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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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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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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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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Annemarie Austin's vividly imaginative poems explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon her own memories and experiences, as well as on art, travel, dream, myth, history and literature. Track is her first new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective Very: New & Selected Poems (2008). There are journeys here. The track may be a railway or a path, and perhaps there's one main route - to the boiler house. There are figures seen on their way and those standing still - the living statue, the woman in camera and the one who's reached the last resort. And creatures too, mourning the death of Pan or trapped in the pound. And behind all these the unreliability of perception, the tension between what can be seen and what cannot, the pressure of space upon the drawn lines, the breakdown of speech in the face of 'the plain gap'.

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Maitreyabandhu's thematically varied debut collection includes poems of spiritual transcendence as well as meditations on love, memory and sexuality. Sometimes comic, often elegiac, the poems convey the pleasures and terrors of childhood as well as the mystical world of fable. Truthful, tender, and written with a kind of wonderment, the collection culminates in 'Stephen', an extended sequence of poems exploring a clandestine, and finally tragic, relationship between two boys. For Maitreyabandhu - a Buddhist teacher and member of the Triratna Buddhist Order for over twenty years - The Crumb Road is an image for the unreliability of memory, and for the vital thread of human value that connects us to the spiritual world.

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Connie Bensley's poems are sharply satirical, often poking fun at social pretence and suburban pretension. They present a comedy of manners in which mismatched characters are bounced between love, death and disappointment. Hers is a seemingly small world but one which spans a whole universe of everyday life. Finding a Leg to Stand On is a retrospective selection of her delightfully pointed poems drawn from six collections published over three decades, plus new work.

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Ko Un has long been a living legend in Korea, both as a poet and as a person. Allen Ginsberg once wrote, 'Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscenti, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.' When a writer has published as much as Ko Un has in the course of more than fifty years of writing, it is hard to know where to begin, what to translate. For this collection, his translators have selected a hundred or so poems from the five collections published since the year 2002, collections acclaimed by Korean critics as bringing poetry to a new level of cosmic reference. Nothing shows more clearly his stature as a writer than the variety of themes and emotions found in his most recent work. Readers here have access for the first time to many of the poems Ko Un has produced in the 21st century, as he approaches his eightieth year, his energy and originality unabated. As Michael McLure wrote years ago: 'Ko Un's poetry has the old-fashionedness of a muddy rut on a country road after rain, and yet it is also as state-of-the-art as a DNA micro-chip.' That remains true today. "First Person Sorrowful" is Ko Un's first book to be published in the UK, and has an introduction by Sir Andrew Motion.

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Come On Everybody brings together poems from a dozen collections published by Adrian Mitchell over five decades, from Poems (1964) to his final collection, Tell Me Lies (2008). His poetry's simplicity, clarity, passion and humour show his allegiance to a vital, popular tradition embracing William Blake as well as the ballads and the blues. His most nakedly political poems - about war, Vietnam, prisons and racism - became part of the folklore of the Left, sung and recited at demonstrations and mass rallies. His childlike questioning was a constant reminder from the 60s onwards that poetry is first and foremost an assertion of the human spirit. A pacifist prophet who remained true to his heartfelt beliefs, Mitchell reported back for over half a century from a world blighted by war, compromise, double-talk and pragmatism without losing his innocence, integrity and impish sense of humour. Angela Carter described him as a 'joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper determinedly singing us away from catastrophe'.

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In this, her first poetry collection since the award-winning Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, but extends beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers’ childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi’s poems guide us through an ‘underworld of longing and deliverance’, making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again. Everything Begins Elsewhere was followed by two further collections, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods in 2018, and A God at the Door in 2021.

