrontational, yet the sense of catastrophe looms.

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Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) was undoubtedly one of the most admired and influential English painters of the twentieth century. Cookham was a major influence on both his life and painting and his reference to the place as ‘a village in Heaven’ is reflected in his famous series of paintings of Biblical scenes featuring local people.The 2017 Cookham Festival’s Stanley Spencer Poetry Competition invited poets to find inspiration for their own art in the work of this remarkable man. Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology publishes a selection from the entries to the competition chosen by its judges, Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder, and Peter Robinson. From this gathering, the shortlist of commended entries and the prize winners were then drawn. These carefully selected poems are presented here with an introduction by Peter Robinson, featuring photographs of the artist at work, reflecting this painter’s extraordinary life and works.

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Whether focusing in on catching fish off a pier, learning to speak Bird at night school, riding towards inspiration on horseback or thinking about manatees, the poems in Claire Dyer’s second collection offer a slantwise look at some of the experiences, both real and imagined, that can shape our lives. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and the Morpho butterfly, the pieces in Interference Effects shift and alter depending on the reader’s viewing angle. Infused by the colour blue, they compare a farmer harvesting to a recipe for Victoria sponge; show children learning to swim as a boy is buried at sea; tell of a heart left at a checkout as a curator’s assistant gives hers in for safekeeping. These pairings search for definition and meaning whilst acknowledging the beauty and strength in never actually being able to capture either.

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`The excitement of reading David Attwooll’s poems lies in the poet’s intense relationship to language and the verbal and textual musicianship with which he treats his subject matter. From the Goths, Transylvanians and teenage samurai, escaped from the pages of books, to email spam or jazz, to memories about childhood and place, these poems capture Attwooll’s delight in the world around him.’ Jenny Lewis

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The stories brought together in Foreigners, Drunks and Babies cast the slanting light of a poet's sensibility on the Imperial Academy of an ancient Eastern empire; detail the musical education of a northern realist parish priest and his sons; travel through the West of Ireland with a couple facing various extinctions; spy on the shadowy private life of a Cold War warrior; engage in hand-to-hand fighting with a classroom full of Soviet teachers; follow the adventures of an Italian girl visiting her sick boyfriend in hospital; discover how hard it can be to get a passport for your first-born; find out why everyone pretends you're not there; investigate a seemingly victimless crime; reveal reasons for a Japanese girl's committing suicide; and realize that there's no need to be forgiven for things you didn't know you hadn't done. In this first collection of his imaginative fiction, Peter Robinson, winner of the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for his poems and translations, brings a characteristic perceptiveness, rhythmical accuracy, and vividness of evocation to these eleven examples of what he's been doing in the gaps between his other writings. His new and returning readers may be both surprised and entertained.

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A.F. Harrold's collection is a sequence detailing the illness and death of his mother, but its tone is anything but elegiac. Addressed to the patient, both present and absent, the poems are frank, unflinching and honest. There is love here, but also frustration, bewilderment, confusion and grief. Together the poems explore the spaces where despair, boredom and exhaustion meet, and at their heart describe the difficulty of dying.

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A year in the life of a garden. From the stillness of winter, unfurling through spring and summer to the contentment of autumn, this imaginative interpretation of a specific space - a twelve-acre garden within an urban university campus - exposes a secret oasis, full of surprises. This book presents the personal vision of the Artist in Residence at the Harris Garden in the University of Reading. Jenny Halstead captures the seasonal changes, portrays the stages of its renovation, and celebrates its enthusiastic workforce, especially the many volunteers. Accompanied by a history of the garden and an account of its restoration, these paintings and sketches memorialise a place in time.

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Poems from the world of painting and decorating. In this first collection, John Froy uses imagery from house-painting to explore life with subtle psychological and social insight. His poems are filled with a quiet sense of contemplation. They also undermine and blur distinctions between art and craft, manual and intellectual work. There is a sense of closeness to phsyical work here, which gives authenticity and freshness. The first section, Gloss, is concerned with ‘the trade’, from dry rot in the bathroom ‘how deep, how far the hungry threads have gone’ through ‘the kinked, ballooning pipes’ of old lead water systems, to the heady fumes of VOCs in gloss paint in Escape from Colditz, and the molecular structure of paint, ‘the fish scales of an aluminium primer’. We meet the poet as Ragged-trousered Philanthropist and then imagining himself working alongside the artist Georges Braque (he also trained as a decorator). The more fragile second section, Eggshell, looks at a troubled childhood, divorce, and death, often through the medium of decorating.

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as 'excellent' and 'the best' by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print.This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs' translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke's Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet's extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.

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Discover a whole new realm of botanical painting - the natural life forms that coexist with flowering plants, revealed in exquisite detail. Traditionally, botanical art has focused on the flowers, leaves and form of plants. They are depicted in solitary glory on a page, divorced from the life forms that live alongside them in nature. But award-winning UK botanical painter, Christina Hart-Davies, believes passionately that flowers are only part of the picture and loves to explore the different stages, related species, habitats and associated creatures that provide their setting in the wild. She looks at plants and other life forms from all angles - scientific, aesthetic and cultural - to tell The Whole Story. Showcasing examples of her most popular works, The Whole Story draws on Christina's long and parallel careers in both art and illustration. Take inspiration from her enthusiasm for the details and beauty of all aspects of the natural world and benefit from her experience as she shares techniques for painting moss and insects as well as advice on composition and lettering. This book will transform your perspective and inspire you to look beyond the flowers.

