Search results for ""Bloodaxe Books""

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF. Please, Do Not Touch This Exhibit is Jen Campbell's second collection, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).

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R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales's greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive - poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems - published to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth - brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas's career - from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the Dublin Magazine, to poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. R.S. Thomas's Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work access to much new and fascinating material. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included in Uncollected Poems.

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Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. Her posthumously published Collected Poems is a remaking of Anne Stevenson’s earlier Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), expanded to include poems from her final three books, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020), drawing on sixteen collections which are presented in their original order of publication.

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City Psalms was Benjamin Zephaniah's first collection from Bloodaxe back in 1992. It includes some of his best-known poems, including 'Dis Poetry', 'Money' and 'Us and Dem'. Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults – and his poetry with attitude for children – Zephaniah has his own rap/reggae band. He has produced numerous recordings, including Dub Ranting (1982), Rasta (1983), Us and Dem (1990), Back to Roots (1995), Belly of de Beast (1996) and Naked (2004). He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the President’s Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996. His first book of poems, Pen Rhythm, was produced in 1980 by a small East London publishing cooperative, Page One Books. His second collection, The Dread Affair, was published by Hutchinson’s short-lived Arena imprint in 1985. He has since published three collections with Bloodaxe, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black Too Strong (2001), the latter including poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. To Do Wid Me, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), includes a full-length feature film on DVD with all the poems performed on the film included in the book.

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In August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and practices that have become commonplace – from disproportionate arrest rates, to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning. Now, acclaimed poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background – weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved – it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains. Illuminating what it means to live in this frightening age, and what it means to bear witness, the ferguson report: an erasure is an engrossing meditation on one of the most revealing texts of modern times. Nicole Sealey won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021 with an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, earning the judges’ praise for creating ‘new moments of lyrical beauty and contemplation’ out of ‘stifling obfuscations’ to shine ‘a light on all that the report tries to hide’, with Shivanee Ramlochan calling it ‘a poem of resonant cultural and social value’. The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is published simultaneously by Knopf in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Nicole Sealey’s first collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.

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In 2008, Bloodaxe published the world's first DVD-anthology, In Person: 30 Poets, a new concept in publishing: readings by 30 poets published by Bloodaxe in its first 30 years captured on film, with all the poems included in the footage printed in the book of the films. Its sequel, In Person: World Poets, is another international collaboration between Bloodaxe Books and award-winning film-maker Pamela Robertson-Pearce. Her style of filming combines directness and simplicity, sensitivity and warmth - the perfect combination for these intimate readings. It is as if the poet were sitting in the room with you, reading just to you, and sometimes saying a few things about the poems. This new compilation on DVD with accompanying anthology covers a wide range of poets from many parts of the world, including America, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Guyana, India, Italy, Jamaica, Korea, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland and Sweden, as well as from Britain and Ireland. Most of the films present informal, one-to-one readings, with the poets reading to you in person. They enhance your appreciation of the poetry.You hear how the poems sound; you see how the poets read and present their work. Poets writing in other languages read in the original with the English translations read by themselves or by their translators. Some poets are also captured in live performance. T.S. Eliot once described poetry as 'one person talking to another', while W.H. Auden believed it was essential to hear poetry read aloud, for 'no poem, which when mastered, is not better heard than read is good poetry'. In Person: World Poets presents the oral art of poetry in that spirit. There are over 14 hours of readings on four DVDs packaged with the book, and all the poems included in the films are printed in the book, with poems written in other languages alongside the translations, enabling you to follow either language as they are read on the film. Like the original In Person: 30 Poets, this new compilation gives readers a personal festival of poetry in DVD and book form for viewing at home on laptop or TV. It is also a unique educational resource for the teaching and appreciation of poetry. In Person: World Poets includes: Robert Adamson, Moniza Alvi, Antonella Anedda, Simon Armitage, Ana Blandiana, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Dan Chiasson, Polly Clark, Stewart Conn, Peter Didsbury, Katie Donovan, Tishani Doshi, Ruth Fainlight, Roy Fisher, Carolyn Forché, Tua Forsström, Tess Gallagher, Deborah Garrison, Jane Griffiths, Philip Gross, Choman Hardi, Robert Hass, John Hegley, Rita Ann Higgins, Tony Hoagland, Matthew Hollis, Esther Jansma, Jenny Joseph, Jaan Kaplinski, Ko Un, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Thomas Lux, Nikola Madzirov, Jennifer Maiden, Jack Mapanje, Samuel Menashe, Esther Morgan, Julie O'Callaghan, Leanne O'Sullivan, Clare Pollard, Adélia Prado, Sally Read, Lawrence Sail, Carole Satyamurti, Karen Solie, Piotr Sommer, Ruth Stone, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Matthew Sweeney, Pia Tafdrup, Tomas Tranströmer, Brian Turner, Chase Twichell, Priscila Uppal, Tomas Venclova, Mark Waldron, Susan Wicks and Robert Wrigley. None of these poets was included in In Person: 30 Poets.

