Search results for ""bloodaxe books""

Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. Mixing myth, history and folktale with science and philosophy, his plainly written, sceptical poems are surreal mini-dramas often pivoting on paradoxes. Poems Before & After covers thirty years of his poetry. Before are his poems from the fifties and sixties, poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: first published in English in his Penguin Selected Poems (1967) and in Bloodaxe's The Fly (1987), with some additional poems. After are translations of his later poetry, all written after 1968, including not only those from his two Bloodaxe editions, On the Contrary (1984) and Supposed to Fly (1996), but also the entire texts of two late collections published by Faber, Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) and The Rampage (1997). With additional translations by David Young, Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub. 'A laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art' – Seamus Heaney 'Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere' – Ted Hughes 'One of the sanest voices of our time' – A. Alvarez 'He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise again and again' – Tom Paulin

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Look, Clare! Look! is the story of a year. When Clare Pollard set off on a six-month world trip, she wanted to write a long poem which engaged with what she saw and felt during her travels. On her return, she discovered that her father was seriously ill, and his funeral was held on New Year’s Eve. Clare Pollard’s third collection is a book about journeys and home. She looks closely at both global issues and the blossom in her yard. Beginning as a meditation on western guilt against the backdrop of SARS and the Iraq War, it ends by looking at our closest relationships, in poems that deal with a pregnancy scare and her engagement, as well as illness and loss.

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Piotr Sommer is one of Poland’s leading poets. Continued extends and enlarges the achievement of his earlier Bloodaxe selection, Things to Translate, and spans his whole career to date. The translations were made with the help of leading British and American poets, including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn and D.J. Enright.

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Cheryl Follon is a feisty new Scottish writer who presents a wild carnival of bawdy tale-telling, songs and boisterous monologues - all in a rowdy spirit of earthy celebration. The poems of All Your Talk - her first collection - are lucid and lusty, direct and daring, spiced with down-to-earth humour and a lively, often wicked wit. Rooted in ballad and storytelling traditions, she describes her poetry as 'like boiling an old turnip and straining off a contemporary soup'.

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Josephine Balmer's 'Chasing Catullus' ventures into border territory, the no-man's-land between poetry and translation, juxtaposing new poems with fresh versions of ancient texts, brazenly reimagining classical literature, wittily subverting epic works, overwriting the past like a palimpsest. But there is a more personal journey here too. 'Chasing Catullus' presents a dark odyssey of the soul, descending in and out of the underworls as Balmer responds to the death of her young niece from cancer, exploring difficult times and dangerous emotions with compassion and humour. The poems push back the boundaries, blurring differences between ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar, giving voice to contemporary loss and grief.

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Pauline Stainer is a poet ‘working at the margins of the sacred’, conveying sensations ‘with an economy of means that is breathtaking… her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own’ (John Burnside). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer’s five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her ‘visceral Muse’. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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Ann Sansom’s poetry overturns the reader’s expectations. Her poems often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions – what Stanley Cook called ‘an authentic Northern mix of realism and imagination’. In Praise of Men and other people was her first new book for nearly a decade, a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection Romance won her many admirers.

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Poetry has never been so rigorous and diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to someone who knew something about it.' That's exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this judicious and comprehensive selection of British, Irish and American manifestos by some of modern poetry's finest practitioners. Opening the 20th century account with Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the book moves through key later figures including W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Dylan Thomas. America is richly represented too, from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to the influential New England poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. Strong Words then brings the issues fully up to date with over 30 specially commissioned statements from contemporary writers including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Selima Hill, Paul Muldoon and Douglas Dunn, amounting to a new overview of the poetry being written at the start of the 21st century. For poets and readers, for critics, teachers and students of creative writing and contemporary poetry, this is essential reading. As well as representing many of the most important poets of the last hundred years, Strong Words also charts many different stances and movements, from Modernism to Postmodernism, from Futurism to the future theories of poetry. This landmark book champions the continuing dialogue of these voices, past and present, exploring the strongest form that words can take: the poem.

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An anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Postcards from god was her first book from Bloodaxe. It combines two collections published separately in India, Purdah (1989) and Postcards from god (1994). In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. Postcards from god meditates upon disquietudes in the poet's chosen society: its sudden acts of violence, its feuds and insanities, forcing her into a permanent wakefulness that fits her eyes with glass lids. If the poems collected in Purdah are windows shuttered upon a private world, those gathered into Postcards from god are doorways leading out into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of the tender grace of attention.

