Search results for ""carcanet press ltd""

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

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An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. In Collected Poems one of Ireland's best-loved contemporary poets brings together poems from her six principal collections, Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), Carrying the Songs (1907), Hands (2011), Keats Lives (2015) and Donegal Tarantella (2019) - more than three decades' work - a poetry of individual poems which compose a memorable, unpredictable sequence of discovery. The immediacy of our response to the beauty of our exploited planet inspire many of Moya Cannon's poems. The perfection of very early cave art she sees as testimony to the centrality of art in our evolution as humans. Geology, archaeology, history and music figure as gateways to a deeper understanding of our relationship with our past and the natural world. 'Whatever inspiration is,' she quotes Wislawa Szymborska as saying, 'it is born from a continuous 'I don't know',' from the confusion of adolescence to the very different confusions of adult life. There are dark confusions and those which are luminous and filled with joy - desperation and rapture are their extremes. Each poem makes a space in which the readers share experience and discover something uniquely their own as well. She regards herself as fortunate in having developed in a culture rapidly changing, in which the poetries of the world were becoming available, in which the situation of women was radically changing. She was at once a beneficiary and an agent of change and these poems retain that enabling agency.

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John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness mark every page.

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Shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing 2021. A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, 'counting silently towards infinity'. Graham's essential voice guides us fluently 'as we pass here now into the next-on world', what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us 'to the last be human'.

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Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021 A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020 An Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year 2020 Sinead Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017). There is throughout Morrissey's work a civic dimension: her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery.

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Sweet Nothings is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.

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We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture. Moving from the fear of Alzheimer's to invocations of 'Remember the Holocaust' and 'Remember Kosovo' by unscrupulous demagogues, from the burial rituals of rural societies to the Berlin and Vienna Holocaust Memorials, from eighteenth-century disquiet about the role of tombs and inscriptions to the late poems of Wallace Stevens, Josipovici has produced, in characteristic style, a small book with a very big punch. Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

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Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021. Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

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A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020). Among Mina Gorji's poems in New Poetries V (2011) was one about Houdini entitled 'The Art of Escape' which returns here as the title poem. This colourful and vivid first collection continues the course of Mina Gorji's meticulous explorations of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformation of an armadillo into music. These poems shift by degrees until new patterns and sounds emerge, transforming the familiar into unexpected configurations. Art of Escape is a wonderful casting off into the complex waters of adult life, in which change has become the constant.

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Nineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.

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Notes from the Dream House is a `best of’ selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musicals – the hits and the misses, the good, the bad and the ugly. French takes on films as disparate as The Gospel According to St Matthew and Ted, The Remains of the Day and Caligula. His reviews are personal, witty, and sharply perceptive. Time and again he reveals not only an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema but also an erudition, an enthusiasm, and a boundless curiosity. Taken together, they form an illuminating commen¬tary on modern culture; but above all they are a distillation of one man’s lifelong love of cinema, a worthy memorial to one of the most respected and beloved of modern critics.

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The first volume of this two-volume edition of MacDiarmid's "Complete Poems" reprints the texts of the Penguin edition (1986), which was based on the first edition of 1978, which MacDiarmid himself saw through the press. Additional poems discovered since the first edition of 1978 are included, and the additional text revised. MacDiarmid insisted that his "Complete Poems" should be books of poetry, uncluttered by editorial annotations and notes. Michael Grieve, the poet's son, and W. R. Aitken, his bibliographer, have carefully followed his instructions, and compiled an extensive glossary based on the earlier collections.

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Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale’s fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. `Joy’ is a monologue in the voice of William Blake’s wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it `an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing’. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto `silent’ dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the `maligned and misaligned’.

