Search results for ""Carcanet Press""

A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year. Rebecca Goss' fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.

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Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024. The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023. A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year. Jason Allen-Paisant's debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, 'Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past - and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.' The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us. Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.

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Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. A The Irish Times Book of the Year. More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.

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This new selection of Donald Davie's poems spans six decades. It traces his protean trajectory from austere beginnings to riskier dislocations of shape and syntax, through to his extended late-meditations on form, content, and spirit. To apply his own critical definition of syntax, his is a poetic of articulate energy, the restless redistribution of force – an abiding resource and inspiration.

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Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023. Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2023. Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022. Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021. In 'Minty', one of the typically charged and capacious poems in this eagerly-awaited debut collection, a mojito glass reflects: whatever grid of bricks & wood makes up the room we happen to be sitting in is dilated & wrapped around a single focal-point; whatever portion of the sky that happens to be visible through the window becomes a convex bowl. The weather also happens, as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other places where it falls into the orbit of the glass. 'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.

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Shortlisted for the Premio Valle Inclán Prize 2023. Mexican poet, teacher and translator Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published several books, two in English thanks to the brilliant poet-translator Forrest Gander, who has put this composite volume together, the first time Bracho has been extensively published in the UK. An extensive selection from Bracho's earlier work, which 'altered the landscape of Mexican poetry' (World Literature Today), is accompanied by the entirety of her new book, of which Gander writes: 'Although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The "plot" follows a general trajectory-from early to late Alzheimer's-with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness. We come to know an opinionated, demonstrative elderly woman whose resilience, in the face of her dehiscent memory, becomes most clear in her adaptive strategies. The poems involve us in the mind's bafflement and wonder, in its creative quick-change adjustments, and in the emotional drama that draws us across the widening linguistic gaps that reroute communication. Bracho's poems have philosophical and psychological underpinnings even when they are descriptive. Her work has always managed to mix abstraction and sensuality, but in this book the two merge into a particularly resonant combination. 'We are inside a mind, maybe many minds, considering a mystery with signal attentiveness, openness, and love.'

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The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether 'we feel the feelings that we call ours'. The second, mainly composed of 'daughter sonnets', describes bringing up children in a foreign language. The third, 'Die Schreibblockade', German for writer's block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma. The fourth cycle is about translation. A libretto commissioned by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti follows, about Ravel's interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Gwyneth Lewis writes, 'Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. His The Feeling Sonnets are an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages' spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.' Born in Leningrad, Ostashevsky grew up in Brooklyn. He is now based in Berlin and New York. In his last full book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by NYRB Poets, discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. His previous book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages.

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A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. In this remarkable first collection, Parwana Fayyaz evokes events in the lives of Afghan women, past and present - their endurance and achievements, told from their points of view. John McAuliffe writes of the 'remarkable litanies, which haunt her poems' occasions' and the title poem, with which she won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, is such a litany, conjuring and commemorating. The poems are not judgmental: they witness. The reader infers the contexts. As well as the human stories there is a spectacular landscape, unfamiliar villages and cities, and a rich history which the Western press in reporting contemporary news foreshortens and diminishes. 'Storytelling has a long tradition in Afghan culture. Stories are passed down orally. Every woman even or especially those who are illiterate knows and has memorized a few important stories - to share [...] I grew up among women who never went to school - my grandmothers, my mother, my aunts.' As the poet grew away from that tradition, in which patience was the chief virtue, she lost patience and began her resistance, their resistance, in her poems which hover between cultures and languages, thinking in one and understanding in another. Each language has its history and value systems: 'it was learning English that gave me my voice as a poet, enabling me to distance myself as well as to comprehend the connection with the tradition I was brought up in.'

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Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022. Awarded the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022. Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A Guardian Book of the Year 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Dublin) Book of the Year 2021. A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021. Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it. Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.'

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This newest Carcanet Classic collects the oldest poetry yet discovered, as written down or runed in the Ice Age in Lascaux and other caves in the Dordogne, and now translated – tentatively – into English for the first time. The translation is at two removes, from French versions by the mysterious linguistic genius Jean-Luc Champerret, and then from the striking originals that retain such a sense of early human presence. Philip Terry mediates between the French and those hitherto inscrutable originals. Jean-Luc Champerret's unique contribution to world literature is in his interpretation of the cave signs. And Philip Terry's contribution is to have discovered and rendered this seminal, hitherto unsuspected work into English. The translated poems are experiments, as the drawings may have been to the original cave poets composing them as image and sound. While archaeologists maintain that these signs are uninterpretable, Champerret assigns them meanings by analogy, then – in an inspired act of creative reading – inserts them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found at Lascaux. The results – revelation of Ice-Age poetry – are startling.