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This comprehensive edition of Russia's greatest modern poet, Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966), includes the complete texts of her major works Requiem, commemorating all of Stalin's victims, and Poem Without a Hero. Akhmatova published her first book of poems in 1912, and in the same year founded the Acmeist movement with her husband, the poet Gumilev. Her intense, highly personal love lyrics were later attacked as anti-revolutionary, and in 1925 her poetry was banned. Gumilev was shot in 1921 for alleged involvement in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and in the years of terror which followed under Stalin, Akhmatova was persecuted for her work along with fellow poets Mandelstam, who died in a camp, and Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide. She was able to publish some work during the war, but in 1946 she again came under attack, this time from Zhdanov, who denounced her with Pasternak and others for trying to ‘poison the minds’ of Soviet youth. These were attacks on her published work. What she was writing – but could not publish – was far more dangerous. For she had entered her years of silence. As she fought for her son’s release from prison, she was writing her greatest poetry: the cycle Requiem, which commemorated all of Stalin’s victims, and Poem without a hero, which she began in 1940 and worked on for over 20 years. All she wrote she committed to memory. Several trusted friends also memorised her poems, among them Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda. She wrote nothing down, and so survived, the people’s conscience, the one who kept 'the great Russian word' alive.

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Born in Hampshire in 1918, Martin Bell was the leading member of the 'lost generation' of English poets whose careers were interrupted by the War. He was a prominent member of The Group during the fifties, and a major influence on younger poets like Peter Redgrove and Peter Porter. His poetry reached a wide audience during the sixties through Penguin Modern Poets, and in 1967 he published his Collected Poems,1937-1966, his first and last book. Bell was also a champion and brilliant translator of French Surrealist poets. He died in poverty in Leeds in 1978. Like other 'provincial' working-class contemporaries, Bell wrote fantastical, highly erudite, biting, belligerent poetry. And yet – as Philip Hobsbaum said – he also wrote 'some of the most delicate love poems of our time' as well as 'one of the major war poems in the language'. A. Alvarez called him 'an emotional tightrope walker... He writes a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else.'

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Helen Ivory's new collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. With ten collage illustrations by Helen Ivory.

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Translation of the Route is the 11th collection by award-winning Argentine poet and translator Laura Wittner. In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age. Dual language SpanishEnglish edition.

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Crystal traces the arc of one woman's experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth. In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an overarching conceit to articulate the devastating impact of living with a loved one who is utterly changed.

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Sri Lanka has thrilled the foreign imagination as a land of infinite possibility. Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers envisioned an island of gems and pearls, a stopping-point on the Silk Road; tourists today are sold a vision of golden beaches and swaying palm trees, delicious food and smiling locals. This favours the south of the island over the north rebuilt piecemeal after the end of the civil war in 2009, and erases a history of war crimes, illicit assassination of activists and journalists, subjugation of minorities, and a legacy of governmental corruption that has now led the country into economic and social crisis. This first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry – many exiles refuse to identify as “Sri Lankan” – features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history. There are poems here about love, art, nature – and others exploring critical events: the Marxist JVP insurrections of the 1970s and 80s, the 2004 tsunami and its aftermath, recent bombings linked with the demonisation of Muslim communities. The civil war between the government and the separatist Tamil Tigers is a haunting and continual presence. A poetry of witness challenges those who would erase, rather than enquire into, the country’s troubled past. This anthology affirms the imperative to remember, whether this relates to folk practices suppressed by colonisers, or more recent events erased from the record by Sinhalese nationalists. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory. Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.

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In 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry – an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo – played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes (3), T.S. Eliot Prize (2), Ted Hughes Award (2), Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers the programme has supported, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes highly personal and politically engaged essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on some of the most significant topics of our time. Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times. Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works.

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Yannis Ritsos (1909–90) is generally considered to be – along with Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis – one of the most significant Greek poets of the last century. His life was, to say the least, troubled. From an early age, he was dogged by the tuberculosis that killed his mother and brother. His father and sister suffered breakdowns and spent time in institutions. His poem Epitaphios (1936), a lament for a young man shot dead by the police during a tobacco workers’ strike, was publicly burned by the Metaxas regime and his books banned. During the post-World War Two civil war – because he sided with the left – Ritsos was arrested and sent to prison camps. Then, in 1967, when the Papadopoulos military junta took control of the country, he was again arrested, again his books were banned, again he spent time in prison camps, before being confined to house arrest on the island of Samos. The violence and tyranny of dictatorship is often fractured by the surreal. In the poems collected here, written by Ritsos while in prison and under house arrest, that fracture in perception is a wound. A Broken Man in Flower has an introduction by John Kittmer and includes the text of an illuminating and vivid letter sent by Ritsos to his publisher in 1969 while under house arrest on Samos describing his life – and the lives of Greeks – under the repressive rule of the Colonels. David Harsent’s thirteen collections have won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Griffin International Prize. He is also a librettist: his collaborations with composers, chiefly with Harrison Birtwistle, have been performed at major venues worldwide.