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One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author. With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Transtromer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralysed and diminished his capacity to write. Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also offers remarkable insights into the processes of translating literature from one language into another. As Bly began to render Transtromer's poetry into English and Transtromer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish, their collaboration soon turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years. Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. Based on the original Swedish edition published in 2001, this publication marks the first time letters by Transtromer and Bly have been made available in Britain. Robert Bly's translations of Tomas Transtromer appear in The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer, published by Graywolf Press. Transtromer's complete poetry is available in English in Robin Fulton's translation, New Collected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books (and by New Directions in the US under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems).

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Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca is a classic of Spanish literature, the tragedy of a woman loved by two men. The man she has loved since childhood is hot-blooded Leonardo, but his family are hated by her own folk, and he marries someone else. Then, on her wedding-night, Leonardo carries her off on horseback, pursued by the men of the two shamed families. The two rivals meet in the moonlight in a ?ght to the death… Lorca said the only hope for happiness lies in 'living one's instinctual life to the full'. And: 'To burn with desire and to remain silent is the greatest punishment we can in?ict on ourselves.' Blood Wedding explores the tragic intensity of lived, instinctual passion. For Brendan Kennelly, this involves a return to the very origins of drama: 'The pure pulsing sense of the mysterious nature of life before we learn to explain things almost out of existence … Blood Wedding is a drama of agonised and bewildering revelation.' Lorca has a searing realisation of the power of desire. Brendan Kennelly rises to the challenge of how to convey this in an English translation. In language at once soaring and accurate, wild and precise, he does justice to Lorca's tragic vision of the nature and consequences of lived desire. His version of Blood Wedding reveals the mysterious, intricate, passionate and truly astonishing nature of Lorca’s masterpiece. Brendan Kennelly's versions of Euripides' The Trojan Women and Medea, and Sophocles' Antigone, are published by Bloodaxe Books in his drama trilogy When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies (2006). His version of Lorca's Blood Wedding was premièred by Northern Stage in Newcastle and Derby in autumn 1996. His Antigone and The Trojan Women were both first performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 1986 and 1993 respectively; Medea premièred in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1988, toured in England in 1989 and was broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

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The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80) confronts the turbulent currents of modern history as it explores with depth and honesty the realms of politics, sexuality, mythic imagination, technological change and family life. Rukeyser was a social activist of unwavering commitment, a tireless experimenter who opened fresh forms and fresh subject-matter in modern American poetry, and a writer who was constantly testing her own limits in a life's work of extraordinary scope. She held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language, and earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty and racism. Edited and introduced by Adrienne Rich, this new selection provides an indispensable introduction to the adventurous and prolific work of one of the most significant and influential American poets of the 20th century.

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Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's weakening hold on the borderline between the present and the traumas of the past. It follows the journey to the end - then beyond, to the tentative byways through which mourning moves. With an instinct for form that both controls and releases depths of feeling, Philip Gross writes poetry that proves it can be trusted with the most raw yet essential things of life.

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Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species - bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies - celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her London house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while other sections of the book include elegies for human beings and poems based on family wills from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as birthday greetings for old friends and for a new great-grandson. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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Robert Wrigley is a poet of America's northern Rocky Mountains. Over three decades his poetry's pervading concerns have been rural Western landscapes and humankind's place within the natural world. His most recent poems have presented a portrait of a nation, one that is a singular part of a singular planet, with an exuberant and frequently exasperating culture. In such a country, the glimpse of a horse under a full moon can be a defining moment, full of grace and a new, if not always comfortable, awareness. So it is with a saved lock of a lover's hair, the memory of a vanished glacier, or a childhood friend disappeared in war. This selection is his first UK publication and covers work from nine collections, including Reign of Snakes, Lives of the Animals, Earthly Meditations and Beautiful Country. Elegiac and lyrical, playful and angry, The Church of Omnivorous Light offers a vision that is fierce, unflinching, and clear. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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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). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her eighth collection Tiger Facing the Mist are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world.