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Winter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard's prize-winning sequence Lark & Merlin, an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of the poet's Northern-English homeland. Stotting clough and gill in sneaping winds, leaping burns by backlit larches, waves of sleek grass skiffing mist ...here, says the poet, 'the weather is overseer'. The borders between body and landscape, desire and object, blur in the mammal heat of pursuit, of a lover, of a self, insatiable and unresolvable. There follows a selection from the Fiends Fell Journals, a haibun or poetry-diary, composed over the decade Pickard lived alone on the wind-blown North Pennines. Short poems dedicated to friends and acerbic, satirical poems lend the second half of Winter Migrants a playful warmth and tonic mischief.As the collection draws to a close, the poems return to the familiar horizon of Solway Firth, the estuary 'where winter migrants gather in long black lines', and the world, cooled now both inside and out, quells: a curlew gifts its 'estuary echo'; gulls make a 'confetti flurry' above the shoreline; and clouds, once pale and flitting, pour purple and gold, 'a mercury whisper of tipped-in light'.' I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain.'Allen Ginsberg'Pickard uses local words and slang authentically. [...] But throughout his work he reaches into a need for a certain strenuous innocence, a resistance to intellectualising, another way of speaking directly to an audience.'Eric Mottram'In these days of technological wizardry it might be a safe guess to say poets have become rather thin on the ground. I mean to say that there seems to be a surplus of estate agents, bankers, media people, technocrats, lawyers, accountants etc...but the POET...the noble BARD appears to have almost slipped off the map.This is one reason why I'm terribly glad that Tom Pickard is alive and kicking, because in fact he is the living embodiment of "poetdom". [...] To try to describe Tom's poems would be pointless. They speak for themselves, in the most powerful and uniquely personal way.'Annie Lennox'With sharp vision Tom Pickard dissects his gut reaction and reminds us to appreciate the cool clear beauty of our own situation.'Paul McCartney'the linguistic ecstasy [...] slipped into the loneliness of the landscape the poet finds himself answering to instead of a lover [...] A lyric poet in profound correspondence with his home in the Pennines and with the erotic muse.'Ange Mlinko, Poetry

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Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020. Winner of an English PEN Award. Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laabi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laabi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from 'beyond the borders of what is human', as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are 'the only weapon we've left'. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is 'right here / inside me / like a second body', and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that 'epic of silence'. These poems, Laabi's 'bitter fruits of the murderous twilight', renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet's duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laabi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laabi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.

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Dennis O'Driscoll is among the finest and most popular poets of his generation. "New and Selected Poems" shows him to be a poet of humanity and wit whose observant, rhythmically supple poetry is attuned to the tragedies and comedies of contemporary life. One of the book's highlights is The Bottom Line, a multi-voiced and multifaceted portrait of business managers and bureaucrats. Closing with a generous selection of previously unpublished work, "New and Selected Poems" - which follows Dennis O'Driscoll's acclaimed "Exemplary Damages", chosen as a Book of the Year by Seamus Heaney in 2002 - makes for a compelling collection, wide in its appeal and yet imbued with a distinctive and often startling world-view.

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This work is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. "Forms of Distance" is Bei Dao's second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, "Old Snow", as 'the work of one of the great poets of our time', and John Cayley wrote in the "Times Literary Supplement" that 'in a sense he is the only contemporary Chinese poet who is knowable for the non-specialist...we can hear the maturing poetic voice of a highly talented, individual Chinese writer.'

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When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out "The Axion Esti", first published in 1959, as 'one of twentieth-century literature's most concentrated and richly faceted poems.' It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of eternal Greece, his vision of the war and its aftermath, and his concluding celebration of human life, Elytis is a true voice of our age A- a deeply personal lyric poet who speaks for humanity at large.

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This seventh anthology in the series includes nineteen poets, new writers and some more widely known.

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"Yellow Studio", Stephen Romer's fourth book of poems, is furnished with the poems of that middle of the life where amorous bewilderment, rueful satire and the bitter-sweet memory conduct their urgent dialogue. Exploring the mystifying link between sacred and erotic love, Romer identifies the source of art itself, a place of creation and refuge, the yellow studio of the title poem. It is the lighted room of childhood, a vulnerable private place the adult tries to recreate. Formal acts of remembrance are attempts to identify what lies ahead as much as to preserve the shadows. Here Romer, with innocence and urbanity, takes stock of past and future.

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Nigel Forde is fascinated by things in the process of change: music, the momentary epiphany, the precarious balance of twilight rather than night or day. The poems, written over a period of years, meditate on memory and landscape: in the unremarkable and evanescent lives can find their greatest clarity. Two central sequences, 'A Map of the Territory' and 'Touchstones', express ways of remaking memories in language. 'Touchstones', a Hungarian sonnet sequence, explores the creative possibilities of strict poetic forms. 'A Map of the Territory' attempts both truth to events and to what distance has made of them. The collection maps a landscape and the mind that it has shaped.

