Search results for ""Enitharmon Press""

The Heart’s Granary marks the 50th anniversary of Enitharmon Press. Compiled by Lawrence Sail, it is a personal selection from all Enitharmon’s publications. It also conveys the Press’s striking range and coherence – international in reach, while true to its Blakean vision. Including prose as well as poems, with more than 120 contributors, and with full colour illustrations by some of the many well-known artists who represent another facet of Enitharmon’s achievements, the anthology creates new contexts for writers, translators and artists, from Nobel Prize winners to emerging talents. The Heart’s Granary is memorable not only on its own account, but as a touchstone of the journeys undertaken by writers in a world that has changed radically since Enitharmon’s beginnings in 1967. Befittingly, this momentous publication marks the end of a much cherished poetry list.

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Here scattered light falls across landscapes and memories. These new poems are among Jeremy Hooker's finest, extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the 'sacred', and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. This new collection contains a variety of short, 'light' poems, longer poems, and sequences such as 'Saltgrass Lane' and 'Hurst Castle' dig deeper into his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline.

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Berowne's Book was written by U. A. Fanthorpe before she began to write the poetry that was to make her reputation as one of England's most popular contemporary poets. 'In 1974, having found that the way to get a job was to conceal my qualifications,' she wrote, 'I contrived to be taken on as a clerk/receptionist in a small hospital.' As a patient at the Radcliffe when she was a student at Oxford, she'd formed a cheerful view of life in a hospital, but a neuro-psychiatric hospital provided very different experiences. It was the shock of discovering this that tipped her over into poetry. 'Poetry' she said, 'struck during my first month behind the desk'. With Berowne's Book she had already written a witty commentary on what she saw around her as she typed. Her observations are accompanied here by some of her very earliest poems. Hilarious, tender, profound and deeply humane, this series of snapshots of hospital life in the 1970s shocks partly because so much is immediately familiar today.

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'Over 32 poems Geoffrey Hill traces an elegiac sequence for William Lawes and his music, intermingling the historical events around his death with flashes of the everyday. The result is a collection that delights in eccentric incongruities. Ben Jonson will appear a line after a popular instant coffee blend has been mentioned, Dante will be found next to a mime artist, Marcel Marceau, and Lawes himself figures auditioning for Ronnie Scott. Mr Hill actively seeks out such juxtapositions. He will audaciously rhyme "haruspex", an Etruscan soothsayer who saw prophecies in the entrails of victims, with "bad sex", his poetry delighting in "a dissonance to make them wince". Yet, as Mr Hill writes, when speaking of Lawes's tendency to jar different musical themes, "the grace of music is its dissonance." This discordance is part of his wider belief in the public nature of poetry. Refusing to be a "light entertainer" like the hypocrites in Dante's inferno, Mr Hill presents a difficult world as he sees it. His gift lies in making such difficulty momentarily understood.' THE ECONOMIST

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Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters - sometime serious, sometimes whimsical - are addressed to people who, for various reasons, have been of importance in Neil Curry's life. Ranging from Angela Carter to the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White's tortoise, they cover topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape-gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart's lorries on the M6. There has not been a collection of verse letters of this nature since the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace and, fittingly, it is to Horace that the final letter is addressed, partly by way of apology.

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As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence Panama Canal evokes the terrors of the Canal's construction; a sequence on the regime of Pinochet (Invisible Ink) interweaves cityscapes and landscapes with allusions to the cruelties and bereavements of that time. But the poems are also about her life as a young girl in Chile, the impact of the Chilean landscape on her, and convey a powerful feeling of love for that country.

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In July 1943, the young Welsh poet and soldier Alun Lewis, already recognised as one of the outstanding writers of his generation, arrived on sick leave at the house near Madras of Freda Aykroyd, a devotee of literature and the wife of a British scientist. Lewis and Aykroyd fell in love instantly, recognising in each other similar temperaments and artistic interests. Their affair, which lasted until Lewis' mysterious death on the Arakan Front in March 1944, inspired some of the finest of his wartime poems as well as an extraordinary cache of letters published here for the first time. The letters throw fresh light on Lewis' passionate and troubled nature and the background to his literary output at a time when he was at the height of his creative powers. In her preface, Freda Aykroyd charts the haunting story of their relationship and its tragic outcome.