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Tess Gallagher is one of America's leading poets. In Midnight Lantern she collects her indispensable work from forty years of writing poetry, along with an ample new section written in the west of Ireland. Included in this generous book are Gallagher's signature nocturnes - for the changing Pacific Northwest, for her tough childhood, and for her late husband, Raymond Carver, and others. Her challenging new work confronts a tumultuous century's worth of art, warfare, and illness, while certifying the stubborn resilience of poetry and love. Astonishing, insightful, mischievous, an inimitable 'seeing-into experience', Midnight Lantern is the essential book by a poet in the prime of her power.

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The poems in "Terrestrial Variations" respond to the sheer chanciness of life. They are elegies for friends, relations, dead selves, and unrealised lives, but - like Jane Griffiths' previous poems - they are also full of things, both real and remembered, whose importance is as much literal as it is symbolic. Linguistically playful and sometimes ironically impatient with their own attention to detail, they record repeated attempts to make sense of the world and the strange business of getting on from day to day. Their slant perspective invites the reader too to realise: 'You'll never again say this is where I stand, and mean it.' Jane Griffiths' previous book "Another Country: New & Selected Poems" was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. "Terrestrial Variations" shows her extending her explorations of people and place with delight at being in the world, despite the threat of loss.

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Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Following the publication of her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, Bloodaxe has published Jane Hirshfield's later collections in the UK: After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). Come, Thief centres on the beauty and fragility of our lives, touching on love, science, ageing and mortality, war and the political, the revelatory daily object, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each facet of our lives its transformative portrait, its particular memorable, singing and singular name.

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Jacob Sam-La Rose has been described as 'a one-man literary industry'. This was Patrick Neate's comment on the BBC Poetry Season website: 'Passionate about poetry and its power to change people's lives, he's a lesson to us all. He's also a damn fine writer.' Already well-known on the UK performance circuit, Sam-La Rose has also spent many years working with young people in schools and communities, especially around London. So it will come as a surprise to many that Breaking Silence is his first book-length collection of poetry. It is a collection that sits on the threshold between the personal and the profound, with eyes on race and dual heritage; masculinity and manhood; definitions and senses of self. Above all, it's a collection that's invested in the power of the voice, in the work of giving a voice to issues and entities that would otherwise remain silent. It speaks on divides, from the spaces in between. Jacob Sam-La Rose's work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and that it's possible to combine the immediacy of poetry in performance with formal rigour and innovation on the page. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

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In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him - through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself. Readers who admired Philip Gross's subtlety and range in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Water Table will find those qualities brought to a new human urgency in the compelling sequences of Deep Field.

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Estonia’s Jaan Kaplinski (1941-2021) was one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region. This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back.

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After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with - but was not entirely caused by - her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. This new collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand. Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return - not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.

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From the natural world to war and politics, from memories of childhood to bittersweet snapshots of everyday life, from wry asides to fantastical flights of narrative fantasy - Kona Macphee applies her versatile and polished technique to a characteristic diversity of themes in her second book of poems. Her eclecticism is never more apparent than in the Book of Diseases sequence, which launches from its simple premise into a delirious medley of forms and subjects. The meticulously crafted lyrical poems of Perfect Blue reflect the growing power of a distinctively original, musical and compassionate voice that laments the transience and fragility of life while celebrating the joy of truly living it. Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

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In "Dirty Looks", Cheryl Follon serves up a fiery gumbo of playful poems drawing on the shadowy side of love. The book presents a wild Rabelaisian carnival of poetry, stories and boisterous monologues flavoured by Deep South folk and foibles, by Scottish ballads and bawdy tales, and by the jaded love chroniclers of ancient Greece and Rome. While some poems touch on more tender times, their main concern is with the thoughtlessness, jealousy, spite, deception and self-delusion that can go hand in glove with love. But for all their darkness, the poems are spiced with saucy humour and a lively, often wicked wit, and set against a sultry backdrop of Louisiana in summertime.

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"Fruitcake" brings together four poem sequences about motherhood by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). "Bougainvillae" explores love and having a mother. "Nylon" is about happiness, and not having or being a mother. Then "Bunker Sacks" brings grace but also the shock of being a young mother. Finally, "Grunter" shows the impact of Asperger's syndrome on both mother and child. Like all of Selima Hill's books, "Fruitcake" charts 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

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Ruth Stone once said, ‘I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ What Love Comes To shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime’s work of a true American original. The winner of the National Book Award at the age of 87, Ruth Stone was still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband’s suicide, on love, loss, blindness and ageing. What Love Comes To opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who ‘had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone’ as a teenager, a later encounter giving her ‘a vision of a genius at work’: ‘Ruth Stone’s poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple – their intelligence is crackling and complex… She is a poet of great humor – mockery even – and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised. Ruth’s poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now… She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other…’

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Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of "the pluralist now". It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the distinctive breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland - from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway - as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation's most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now.

