Search results for ""two rivers press""

In The Adjustments, Claire Dyer's fourth collection with Two Rivers Press, the poet explores the vagaries of time and experience. As a narrative in reverse, her book scrutinises the fine tunings of life - from what's expected to what happens - and the associated search for equilibrium in a world that's constantly changing.

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Peter Hay (1951-2003) was a visionary artist. He was a very English painter whose work has a poetic and mystical quality. Eclectic, curious magpie, he found inspiration from everywhere and gathered it into his image-making. He was a fine draughtsman and watercolourist, a brilliantly inventive printmaker. At heart a figurative artist, the work moves into abstraction through striking black and white and a rich use of colour. After studying Fine Art at Reading University, and two years away in Cornwall, Peter Hay settled in Reading for the rest of his life. He had a strong sense of place; the junction of the rivers Thames and Kennet close to his home was a frequent symbolic theme in his work. He became a central figure in the local art community and was an inspirational teacher. In 1994 he founded Two Rivers Press which gave him the opportunity to pursue through illustration his passion for campaigning, his love of poetry and history. This book brings together the range of this prolific artist's work for the first time.

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In the title poem of Katherine Meehan's debut collection, Dame Julie Andrews' Botched Vocal Cord Surgery and Other Poems, the poet presents an examination of losses, failures, and griefs, all of them tempered by an unusual humour. Grounded in the particularities of location, these poems wander between urban and rural spaces, from Los Angeles and Appalachia to the English home counties. Glass eels, Grendel's mother and a host of nameless 'losers' are given voice as the collection explores the tension between the futility of the speech act and its necessity.

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Paradise Takeaway is a long poem with Luton Airport in it. Part memoir, part invention, it takes us along the bus and train routes of the London metropolitan area, not stopping at the eponymous fast food outlet en route to Aylesbury. On the way you’ll meet the Spirit of Rail, the Lady of Passport Control, a famous German philosopher, and other figures real and unreal. Warning: this book contains Marmite. Somewhere at the back of it all is ‘Germany: A Winter’s Fairy Tale’, Heinrich Heine’s long poem on returning to Germany for the first time after thirteen years in Parisian exile. Drawing on thirty years of trips back from Berlin to the UK, and a lifetime of not always entirely healthy eating, Alistair Noon reflects on what it is to watch a country and a waistline changing. And there isn’t a single mention of You Know What.

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Turning Manet on his head, entering the thoughts of a post prandial lion, viewing and buying a ‘snorting’ Hot Rod, imagining life on a modern-day Titanic, wondering what happens to the story after a book is finished or what a sonnet written by a modern day Shakespeare might look like, 'The Weather on the Moon' ranges across art, music, philosophy, literature and poetry, politics, history, science and the natural world to encounter what it’s like to be alive. Bubbling away throughout this intense, sometimes humorous, sometimes quirky, always compassionate poetry is a joy in language, its possibilities, and music. As Graham Hardie writes, his work ‘fuses many elements into one short space: pathos; wit; dexterous use of simile and metaphor; a heightened imagination; an ability to make poetry from the commonplace.’

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Relive the decade when Reading's music scene turned itself up to 11 and really started to rock. This hugely well-informed and entertaining account of live music in Reading between 1966 and 1976 charts the journey from the emergence of psychedelia to the dawn of punk, and brings into focus the many musicians and bands - from The Amboy Dukes to The Who - that played at venues around the town. Read about the early years of the Reading Festival, lost and much missed music venues, and local musical heroes. Includes a foreword by Mike Cooper.

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There's more to Reading than traffic, concrete and busy people. Wildlife flourishes amidst the urban hustle and with a couple of hundred open spaces, some ancient woodlands and two great rivers, Reading rewards the appreciative naturalist. Wander from town centre to suburbs exploring the parks and meadows, following the rivers and the wooded ridges, watching the seasons change. You'll be surprised at what you find. Over 25 years Adrian Lawson chronicled the wildlife he encountered in his days working in the parks, walking his dogs in the woods and riding his bike around the town. This book takes us through the calendar year with a selection of articles from his long-running newspaper column, Rural Reading, plus some new and previously unpublished pieces. Accompanied by perceptive and very personal illustrations from Geoff Sawers, equally devoted to the natural history of Reading, this exquisite collection will open your eyes to the wild side of town.