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"It was dusk, when the dark earth stains the blueing air and soothes bird in tall tree and beast in silent lair; I alone amidst all that hush of soil and leaf prepared for the war of the way and the way's great grief, of which an undistracted heart may speak or sing..." Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Ned Denny's baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet's version – in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope – is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime.

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In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity's engagement with the non-human. By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects - environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson - only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back. Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft's isolation and the world's irrepressible variety. Gloves on and gloves off, the poet's hands destroy and build, gather and scatter, caress and strike.

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A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Review 31 Book of the Year 2020. With The Barbarians Arrive Today, Evan Jones has produced the classic English Cavafy for our age. Expertly translated from Modern Greek, this edition presents Cavafy's finest poems, short creative prose and autobiographical writings, offering unique insights into his life's work. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863-1933) was a minor civil servant who self-published and distributed his poems among friends; he is now regarded as one of the most significant poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influence on writers across generations and languages. The broad, rich world of the Mediterranean and its complex history are his domain, its days and nights of desire and melancholy, ambition and failure - with art always at the centre of life.

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This dual language edition is reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitán as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.

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A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak - bluntly, humorously - always alert for the fantastic. This is the first translation of Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.

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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.

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A Book of the Year 2019 in The Morning Star. This is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a small, ambitious press over a period of radical transformation in publishing. Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of letters - handwritten, typed, and now emailed - between an author and the editor. Beginning in 1969 with the response to an invitation to subscribe to Carcanet for two guineas, the book traces Carcanet's progress and offers insight into the nature of literary editing. At its heart is the personal relationship of author and editor/publisher, the conflicts, friendships and vicissitudes that occur at the nexus between the work, its creator, publisher and reader. Poets are central, but fiction writers, translators, biographers and critics also contribute to the Carcanet ferment and firmament. Fifty Fifty celebrates the writers', readers' and editor's risks, passions and pleasures.

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Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.

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Winner of the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry 2020. The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month August 2019. So Many Rooms, the debut collection from Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winning poet Laura Scott, moves with its own lyric strangeness, opening up different rooms and also different worlds.

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Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. A Map Towards Fluency, Lisa Kelly's first collection, considers words, the power they impart, the power their absence withholds. Forgetting, mis-hearing, mis-remembering all challenge the imagination to find ways round and ways through. `The idea of fluency interests me - and whether we can ever claim fluency in any language.' Her mother speaking Danish - which she cannot herself understand - is familiar and yet alienating: how Danish can she herself be when she cannot hear her mother's tongue with understanding? Her own attempts with British Sign Language are another challenge, a form of translation of sense in the absence of sound. `I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How ca form not matter?' The poems touch on these themes in various ways, not least in what they do with form.

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What is time? Our understanding of it changes, between when the angels rejoiced at the incarnation to when Einstein and then Feynman reconceived it. In the strange, unregulated and disorienting world of the web we experience it in new ways, its predictabilities wrested from us. In Mary O'Malley's Demeter and Persephone sequence, time is experienced through generations, but the new gods play differently and spin the clock hands in their own mischievous ways. New generations find the time-patterns and expectations of their predecessors arcane and incomprehensible, and vice versa. Through mythology and ecology, this book sets out to restore connections. The book opens with oranges orbiting a winter kitchen. Time in its dozen guises moves through the poems, as does fate. Mary O'Malley was appointed 2019 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

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A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. 'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'. She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award. In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire.

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Longlisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold. The collection marks an adventurous departure for a pen-and-paper poet. These texts are the fruit of collaborative experiments in theatre, dance and other performance, drawing on burlesque and mime as well as Capildeo's fascination with Caribbean masquerade. The poems are astir with voices and bodies usually kept `between the lines' of poetry: a weeping poltergeist disrupting the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-towercity road. Novels are turned inside out to become dramas of sleaze and surveillance.