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This anthology follows the OxfordPoets anthologies of 2000, 2001 and 2002. It introduces a number of new poets who are beginning to make their way. The collection celebrates the diversity of the Oxford list (since 1999 an imprint of Carcanet Press in association with the English Faculty of the University of Oxford). The editors are members of the OxfordPoets board. Bernard O'Donoghue, born in County Cork in 1945; teaches Mediaeval English at Wadham College, Oxford and has published four books of poems. David Constantine, an authority on Holderlin, is a poet and a freelance translator.

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This is the second Oxford poetry anthology which represents works of the Oxford poetry list.

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By turns sensual and incantatory, "Common Prayer" offers a liturgy for a world in crisis. Meditations on the actuality of sickness and bereavement move outward through narratives of the broken body of Europe's violent twentieth century. Challenging and exploratory, Fiona Sampson's poetry remakes the spiritual and physical metaphors by which we live.

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This second volume of extracts from Frederick Raphael's notebooks (never a diary) covers the first five years of the 1970s. It describes and analyses a variety of experiences which are always opportunities for the precise definition of people, places and events.

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The "Contes et nouvelles en vers" are the fruit of the author's wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccacio's "Decameron", Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso", Rabelais and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females, addled males, proved the inspiration for some richly inventive plotting.

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Some of the speakers in this poetry collection are ancient, some modern, and all ask questions dictated by their situations in life and history. The characters are for the most part stoical and pessimistic, but their pessimism is remote from the cynicism and irony of our age.

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From the author of "Time Signatures", this is a collection of love poems which explore the cultural and individual difficulties of desire and loss.

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These sometimes savage, sometimes wry and rueful, always inventive stories evoke the reality of the South Pacific Zealand and environs - with its "more market economy" tourists and its wacky national pride. Several of the pieces, first collected in "The New Land", won the 1990 Buckland Award for the best work of literature published in New Zealand. To "South Pacific" Bill Manhire adds new tales and other work. There's a do-it-yourself murder mystery, the story of an assassination attempt on the Queen, the hilarious account of a Writers' Congress in Kuala Lumpur, and an unsettling, futuristic tale set in 1999. A vein of satire runs through Bill Manhire's stories. Yet, rooted as many of them are in a particular place and time, the laughter they generate is anything but local.

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In his poem 'Modern Painters' Dan Burt looks at the twentieth century and its aftermath through the shattered lens of Ruskin's famous book and the work of certain modern painters. 'We look like this after things fall apart;/The painting is the autopsy report,' reflecting on two World Wars, stepping over the corpse of the Enlightenment. His poems are steady, hard, truth-telling in the way of the painters he most admires, and proof against sentiment. He matches the scale of his concerns with a substantial large- and small-scale poetic architecture, lyrical, philosophical, elegiac or satirical as appropriate. Dan Burt, a master of traditional forms, has published two chapbooks and an art book. This is his first full collection and includes poems, sequences and his celebrated prose memoir 'Certain Windows'.

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"Glass is Elastic" is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see - what do we know - in a world experienced through lenses and screens? 'Don't blink. Nobody's / looking, nobody's seeing'. Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye's lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling. A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial. In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple every day, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world. Cover photograph Paul Maddern, Keel 14. Copyright A[copyright] Paul Maddern, reproduced by permission.

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From his first wartime collection evoking a generation's experience of a country made strange by blackouts and air raids, the 'vivid allegorical / Reality of gun and hangar', to the consolatory wisdom of the Last Poems of 1993, Roy Fuller was a poet of the familiar and ordinary made extraordinary. Mundane details, observed with Fuller's tolerant humour and acute eye, reveal depths and dissonances from which a civilised life may be created: the unremarkable year 'of painting the shed ...Is also that of harmonies / That have made one's life and art for evermore off-key'. On the centenary of Fuller's birth, this generous selection, introduced by John Fuller, the poet's son, and with an afterword by Neil Powell, Fuller's biographer, brings to a new generation of readers the work of one of the essential twentieth-century poets.

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"Cold Eye" is a collaboration between an artist and a poet to examine the creative process. The work yokes ten images with ten poems and in so doing one explores the other: text uses apposition to excavate image and its genesis, and image illuminates text and its content. Image and text share a sense of doubt which permeates the work and its subjects. The drive to present a clear, cold view of them is always paramount.

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Archimedes enjoyed from childhood a natural communion with Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and protector of his city-state. This book takes us on a pilgrimage to Eleusis, to Thermopylae, and to Alexandria and the Egypt of the Ptolemies. It demonstrates that the wisdom of the ancients is central to the search for truths about ourselves and our cosmos.