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This landmark book brings together, for the first time in English, translations of 75 poems by the renowned Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta. It contains selections from each of her 21 volumes of poetry published over a writing career that spans six decades. The poems are presented in their original Portuguese with facing-page English translation by prize-winning poet Lesley Saunders. The book opens with a critical essay by leading scholar in comparative literature, Ana Raquel Fernandes, which - together with the translations - enables an English readership to acquire a sense of the formal, emotional and intellectual power and significance of this poet's work. The book also serves to underline the importance of sustaining cultural connections between the UK and Europe.

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Taking some convalescent wanders around Reading, the narrator of The Constitutionals, a figure haunted by being called Crusoe in childhood, also `sets out to avert global catastrophe, hoping to trigger the end of neoliberalism by going for a walk.' What does he discover about the place in which he's settled with his wife, who he will call Friday, and their ocean-haunted daughter? Published on the tercentenary of Robinson Crusoe's appearance, our author answers such questions by paying sustained tribute to the town, and the founding `autobiography' by which it has-as have so many works alluded to here-been indelibly marked.

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In Penumbra, Kate Behrensʼ third collection, the poems are linked by themes of dislocation and heredity. If the dead are ever-present here, so is love: the absence of, rewards and longing for it, the endurance and effort of it.We are led from the poetʼs bohemian childhood to the complex grief, in middle age, that followed the death of her painter father, and on to individual animals, people, and even trees that are differently uprooted or burdened. Everything is haunted here, but the boundaries of death and love are permeable, nature full of revelation. ‘These are poems with huge scope. They speak personal lament, love, whilst looking up also to wide horizons of thought, and exposing the “secret doings” of the world. They are poems alive with surprising images, unexpected turns. This is a very achieved and compelling collection’ – Steven MatthewsResponses to Man with Bombe Alaska (2016):ʽ… the lines move with hallucinatory clarity, the syntax is unexpected, but break by break the poem implies an ever-expanding context. This is the language of poetry: lines that might never be spoken, but which have been wrought until they are more accessible, more natural, than daily speech’ – Dennis Nurkseʽ… will reward repeated readings and resonate long after the page is turnedʼ – PBS Bulletin

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Edith Morley (1875-1964) was a scholar and the main 20th century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was the first woman appointed to a chair at an English university-level institution. Born into a middle-class Victorian family, she hated being a girl, but a forward-thinking home life and a good education enabled her to overcome prejudices and become Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908. An early feminist with a strong social conscience, she ‘fought… with courage… and passionate sincerity for human rights and freedom.’ Covering the vividly described era of her late Victorian childhood, her student days with the increasing freedoms they brought, the early feminist movement, the growing pains of a new university and, much later, the traumas endured by refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, this absorbing memoir brings alive a very different era, one foundational to the freedoms we enjoy today. Intended to ‘relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century’, Edith Morley’s 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after her retirement.

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The Roman Town at Silchester, Calleva Atrebatum, was a working archaeological dig – the University of Reading Field School – which took place every summer until 2014. Then, the dig was filled in, for future archaeologists to dig up again in the future. Taking advantage of the last opportunity to record ‘life on the dig’ in 2014, artist Jenny Halstead spent the summer creating and collating material for a beautiful and historically important book. Jenny’s superior draughtsmanship, her eye for colour and her wide variety of techniques have produced evocative, lively images of life “on the dig” to illustrate Michael Fulford’s fascinating account of the archaeological purpose of the project and the process by which it was conducted. From excavating, washing and cleaning the finds to teaching and arranging student entertainment, the final summer of the Town Life Project is captured here in all its richness – a fitting and enduring record of this historic episode in the life of an ancient city.

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel gave Reading an inconvenient station with but a single platform; after four major rebuilds it now has 15. This book documents 175 years of growth; the proliferation of branches and connections; the 'railway mania' of the 1840s; the 'battle of the gauges'; competition between the Great Western, South Western and South Eastern lines; increasing speeds; and the current transformation to a safe, flexible and efficient interchange. It looks forward to electrification and the possibility of through trains to Heathrow, the City, Essex, North Kent, and even mainland Europe.

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Robert Gillmor, one of Britain's most influential wildlife artists, illustrated four sets of pictorial stamps featuring birds for Royal Mail's Post & Go. Brought together and reproduced here for the first time, in larger-than-stamp size, these prints demonstrate the author's lifelong love and appreciation of our nation's birds. His own account of the process by which his linocuts are made, along with anecdotal descriptions of his bird encounters, bring the pictures to life. This beautifully produced collection will be coveted by wildlife lovers, artists and stamp collectors alike.