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From Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight, Out of Bounds is a newly charted map of Britain as viewed by its black and Asian poets. It takes the reader on a riveting, sensory journey through Scotland, England and Wales, showing the whole country from a fresh perspective. This extensive and ground-breaking anthology – with its sudden forks in the road, and its roads not taken – stops off in the Highlands and Islands, skirts the North East coast from Whitley Bay to the sands of Bridlington, wanders lonely through the Lake District and Yorkshire, climbs the mountains of Wales before descending to the Black Country and Southern England. Along the way it takes in lochs and landmarks from Glasgow’s George Square and the Angel of the North to the London Eye and the Long Man of Wilmington. If alienation, unbelonging and dislocation remain key aspects of black and Asian experiences in Britain, what such terms simultaneously conceal are the rich and manifold attachments to place, region, city and landscape offered in Out of Bounds. The poems question the idea of an easy or singular identity, nimbly dealing with the triple bind of ethnic, geographical and poetic belonging. An alternative A to Z of the nation, a new poetic guide, the book enables us to look again at the UK’s local and regional landscapes and the poets who pass through them. Out of Bounds is a definitive anthology that brings together new and established black and Asian writers and places them firmly on the map of what is great and not so great about Britain. Includes: Shanta Acharya, John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, James Berry, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Vahni Capildeo, Merle Collins, Fred D'Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Imtiaz Dharker, Bernardine Evaristo, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Tariq Latif, Sheree Mack, Jack Mapanje, E.A. Markham, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Michelle Scally-Clarke, Seni Seneviratne, John Siddique, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Benjamin Zephaniah, and many others.

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Shortlisted for the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize, this third collection by Esther Morgan is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and includes 'This Morning', winner of the 2010 Bridport Poetry Prize. What happens if, when the angel arrives with his message, no one's at home? In poems of lyric concentration, Grace examines our need for purpose, for the signs that might help us decide what to do with our lives. It's a desire that makes for restless spirits - like the woman who keeps shifting her furniture around or the invisible subjects of an early photograph, moving too fast to be captured. Other poems ask what happens when we reconcile ourselves to watching and waiting - whether the angle of the sun in a guest room or the colour of a bruised clementine is really 'enough to be going on with'. Haunted by a blue sky out of which something (or nothing) might come, these are poems of intensely felt moments. They create a vision both troubled and informed by doubt, where the ghost of a film star may be the closest we can come to grace.

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Roddy Lumsden's Terrific Melancholy is a book of changes, physical and emotional. It begins with a diverse sequence on that most dubious and folkloric of changes, rebirth into a new life, exploring our history's advances - changeless, changeful. Meanwhile, in the lengthy title-poem, an actor's reluctant crush on a younger colleague leads him to look back on life from middle age, while the poet himself does the same during travels in the USA. This is Lumsden's sixth collection and it also contains a miscellany of new poems which display the writer's acclaimed inventiveness with form and structure and his breadth of approaches: satire, listing, praise poems and a new form, the 'ripple poem', which develops the use of 'fuzzy' rhyme.

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"Stray" is a book about strays - human and animal - and about straying. It's about the lost and being lost, searching for home, and it's about the extraordinary places we sometimes discover when we're off the beaten track, deliberately or accidentally off-course. It's sometimes a noun and it's sometimes a verb - almost a command. As Allan's mind strays and roams, he recasts himself as astronaut Buzz Aldrin. He may be lost in space, but he has an amazing time up there! A feral child becomes a dog to find her way back home. Medea fetches up in Sheffield, semi-wild, living in a van with a goat on a rope. She's washing dishes in a Sheffield pub when in walks footballer Jason - Cesare the somnambulist has lost himself in sleep. It's only when he falls from the path and is dying that he can wake - In many of these poems objects matter. They are the things we think with, we remember with them, they confirm or reduce us. Sometimes they help to identify who or where we are. Often they're broken, or themselves lost, separated from their home or from each other: the letter, torn and scattered, the diminishing number of objects on a mother's table, a museum's broken and displaced treasures.

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"Catulla et al" summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus - his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy - by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Tiffany Atkinson's Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment. The Catulla poems in her second book show a shift away from the loosely confessional or straightforwardly narrative poems of her first collection, "Kink and Particle", towards a more explicit playfulness with stories. Other poems try to keep one foot in a recognisable real worldA" while still bending it out of shape with strange plot twists, elements of folk tale or myth, and philosophical musings. Catulla et al was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year).