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Edward Thomas' stories formed an important stage in his imaginative development, and constitute a significant achievement. His fiction includes stories reflecting his personal quest for spiritual and social values, which have considerable psychological interest; and versions of traditional Celtic and Norse tales and English proverbs. In both original and traditional tales Thomas explores the relation between the human world and the realm of nature. His stories were, as he said, written under a 'real impulse', and they represent his whole effort to shape imaginative responses to fundamental questions of life and death, the self, and reality. "The Ship of Swallows" is the first selection to have been made exclusively from Edward Thomas' fiction, which it represents at its best.

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These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward's continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward's fiction still make a powerful impression.

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Anthony Thwaite's new collection is both moving and funny, elegiac and playful. The personal poems span a life-time as Thwaite relives moments of childhood, or reassesses his role as son to a dying mother, or gets told how to behave by his grandson. Elsewhere he laments his old cat and conjures up a Sumerian Anthology of poets. The principal concern of the collection is what lasts and what vanishes: dreams, memories, people and objects. In this quest, he takes us with him to Italy, Siberia and Syria, and is haunted by the mystery of places 'where there are no words'. It is, however, the very craft of his finely wrought poetry and its sudden moments of sheer beauty which make palpable for the reader 'the shape of the invisible soul'.

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Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), wrote The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love in the last years of his life. Both books were published posthumously and explore passionate love. The setting for The Divan is the poet's Granada, while the Sonnets are a solitary, intimate voice speaking to one person. In translating these powerful poems, Jane Duran and Gloria Garcia Lorca have tried to remain as close as possible to Lorca's words and to his emotional and sensuous intensity.This bilingual edition also includes essays by two acclaimed Lorca scholars. Christopher Maurer's essay, 'Violet Shadow', explores Lorca's relationship with Arabic poetry in the Divan. Andres Soria Olmedo's essay, 'Dark St Valentine', studies the implications and resonances of 'dark love' in the Sonnets.

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The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region's abounding rocks. Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. The many layers of stone and sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the colours released by the carver's tools will likely never return to shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large, of humankind.

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'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' - Michael Longley. When Edward Thomas died in the First World War, very few of his poems had been published, but he is now recognised as one of the finest and most influential poets of the last century. Although often referred to as 'a poet's poet', his writing has an almost universal appeal. He wrote accessibly, on traditional themes - the natural world, human relationships, transience and mortality. And yet his poetry is alive with the critical intelligence that came from years of writing non-fiction and reviewing verse. "Branch-Lines" captures the range of Thomas' achievement, not least by combining poetry with prose. In this unique collection, fifty-five contemporary poets reflect on Thomas' craftsmanship and enduring power. Some have chosen poems of their own in which they detect his influence, others have written new poems in his honour. Each poet has also contributed a piece of prose, and the volume contains an introduction, four critical essays, illustrations, a foreword by Andrew Motion and an afterword by Michael Longley. "Branch-Lines" offers a fascinating perspective on the workings of literary influence, with personal insights from some of the leading poet-critics of our time. 'The collection has a double value. It is a celebration of Thomas, and dignified tribute to his achievement; at the same time it bears witness to his powers of regeneration' - Andrew Motion. 'I read Thomas' collected poems at a sitting, poem by poem, all the way through and felt as I had not felt since reading Lawrence and Graves ten years before: I love this man, I can learn from him.' - David Constantine. 'I have always loved Edward Thomas' poetry' - Geoffrey Hill. 'He comes naturally, I think, to writers in English, like grass growing.' - U. A. Fanthorpe. 'When I started to try and write poetry and prose, a very uncertain beginning, it would have been even more uncertain if I hadn't read Thomas' poetry in my teens.' - Tom Paulin.

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Gascoyne's membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali - placed him in an ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost artists and writers.

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Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.' Jack Kerouac. Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel "On the Road", Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following in the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form's essence. He incorporated his 'American' haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings.In this edition, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. The result is a compact collection of more than five hundred poems that reveal a lesser known but important side of Jack Kerouac's literary legacy.

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As one of the key figures in the first generation of British conceptual artists and a crucial force behind many of the Young British Artists, Michael Craig-Martin has dedicated a career to complicating the practice and reception of drawing. Often considered the 'high priest of the everyday', he is engaged with the methodical exploration of those objects and design classics that are so often taken for granted: the tap, the clothes hanger, the petrol pump, the Anglepoise lamp. For Craig-Martin, those objects that we value least, simply for their ubiquity, are often the most extraordinary. His is a world of revelation.