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This famous medieval round is reproduced here with exquisite black and white illustrations. Written about 1250, possibly by the monks of Reading Abbey, where the manuscript was located, Sumer is Icumen in is famous for its cheerful complexity, and for providing instructions on how it should be sung. The book contains a full-colour facsimile of the original manuscript and an explanatory text by Chaucer scholar Phillipa Hardman of Reading University. Sally Castle’s lively illustrations exactly portray the celebration of spring (not summer – read it to find out why) which is depicted in both words and music. For those who want to try singing it, there’s a modern version of the music as well.

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From the medieval dancers of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne to Wesley, Tennyson, Lawrence and John Clare, William Bedford's The Dancers of Colbek explores his own early years among the market towns and seacoasts of Lincolnshire. There are prize-winning poems from his family's history of farming, and a sequence of poems voicing John Clare's experience of poverty and dispossession during the enclosures. The decline of rural ways of life is shown against a background of the arrival of American forces in the 1960s, their nuclear weapons dominating the landscapes where medieval dancers once celebrated pagan rites in midnight graveyards.

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In The Blue Armchair, his third collection, John Froy seeks to rediscover his mother after her death in poems widely and wildly various. But which mother? The inspiring painter he hardly saw, a reckless mother he saw too much of? Or an ill, unhappy woman? These complications provide the background, but others too often take centre stage. We meet father, siblings, step-parents, a grandmother and a tragic grandfather, lovers and friends. In poems written over twenty years that don't flinch from pain, loss, and mental health issues, we also find much family love, art, colour, scented flowers, food and wine. We travel across the world, encounter the earth mother, Gaia, get up to hear the dawn chorus. An artist stepfather shines through, as we end with the joys in being a grandfather.

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This new anthology features work from 37 emerging and established Reading poets. Edited by award-winning poet Vic Pickup, this book presents a vibrant and diverse collection, reflecting the energy and variety of the town's arts scene.

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In Goldhawk Road, her eighth collection, Kate Noakes raises questions of identity – the who and where we are, the where and who we want to be. She returns to London after six years spent shuttling back and forth to Paris for work. An observant and curious flâneuse, Kate explores her new city and the wider country with fresh eyes on the geography, the natural and the human history, while other poems here take us on travels further afield to the varied landscapes of the USA, Japan’s temples and gardens, the Australia of her childhood and imagination and, of course, to France in both its sadness and beauty.

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A long-awaited re-issue, beautifully redesigned, of Jane Draycott's 'Tideway', a mesmeric sequence of poems about London's working river in a time of transition, with paintings by Peter Hay specifically created for the first edition as companion pieces to the poems. The River Thames can be a dangerous place to work: powerful tides, strong winds, difficult bridges and paralysingly cold water. At the turn of the millennium, Jane Draycott spent several weeks with the London watermen on the city's tugs, barges, and salvage vessels - a community of highly skilled men and women watching their working landscape and their futures change around them week by week: docklands transformed, slipways built over, warehouses converted to luxury apartments. 'Tideway' brings the poems written during that time together with Hay's light-filled paintings and the transcribed words of the watermen themselves. "What Draycott manages in two sentences contains a world. It isn't just the concise audacity of the imagery created here that is persuasive... [her] confidence secures the registers and makes a fine, clear lyric. Moreover, she makes significance out of insignificance. Say it out loud; you'll want to sing it in time. Time's the theme." David Morley

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'A la lumiere d'hiver' (1977) is a central work in the writing of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). Written in middle age, it forms a bridge between the poet's intricate early lyrics and his more expansive and meditative later work. Starting from a direct confrontation with the raw facts of mortality, its three poem-sequences strip away further layers of illusion until a glimmer of meaning starts to appear in the 'winter light' of the landscape of the Drome area of northern Provence, where Jaccottet made his home from 1953 until the end of his life. Tim Dooley's translation, 'In Winter Light', is the product of a long relationship with the original, which he first read at the time of its publication. His English version mirrors the tentative, scrupulous exploration of being he finds in Jaccottet's French, both its hesitancies and circular movements and, finally, its 'unblinking eyes'.