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Constellations, Ian Pindar's second collection, begins with a celebration of sunlight, but ends with the appearance of the moon, the coming of winter, snow and 'perpetual night'. There are as many poems as there are constellations in the celestial sphere, although Pindar never abandons what he calls 'the Plane of Matter'. In poems of haunting beauty the poet takes us from a summer love affair by the sea to the coming of war and its aftermath. The work as a whole is a profound meditation upon sex, love, parenthood, the power of dreams and memory, and the passing of time, as well as being and mortality, literature and language, and the place of poetry in the modern world.

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Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. 'Do you mean to say you've married / an apprentice fitter and come all this way?' an official asks the poet's grandmother who, trusting to luck, emigrates to a new life in South Africa after the First World War. An ironic and grateful presence, Powell observes the lives that he inherits. Perspectives shift with time: an old photograph shows his mother 'more beautiful and happier than I remember her', his father 'looking for once the statesman he should have been'. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrative based on a journal kept by Powell's grandmother of her life in South Africa: a feckless husband, a 483-mile trek with horse and covered wagon, violence and poverty. There's also a shorter, teasingly fictional narrative and a sequence about the life of a grand piano. Other poems deal with childhood, leaving home and first love; a park in Kent and a wood in Suffolk; an old photograph of the Strand and Louis Armstrong's first solo; the London bombers of 2005; and, finally, two old friends recalled in very different elegies. Meditative, wry, melancholy and celebratory, this is Neil Powell is at his most versatile and memorable.

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"Eye of the Hare" affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of "The Psalms", John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towards the planet and the needs of society. Deane revives the language of sacrament and celebration with raw and tender grace; in sonnets, narratives and lyrics Eye of the Hare advances towards redemption. In the book's final section. Deane honours the places and landscapes of Achill, that beautiful, demanding island off the west coast of Ireland.

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Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age shaped by the Suez crisis and the Cold War. The barbarities of the twentieth century haunt the shadows; there is comfort in the graces of domestic life, in friendships and long memories, in cats and gardens and eccentricities. A sequence of poems honours the life of a scholarly father-in-law who fought in the Great War. In a parallel autobiographical sequence, 'Playtime in a Cold City', three undergraduate years in the 1950s become a touchstone for a lost pastoral, before the 'fields of youth' fade to memory, 'the lit faces of dead friends, /laughing'. Generous, witty and shrewd, Borrowed Landscapes affirms Scupham's belief that when a 'murderous crew' of sorcerer's apprentices 'turn is to was', there is 'only a pen to turn was to is'.

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Clive Wilmer's New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Hagia Sophia', where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer's poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer's work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred's Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which - conversational in tone and formal in composition - make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer's translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

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Emporium, Ian Pindar's first collection, is stocked with curiosities, jokes and horrors. Step through the door and discover Big Bumperton on his bicycle, Mrs Beltinska in her bath, Monsieur P. on holiday, a transfixed girl in blue jeans, a wasp, two lascivious figs and a god who wanders shopping arcades 'enhaloed in black flames of longing and dread'. A chain letter travels across centuries of poetry, from Langland to Maxine Chernoff; deep in a snowy forest, seen only by wolves, a mysterious machine is resonating - Pindar maps a surreal hinterland where the dark humour of absurdity lies in wait.

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The Baboons of Hada introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricate wonders and memories: the grandeur of noses, the mayonnaise tornado whipped up by a kitchen whisk, the gossip gravediggers whisper to the dead. An American childhood and kinships are evoked with loving particularity, alongside a flamboyant caliph, Lazarus and his disenchanted wife, and the great medieval Arab poet al-Mutanabbi writing in exile lines that reverberate across 'all the empty places' of the world.

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The January-February 2021 issue.; Editorial considers the British Library's controversial Printed Heritage Provenance Research report and its negative impact on their welcome anti-racism policy.; Jason Allen-Paisant considers blackness and landscape.; Vahni Capildeo on trees and the poetry of ecology.; John Clegg's 'Marianne Moore Buys Some Bananas'.; Jonathan E. Hirschfeld sculpts Czeslaw Milosz (illustrated).; New poetry by Tara Bergin, Miles Burrows, and Nina Bogin.; New to PN Review this issue: Colm Tóibín, Daisy Fried, Alexey Shelvakh, and Camille Ralphs.; And more...

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