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Poetry

One Two II

£7.99

Daring, funny, fierce and musical, Eva Salzman has in her new collection managed to combine a robust yet never unsubtle take on modern life and love. Addressing itself primarily to the muse and the blues, this ‘songbook’ is woven through with references to history and myth so that the personal is always balanced by an awareness of community to which she sings.

 

With two published collections to her credit and this remarkable recent compilation, Eva Salzman is one of the most accomplished poets working in Britain today. She is a New Yorker, but such is the universal catchment area of poetry now that her living and writing in Britain does not make her either an American or a British Poet, but simply a very good one.

 

The epigraph to the collection draws on St Thomas ‘When one becomes two what will you do?’ and this becomes the central metaphor of the book: twins, doubles, doppelgangers. For a short book with so light a touch there’s a tightness and surety to the way in which preoccupations are worked through. So that amidst the personal lamentation of ‘Remembering Before Forgetting’ and ‘After Verlaine’ are juxtaposed a poem on the Brooklyn Bridge, a poem about the Buddhas of Bamiyan, as well as a poem on the cutting of the OUP poetry list, the sharply satirical ‘In the OUP hospital’ where she writes ‘I’d rather be lying unpublished / than be published by you and be dead’. Refreshing, dangerous, ironic, always surprising, this is Salzman at her most Salzmannesque. – Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2003

Opposite: Poems, Philosophy & Coffee

£9.99

What happens when poetry and philosophy converge? Over coffee at Leeds’ Opposite Cafe, award-winning poet Helen Mort and Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics Aaron Meskin set out to explore that very question.

 

Their caffeine-fuelled discussions morphed into the intriguing concept behind this book: a cross-disciplinary creative dialogue in which the poet lets her imagination loose on philosophical texts and the authors of the papers respond.

 

Like all the best coffee shop conversations, the results take unexpected turns through the art of tattooing, graffiti, Belle & Sebastian, food, rock climbing and whether there’s such a thing as bad art. So pull up a chair, and join Helen, Aaron and ten of the world’s leading philosophers of art for coffee, poetry and everything in between.

Oswald’s Book of Hours

£7.99

Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Oswald, King of Northumbria from 635 to 642 AD, was a warrior, evangelist, hunter, scholar, martyr and, most famously of all, main rival to George s claim to be patron saint of England. Oswald s Book of Hours is a series of elegies and eulogies for Oswald, written in the voices of an unlikely band of northern radicals, including union leader Arthur Scargill, hermit Richard Rolle, brigand John Nevison, Catholic rebel Robert Aske and Oswald himself. Brutal, provocative and thrillingly original, Oswald s Book of Hours is a pocket history of northern subversion and exile, going back before the Industrial Revolution, before the Reformation, before England even existed.

Our Sweet Little Time

£6.00

Our Sweet Little Time depicts a calendar year in a series of 120 haiku. Alongside seasonal changes and observations of the natural world, the poems pay equal attention to urban life and human behaviour. While each haiku can be enjoyed in isolation, collectively they form a narrative that enriches the book as a whole, reflecting personal events from the mundane to the momentous–from job-seeking and paying debts to marriage and what is the book’s central theme: the birth of the author’s daughter. In a book of contrasts, wonder and joy are counterpointed by unease, anxiety and exhaustion, all treated with honesty, insight and humour.

Paper Aeroplane

£14.99

When Simon Armitage burst on to the poetry scene in 1989 with his spectacular debut Zoom!, readers were introduced to an exceptional new talent who would reshape the landscape of contemporary poetry in the years to come. Now, twenty-five years on, Simon Armitage’s reputation as one of the nation’s most original, most respected and best-loved poets seems secure. Paper Aeroplane: Poems 1989-2014 is the author’s own selection from across a quarter-century of work, from his debut to the latest, uncollected work. Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor and Seeing Stars, this generous selection provides an essential gathering of this most thrilling of poets, and is key reading for students and general readers alike.

Pepper Seed

£8.99

Shortlisted for the Poetry Prize for First Collection from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry

 

Malika Booker s Pepper Seed is map and compass to a world of distinct yet interconnected landscapes. At home in a number of locales (Brooklyn, Brixton, Trinidad, Guyana, and Grenada) Booker trains a brave eye on the unspeakable and the unspoken. By turns bearing witness, to the interior lives of the characters that people her poems, and laying herself bare, conjuring an immediate and complex vision of the miraculous ordinary. Pepper Seed is a wind at the reader s back. It tickles, whispers, prods and shouts as we are borne from one world to the next.

