Search results for ""worple press""

This collection follows Bowl from Worple and The Sound of Rain from Garlic Press. It explores the dynamics of presence and absence. There is lament but also affection and delight.

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The Guest Room, Diana Hendry’s new collection of poems, continues her always perceptive explorations of family, childhood and finding oneself, encounters with people (whether neighbours or strangers) and animals (pets or otherwise). Added to this is her embracing of Seamus Heaney’s notion of poetry paying attention to the world, here including climate change, coronavirus, political prisoners, Palestine and the health service, for example – never preachy, telling it slant.There’s pleasure to be found throughout, in her craft and characteristic wry humour and in what U.A.Fanthorpe called her ‘remarkable eye for the truth and an ability to see the otherness in the ordinary.’

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Whether the poems recall a square of chocolate dropped by a brother, show compassion for the suffering of ill friends, or imagine the creative life of Monet, they always understand the special power of poetry to leap across the spaces between people, and connect us to each other in a way that nothing else can. The sum of all this is a collection which does nothing less than make us proud to be human, and privileged to share these poems with a writer who is using his extraordinary linguistic gifts for the most significant explorations of the human heart.

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Accidental Fruit is about the almost seen, the half remembered and the not quite touched, the silent collisions of past and present and the perpetual interweaving of childhood and age. It registers death as the moment where lived experience is transformed into history. But it is equally preoccupied with the absurdities of the school run and the small satisfactions of village gossip, the way the trees move on a windy day, and its own impossible efforts to pin down the sea.

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'Like the Living End', an elegy occasioned by the sudden death of a school friend, is the centre-piece of this gathering of poems completed since The Returning Sky (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Described as 'the finest poet of his generation' and 'the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, mome

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The poet’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development, prompted, as is evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country, and beyond, by the 2016 referendum on membership of the EuropeanUnion. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, bothpersonal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer.

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Over a period of several months poets were invited to write new poems in response to the 1217 Charter of the Forest, to trees or woodland of personal significance to them, or how trees have shaped our society, landscape and lives. They sent poems about trees in gardens and along the sides of roads, trees to climb and build dens in, favourite trees cut down. Poems about childhood, memory, history, motherhood, nationhood, law, mythology and death. Poems about turning into trees. Poems about getting lost in the woods. Poems about oak, ash, alder, pine, chestnut, birch and many more besides. They are a profound celebration of trees. A structure emerged which echoed the three branches of the Charter: Trees, Woods, People. Although many of the poems could find a home in any one of the three parts, in 'Trees' poems were gathered in which we encounter individual trees as species or organisms: their life cycles, the pleasure of standing in their presence, the act of taking them apart. In 'Woods' we meet trees en masse, go deeper into the forest and get lost in the beauty and otherworldliness of ancient woodland. A number of poems take inspiration from the original 1217 Charter, soaking up the language, giving us woods haunted by foresters, hunts and pageantry. In 'People' we come out of the woods and witness how trees shape our lives: our culture, our society and our psyche. The poems are at times dark, sometimes painfully sad, and often incredibly funny.

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An eagerly awaited first collection

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National competition winners ( Caroline Price, Jenny Morris, Anna Davis, Phil Powley, David Grubb, Julian Stannard, Kate Rhodes,etc.) alongside young writers from Kent and Sussex ( Jack Lindsay, Megan Snyders, Hariett Hughes, etc.)plus introduction from Ann and Peter Sansom

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Poems by Nell Keddie, Maggie Sullivan, Susan Utting, Allison McVety, Paul Merchant, Sam Riviere, Michael Swan, Siriol Troup and others in the adult section from a National Competition; young prize-winners from Kent and Sussex ( Sophie Goodall, Sam Green, Jennifer Leach, Katy Dye, Charles Hooper, Christian Mueller annd others)

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Anthony Wilson's third poetry collection examines the precariousness of male identity confronted by shifting roles. It invites the reader into everyday dilemmas which are relished even as they remain unresolved. The personae of husband, father, brother and son are exposed and embraced.