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Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets, the winner of the Nordic Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for her collection Queen’s Gate, published in English by Bloodaxe in 2001. This new translation of her work combines two more recent collections, The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, which comprise the first and second parts of a quartet written over ten years: the third and fourth parts are The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun (published in English by Bloodaxe in 2015 as Salamander Sun and other poems). The poems of The Whales in Paris span the moment of conception to eternity. Life is seen as a confrontation with what is bigger than oneself: love, desire and death, primordial forces that are present even in our very modern civilisation. Those great forces of existence form the territory of The Whales in Paris: above all, desire and death, illuminated with motifs from childhood, the relation to parents, family, mythical figures from the Bible. Time, dreams and meditation also play their part. Pia Tafdrup writes: 'Tarkovsky’s Horses is about loss in a double sense. The themes of the poems are my father’s increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then my loss of a father. The book is a poetic portrayal of the course of an illness for which science has few words – my father begins to suffer from dementia, and then he has to go into a nursing home, where he dies. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that makes use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems about a father who forgets more and more are set in a border landscape which is also not without its comical aspects. The poems narrate the drama of what it is to be a human being.'

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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. Ruth Padel’s lectures link metaphor to silence and white space on a page. Equating a poem’s music with its politics, she explores tone, register and harmony, suggesting that how poems hold our “attention” is through “tension”. Finally, she investigates what it means for poems that they are “given to” other people. With her trademark blend of literary analysis, psychological and mythical learning, an intimate knowledge of Greek poetics plus a generous and joyful trust in the energy of today’s poetry, Ruth Padel plumbs unheard rhymes, Echo and Narcissus, the silent music of John Cage, and what happens when Paul Durcan plays Seamus Heaney at ping pong. She wears her erudition lightly, paying playful attention to the resonances of many different poems – and to their smaller atoms, words and syllables. A fascinating and groundbreaking book, Silent Letters of the Alphabet is a gift for anyone writing, reading or teaching poetry today.

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George Szirtes is a leading figure in contemporary poetry in England and in Hungary, the country of his birth. His poems explore - in a wide variety of complex, skilfully handled forms - his origins, his life, and his critical engagements with works by other poets and artists. They offer powerful and moving meditations on the roles and functions of the poet in the modern world. "Reading George Szirtes" offers the first sustained analysis of Szirtes' work, mapping his development chronologically and thematically, and paying close attention to form and technique in its analysis of each poem.Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; humanity and truth. Throughout his work, there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter", "Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel". John Sears offers detailed and lucid readings of these and other key poems - including Szirtes' most recent poetry - relating them to historical events and to work by other poets. "Reading George Szirtes" is a critical companion volume to George Szirtes' "New and Collected Poems". Both books are published on Szirtes' 60th birthday.

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Selima Hill's poetry has been called wanton, wildly imaginative, tender, intelligent, dangerous, defiant, subversive and startling. All these qualities are strongly present throughout "Gloria", a comprehensive selection drawn from ten formally diverse and thematically unified collections, each offering wild variations on her abiding themes: women's identities, love and loss, repression and abuse, family conflict and mental illness, men, animals and human civilisation. "Gloria" covers all Selima Hill's books from "Saying Hello at the Station" (1984) to "Red Roses" (2006), and was published at the same time as a separate, new collection, "The Hat" (2008).

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Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2008, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The language of Jen Hadfield's poetry is one of incantation and secular praise. Her first book, "Almanacs", was a traveller's litany, featuring a road movie in poems set in the north of Scotland. "Nigh-No-Place" is the liturgy of a poet passionately aware of the natural world. Hadfield began her new book on the hoof, travelling across Canada with a ravenous appetite for new landscapes. She took epic routes: the railway line from Halifax to Vancouver and the Dempster Highway's 740 km of gravel road, ending in the Arctic oiltowns of Inuvik and Tuktoyuktuk. But it is in Shetland that she becomes acutely aware of her own voice - her fluency and tongue-tiedness; repetition, hiatus and breath. "Nigh-No-Place" reflects the breadth of ground she's covered. 'Ten-minute Break Haiku' is her response to working in a fish factory. 'Paternoster' is the Lord's Prayer uttered by a draught-horse. 'Prenatal Polar Bear' takes place in Churchill, Manitoba, surrounded by tundra.