Peter Redgrove: Collected Poems

£15.00

Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers – from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of ‘how important you’ve been to me. You’ve no idea how much – right from the first time we met.’

 

In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse – from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove – poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet’s art. In Redgrove’s poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.

Poet to Poet: John Skelton

£3.50

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. John Skelton (1460-1529) lived through one of England’s most turbulent and dangerous periods. A tutor to Prince Henry (later Henry VIII), Skelton enjoyed the monarch’s favour at court, despite his outspokenness. Throughout the sixteenth century many of Skelton’s poems were printed and reprinted, including “The Bouge of Court”, “Philip Sparrow”, “Colin Clout” and “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming”.

Red Roar

£12.00

A giant of modern literature, Niall Griffiths’ first poetry collection is every bit as exhilarating as his celebrated novels. Culled from two decades of notebooks, diaries and the sodden backs of beermats, “Red Roar – 20 Years of Words” celebrates Griffith’s journey towards ecstatic redemption through language. Here is poetry that strips the human experience back to its barest bones and exposes the raw and unflinching essence within.

Remembering Oluwale

£8.99

Winner, “Best Anthology” at the Saboteur Awards 2017.


The result of the Remember Oluwale Writing Prize, launched in late 2015, this is a collection of thoughtful and poignant responses to the story of David Oluwale, hounded to his death in the River Aire in 1969. The 1971 trial in Leeds, UK, of the two policemen accused of his manslaughter brought David’s plight briefly into the national spotlight; newspaper reports by Ron Phillips, a BBC radio play by Jeremy Sandford and poetry by Linton Kwesi Johnson followed. Then David was mostly forgotten, while the issues that he embodied – hostility to migration, racism, mental ill-health, homelessness, police malpractice and destitution – continued to scar British society, still making headlines fifty years on.

 

Remembering Oluwale includes extracts from recent books about David by Caryl Phillips and Kester Aspden, as well as poems responding to his story by Ian Duhig, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sai Murray, Zodwa Nyoni, and many other contemporary writers. The resulting body of work serves as an introduction to some fascinating new voices in UK literature, and also as a clarion call for us to re-make our neighbourhoods as places of inclusion, acceptance and hospitality.

Ricantations

£9.99

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

 

Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Loretta Collins Klobah as superb poetic story-teller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences. There are absorbingly reflective poems on Velasquez’ paintings of an hyperphagic child, painted both naked and clothed, a stray horse that hangs around the poet’s property, homunculi in glass bottles in a teaching hospital, the keeper of a butterfly farm, a high-wire circus family, and the irony of Nathan Leopold (with Loeb, the perpetrator of a famously brutal crime in the USA) becoming the expert on Puerto Rican bird life.

 

Poems begin from the most fantastic premises – a Che Guevera club in heaven with prizes for the coolest Che impersonator – then line by rich baroque line open up her island’s secret heart, revealing a society under multiple pressures even before Hurricane Maria, about which the title poem offers a brilliantly hallucinatory picture. Love must always be mixed with despair in a society where the reckless machismo of New Year gunfire kills a young woman, and older men prey on schoolgirls.

 

New World English and Spanish rub shoulders in these poems, but the reader soon picks up the precise, word-loving, observant rhythms of the poet’s own voice, a voice which has space for humour, as in a witty sequence of Jamaican poems about the attraction to men of women of ample size. There are more personal and intimate poems – memories of her mother’s psychiatric hospitalisation, of her own struggles with size and health, and the vulnerability of the body when a hurricane can strip life back to its hazardous basics.

Roar!

£9.99

Martin Hayes’ new collection is a roar of frustrated rage and pain at the way we live and work in the twenty-first century. It’s a book about 11-hour shifts, sick-days, lay-offs, computer systems crashing and the joy of Friday afternoons. Dermot, Stacey, Shaq, Big Bri, Dexter the old-timer, Antoine, Mohammed, Jim the Letch and Harry the head supervisor work for Phoenix Express couriers, located somewhere ‘between Stockholm Street and Syndrome Way’, making money for other people and trying to make themselves heard above the roar of an economic system that ‘has us in its mouth and is shaking us about in its teeth’.