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Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets from China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of his poetry, written between 2019 and 2022. The different sections – short poems, sequences, and one long poem – form a single comprehensive statement of Yang’s recent explorations. It is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as his father’s death. The creativity of the writing faces – is even excited by – the depth of the challenges of reality. The long title-poem in seven parts is a spiritual journey travelling back in time, completed back in the now, building up into 'a reincarnation within one', as endless time is transformed into multilayered poetical space, in Ai Weiwei’s words: 'This intellectual tower… [turns] the unsurpassable puzzles intermingled with life and death into an in-depth exploration of human emotion.' Ai Weiwei's innovative cover image featuring CCTV cameras and chains made of gold stretches around the whole book, across French flaps and then continues inside the front and back covers of the book, becoming an extraordinary metaphor for the book’s content.

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Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999’s Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the malevolent powers-that-be to task, as in her seminal poem ‘I’m Over the Moon’: ‘I don't like what the moon is supposed to do./ Confuse me, ovulate me,// spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient / date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,// I'm angry. I'll take back the night.’ Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Her poems dance wildly to the sizzling music of the English language, awake to every syllable: ‘Artless// is my heart. A stranger/ berry there never was,/ tartless.// Gone sour in the sun,/ in the sunroom or moonroof,/ roofless.’ These poems are also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny – ‘like having a bad boyfriend in a good band’ – though there is always wisdom beyond the punchline. Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, Liquid Flesh collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.

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What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his exploration of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic. With unexpected playfulness and irrepressible humour, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorisations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another. Chen Chen's debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was published in the UK by Bloodaxe in 2019.

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I’m totally killing your vibes is one-part phantasmagoria, one-part brutal document, with equal measures of irony and sincerity. It is a book compulsively drawn to a world in which identity and performance have become indistinguishable, where the squelch and seep of feelings frustrate our safety nets of logic and ethics, and violence and inadequacy are so often the corollaries of love. I’m totally killing your vibes is a book of poems concerning the exuberant performance, and the manic dissolution, of the self. It moves through the slow, fragmented dissolve of a relationship, via a tableau vivant of assorted, itinerant characters, and an extended, darkly comic dialogue with the feedback of literary, academic, and everyday life. A final, long-form prose poem extends the book’s interrogation of consumption as our contemporary mode of self-construction, of masculinity, and of desire.

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John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents. His border territory ranges from Love in a Sceptred Isle, a novella-like narrative poem of a romance between Barbados-born photographer, Victor, and Welsh librarian, Rhiannon, told with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to Casanova the Philosopher, a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosophically observing 18th-century English ways in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue. This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegiac rub shoulders alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put – with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener – as well as calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry puts on his hat as ‘poetsonian’, a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a crucial strand of Agard’s varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.

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Claire Askew’s electrifying second collection is an investigation of power: the power of oppressive systems and their hold over those within them; the power of resilience; the power of the human heart. It licks flame across the imagination, and rewrites narratives of human desire. It is a collection for anyone who has ever run through their life ‘backwards/ in the dark,/ with no map’ – these bright poems illuminate the way. How to burn a woman throngs with witches, outsiders, and women who do not fit the ordinary moulds of the world. It is a collection which traces historic atrocities, and celebrates the lives of those accused of witchcraft with empathy, tenderness and rage. It lifts a mirror up to contemporary systems of oppression and, in language that is both vivid and accessible, asks hard questions of our current world. These poems also delve deep into love in all its forms: from infatuations to the bitter ending of relationships. They ask what it is we want, how we might go about getting it, and what its cost might be. How to burn a woman sweeps the world up in its arms and presents it: a rough bonfire of London buses, Salem streets, Edinburgh closes. Askew’s astute, incisive language lifts from every page, throwing sparks.