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Esther Jansma is a leading Dutch poet as well as an influential archaeologist. Interweaving a dazzling variety of strands, her poetry explores time and memory, past and present, death, loss, decay and legacy, and yet draws fresh power from these perennial themes because she writes from two opposite but complementary viewpoints. As an archaeologist she refined a technique for establishing the age of wooden artefacts from growth-rings in the wood which could be applied to timber from The Netherlands. Lending a voice to the past, making time visible in all its aspects, is also what she does in her poetry. The philosophical is earthed in the everyday, the mythic intertwines with the mundane, the word with the world. In her early work, the voices of the past are heard from bewildering years: as a child, the death of a father, then as a mother, the loss of a child. Her later poetry is less personal but more compelling as her poetic universe expands, embracing the whole world.

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Humour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay's part of the equation. "Darling" brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, "The Adoption Papers", "Other Lovers", "Off Colour" and "Life Mask", as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay's poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, "Why Don't You Stop Talking", could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.

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"Earth Shattering" lines up a chorus of over two hundred poems addressing environmental destruction. Whether the subject - or target - is the whole earth (global warming, climate change, extinction of species, planetary catastrophe)or landscapes, homelands and cities (polluting rivers and seas, fouling the air, felling trees and forests), there are poems here to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen. Other poems celebrate the rapidly vanishing natural world, or lament what has already been lost, or even find a glimmer of hope through efforts to conserve, recycle and rethink. Earth Shattering's words of warning include contributions from many great writers of the past as well as leading contemporary poets from around the world, ranging from Wordsworth, Clare, Hopkins, Hardy, Rilke and Charlotte Mew to Wendell Berry, Helen Dunmore, Joy Harjo, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin and Gary Snyder. This is the first anthology to show the full range of ecopoetry, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to 21st-century native American poetry, with postcolonial and feminist perspectives represented by writers such as Derek Walcott, Ernesto Cardinal,Oodgeroo and Susan Griffin. Ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry to take on distinctly contemporary issues, recognising the interdependence of all life on earth, the wildness and otherness of nature, and the irresponsibility of our attempts to tame and plunder nature. The poems dramatise the dangers and poverty of a modern world perilously cut off from nature and ruled by technology, self-interest and economic power. As the world's politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards Eco- Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But its power is in the detail, in the force of each individual poem, in every poem's effect on every reader. And anyone whose resolve is stirred will strengthen the collective call for change.

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W.S. Merwin was arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century – an artist who transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. While he was long viewed in the States as an essential voice in modern American literature, his poetry was unavailable in Britain for over 35 years until Bloodaxe published this edition of his Selected Poems in 2007. This new selection covers over five decades of his poetry, from The Dancing Bears (1954) to Present Company (2005). Most of the book is drawn from his major American retrospective, Migration, winner of the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry. It was followed in 2009 by The Shadow of Sirius, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize, and then by The Moon Before Morning (2014) and Garden Time (2016). Merwin’s poetry has moved beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of his work: ‘I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.’ His recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. Merwin is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world.

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"Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by celebrated contemporary poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver, as well as by many lesser-known writers from all periods and places. The anthology opens with a series of poems on human life and spiritual sustenance, starting with Rumi: 'This being human is a guest house./Each morning a new arrival...'. The poems which follow explore many ways of keeping body and soul together, offering food for thought on knowing yourself, living with nature, who or what is God...All are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to searchers and non-believers. "Soul Food" shows how poetry can help feed our hunger for meaning in times of spiritual starvation.

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Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective "Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems" in 2004. "After" was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is an extended investigation into incarnation, transience and interconnection. These alert, incisive and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgement and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, meanings in overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. Often elegies - some overt, others implicit - these poems resound with a bass-note awareness of time, its inexorable subtractions but also its exuberant gifts.

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Nick Drake's "From the Word Go" explores the different meanings and implications which are tightly packed into that small word - from departures on journeys in this world and beyond it, through expulsions from homes, places and relationships, to the possibilities of adventure and new discovery. At the heart of the book is a sequence describing the dying, death and afterlife of his father, an account of the struggles, fears, comedies, losses, and revelations of that final process of going out of this world. "From the Word Go" builds upon the considerable achievement of Nick Drake's award-winning first collection, "The Man in the White Suit".