Robert Bringhurst: Selected Poems

£5.00

For the past four decades, Robert Bringhurst has been writing some of the most powerful poetry in English. Distinguished by engaged and passionate curiosity, a wide-ranging intelligence and true originality, his poetry has sometimes been mistaken as austere and opaque. In fact, his work engages in ideas about the human condition, myth, the natural world, language and philosophy, and is unusual for having both a pared simplicity and profound wisdom.

 

His watchword is clarity, and the elements he considers crucial to effective typography could just as easily be looked for – and found – in his poetry: ‘invite the reader into the text; reveal the tenor and meaning of the text; clarify the structure and the order of the text; link the text with other existing elements; induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.’

 

There is such relish for the tactile, physical nature of words, for spare, elemental imagery and for rhetorical weight – in the voice, and the sound of the voice – that each poem has a sense of gem-like purity. While Bringhurst’s work may not be the most fashionable poetry being written today, it is certainly amongst the most compelling in its truth, power and beauty.

Robert Browning: Selected Poems

£3.99

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.

 

Robert Browning (1812-89) was largely educated in his father’s vast library and spent only one term at university. In 1846 he married Elizabeth Barrett Browning, eloping to Italy until her death in 1861, when he returned to England to complete his celebrated work The Ring and the Book (1868-9). He died in Venice in 1889.

Robert Herrick

£3.00

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

 

Robert Herrick was born in London, in 1591, the seventh child of a prosperous goldsmith. He graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1617, and became a Cavalier poet in the mould of Ben Jonson, mixing in literary circles in London. He was ordained in 1623 and subsequently appointed by Charles I to the living of Dean Prior in Devon, where he lived in the reluctant seclusion of country life and wrote some of his best work. In 1647, under the Commonwealth, Herrick was expelled from the priory and returned to London, where he published his major work, Hesperides, the following year. With the restoration of Charles II in 1660 he was returned to Devon and died a bachelor in 1674.

Robert Lowell (Poet to Poet)

£3.00

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

 

Robert Lowell (1917-77) was born in Boston. Life Studies, published in 1959, was a watershed in American poetry, initiating an autobiographical project that became the dominating feature of his work and shaped poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including For the Union Dead (1964) and Day by Day (1977). Faber published his Collected Poems in 2003.

Roddy Lumsden Is Dead

£7.95

With his exuberant and otherworldly poems, Roddy Lumsden has quickly established himself among Britain’s leading younger poets. In this his third book, the filmic tour de force of the title sequence, by turns comic, tragic and fantastic, follows the twists in a maze of madness, love and self-deception, from Edinburgh to Stoke Newington via the Philippines. The collection’s second half brings together new work with some favourite pieces which show why Lumsden is such a popular reader on both the literary and performance circuits.

Runaway

£11.99

A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

 

In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present – a now – in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, ‘counting silently towards infinity’. Graham’s essential voice guides us fluently ‘as we pass here now into the next-on world’, what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us ‘to the last be human’.

Running Upon the Wires

£7.50

Running Upon The Wires is Kate Tempest’s first book of free-standing poetry since the acclaimed Hold Your Own. In a beautifully varied series of formal poems, spoken songs, fragments, vignettes and ballads, Tempest charts the heartbreak at the end of one relationship and the joy at the beginning of a new love; but also tells us what happens in between, when the heart is pulled both ways at once.

 

Running Upon The Wires is, in a sense, a departure from her previous work, and unashamedly personal and intimate in its address – but will also confirm Tempest’s role as one of our most important poetic truth–tellers: it will be no surprise to readers to discover that she’s no less a direct and unflinching observer of matters of the heart than she is of social and political change. Running Upon The Wires is a heartbreaking, moving and joyous book about love, in its endings and in its beginnings.

Sacrilege

£7.95

‘If it weren’t sacrilege, I’d call Brendan Cleary the fallen Messiah, a troublesome, tormented prophet showing us the way through the fragmented wilderness that is the modern city, staggering through the disintegrating concrete jungle with his kindred dispossessed. He’s the urban cowboy of broken hearts, and he shoots from the lip. His Irish Card was a tearful and brilliant testament of estrangement and exile. Sacrilege finds him in the last chance saloon of inner exile, firing off irreverent messages to anyone who’ll listen: obsessed and obsessive, bleak but almost blissful in a manic fashion, scathing yet giving himself the same lashing as anyone else within tongue-reach. The Cleary of Sacrilege is a word-brawler looking for one of Miss Magdalene’s lost girls to save him from the cross of his own fear. Sacrilege is the gospel of the city according to Cleary, the four books of Goin’ Down Slow, Radioland, Sad Movies and The New Rock ‘n’ Roll. If poetry is the new rock ‘n’ roll, then Cleary is the mouthy member of the band, giving it all he’s got on stage with Sacrilege before smashing up his heart in the hotel-room. He’s the one who’ll get us all bust.’ – Harry Novak