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George Seferis's Complete Poems reissued as a Carcanet Classic. George Seferis is the great Greek poet of the twentieth century, a classic among classics. The formal and thematic versatility of his work, its decisively modern inflections, call Eliot's poems to mind: fastidious and expansive in equal measure. Like Eliot's deep-rooted Modernism, Seferis's never loses touch with the stones and inscriptions of the past. He writes for his and our time, poetically and politically alert: culture can free us or, misapplied, can trammel us. Aptly described as 'the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages', Seferis was for Peter Levi `one of the greatest writers in this century in any language. . . From Seferis it was possible to learn. . . what seriousness about poetry is.' And Archibald MacLeish wrote, 'if any contemporary poet can be said to be essential, Seferis is that poet, and this' - referring to an earlier edition of this book - 'is the true body of his work'.

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from `Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. `The words are only the words,' he writes, `which is more or less everything.' Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a `genial smuggler of surprises': `his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)

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Jenny Lewis relocates Gilgamesh to its earlier, oral roots in a Sumerian society where men and women were more equal, the reigning deity of Gilgamesh’s city, Uruk, was female (Inanna), only women were allowed to brew beer and keep taverns and women had their own language – emesal. With this shift of emphasis, Lewis captures the powerful allure of the world’s oldest poem and gives it a fresh dynamic while creating a fastpaced narrative for a new generation of readers.

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Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials, links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.

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The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) writes in direct response to the Holocaust. She is uniquely a 'prophetic' poet, one of the greatest of that species in the twentieth century. Her first book appeared in the immediate wake of the Second World War, in 1946. Since that time, Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, 'she has been writing fundamentally a single book'. That book is represented in this volume which reveals her whole progression rendered into English. Unlike earlier translators, Andrew Shanks calls his versions 'translations/imitations', moving away from the doggedly literal to render more faithfully the sense and intention of the originals. Sachs escaped Berlin in May 1940. She found refuge in Sweden. Her major work is an evolving response to the trauma of the Holocaust. In 1966 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes. Her poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust. Other themes develop: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, personal bereavement, mental breakdown. And there are reflections on poetic vocation in the darkness of recent history.

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Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019. Shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2018. Gabriel Josipovici's The Cemetery in Barnes is a short, intense novel that opens in elegiac mode, advances quietly towards something dark and disturbing, before ending with an eerie calm. Its three plots, relationships and time-scales are tightly woven into a single story; three voices - as in an opera by Monteverdi - provide the soundtrack, enhanced by a chorus of friends and acquaintances. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris and then to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader's darkest intuitions. The Cemetery in Barnes reaffirms Josipovici's status as `one of the very best writers now at work in the English language, and a man whose writing, both in fiction and in critical studies, displays a unity of sensibility and intelligence and deep feeling difficult to overvalue at any time' (Guardian).

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After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

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With `Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His `I’, like theirs, makes space for a reluctant `us’. Dear Pilgrims includes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a `new testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his `Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God’.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, `revving on a wish'.

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Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017. Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in 'Mask', are both 'themselves and strangers'. 'That's all they wanted.'

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`The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manque: I make no other pretensions ...' (Anthony Burgess). Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously prolific journalist. During his life he published two substantial collections of journalism, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986); a posthumous collection of occasional essays, One Man's Chorus, was published in 1998. These collections are now out of print, and Burgess's journalism, a key part of his prodigious output, has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade is a brilliant new selection of his reviews and articles, some savage, some crucial in establishing new writers, new tastes and trends. Between 1959 and his death in 1993 Burgess contributed to newspapers and periodicals around the world: he was provocative, informative, entertaining, extravagant, and always readable. Editor Will Carr presents a wealth of unpublished and uncollected material.

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Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Rebecca Watts's debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry. In assured style, Watts positions herself where Wordsworth, Frost and Hughes have stood; with an original point of view and an openness to the possibilities of form, she retunes the genre for modern ears. From the wide-open plains of ecology and social history to the intimate enclosures of dreams, homes and bodies, these poems approach their often-unusual subjects with the clarity and matter-of-factness of Simon Armitage and with humour that recalls Stevie Smith, spinning memorable scenes and vivid images from the material of ordinary language. Animals, as familiars and omens, abound. Weather anticipates and directs human drama, under the analytic and tender watch of a poet influenced as much by science and realism as by Romanticism. As landscaper, orienteer and companion, Watts finds new ways of negotiating the complex territories of our physical and emotional worlds.