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Throw in the Vowels is a retrospective from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed. The 2010 reissue of this title included a free audio CD of poems read by the author now replaced by a QR code linking with these recordings online. She has since published two later collections, Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016).

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'This book of poems is for all of us who go through illness, deal with doctors, hospitals, and experiences such as bereavement and ageing, and who struggle to find language to describe the suffering we have to go through. Medical language baffles and alienates us. It's a harsh, unforgiving vocabulary that often seems to bear no relationship to our own emotional predicament. In this uplifting anthology we see how poetry can give us metaphors and images to help us understand our feelings and communicate them to people around us. This is a book that should be in every waiting-room, and should be by the bed of every GP and consultant. It may inspire you to write poetry, and also help you to find order in the chaos of ill health. By giving us words, poetry can help cure us.' – Julia Darling & Cynthia Fuller

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From London's hospital wards to rural Italy and the Great Plains, Sally Read's first collection eulogises the emotional and physical borders we cross, whether in sexual surrender, the squeezing of a trigger, or the point at which skin is pierced by a needle. What results appeals to the thresholds at which we succumb to desire, love, or grief. Yet, ultimately, there is tenderness and acceptance as she considers what breaks us, and what binds.

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Tua Forsstrom is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland's most celebrated contemporary poet. Her breakthrough came when she was still only 30 with her sixth collection, "Snow Leopard", which brought her international recognition, with its English translation by David McDuff winning a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. "I Studied Once At A Wonderful Faculty" is a trilogy comprising "Snow Leopard" (1987), "The Parks" (1992), and "After Spending a Night Among Horses" (1997), coupled with a new cycle of poems, "Minerals." Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. As Sweden's August Prize jury commented, this is poetry 'both melancholy and impassioned', expressing a 'struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction - against death in life'.

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Clare Pollard wrote her first book The Heavy-Petting Zoo while still at school. Its sequel is Bedtime: a setting for intimacy and tenderness as well as cruelty and pretence, where reality and fantasy are blurred. These are cutting poems from the edge, confronting evil in all its manifestations, especially the bondage of sex and cruelty. They address highly contemporary issues, from confessionalism and reality TV to masculinity in crisis, racial politics and atheism.

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Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and her work has always been highly regarded by other writers. In surveys of British poets carried out in 1984 and 1994 she emerged as a surprising major choice or influence for many, from Andrew Motion and Craig Raine to Kathleen Jamie and Lavinia Greenlaw. A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral. Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "Complete Poems" (1983) has been published, along with "The Collected Prose" (1984), her letters in "One Art" (1994), her paintings in "Exchanging Hats" (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile. "Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery" was the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers.

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Basil Bunting (1900-85) was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'. As well as Briggflatts, this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great Sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realised 'Overdrafts' (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). Like the earlier Oxford edition, it presents in its entirety Bunting's own Collected Poems, with addition of the posthumous Uncollected Poems; but this centenary edition from Bloodaxe also has a new introduction by the late Richard Caddel. Bunting wrote that 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard.' His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. The new separate Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts (2009) includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. Bloodaxe has sublicensed a critical edition of Bunting’s complete poetry, The Poems, edited by Don Share (2016), to Faber & Faber. This has three poems not included in the Bloodaxe edition, together with a number of variants, anomalies, fragments and "false starts": apart from those additions, Bloodaxe's Complete Poems is complete (but has no critical apparatus).

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Attila József is Hungary’s greatest modern poet. His extraordinary poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a difficult life. Born into poverty in 1905, deserted by his father and put out to fostering, József had a brutalised childhood, and tried to poison himself at the age of nine. Mostly self-educated, he was prosecuted at 18 for blasphemy in a poem, and expelled from university a year later for With a Pure Heart, a now celebrated poem which spoke for a whole generation. He is a genuine revolutionary poet, neither simple-minded nor difficult, though his thought and imagery are complex. A deeply divided man, his poetry has a robust physicality as well as a jaunty and heroic intelligence – Marxist in its dedication but fuelled in its audacity by both Freud and Surrealism. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he underwent psychoanalysis, and yet continued to write magnificent poetry which – although darker – drew upon highly exacting and intricate structures and metres, and upon an eclectic but balanced framework of ideas. By 1937 he was almost destitute, financially and emotionally, and in deteriorating mental health. But he was still writing some of his most compelling work, compulsive guilt-ridden poetry whose glittering lyricism is at once personal and mythic, even while receiving shock treatments and heavy medication in a sanatorium. Finally, at the age of 32, he clambered onto a railway track, and a train broke his neck and cut off his right arm.

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