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Martha Kapos imagines sonata form as a narrative structure in this remarkable, and psychologically acute, showcase for poems written over nearly 30 years. With an afterword by Lawrence Kramer: Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?

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Saint Christina the Astonishing was born into a poor Belgian family in 1150. She 'died' aged 22 but at her requiem she rose from her coffin and flew away like a bird, wanting to escape the smell of sinful humanity. This was the first of many mad, disobedient exploits in her long and remarkable life. Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders retell - through their own poems as well as brief extracts from medieval religious writers - Christina's story as a woman's search for selfhood. The book includes artworks from Peter Hay, which he created for the original edition in direct response to the poetry. First published in 1998 and long out of print, this new edition makes Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders' sensual and exhilarating poetic collaboration available once more. 'Ascetic and excessive, exasperating, sometimes absurd, the life of the little-known St Christina provokes fantasies and questions. Was she a wonder worker? Or an anorexic, fuelled by hatred of the flesh? Or a powerful woman whose legendary flights set her free from her time and her place? Rather than offering pieties or diagnoses, Lesley Saunders and Jane Draycott, invite us to a feast of soul food. Their two distinctive voices meet the voices of the Middle Ages in an extraordinary blend of the sacred and the profane, the rapt and the irreverent, playful, sensual and deeply felt.' Philip Gross 'Poetry as exciting as this is rare: fusing an earthy sensuality with the spiritual, it lets us hear Christina's voice ringing clearly from the rafters.' Robyn Bolam

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Transitional Spaces, Kate Behrens's fourth collection, is concerned with inner lives and the secret doings of damage and repair. Touching on politics, sickness, sex, art, global warming and the messages of fantasy and dream, it looks at the lost and the longed-for, and at what happens when the bonds between us rupture. Nature appears as mirror, pointer or consolation. Creativity is explored in lines that include poets, a painter, a pattern-cutter and tapestry-maker, but also in our instinctual methods of surviving trauma. Behrens does not attempt an answer, rather she maps the trackways of feeling.

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In the title poem to Sicilian Elephants, his most wide-ranging and ambitious collection to date, David Cooke imagines the short-lived paradise achieved by those miniature elephants whose bones have been found on the island. In poems gathered here he explores notions of home and the way humans aspire to define their space and achieve a life of ease. Starting out from familiar domestic settings, he explores the rituals of DIY and gardening. However, the inevitable tensions between us and our environment and the ways that human achievement is subject to time are further explored in new and startling situations as when in a poem about heaven, the quest for a spiritual homeland is set against territorial conflict. With Sicilian Elephants, in words from the Poetry Book Society Bulletin: 'Cooke's lyrical insight and precision make the personal universal.'

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Three definitions of the word Yield give meaning to the odyssey undergone in Claire Dyer’s third collection: a journey which sees a son become a daughter, and a mother a poet for both of them. Charting these transitions, the poems take us through territories known and familiar – landscapes of childhood, family and home – into further regions where inner lives alter, outer ones are reimagined. Whether evoking clinic visits, throwing away old boyhood clothes, grieving over what’s lost, these honest and unashamed poems build to celebrate that place at the heart of motherhood where gender is no differentiator and love the gain. 'The actual things of the world are everywhere in Claire Dyer’s Yield – thick socks, Glenfiddich, bathrobes, Swarfega, Swedish Meatball Wraps – and in the spaces between move families, friends, lovers, their interrelations astutely picked out as the unsaid is made solid. But such rooted settings don’t prevent flight. Any poet who can end a poem with the lines “the bones in its spine small white discs of” or “Fuck the gob-lin. Rock it” has earned the right to our attention.' ~ Matthew Caley 'There is so much that is uncompromising in Claire Dyer’s poems: the cruel precision of each word, line and image, and the sharply perfect intelligence of every metaphor and conceit. And yet Yield is a warm embrace of a book. A chronicle of love, generosity and ethics, Yield is a restorative piece of writing – a solace.' ~ Kathryn Maris

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The title poem of Conor Carville’s second collection takes off from a London church and its congregation, but pushes on out into planetary, even cosmic dimensions. In another poem, the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett appears in the TV room of a London mental hospital, to tell the strange story of a mass on Clapham Common in 1984, when the London-Irish assembled to celebrate his beatification. These poems, and many others here, reassert the capacity of song to grasp the shape of a life, a community, or a world, in the shadow of its vast disorder. Sometimes lyric, sometimes violent, this is a book that teems with the martyrdoms, both everyday and epic, that punctuate our lives.