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A collection of poems. Using a variety of forms, Peter Carpenter explores political, artistic, emotional and childhood contexts with technical assurance and a range of tones.

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Evoking childhood memories and lifelong relationships with humour, poignancy, and preternatural clarity, What Possessed Me also explores the natural world and landscapes in various parts of England, Wales, France, and Greece. Another theme is the work of teaching and other professions seen from the vantage points of provider, recipient, and witness. There are salutes to writers like Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and Jack Gilbert who, we are told, 'put his life into poetry.' Separate sequences celebrate years of occasional visits to Llandaff Cathedral and its surrounding landscape, and the delights and political revelations of a stay in Athens. This is a book diverse in its moods and subjects but unified by an infectious openness to the moment and to life's joys and sorrows, and an unfolding sense of accumulating experience and insight. It is illuminated by a recurrent sense of inspiration, of 'what possessed me.'

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A fantastic new chapbook from a poet much celebrated for his tonal control and simultaneous considerations of matters mordant and gleeful. Poems here are at once funny and melancholy; the style is inimitable: Stannard takes his readers through a range of emotions via a witty and wonderful tight-rope walking act with language

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Pieces of Us is an eagerly-awaited first collection, full of Sally Flint's sensuous, groundedand well-crafted darts into those 'spots of time' that reverberate again and again for the reader, rendered as they are in engaging, compelling and memorable detail.

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A brilliant collection that explores the frailties, perils and joys of love in all its guises. Clare Best's carefully observed, memorable and formally daring poems deal with a wide range of themes, including the intimacy of domestic situations, the rights of women in our society, and the pressing need to respect and learn from the natural world.

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At its heart a collection of love poems, Because we could not dance at the wedding is about coming out, coming to terms and settling down.Through a series of vividly observed scenes – from single- bedded student flat to registry office waiting room, from a clumsy hotel-room dance to the enforced domestic retreat of lockdown – these poems chronicle a relationship across two decades. Michael McKimm, whose work has been described as ‘powerfully tactile’ (Penelope Shuttle) and ‘delicately momentous’ (TLS), has developed a gently radical urban-pastoral, where beating the bounds of his east London neighbourhood may be a negotiation with anxiety and threat, but is always – ultimately – a celebration of falling in love and finding joy in an uncertain world.

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Anthony Wilson’s poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife explores central themes: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment.

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This is a new collection of poems. They are accessible, highly intelligent,and have a wonderful psychological truthfulness, particularly about relations between mother and daughter.The poems transcend the individual situation to become meditations on meaning in the face of mortality.

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Joanna Seldon was diagnosed with an incurable cancer in 2011, and lived with it bravely for five and a half years until her death at the end of 2016. Some of the poems here are informed by her experience of cancer. All of the poems celebrate life.

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In Bloodlines Andy Brown turns his attention to the subjects of medicine and the human body, treating them with the lyricism, imaginative range and formal agility for which his poetry has become widely known. The poems in part one, Shifting Shape, offer more personal narratives, while the poems of part two, Bloodlines, explore the longer lines of medical history, through medical paintings, sculptures and translated versions from Spanish. There are also several lively versions of medical scenes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a number of poems that focus on disease, hygiene and sanitation.

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Kevin Jackson's versions (rather than literal translations) of the sonnet sequence written in exile between 1824 and 1829 by Poland's greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz, are both urgent and memorable. The originals are poems of intense patriotism and nostalgia; Jackson's versions capture this and much more, including what he terms in his new companion essay, 'Mickiewicz's aching sense of loneliness and loss'. Jackson wrote in his introduction to Anthony Burgess's 'Revolutionary Sonnets' that 'pleasures both demotic and recondite abound in the pages': the same might be applied to this striking sequence. In the spirit of Robert Lowell's 'Imitations' he deliberately plays fast and loose with the literal sense of the poems, memorably revivifying diction and tone. In so doing, he shows himself to be an unassuming and masterful guide and host to Mickiewicz's original works.