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Diana Anphimiadi is one of the most widely revered Georgian poets of her generation. Her award-winning work reflects an exceptionally curious mind and glides between classical allusions and surreal imagery. She revivifies ancient myths and tests the reality of our senses against the limits of sense. Boldly inventive, prayers appear alongside recipes, dance lessons next to definitions. Her playful, witty lyricism offers a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday. The poems in this selection have been collaboratively translated into English by the award-winning British poet Jean Sprackland and leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters. A chapbook selection of their translations of Anphimiadi's work, Beginning to Speak, was published in 2018 and praised by Adham Smart in Modern Poetry in Translation for capturing the 'electricity of Anphimiadi’s language' which 'crackles from one poem to the next in Bukia-Peters and Sprackland’s fine translation'. Georgian-English dual language edition. Co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.

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In Passport to Here and There Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana. Her ninth collection of adult poems and her fourth book with Bloodaxe, Passport to Here and There makes a significant contribution both to Caribbean and to British poetry. Our Demerara voices rising and falling growing more and more golden like a canefield's metamorphosis from shoots into sugar -- the crystal memory shared with a river… Passport to Here and There is Grace Nichols's third new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and The Insomnia Poems (2017). It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is the grandmother, with her tales of wild tigers, but she’s also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. In exuberant and tender ecopoems, the saving grace of love in an otherwise bleak childhood is celebrated through spellbinding visions of nature, alongside haunting images of poaching and species extinction. Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection, and her second from Bloodaxe, following Mama Amazonica, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2018 – the first time a poetry book won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place. It is shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

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The two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross’s writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation – with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.

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Eleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages. Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children. A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections.

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Scientists and engineers are the great explorers of our age. Inspired by the work of leading research scientists, by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, space telescopes which allow us to see our Sun in wavelengths far beyond human vision, and by the Cassini mission’s astonishing photos of Saturn’s moons, poet Katrina Porteous translates to the non-scientist contemporary questions about the nature of physical reality and our understanding of it. Edge contains three poem sequences, Field, Sun and the title sequence, which extend Porteous’ previous work on nature, place and time beyond the human scale. They take the reader from the micro quantum worlds underlying the whole universe, to the macro workings of our local star, the potential for primitive life elsewhere in the solar system on moons such as Enceladus, and finally to the development of complex consciousness on our own planet. As scientific inquiry reveals the beauty and poetry of the universe, Edge celebrates the almost-miraculous local circumstances which enable us to begin to understand it. All three pieces were commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle between 2013 and 2016, with computer music by Peter Zinovieff. Sun was part of NUSTEM’s Imagining the Sun project for schools and the wider public (Northumbria University 2016). The title sequence, Edge, was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4. Edge is Katrina Porteous's third poetry book from Bloodaxe, her first to draw upon her long involvement in scientific projects, following two earlier collections, The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England.

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When she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'. An encouraging example to all late developers, this particular bird's voice took its time: she didn't become a poet until she was 45. But these examples of her very earliest work show the latent mastery and the rapid development of the craft that would bring her wide critical acclaim and an affectionate general readership. The mysteries of the trade gradually reveal themselves as rooted in a wide and uncensored range of subject-matter, a life-time's love of words, and an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of form and voice. Recognising her role so late, she was a woman in a hurry; there wasn't time for self-consciousness or grandiose notions of 'vocation'. 'A poet,' she said, 'is a smuggler. He imports things clandestinely which are not supposed to have got through the customs.' Poetry 'happened to me', she would say. Her job? To listen, to pass it on.

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Incendiary Art confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men. Dynamic sequences, including a compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, Patricia Smith reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal, visionary book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history now. Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 2018 NAACP Image Award, Incendiary Art was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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Lawrence Sail's poetry is noted for its scrupulous combination of close observation and broader reflections. In Guises he builds on the strengths of twelve previous collections, writing 'in praise of perception', which brings its own challenges and delights, embodied in the shifts and layers of language. A sense of the precious and the precarious informs poems with widely differing subjects and settings. There is, too, a new awareness of the threat to the sumptuousness of the natural world posed by human profligacy. Sounding the provisional nature of our earth-bound experiences, Sail knows the closeness of eulogy to elegy, and his poems celebrating the immediacy of human affections and experience sit aptly alongside those remembering friends who have died. Forty-six years on from the publication of Sail's first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness.