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Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book's contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite 'writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present - and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.'

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This remarkable collaboration had its origins when John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets who had long admired and enjoyed each other's work, discovered by chance that the new poems they were working on shared a preoccupation with the sea. Marine brings together those poems and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers, with people's relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic; the two poets' highly distinctive voices, while drawing on a dazzling variety of forms and sources, complementing each other in a powerful counterpoint.

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Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry gleaned from ephemera, correspondence, and notebooks housed at numerous archives in the USA and UK. From Dorn's first Beat poems in 1952, to visionary juvenalia from his study at Black Mountain, to the long poems that were central to the development of the British Poetry Revival, and to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, the transatlantic roots of Dorn's anti-capitalism are here fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote of Dorn that "No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political". Whereas Dorn's Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes in the diverse forms of the lyric, the pronouncement, the mock-epic, and the epigram. Recovering four lost books, Derelict Air significantly expands Dorn's oeuvre, including impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children's book, "confetti poems" meant to shower the 1968 DNC, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties "stock ticker". Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.

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The poems of Ancient Sunlight range in theme and space from the inner East End of London - where the poet has lived for over thirty years - with its complex richnesses of cultures and the often brutal pains of its regeneration, to great European cities such as Prague and the Italian mountains of his family origins. It is a poetry that marries personal acuity with deep communal awareness, reflecting his work as a poet in schools, hospitals, galleries, drop-in centres, urban and moorland fastnesses, and the wilder places of the human heart. This is a generous, passionate poetry of affirmation and anger for those excluded by, or on the margins of, our drunkenly material literature and society.

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Myra Schneider's new collection brings a fresh sense of reality to some well-known images. Colour is the keynote of the book, moving through Matisse, Hockney, Chagall; sound too, in Mahler and Beethoven. Often we find skin-deep assumptions turned around: the gold of ancient Crete is not its jewellery but olives; a postbox's bright exterior conceals menace; a major twentieth-century artist only started painting by chance at the age of twenty; and the long poem 'Minotaur' makes it clear that the Minotaur is no monster, Theseus no hero. Myra Schneider's tenth full collection is 'worth getting hold of if you like your poetry emotionally vulnerable, richly allusive and superbly poised between past and present.' Poetry London

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"I Have Found a Song" is a fascinating collection of poems and images published to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. It originated in a commission from Arts Council England for 12 poets to write on the theme of enslavement, which has resulted in a richly diverse selection of new poems. Interspersed with these are elaborate and exciting visual contributions by five artists invited by "Enitharmon Editions" to produce work on the same theme. The de luxe edition of the book is accompanied by a portfolio of signed original prints, and each artist has also contributed additional sequences of images reflecting on enslavement in its many forms. The poets include Patience Agbabi, Polly Atkin, Valerie Bloom, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Fred D'Aguiar, Helen Dunmore, Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Farley, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Iain Sinclair, Hugo Williams, and Benjamin Zephaniah. The artists include Sonia Boyce, Hew Locke, Shanti Panchal, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Paula Rego.

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"Nothing Like Love" is a collection of love poems by one of Britain's most popular and highly acclaimed poets. Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of "Warning", her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny Joseph was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of forms - new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories - she has always written what she things of as 'songs'. For this new book she has brought back some of the best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph's ability to convey the experiences of a 'thinking heart' is in no way diminished.

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"This Is How You Disappear" is Jeremy Reed's most autobiographical book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life as a poet.

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On 26 April, 1986 at 1.23 am, in the cool dark of an early Saturday, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex exploded. "Heavy Water" is based on eyewitness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster. Petrucci takes up the challenge confronting society in every age: to attempt the difficult task of exploring its most terrible events. His poem unites the concerns of artist, humanitarian and historian at a common source: the desire not to forget. This poem stands to remind us that those who have been exposed to the invisible should never become so.Each segment paints an intimate picture: some elements of everyday life remain unchanged, others are profoundly altered. The collection's recurring motifs of black and white signal how all are silenced, reduced to anonymity - which in turn engenders fierce solidarity. Meanwhile, men and machines toil side by side to tackle the insurmountable. Petrucci's use of scientific and medical terminology makes his descriptions chillingly precise. In contrast, we hear, from a deeply personal angle, the simply expressed accounts of real people who struggle to cope with the enormity of the disaster. This poem is at once deeply shocking yet pervaded by an uplifting beauty.