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After mapping Britain's national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The vitriolic social critic became poetry's Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world's wildlife and environment. "Vendange Tardive" is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. Peter Reading is probably the most skilful and technically inventive poet writing today, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phoney media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment.

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Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). His latest collection, "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon", takes its title from an improvised children's game. It is a book about staged loss and staged recovery and how, in our games as in our poems, made-up losses depict real ones. At the book's centre is the title-poem, a long exploration of being a father in light of having lost one. His previous book from Bloodaxe, "Natural History and Other Poems" (2006), brought together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005).

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Samuel Menashe’s poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For over 50 years he practised his art of ‘compression and crystallisation’ (in Derek Mahon’s phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe ‘compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds’. Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe’s work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. Expanded from its original Library of America compilation, this edition covers the full range of his work, from the early collections to very recent work, and includes a DVD of Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. This features a visit to Menashe in the tiny apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village where he lived from the 1950s until 2009. Even in his 80s, Menashe still knew all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, recites numerous examples with engaging humour, warmth and zest.

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"Lara" is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo's own childhood and family history. The eponymous Lara is a mixed-race girl raised in Woolwich, a white suburb of London, during the 60s and 70s. Her father, Taiwo, is Nigerian, and her mother, Ellen, is white British. They marry in the 1950s, in spite of fierce opposition from Ellen's family, and quickly produce eight children in ten years. Lara is their fourth child and we follow her journey from restricted childhood to conflicted early adulthood, and then from London to Nigeria to Brazil as she seeks to understand herself and her ancestry. The novel travels back over 150 years, seven generations and three continents of Lara's ancestry. It is the story of Irish Catholics leaving generations of rural hardship behind and ascending to a rigid middle class in England; of German immigrants escaping poverty and seeking to build a new life in 19th century London; and of proud Yorubas enslaved in Brazil, free in colonial Nigeria and hopeful in post-war London. "Lara" explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations. This is a new edition of Bernardine Evaristo's first novel "Lara", rewritten and expanded by a third since its first publication in 1997.

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Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre. Her latest book, "The Upshot", includes a new collection, "The Divided", which constructs a modern metaphysic out of love and the daily, set against the latent (sometimes tragic) divisions in contemporary society. The selection from three critically acclaimed earlier collections ranges from the lyrical exuberance of "Sunset Grill" to the vivid nocturnal surrealism of "The School of Night".

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Selima Hill's "The Hat" is a disturbing portrayal of a woman's struggle to regain her identity. Her story emerges through a series of short poems, often related to animals: how she is preyed upon and betrayed, misunderstood, compromised and not allowed to be herself. Like all of Selima Hill's books, "The Hat" charts extreme experience with a dazzling excess', with dark humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. "The Hat" was published at the same time Selima Hill's "Gloria: Selected Poems", which draws on ten previous collections.

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C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. ‘A voice that has become utterly distinctive: restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in its quest to find and speak the truth…an intelligence both compassionate and fierce. The result is four decades of poems that delve into everything from the most joyous and private matters of the heart (he is one of our greatest love poets) to the chaos and horror of politics, warfare, and our species’ seemingly innate penchant for cruelty and self-destruction. Like Whitman’s, his world view is simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic. Williams’ rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and his syntax enacts the ways in which the mind moves through mood and memory, speculation and logic. Because the voice is both cerebral and muscular in its reflexes, the music it makes feels spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which it sings. The poems are wholly American in this regard; their simultaneous tenderness and outrage bring to mind the music of Charles Ives. Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement, but C.K. Williams is one of them. His poetry will speak to future generations, as it does to us, of what it was to be human in our time.’ – Chase Twichell

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Joan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain’s major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but for the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. In poems evoking the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, Margarit reminds us that it is not death we have to understand but life. His poetry confronts the worst that life can throw at us, yet what lingers in the mind is its warmth and humanity. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

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Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work.