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A history of Reading's iconic gaol: architectural landmark, cultural emblem and symbol for a community determined to cherish the town's heritage. Layers of history and art are carefully peeled back as Peter Stoneley reveals its past as architectural showcase for Sir George Gilbert Scott's decorative (and expensive!) style, location for experiments in prison reform, training ground for the leaders of the Irish Independence movement and, of course, the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. Bringing the narrative right up to the present day with the discussions over its future use, the impact of the ArtAngel exhibition and Banksy's graffiti, this book is a timely platform for the building to tell us its story.

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Sally Castle’s beautifully hand-lettered and illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince sets the story among Reading’s parks, squares, rooflines and churches – the town that’s shaped her and her artwork and where Oscar spent an unhappy period in gaol. This enchanting combination of fairy story with concrete urban reality, a tale of sacrificial love written with a flourish and swirl, turns a simple book into a gem as precious as the large red ruby that glowed on the Prince’s sword-hilt. With an introduction by Michael Seeney, author and collector of Wilde’s work.

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A wide-ranging and fact-filled compendium of influential women, all with a connection to the Reading area. Some are well known international names, others deserve to be. They are pioneers, familiar faces, recognisable voices, unsung heroes, campaigners, world changers, socialists, celebrities, Olympic champions, writers, artists, and scientists. This book features more than 60 individual Women who have a connection with Reading and have made a notable difference in the world. They include a fish scientist called ET, an air racer and one of Britain's worst serial killers. Illustrated with a quirky mix of artistic styles, chosen to complement the individuals' stories, this book will open your eyes to the parts women have played in our town's life over centuries.

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In a beautifully harmonious juxtaposition of two cultures, Islamic Art Meets British Flowers combines the formal structure and discipline of Islamic floral pattern-making with British flowers and architectural forms to create a truly unique series of artworks. Hadil Tamim, was born in Al-Yarmouk Refugee Camp south of Damascus, Syria. Her family's heritage is rooted deeply within occupied Palestine. For the last two decades she has been living in Reading, UK, where she has turned to her art to create a bridge between two homes and two cultures. The result is a couple of dozen breath-taking new works - a new pattern line. They draw on the architectural forms of the buildings in Reading for structure and colour, the wildflowers found in and around the town for the arabesque, and the artist's training in ceramic and Islamic decorative art. Together with excerpts from her sketchbook and practical sections on the techniques she uses, along with Adrian's commentary on the wildflowers, this gift of creativity in a situation riven with conflict, provides inspiration and hope for art lovers across the globe.

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Have there always been places where the inner life and the outer world can’t be told apart? Do the cities we’ve so skilfully shaped reciprocate in any way? If the meaning of a building or symbol is lost can it be restored or only reinvented? In his carefully meditated debut collection of poetry, James Peake explores the imagination’s material legacy – how our ideas have entered wood and stone, celluloid and skin, metal and glass, and become restless in the process. Reaction Time of Glass is a work of unusual clarity and coherence. Like the cityscapes it relishes, it is home to interiors – eerie or homely, dark as well as light, imaginative as much as factual – akin to those we’ve inherited and inside of which we perform our lives.

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Whispers of Better Things is a quest to understand the origins of some of the campaigns in Victorian England for greater social and environmental justice.These movements created a legacy that still enriches our lives today. Without them we would not have the National Trust, Green Belts, 'rights of air and exercise', play grounds, public sanitation, or social housing. Without them, beauty would take even less precedence in public decision making than it does today.This book focuses on the Hill family, their forebears and associates who, by standing up and standing out in Victorian society, led the way to these better things. Some of these whispers require our attention today lest we lose them or fail to enhance and adapt them to our current and future needs.

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In recognition of the town’s long history and rich heritage, the poems gathered in this anthology celebrate Reading’s connections with poetry, both past and present. Written by poets who live or have lived in the area, many of the poems are set in Reading and the Thames Valley and make reference to poems and writers associated with the town over the years: Coleridge in flight from his university debts, Rimbaud’s association with a language school in King’s Road, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Jane Austen’s only formal schooling, and Dickens’s many visits to the town. The anthology is also an essential introduction to reading poetry. Each poet has provided his or her own account of their relation to the anthology’s theme, their inspiration, their muse. The poets represented are Paul Bavister, Adrian Blamires, David Cooke, Jane Draycott, Claire Dyer, John Froy, A.F. Harrold, Ian House, Wendy Klein, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Kate Noakes, Victoria Pugh, Peter Robinson, Lesley Saunders, Susan Utting, and Jean Watkins. Specially commissioned illustrations from Sally Castle round off this refreshingly approachable collection.