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Gathers together the finest of Ruth Pitter's poems.

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Simon Armitage - poet, playwright, broadcaster and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University - has been commissioned by 14-18 Now to write a sequence of poems in response to photographs (aerial, oblique and panoramic) of areas associated with the Battle of the Somme, which took place on the Western Front between July to November 1916.

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Michael Longley’s prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his (often-combative) youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry. Among the poets Longley discusses are Homer, Propertius, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, James Wright, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ruth Stone. Sidelines, which includes interviews with Longley, not only illuminates his own work. Longley’s perspectives on modern poetry are both distinctive and important. He is also uniquely qualified to interpret the phenomenon of poetry from Northern Ireland. Cover Image: My Father in the Cottage, Sarah Longley

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Edward Thomas ranks as one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century, both in his own poetry and in his influence on subsequent poets. 'He is the father of us all,' asserted Ted Hughes.This book combines the story of his life until his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917 with numerous illustrations, including photographs, printed material and original letters, many of which have never been published before. The book will add to what is already known of Thomas and his family before and after his death by putting his biography into a visual and historical context.

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The poems in Nancy Campbell's first collection transport the reader to the frozen shores of Greenland. The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. We hear the stories of those living on the ice edge in former times: hunters, explorers and settlers, and the legendary leader Qujaavaarssuk. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. In the final sequence, Jutland, we reach the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.

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Winner Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill-health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos's epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but, at the same time, freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given - the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas - have an irresistible potency.

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When David Gascoyne celebrated his seventeenth birthday in Paris in 1933, he already had a poetry collection and a novel to his name. He spent much of the next few years in the French capital associating with Eluard, Dali, Ernst, Breton, Peret and other surrealists. By the age of 20 he had firmly established himself within the movement with the publication of his groundbreaking A Short Survey of Surrealism and the poems of Man's Life Is This Meat. In 1938 Holderlin's Madness marked his move away from surrealism in 'a renewal of vision', followed by his milestone collection, Poems 1937-1942 (1943). After the war Gascoyne revisited Paris, publishing A Vagrant and other poems in 1950 and Night Thoughts, the acclaimed BBC radiophonic poem for voices and orchestra, in 1956. Despite several breakdowns he continued to write, particularly during the latter years of his long life, producing few poems, but many translations, reviews and literary criticism, memoirs and obituaries. Even so it was his contention that he was 'a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad'. This self-deprecating judgement could not be further from the opinion of those who knew him and valued his achievement. As his fellow poet and lifelong friend, Kathleen Raine, wrote on Gascoyne's 80th birthday: You are the chosen one To speak the words of blessing In this time. This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne's friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne's poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth-century literature, and its continuing relevance.

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Features Christmas poems from a range of years, in a range of styles.

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'In the Orchard' is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from 'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like 'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears.

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These new poems by Martha Kapos represent an act of reclamation or capture: an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur ' - a thing is most itself when likened' Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing 'being most itself'. Most often the viewpoints are visual ones - making use of the phenomenon of perspective with its effects of hiddenness, distance or diminution. In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an example of the animating power of metaphor to reshape loss into presence.

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In "Voodoo Excess," Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members, shaping the raw material into memorable lyric poetry. This new volume is introduced by Mick Taylor, the musician who left the band only to rejoin it, to great acclaim, for their recent anniversary tour."

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Songs of the Darkness brings together a selection of poems for Christmas written over a period of more than thirty years. They are notable for their combination of a close focus and breadth, and for the way in which the seasonal is celebrated alongside the challenges of history and the beauty of the natural world. topographically the poems range from a Romanian convent to a Devon beach to an alpine cablecar. The finely drawn illustrations by Erica Sail, the writer's daughter, add their own note of precision and detail. Taken together with the poems, they help to create a perspective in which the darkness of winter really does yield up its music. All royalties from sales of Songs of the Darkness will be given to Trusts for African Schools, a registered charity which acts as a conduit for money raised in the UK to be sent out to some of the poorest schools in Africa. More information, and details of the ten individual schools currently supported by the Trusts, eight in Kenya, and one each in Uganda and Ethiopia, are available on the website www.trustsforafricanschools.org.