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems (Poet to Poet)

£3.00

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the youngest son of a clergyman. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital School, London where he began his friendship with Charles Lamb, and Jesus College, Cambridge. He first met Dorothy and William Wordsworth in 1797 and a close association developed between them, issuing in their groundbreaking joint-publication, Lyrical Ballads, in 1799. Coleridge subsequently settled in the Lake District, and thereafter in London, where he lectured on Shakespeare and published his literary and philosophical theories in the Biographia Literaria (1817). He died in 1834 having overseen a final edition of his Poetical Works. As poet, philosopher and critic, Coleridge stands as one of the seminal figures of his time.

Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic

£16.99

Over the course of several years, Simon Armitage has written hundreds of poems for various projects, commissions, collaborations and events, which stand outside of his mainstream collections but now form a substantial body of work in their own right. They vary from single poems, such as ‘Zodiac T Shirt’, written to be performed at the launch of Beck’s Song Reader, to the suite of ten poems about Branwell Brontë written at the time of the writer’s bicentenary. Some have been published – such as the Walking Home and Walking Away poems – but the majority has not, and together they cover an eclectic array of subjects including sculpture, the environment, travel, drama, and media.

 

Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic represents the nature and scale of Armitage’s work – it is an important reflection of his public engagement as a poet and the astonishing range of his interests and talents.

Sax Burglar Blues

£9.99

The poems in Robert Walton’s Sax Burglar Blues range from vivid memories of childhood, such as ‘Twm Siôn Cati’ where a teacher ‘wiry-haired, fierce-eyed’ brings a fictional villain to life, banging out rhythms with her shoe on the floor of a Cardiff classroom, to memories of a rock‘n’roll influenced youth on the back of the Dusty Springfield night bus, or an archetypal narrative of getting kicked out of a band just before they hit the big time (‘Three Out of Four Original Members’).

Seasonal Disturbances

£9.99

Following her groundbreaking 2014 début An Aviary of Small Birds (‘technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak’ – Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances.

 

Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican émigré, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an ‘activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love’.

Selah

£9.99

The Hebrew-derived word Selah appears as a musical interlude in the Psalms, often meaning ‘stop and consider’, and is used in other contexts, religious and secular. This collection brings together poems that combine musical intrigue with history and desire, from organ recitals (‘Resonances’ and ‘When the Roll is Called’) to teenage gospel hip-hop (‘Hip-hop Salvation’). Humour and sex punctuate social commentary (‘Gay Poem’ and ‘No Timewasters’) throughout. Above all, Selah asks the reader to stop and consider, pausing at the fault lines in relationships and intimacy (‘Making Light’) and transgression (‘Transfiguration’), asking difficult questions and holding them to the light.

Sex&Love&Rock&Roll

£5.99

This is Tony Walsh’s eagerly-awaited first collection. He takes us on an extraordinary journey through ordinary lives; flying the flag for the performance poetry scene which packs out venues and festival tents around the UK. These are accessible, musical poems, influenced by the songs which soundtrack our lives, brimming with northern warmth and humour, propelled by passion and compassion as their bassline and their beat. Sex & Love & Rock&Roll is a book to unite and inspire. lt’s all about coming together and changing the world.

Sharp Street

£10.00

Sharp Street tells the story of 140 men who died in World War I. They were all from an area of Hull that is a relic of the Industrial Revolution; growing up together, working together and supporting local Rugby teams. The poems offer a narrative of the War from the opening salvos through to the Armistice. The central characters include Mina, a Mother of three girls and four boys who died in the conflict. One poem, Mina’s Dream uses the image of running into the sea as a metaphor for the machine guns that met the men in no-man’s land. Another poem, Rugs, brings us back to the contemporary conflict in Afghanistan. An end is beginning starts with the notion that you die twice: once when you stop breathing and second when people stop talking about you. The poems seek to keep the talk going.

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