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In May of 1895 Oscar Wilde, the century's most dazzling man of letters, was sentenced to two years with hard labour for 'acts of gross indecency with another male person.' On his release he moved to France, where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol: an indictment of the prison system and the death penalty, an anguished plea for prison reform, and a passionate expression of sympathy for his fellow prisoners, those 'souls in pain'. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was a success from its first publication, and to this day some of its lines are among the most famous in the English language. Peter Hay's powerful images are retained in this new edition which contains an Afterword by Peter Stoneley, drawing on unpublished material in the prison archives.

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Presents the local history of Berkshire, from 1800-1900.

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Reading's Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I of England, was huge, wealthy and important until Henry VIII's dissolution in 1539, after which it declined over the years into the picturesque ruins that grace the north bank of the Kennet today. This history of the Abbey and the Abbey Quarter relates the motive behind its foundation, the relics that made it a famous destination for pilgrims from all over Europe, the part it played in royal and parliamentary life, the story of its downfall and its continuing influence on the geography and buildings of our town. With detailed descriptions of the Abbey buildings and their layout alongside features on monastic life and the Abbots, the book brings to life the role of the Abbey in the town both before and after its dissolution. A walking tour (with map) of the Abbey Quarter provides readers with an opportunity to discover the clues history has left behind; it indicates where some of the Abbey stone has ended up, and allows readers to connect directly with the past and understand the legacy we are left with today.

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Take a fresh look at the world through the lens of a self-confessed nature-obsessed artist. Asuka Hishiki possesses not only a sense of profound awe and wonder at the intricacies of the natural world, but also the talent to communicate it through her paintings. Recalling the Wunderkammer (literally, 'wonder rooms') of 16th and 17th century European collectors, Asuka Hishiki's Botaniphoria: A Cabinet of Botanical Curiosities encompasses subjects as diverse as rotting vegetables, endangered species, mundane weeds and backyard insects - all treasures to her and transformed into objects of intense and fragile beauty through her skill with watercolour. Her work is held in prestigious collections such as The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, California, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pennsylvania. One of the first people to appreciate her work said about it, 'your work is not to hang upon a wall in a bright living room, but to put in a drawer in the study. Then, alone in the middle of the night, to take out and ponder upon.' In the best traditions of Wunderkammer, this book is an artfully arranged collection intended to be pondered upon. From the interactions of the objects within the paintings, to the quirky choice of subjects and the realism with which they are portrayed, they will bear revisiting again and again. As Asuka admits, painting is her language. She is an extremely adept communicator in it.

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This Thing of Blood & Love, Lesley Saunders’ fifth collection with Two Rivers Press, is an intense examination of human culpability, the secrets we half-keep from ourselves, the contradictory selves we inhabit, the histories that live on unreconciled in us, the planet whose imperfect stewards we are; and above all the unfathomable mystery of being (in) a body, incarnated, made flesh – a thing of blood and love that betrays us with its appalling vulnerabilities. The poems in this book display the celebratory delight in language which has continued to impress readers and reviewers of Saunders’ work, though here imbued with a disturbed and disturbing awareness of mortality – the ultimate vulnerability from which in the end we derive our deepest sense of self.

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Mairi MacInnes published her first book of poetry, Splinters: Twenty-Six Poems (1953) as one of a series printed by The School of Art at the University of Reading. More than sixty years later, Two Rivers Press, based in the same town, has brought together a selection from her poetry of seven decades and added to it a gathering of poems written since the appearance of her most recent collection in 2007. Amazing Memories of Childhood etc. makes available once more in its first section a representative range of her poetry, much of it set in the USA, where she lived for nearly thirty years. In the second, it reveals with the new title sequence and other recent poems that her touch is as sure as ever. The vividness of her rhythmically vital work once again reminds us what a fine poet she is and has been for such a long time.