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A noctuary is a diary for the late hours. In Niall Campbell’s poems, this is a time for reflection, discovering what it means to be a young father, anxious, caring and protective, deeply connected to the new, precious life of another human being. The deftly lyrical poems in his second collection illuminate a night world of disturbed sleep and half dream, midnight feeds, the quiet of snowfall through the hours of dark. At the same time the grown man now living in the city reconnects with his own childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, the territory of his highly praised first collection, Moontide. Hearing his father’s voice in how he calls to his son, other images of the island’s seascapes, myths and wildlife return to him in Noctuary. Noctuary was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

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Spiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).

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After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry following the publication of her first collection Chameleon in 2015. Her first English translation combines her debut volume with her second book Nachtroer (2017), its untranslatable title the name of all-night shop in Antwerp where she lives. Chameleon is a set of apparently naïve but knowingly ironic, playful and subversive poems which trace a girl’s search for a woman’s identity, a coming-of-age exploration of body and language drawing on memories, shapes and landscapes. In Nachtroer her poems take a nighttime journey through heartbreak, insomnia and the hectic flow of daily life, driven by a desire for disappearance, displacement and dissolution. Chameleon ends with taking to the ocean. Nachtroer’s last poem is about building a boat for such a voyage. Chameleon | Nachtroer sets the two books afloat in English.

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Winner of the Costa Book of the Year for her final collection, Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore was as spellbinding storyteller in her poetry and in her prose. Her haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity, nowhere more so than in Inside the Wave, in its exploration of the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. All her poetry casts a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss. Counting Backwards is a retrospective covering ten collections written over four decades, bringing together all the poems she included in her earlier selection, Out of the Blue (2001), with all those from her three later collections, Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012) and Inside the Wave (2017), along with a number of earlier poems.

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Spiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself and welcome who one chooses to express hospitality towards; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it. The drive of this collection is spirit in the sense of the courage it takes to true to one’s instincts. There is a timelessness to the poems in this book and a sense of what endures. Here is oneness with existence, an appreciation of the universe, a happiness that springs from standing on the globe and the feeling of being a living, breathing soul in it.

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Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. His politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. The pivotal work marking this shift was his long poem Fox Running (1980), brought to recent attention when an archive recording of him reading it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please in 2016. His Collected Poems brings together poetry from four decades, including all the work from two earlier retrospectives, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), together with the posthumously published You Again: last poems & other words (2004). The book is introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover. Publication coincides with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).

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Moniza Alvi's new book is unified by birds. Her creations 'Motherbird' and 'Fatherbird' are inspired by her parents, and by the loss of her father and by his emigration from Pakistan. Among the many bird-related poems are versions of the French poets Jules Supervielle and Saint-John Perse, and poems 'after' the paintings of the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist Remedios Varo. Blackbird, Bye Bye is Moniza Alvi's first new poetry book since her T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection At the Time of Partition, published in 2013.

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Albania's Luljeta Lleshanaku grew up in negative space, living under family house arrest during the years of Enver Hoxha's autocratic communist rule. Her recent poems are a response to what was missing then, not only in her life but for her whole generation, evoking absences, emptiness - what was unseen, unspoken or undone - through the concept of negative space. The space around objects, not the objects themselves, becomes the real, most significant part of an image, bringing balance to the whole of a composition, so enabling Lleshanaku to look back at the reality of her Albanian past and give voice to those who could not speak for themselves.Many of the poems are tied to no specific place or time. Histories intertwine and stories are re-framed, as in her long poem 'Homo Antarcticus', which traces the fate of an inspirational explorer who could adapt to months of near-starvation in sub-zero Antarctica but not to later life back in civilisation, one of a number of poems in the book relating to society's pressure on the individual. Sorrow and death, love and desire, imprisonment and disappointment are all themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku's hauntingly beautiful poems. Negative Space draws on two recent collections published in Albania, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015), and follows Haywire: New & Selected Poems, her first UK selection published by Bloodaxe in 2011, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation which was shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize in 2013. Negative Space is also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2019.