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In Martyn Crucefix's bold new sequence of poems, A Hatfield Mass, the sensuous shapes of Henry Moore's work interweave with the fluid, observant voices of the verse. From curves and spaces, words and silence, Crucefix constructs a secular Mass that explores a variety of forms of love, our relationships with people and the world around us. In part a journey from innocence to experience, these are poems marvellously open to the beauty of landscape, the shared intimacies of our bodies, the passage of time through which we are endlessly becoming: "if not more beautiful we grow more rich"

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"Full Stretch" is a collection of poems.

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In these wonderful poems, telling stories of the abuse of women long before the outcries of the current scandals, Patricia McCarthy ranges across cultures and religions, poetry, art and music, to dramatize the particulars of female lives she has known, both tragic and heroic.

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A long-awaited second collection of poetry that exlpores both public and domestic themes with great skill, sensitivity and accessibility. Memory, the powers of art and the limits and responsibilities of 'free expression' are themes explored with rigour and humanity.

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Cult experimental novel from the late William Hayward first published by Heinemann in 1964.Follows the progress of Bran Lynch, Irish ex-poet, and a group of refugees from employment. Shows influences of the Beats and modernists such as James Joyce: 'a raucous combustion of jazz, sex and cider.'

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Poems by 60 poets involved in The Practice of Poetry course( students, tutors and visiting poets)at the University of Warwick from 2000 to 2010; poems arranged alphabetically, with an introduction by David Morley. Poems by Peter Belgvad, Zoe Brigley, James Brookes, Phil Brown, Peter Carpenter, Swithun Cooper, Jane Holland, Luke Kennard, Anna Lea, Michael McKimm,Glyn Maxwell, David Morley, Jon Morley, Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, George Szirtes, George Ttoouli, Simon Turner and others.

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Clive Wilmer's fourth collection of poems. The elegies, colloquys, meditations and passionate recollections learn from masters of modernism such as Pessoa and Pound, and are all the time informed by the prophetic voices of Morris and Ruskin.

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Exurbia is the name of the urban fringe at the outer limits of suburbia. These poems begin here, characterised by edges, transition and change. In the assured lyric voice for which Andy Brown's poetry has become well known, they pay meticulous attention to where and how we make our homes. The poems of the book's central sequence are elegiac versions inspired by the Argentinian poet Borges, gazing over the city's blurred outskirts at dawn and sundown, while the book's final poems reach fully ex urbia, arriving at woodlands and moors, rivers and estuaries. Here, from the edge of the shoreline, they head out to sea before making a circular migration back home.

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Clive Wilmer's New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Hagia Sophia', where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer's poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer's work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred's Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which - conversational in tone and formal in composition - make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer's translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

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Read four sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Peter Carpenter's poetry is radiant with quiet surprises, important moments captured in the folds of an old document wallet, in back gardens or on winter sea-fronts, buried in the sand or hidden by the noise of a football crowd. Such moments take flight to uncover a distinctive take on both 'the here and now' and the echoes of public and private histories. After the Goldrush is thus of its time and about time, in the attentive, skilful hands of a poet truly hitting his stride.One year's the historyOf Europe, time runs barefoot on the cinder-trackAt the White City (from 'Namings')"… a new voice, precise and distinct, and therefore, doubly welcome."George Szirtes "In short, Peter Carpenter is a masterly portrait-painter." Matthew Jarvis, English "always original and enjoyable poems…there's something modestly dazzling about Peter Carpenter's writing, but also something wonderfully spare and taut… it reminds me in places of the modern pastorals of R.F. Langley… the tone jinks and darts from the tender to the sardonic, the wry to the comic."CJ Allen, Staple "Peter Carpenter has the ability to pull the rug from under your feet at the very moment when you think you've got his number."Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Papers Peter Carpenter is co-director of Worple Press and was recently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading. His fourth collection of poetry is Catch from Shoestring; and he recently contributed to Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances (Penguin).

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