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'There's something about the Whiteknights area that makes people stay here.' - From the Foreword by Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3 Presenter and long-term resident Two hundred years ago, the aptly named 'Southern Hill' that rises steeply from the edge of the river plain south of Reading was part of Whitley and largely farmland. However, its vistas, fresh air and proximity to the town led prominent Victorians to invest in and develop the area and their contributions have shaped it into the 'village within a town' that it is today. Schools, the University, hotels and a care home now occupy many of the sites originally owned by the town's famous industrialists and their elegant homes have been co-opted for community use which gives the area its unique aura of egalitarian refinement. Celebrated in the annual walking tour of artists' studios, the creative heart of the district beats stronger than ever and this book brings together 28 artists to respond in their own way and their own medium to the place we call 'Whiteknights'. And to give context to the artwork, local historians paint a fascinating picture of the Whiteknights estate that became the University campus, the buildings, the streets and the people who lived here. This joint venture from the Whiteknights Studio Trail, celebrating 20 years, and Two Rivers Press, publishing in the area for 25 years, pays tribute to the heritage we are privileged to be part of.

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Downlandis a unique collaboration celebrating the landscape of the Berkshire Downs as seen through the eyes of artist Anna Dillon and poet Jonathan Davidson.

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The Colour of Rain is Susan Utting's fifth full collection, following her New and Selected, Half the Human Race. Here she demonstrates a new-found intimacy with the natural world, a closeness that leads her to become part of it. She 'becomes' a Willow Sister, joins an avenue of poplars, has conversations with bees. And while nature is joyfully celebrated, poems also lament its losses: felled trees. disappearing species, Rachel Carson's all too present 'Silent Spring'. The poet's trademark musicality and dancing rhythms are in evidence throughout the collection's four sections. Her fascination with language, its sounds and resonances, demonstrate reviewer Philip Gross's comment that 'Utting unashamedly loves language, and it seems to love her back.'

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Passionate and affirming, the poems in 'Love Leans over the Table' have at their heart an intense hunger for life, not only this side of death but after. Celebrating both human and divine love, they trace a path from personal loss to spiritual struggle and eventual epiphany, finding echoes in the vividly imagined experience of various mystics, including Rabia of Basra, John Donne and Simone Weil.

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The Retrieved Attachments in Peter Robinson’s new collection are to people and places, friends and loved ones, mentor poets and artists. Deploying the full range of his gifts, these poems are characteristically responsive both to fresh encounters and evocative returns. Presented in five titled sections they revisit the landscapes of his years in Japan, find a way to tell the story of a heartbreak, return to familial locations in an unvisitable Italy, elegize or re-encounter companions and friends, and, for the final section, recover intimate senses of a locality’s flora and fauna. Peter Robinson has been described as ‘the finest poet of his generation’ (PN Review) and ‘a major English poet’ (Poetry Review). Retrieved Attachments again shows why.

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'Some Other Where' is about steps and missteps, disconnection, and connection, both in relationships and between ourselves and the world. Matthews’s poems, which have been described by Bernard O’Donoghue as ‘life enhancing,’ embody those sudden jolts when we see our lives differently. Work here touches on the climate crisis, on how the ancient past speaks to our present lives, and on moments glimmering with the extraordinary and the sacred.

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The Star in the Branches, James Peake’s second collection, is an intense and heartfelt examination of memory, how it pains and consoles, deepens and shrinks, is both equal to, and less than, the objects and people who come to reside there. At either end of the book are the disappearances of loved ones: a parent succumbing to dementia, and a school friend lost to more voluntary forms of forgetting. Elsewhere are poems of erotic love, big city loneliness, and the boon and burden of family, poems of praise in which the spiritual and the tangible are not remote but intimate. From the ancient quarries of Naxos to the electronica of Aphex Twin, these highly distinctive poems celebrate the unique wherever they find it.

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James Harpur entered a boy's boarding school in the 1970s and survived to tell the tale. His sequence of poems is a searingly honest and compelling account of his five-year journey, from leaving home for the first time and sleeping in a dormitory in which enemies appear like shadows, to his sadness at his parents' separation and the death of a father figure from a bomb. For as well as Prog Rock, flared trousers and industrial strikes, this was the era of the Troubles. An introvert in an extraverted world, Harpur took refuge in Homer and the magical world of Troy, and found that school could be a haven, and even fun: a sex education lesson that backfired; a rare sighting of girls at a dance; a scary ride on his brother's illegal motorbike; a surreal trip to Covent Garden. Powerful, poignant and humorous, The Examined Life re-creates a 'vale of soul-making' that, with its tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains, is like a microcosm of life itself. 'A quite marvellous work...an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' -From the foreword by STEPHEN FRY