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'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' -embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage.' Cliche', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity. 'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'

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R.F. Langley is known for his meticulous observation of the natural world and his highly original voice. This volume brings together his two previous Carcanet collections, Collected Poems (2000) and The Face of It (2007), along with his celebrated but uncollected late poems, including 'To a Nightingale', which won the 2011 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The book includes a biographical introduction and a rare note by the poet on his own compositional practice. Langley kept a careful record of the reading and writing which inspired his poems; this edition is fully annotated with these sources, making it an invaluable guide for readers wanting to explore the visionary imagination of this master craftsman.

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First published under the title "An Unofficial Rilke", Hamburger's translations have been critically acclaimed for their contribution towards a more complete understanding of one of the major poets of the 20th century. While Rilke has been perhaps more widely translated into English than any other modern poet, the emphasis has always been on 'major works' - the "New Poems" volumes, "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus". Yet Rilke produced many more poems which had little or no airing beyond the confines of his workshop. Michael Hamburger argues in his perceptive and entertaining introduction that these poems are not inferior to the poems in the collections that form the accepted corpus; rather that they merely failed to fit in with Rilke's wish to form a definitive statement.

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Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) now takes a place among the English poets. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private, the passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire, and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he made a poetry unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his poems, was made by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the "Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney". It is reissued now, with a few corrected readings, and with a Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life, by P.J. Kavanagh.

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Written with a keen awareness of both climate change and the situation in the Middle East, this work features poems that draws upon the poet's travels in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Argentina, and his 25 years in the environmental movement. It also includes politically-charged poems such as An Opera in Baghdad and An Isotope, Dreaming.

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The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of "Ticks and Crosses" are an account of a farcical summer afternoon spent floating down a French river on a lilo in the company of Shirley Williams; an alarming trip up the wrong (and by no means dormant) volcano in Guatemala; meeting Nabokov; taking part in Any Questions with Enoch PowellA...The eminent are caught off-guard; aphorisms sparkle, and throughout, Raphael's love of French life and culture, his delight in the human comedy of social life, illuminate his unfolding chronicle.

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'I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I didn't live much longer!' "Clarity or Death!" takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of the world, the universe and ourselves is the linking preoccupation of Jeffrey Wainwright's collection. Five poems develop the physicist Richard Feynman's proposition that through scientific study 'we may be able to reduce the number of different things'. Others ponder infinity and number. These poems are both playful and intellectually rigorous, exploring not only ideas but the experience of having and articulating them. They play alongside other aspects of personal experience. Central to Wainwright's writing is a fascination with what Wallace Stevens called 'the uncertain light of single, certain truth', an uncertain light embodied in the sensuousness of language given poetic form.

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Who are the invisible kings? Why do two bears follow them round Britain? And what happens when a gypsy's curse comes miraculously to life? David Morley's new book reveals extraordinary worlds where the real and imagined converge in stories and charms, just this side of science and magic. When David Morley's Romani poems first appeared in the "London Review of Books" and "PN Review", the strangeness of the language and their narrative power convinced readers that here was a genuinely new imaginative world. Partly Romani himself, the poet follows - and remakes - a tradition of weaving stories, from the conflicts in his own culture and that of the Roma. The personal poems that open the collection develop into a traveller's-eye view of England and Europe as stages for war, passion and betrayal. Never before has a writer made such daring and beautiful use of the Romani language as a vehicle for contemporary poetry, nor has a Romani poem achieved the devastating epic scope of 'Kings', the central narrative of the collection. "The Invisible Kings" continues a cycle of poems that began with David Morley's "Scientific Papers" and which will conclude with "An Island Blown Inland".

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Roger Langley's poems explore perception. They take their bearings from forms as diverse as Renaissance hermeticism, a Greek vase, Rauschenberg's painting, Bottom's dream, a green beetle. Here the world may chime, like a building by Palladio, or disappear on a parting wave as in a film by Bergman. Surprise and truth come together. Things are both ordinary and vivid, distinct and universal. Langley's poems take delight in the sound and sense of language: for him, etymology can be revelation. In the interplay of word and object, each poem attempts an epiphany.

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Ditch-crawling has no rules, just aesthetic principles, the most important thing is to travel lightly, leave no legacies, and try to make no sound at all.

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A delightfully wise and playful collection from one of our most senior poets, offering a feast of sensory experience.

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