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The landscape of Polly Clark's "Take Me with You" is strange and dangerous, her narrators searching for answers to questions about the nature of human attachment and longing. Her acclaimed first book, "Kiss", took the reader on a journey into the self. In this new collection, the journey turns outwards and explores the ways in which we connect with others and the wider world. Polly Clark's characters speak in many voices, both animal and human, bringing into focus the moments when we are most alive, and most alone. The poems are unsettling even as they are compelling, taking the reader from the last performance of a virtuoso octopus, to the dizzying industry of a Chinese city, to the vast and lonely seascapes of the Scottish coast.

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What are the contours of a life? For Andrew Greig: childhood, adolescence, the country then the city, sex, love, marriage, break-ups and breakdowns personal and political, mountain adventures, illness and recovery, increased awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the moments left, late love...they're all here in these wildly diverse, affirmative, open-hearted poems. As a poet and latterly as a novelist, Andrew Greig is one of Scotland's most esteemed writers. Each of his poetry books has been distinctively different, from the early and late poems rooted in the natural world, to the game-playing extended narratives of exultation and risk, from human love to the mountaineering poems. But this selection covering 35 years of his poetry shows how the thrust of all his work is the re-enchantment of this life.

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Carole Satyamurti's poetry explores love, attachment and the fragility of personal survival, charting the tension between connected and separate lives. With an unflinching eye, she takes on complex and often painful subject-matter - cancer for instance or raising a disabled child. Many of her poems hinge on a turning-point or a place where one life touches another, bearing witness to the way we imagine - or fail to imagine - the otherness of others. Stitching the Dark draws on four previous books and includes a whole new collection, her strongest and most formally adventurous. In these new poems, there is a deeper engagement with the universal predicament of how to live in the face of mortality - of what it means to exist, and to cease existing. The title suggests that the act of writing - the search for the right words - is an attempt to repair, illuminate, and give form to what is unknown, fearful, perplexing. But the collection is by no means solemn. There is also wit and celebration, dark humour and a fine sense of the absurd, as well as poems challenging our responses to events that do not affect us directly. She also published a later collection, Countdown (2011).

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"Extreme of Things" is a large collection combining new poems with a thematic selection from recent books. It explores the duality of existence, a track which runs through all Jenny Joseph's work, whether for children or adults, in poetry or prose. This new book continues her attempt to present "how things work" at the core, at the edge. It begins with poems from her last two collections, "Ghosts and Other Company" (1995) and "All the Things I See" (2000), which lead to the body of new and previously uncollected poems in the second part. The "'Season Songs' from Persephone" (1986), her long out-of-print fictional work, are here reprinted as a bridge or interlude between the two main parts.

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Leanne O'Sullivan was born in 1983, and comes from the Beara peninsula in West Cork. She received an MA in English from University College, Cork in 2006. The winner – while still in her teens – of several of Ireland's poetry competitions, including the Seacat, Davoren Hanna and RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam, she has since published four collections with Bloodaxe: Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009), The Mining Road (2013) and A Quarter of an Hour (2018). Waiting for My Clothes, her first collection, traces a deeply personal journey, from the traumas of eating disorder and low self-esteem to the saving powers of love and positive awareness. Leanne O’Sullivan has been writing poetry since she was 12, and began these poems not thinking they would ever form part of a book, but ‘writing down the reasons I should live for’ and then ‘becoming addicted to looking at things to find the beauty in them’.

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Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain's leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a selection from her early collections, from times of change and travel. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the 'difficult questions' of identity posed in her much celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba, which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a seminal volume in modern Scottish poetry. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes most of her poems from Black Spiders (1982), A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Way We Live (1987), The Autonomous Region (1993) and The Queen of Sheba (1994).