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Staying Human is the sequel to the Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies which have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. This fourth Bloodaxe world poetry anthology offers poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 500 more ‘real poems for unreal times’, with a strong focus on 21st-century poems addressing current issues. The range of poetry here complements that of the first three anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about what makes us human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder; talismanic poems which have become personal survival testaments for many. There’s a strong focus on the human side of living in the 21st century in poems from the past two decades relating to migration, oppression, alienation and the individual’s struggle to hold on, stay connected and find meaning in an increasingly polarised world. Staying Human also draws on poems suggested by readers because they’ve been so important in their own lives, as well as many poems which have gone viral after being shared on social media because they speak to our times with such great immediacy. And there are poems from around the world written just recently in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

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Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

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Hello. Your promise has been extracted is Ahren Warner's third collection of poems, a book in which the lyric runs in parallel with a series of photographs made by the author across Europe. From Paris, Berlin and Budapest, to Athens during the height of the Greek debt crisis and Kiev in the wake of the Maidan Revolution, the poems and images of this book form what Immanuel Kant might have called a cosmopolitan dialogue: a conversation between two speakers in two utterly different languages. Though the poems here often begin in conversation with writers and thinkers - from Celan and Plato to David Foster Wallace and Emmanuel Levinas - they are also profoundly and emotionally engaged with the realities of the contemporary world. Hello. Your promise has been extracted is not a polemic. It is neither witness nor reportage. Rather, it is a book that offers an insistent performance of poetic dialogue with the visual, philosophical and human experience it confronts. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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Ten: poets of the new generation presents the work of ten exciting British poets from diverse backgrounds. It is the third anthology from The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, a national programme supporting exceptional black and Asian poets founded by the writer Bernardine Evaristo in 2007. Already making a big impact on the British poetry scene, poets from the series have included Sarah Howe, the 2016 winner of both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; Mona Arshi, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016; and Warsan Shire, who collaborated with Beyonce on her visual album, Lemonade in 2016, which featured many of Shire's poems. This latest anthology in the Ten series will not disappoint readers hoping to discover more exceptional talent. It includes poets with even more diverse backgrounds ranging from Somalia and Nigeria through to Jamaica and the multiculturalism of Macau, and features the first poet from Latin America. These are poets who interrogate race and explode any ideas of a page/stage divide. Fierce, unexpected, sometimes beautiful and always passionate, here are ten poets to savour and enjoy. The poets included are: Raymond Antrobus, Natacha Bryan, Leonardo Boix, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Will Harris, Ian Humphreys, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Momtaza Mehri, Yomi Sode and Degna Stone. The Complete Works III is directed by Dr Nathalie Teitler, with thanks to Arts Council England for their generous funding. Copublication with The Complete Works III.

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Bodies. Rhythms. Motion. Sounds. All Fours is a debut collection of poetry from Nia Davies, a book of rituals in language that stalk the space between what is uttered and what is meant. These poems are haunted by the strange traces of the longest words in the world and folk-mythic figures such as Sinbad, Eurydice, Mossy Coat, Pan and Baba Yaga. They pose riddles with multiple or mysterious answers. A swerving sweary jump into a terrain that is both comically musical and perplexedly political, All Fours speaks of the (mis)adventures of sex and human communication, a life full-to-bursting with burning questions. All fours was longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards).

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Splash like Jesus brings together three contrasting but complementary, familial poem sequences by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson), Buttercup the Sloth, about mothers; Lobo-Lobo, about sisters; and Behold My Father on His Bicycle, about exactly that. Like all of Selima Hill's work, all three sequences chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

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In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Anne Stevenson argues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. She also argues that without an understanding of how poetry has re-invented itself through its history, today's present innovations are likely to remain rootless and unnourished. Drawing on lines from her own poem, 'The Fiction Makers' - 'They thought they were living now/ But they were living then' - Stevenson traces the theories, fashions and beliefs of modern poets in America and Britain since the 1930s (the span, in fact, of her own lifetime). Giving special attention to the voices of T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, she shows how, after World War II, populist movements in the United States rose up against a university-based establishment, introducing a barbarian energy into the art while at the same time destroying its solid base in traditional rhythm and form. Each lecture features poets she considers to be among the most effective of their kind, ranging from W.B. Yeats, Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur, to Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Denise Levertov. In her final lecture, she quotes extensively from friends and contemporaries recently deceased: G.F. Dutton, Frances Horovitz, William Martin, and finishing with a tribute to the voice and ear of Seamus Heaney. To the three texts of her 2016 Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures Stevenson has conjoined additional essays originally given as talks in the Chapel of St Chad's College in the University of Durham. These have mainly to do with rhythms and sounds rather than with subject-matter, arguing that, until very recently, it was a defining virtue of poetry not to be about anything that could better or more clearly be said in prose.Finally Stevenson, having had a number of second thoughts about Bitter Fame, her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), includes a talk on this American poet's astonishing gift and tragic life, first given at Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2013.

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