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Which memorial’s unveiling were the public barred from, so that no disruption could be caused by suffragettes? Why is a Danish prisoner of war remembered in Reading? Who was Goldwin Smith, whose birthplace is marked by a plaque on Friar Street? Did the sculptor responsible for the lion in the Forbury really commit suicide because of it? How many times did Queen Victoria visit Reading, and did she like her statue? The stories behind Reading’s memorials bring the people and events of Reading’s past to life. This book describes aspects of the town’s history by considering some of its – often not well known – plaques, statues and monuments. Even the better known memorials have secrets to yield in the tales of their origins. With descriptions of where the memorials can be found, along with photographs to help identification, the book reveals vivid glimpses of life in Victorian Reading, and reminds us of the physical, as well as social legacy, our forebears left behind them.

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The poems in Handling, Jack Thacker’s debut gathering, display an extraordinary gift for describing the sights and sounds of farming life through an exact and tactile evocation of daily work, implements and activities. Childhood memories and seasonal tasks, such as planting vegetables, shearing sheep, and ploughing fields, are handled in a language that is at once strange, familiar, and as rhythmically measured as it is inventive. The descriptive poems in the book’s first part set the scene for the political and artistic perspectives in its second – made up of pieces arising from time spent as poet-in-residence at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. In these poems, which centre stirringly on the agricultural organiser Joseph Arch, lived experience enters into an exchange with imagined pasts, as the museum’s objects and archives are vividly brought to life with this poet’s feeling for words. `In the title poem of Jack Thacker’s `Handling’, the young speaker struggles to steer large – and stubborn – sheep. Watching his father, he realises that handling animals needs subtlety as well as strength. Both these qualities grace Jack Thacker’s poems not of surface glamour, but of depth and skill. They offer their readers rich rewards’ – Alison Brackenbury. `On a first reading Handling is a convincing and likeable book; it takes a while to appreciate fully the quiet brilliance of this brief masterpiece, but once you do, it stays’ – Bernard O’Donoghue

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Three long poems - contemplating `The Uses of Greek', imagining the poet Sappho living out her life on the island of Inishbofin, and celebrating `The Farness of Latin' - mark transitions between thematic clusters of shorter pieces. Nominy-Dominy, with its vivid enactment of how, and why, antiquity continues to shape us, will confirm what Michael Hulse, writing in The Poetry Review of her 2012 Cloud Camera, found to be a `most intelligent and thrilling book of poetry'.

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Chill Factor, Gill Learner’s second collection, resonates with her concerns for the state of the world, its political and environmental predicaments and problems. Yet interwoven with those sustained themes are poems further responding to her interest in crafts and skills, as well as her love of music. Family and friends, both dead and alive, mingle with people from the world of literature and history to form uniquely peopled landscapes evoked in the vividly colloquial language we have come to expect from this poet.

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Intended to 'relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century', Edith Morley's 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after retiring as the first female professor at an English university. Born into a middle-class Victorian family, she hated being a girl, but a forward-thinking home life and a good education enabled her to overcome prejudices and become Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908. An early feminist with a strong social conscience, she 'fought...with courage...and passionate sincerity for human rights and freedom.' Covering the vividly described setting of her late Victorian childhood, her student days with the increasing freedoms they brought, the early feminist movement, the growing pains of a new university and, much later, the traumas endured by refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, this absorbing memoir brings alive a very different era, one foundational to the freedoms we enjoy today.

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Allen W. Seaby's life has been described as "a classic tale of Victorian self-improvement." But there is more to the tale than just upward mobility. A. W. Seaby was a pioneering, innovative and inspirational man who rose to become a prominent print-maker, teacher, author and illustrator. Best-known for his colour woodcut printing using traditional Japanese methods, and as a prominent wildlife artist, the story of Seaby's many accomplishments is recounted by his grandson, who inherited Seaby's love of birds and became internationally renowned in his own right, Robert Gillmor. Alongside this personal recount, Martin Andrews (Seaby's successor as President of the Reading Guild of Artists) selects aspects of his career and expands upon his techniques, his illustrative methods, his circle of fellow artists and the books he published to give a full and rounded account of a man whose work is currently enjoying a well-deserved renaissance.

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The very first book in the world to be illustrated with photographs was produced in Reading between 1844 and 1846. In 1843, William Henry Fox Talbot set up the first commercial studios to mass-produce photographs from negatives and he chose the Berkshire town of Reading as its location. The Reading Establishment, as it became known, marks a pivotal moment in the development of photography. Martin Andrews tells the story of these momentous events and places them in the context of the discovery and early history of photography. Told in a lively and engaging way, the story starts with a mystery. Who is the strange, foreign gentleman buying unusual substances in the chemist shops of Reading - is he a forger or a spy?

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Tom Phillips’ first full-length collection navigates terrains which range from Eastern Europe, Australia and the Home Counties to his own back garden in Bristol. From the different perspectives these vantage points offer, it unearths connections between chance meetings and `big history’, family stories and the state we’re in. It also looks at poetry itself as a ground on which to recreate – and negotiate with – one thing that nobody can change: the past.

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How well do you know Reading? This witty and entertaining book will test your knowledge and develop your acquaintance with the hidden corners, the events and incidents of this much-maligned town. 110 questions, including 20 photos of places to identify.

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