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Anna Robinson's first full collection, "The Finders of London", introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Her poems, set in and around the centre of London, depict a capital both familiar and alien, peopled with figures contemporary and historical: from the residents of present-day Lambeth, to the victims of Jack the Ripper, and to those whose spirits are still embedded in the reflections of a plate-glass office window, in the earth beneath the author's feet, or in the flotsam washed up on the Thames beach. It's these working-class voices that lend strength to Robinson's own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city. The river Thames is never far away, its foreshore the setting for the long poem that provides the book's title: "The Finders of London", part-chronicle, part-modern fairytale, caked in mud, it challenges the morality of its Victorian counterparts while telling a simple and elegant tale of the toshers and the river they live and work under.

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"Behold" is Nicki Jackowska's seventh book of poetry. The title poem vividly evokes the history of the Holocaust with precise particulars and mundane details. Her European consciousness and working-class English roots give her writing an extraordinary spectrum of awareness. Many of the poems are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton Terrace and thence to Krakuw. John Berger writes of the collection that 'Its grief has penetrated its syntax, and when there's that kind of penetration - it changes the reader's breathing.'

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Jim Dine's vivid, candid and detailed reminiscences about his friendship and working relationship with Aldo Crommelynck, the printer of Matisse and Picasso, over a period now of more than 30 years are full of affection, humour and layer upon layer of information. In conversations with the art historian Marco Livingstone, Dine, one of the greatest post-war American artists, charts the extent to which his experience of working with a man who was not only a great printer, but also a skilled draughtsman, an aesthete, dandy and bon viveur, coloured and enriched his experience of France on every level, from an appreciation of its art and culture, its city life and countryside, to its food and its specialist shops - especially those in which to find the best tools and musical instruments.Dine's ruminations take some unexpected but illuminating detours, even into the making of bespoke bicycles, that prove deeply revealing of the specific nature of his love for France and of his many debts to an esteemed colleague, fellow traveller and much loved friend.

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In her fourth collection, Exile and the Kingdom, Hilary Davies embarks on pilgrimage - poetic, religious, psychological. Using a dazzling interplay of narrative and lyric line, she travels through real and imagined territory in search of answers to the great questions which preoccupy us as human beings. In 'Rhine Fugue' the poet follows the river that both unites and divides Europe, conjuring an impressive sweep of history that includes the Wars of Religion, the Jewish tradition, the upheavals of the twentieth century, the hope for peace. Two lyric sequences evoke the spirit of the Lea Valley in London, where Hilary Davies lives, and the spirit of her late husband, the poet Sebastian Barker, while 'Across Country' and 'Exile and the Kingdom' chart the journey of the individual soul through darkness and confusion to a hard-won and complex faith.

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Into the Woods takes us to imaginary wild woodland in the centre of London. In this story the woodsman, the wild girl and the widow Mary live in a recognisable present, but being archetypes, they continually try to emerge from our time into one that may never have been - to the Lambeth woods. We too are drawn into our own fantasies of wild woods from folk tales, and here real-life images of Epping Forest and Box Hill fuel our imagination and work to plunge us, resisting, into the centre of the woods, into heterotopia. In the end though, we emerge back to the familiar, and the widow Mary snaps us back to reality when she purchases an acre of woodland from the Archbishop of Canterbury, signaling the end of the wild wood. The second book from Anna Robinson builds upon her acclaimed debut The Finders of London, leading us further into a London that we have never seen

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In this welcome centenary edition of C. Day Lewis' poems, Jill Balcon has substantially extended her husband's own Penguin selections of 1951 and 1969, including not only his last collection "The Whispering Roots" (1970), but also vers d'occasion written when he was Poet Laureate and a number of the Posthumous Poems. This broad retrospective allows the reader a proper view of the technical variety and range of Day Lewis' work, from the pastoral lyrics of his youth, inspired by Hardy and Yeats, through the political verse of the 1930s, to the reflective and more personal poems of his later years. Day Lewis was fond of quoting Robert Frost's dictum that 'a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom'. This could equally well describe his own development as a writer: idealistic, sincere and psychologically acute, he bears witness in his poetry to a lifelong commitment to serving literature and its makers.

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