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The Book of Judas, Brendan Kennelly’s 400-page epic poem in twelve parts, was the number one bestselling book in Ireland. The Little Book of Judas is a distillation of that literary monster, purged to its traitorous essence. But Judas never goes away. He continued to worm his way into Kennelly’s imagination long after the original book was “finished”, and The Little Book of Judas includes some damning new revelations from the eternal scapegoat and outcast. Not merely lost but irredeemable, Kennelly’s bitterly articulate Judas speaks, dreams and murmurs – of past and present, history and myth, good and evil, of men, women and children, and of course money – until we realise that the unspeakable perpetrator of the apparently unthinkable, in penetrating the icy reaches of his own world, becomes a sly, many-voiced critic of ours.

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Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was Sweden’s most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Tranströomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.

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Paul Valery (1871-1945) was a poet and essayist, and along with Verlaine and Mallarme is regarded as one of the most important Symbolist writers, and an influence on poets from Eliot to Ashbery. He had a quiet life by many standards, but in one respect it was exemplary, even legendary; he made an early reputation in little magazines, decided to stop writing verse when still only 20, kept his silence for 20 years, then began again; and his first book of verse, published when he was 45, was his masterpiece La Jeune Parque.'A poem should not mean, but be,' said Archibald MacLeish. La Jeune Parque ('the goddess of Fate as a young woman') certainly exists: she's beautiful and makes great gestures. And as for what she means, there's a substantial amount of argument about that, so La Jeune Parque is a poem by either definition. It's a classic, by general agreement, written to the full 17th-century recipe for alexandrine couplets, and it's modern, with every word pulling its weight in more than one direction. Alistair Elliot's translation with notes is aimed at making this rewarding but difficult long poem accessible enough for bafflement to turn into admiration. He attempts to clarify its small puzzles and also trace the overall narrative line of Paul Valery's poem: it does have a story (what should a young woman do?) and does struggle towards a resolution. He also provides an introduction which deals with the interesting circumstances of the poem's four-year composition (1913-17), which resulted in Valery's instantly becoming a famous poet at the age of 45, after having written no poetry for 20 years.

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French Love Poems is about the kinds of love that puzzle, delight and af?ict us throughout our lives, from going on walks with an attractive cousin before Sunday dinner (Nerval) to indulging a granddaughter (Hugo). On the way there’s the ?rst yes from lips we love (Verlaine), a sky full of stars re?ected fatally in Cleopatra’s eyes (Heredia), Iying awake waiting for your lover (Valéry), and the defeated toys of dead children (Gautier). The selection covers ?ve centuries, from Ronsard to Valéry. Other poets represented include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, La Fontaine, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle. The 35 poems, chosen by Alistair Elliot, are printed opposite his own highly skilful verse translations. There are also helpful notes on French verse technique and on points of obscurity. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

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Zoom! is the book which launched Simon Armitage's meteoric rise to poetic stardom. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1989 and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The e-book edition of Zoom! incorporates audio files for 18 of the poems using recordings Simon Armitage made for Peter Sansom in Huddersfield in 1989. So the voice you hear is that of Simon Armitage, then aged 26, when he was still working as a probation officer and had just published his first book of poems.

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The Island in the Sound, the third collection by South Uist poet Niall Campbell, creates an archipelago of memories, lyrics, observations and folktales that place the small islands of his birthplace into conversation with moments from literature and history.

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Backalong, a dialect word from Nia Broomhall's native Somerset, describes any point in the past. Her impressive debut collection observes distant past and recent past through poems of place and origin as well as tracking the process of grieving for someone w?ho was right there, not so long ago.

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Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. The poems bind this looming curse to the colonisation of countries, the earth and its creatures, those who own the story and those who redirect it through art or artifice.

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With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt's books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia's best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.

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Poems 2016-2024 is effectively volume two of Prynne's Poems (2015) but this supplementary edition is bigger than his previous life's work retrospective, bringing together the complete texts of 36 collections from the late and most productive period of Prynne's writing, all previously only available in limited editions.

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Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.

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