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The ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Paris Scenes) section of Les Fleurs du Mal contains eighteen poems which record a twenty-four-hour tour of the city: a type of Joycean journey from the point of view of a dandy Odysseus. Many of the poems in the sequence possess the sharpness and intensity of a dream, a dédoublement, enabling us to contemplate life in a manner that merges the fantastic and the sordidly realistic. These new translations are accompanied by artist Sally Castle’s responses prompted by the work of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s favourite ‘painter of modern life’. ‘These unblinking translations by Ian Brinton offer us a revival of Baudelaire’s offense against public morals. Hand-in-hand with the poet’s unquiet ghost, Brinton reminds us of the transparency of our contemporary mores so that we see through to Baudelaire’s genius, to his insistent sense of mortality in its Romantic eroticism and corruption. To understand the poet “tranced in envy” at the antics of these corpse-like erotics is to glimpse a form of compassion, of pity for the human condition. This strange and haunting quality is there at every turn of Brinton’s Baudelaire.’ — KELVIN CORCORAN

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The geology of the Thames Valley provides little good building stone, so the towns are made very largely of local brick. Reading is particularly rewarding for the brick-fancier, thanks to the variety of colours available and the inventive patterns that Victorian bricklayers loved to make. Illustrated throughout with photographs of surviving examples, Bricks and Brickwork in Reading gets back to basics with bonding, tells the 100-year story of a successful Victorian brick maker, pays homage to Alfred Waterhouse and revels in the delights of air bricks and crinkle-crankle walls. A walking tour gives the reader the opportunity to see the more notable examples of Reading's brickwork for themselves.

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`Jean Watkins ... illustrates a particular gift for concrete detail with poems so rich in the senses that they seem to lift off the page ... This collection also includes a number of poems which have a sparkly `stand alone' quality' - The North `Watkins works our imaginations through our senses and, as with the best short poems, the story is rich in what Roland Barthes called blind field, the white area around a photograph, the world around a poem' - London Grip `Watkins' sense of detail is sharp, whether describing nature, an urban scene in Reading or family matters. ... Make no mistake, these are poems crafted as carefully as the artefacts and heirlooms they sometimes describe ... and I am left wanting more' - The Interpreter's House

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Marking the 800th anniversary of the Forest Charter, award-winning botanical artist Christina Hart-Davies celebrates our long relationship with trees. Since pre-historic times they have provided us with shelter, fuel, medicine, food and even the air we breathe. They have tanned leather, dyed cloth and made everything from cathedrals to clothes-pegs. We have told stories about them, admired their magnificent beauty and woven them into our spiritual lives. Following A Wild Plant Year, which recorded the folklore and cultural history of our native wildflowers, in The Greenwood Trees Christina looks at the history, folklore and virtues of our native trees - and a few well-known introductions too - all illustrated with her exquisitely detailed watercolour paintings. We have relied on trees throughout our history. We still do, and we always will. Touch wood. * Which tree provides a talisman supposed to protect against lightning? * Which firewood burns best, even when green? * Which tree should you plant by the dairy and the privy to deter flies?

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Written as a poet’s view of the world’s oceans and islands from a small boat, these are poems concerned with human vulnerability and ecological anxiety. John Froy’s second collection is filled with love, hopes and fears for his family and friends and for the natural world, from Costa Rica to Japan, Somerset to Cumbria, to Antarctica and the oceans. There is loss, both personal and global – the death of a father, a stepfather – and environmental loss, the damage and havoc we continue to inflict on our planet, habitats and species despite all warning, and the urgent need to protect them. But there is also joy, humour, gratitude, admiration and love. Simple, direct and unconfrontational, yet the sense of catastrophe looms.

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Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) was undoubtedly one of the most admired and influential English painters of the twentieth century. Cookham was a major influence on both his life and painting and his reference to the place as ‘a village in Heaven’ is reflected in his famous series of paintings of Biblical scenes featuring local people.The 2017 Cookham Festival’s Stanley Spencer Poetry Competition invited poets to find inspiration for their own art in the work of this remarkable man. Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology publishes a selection from the entries to the competition chosen by its judges, Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder, and Peter Robinson. From this gathering, the shortlist of commended entries and the prize winners were then drawn. These carefully selected poems are presented here with an introduction by Peter Robinson, featuring photographs of the artist at work, reflecting this painter’s extraordinary life and works.

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