Shirley May’s She Wrote Her Own Eulogy takes the reader on a journey, the landscape of Kent and Manchester brought to vibrancy via Jamaica. It is a twisting road, the displaced lives making new communities on strange soil, the stories kept and told and shared. It is wisdom, it is memory, and it is future and hope.
In this innovative book of poetry from the editor of “Heart to Heart”, forty poems from around the world speak about specific works of art. Included on every spread is the poem in its original language, an English translation and the piece of art that the poem is about. Readers will look at art and poetry in a new way in this multi-cultural selection! It includes a biography (brief) of each author, translator and artist.
Her final collection as Poet Laureate, a frank, disarming and deeply moving exploration of loss and remembrance in their many forms. Presented in a beautiful, foiled package, this will be the poetry book of the year.
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.
Sir Walter Ralegh, poet, scholar, soldier and explorer, travel-writer, historian and favourite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, was born in Devon around 1552, knighted in 1584, imprisoned twice in the Tower of London, where he wrote his History of the World, and executed in 1618. Many famous poems attributed to him, like “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage”, may not actually be his. But, like the many poems written to him by the Queen and others, they testify to what Ralegh stood for in the Elizabethan age, as a poet and a man.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘An intoxicating mixture of poetry and prose, Slug is a taboo-busting delight’ SCOTSMAN
‘One of the best poets we have’ MATT HAIG
The new collection of poetry and prose from the Ted Hughes Award-winning author of Nobody Told Me. From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg’s anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie’s driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.
From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg’s ani-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie’s driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.
Welcome to Small Havocs, where views from hospital windows show more than what’s been said. Where a doomed poet’s name is called out in the waiting room. Where conversations tell us little but the white space around them say it all. Where a poet tells us all he wants to hear, but the reader discovers so much more.
So Many Moving Parts, Tiffany Atkinson’s third collection, is an eccentric 21st-century meditation on the awkwardness of body and spirit and their unexpected, often unwanted intrusions into the business of everyday life. Lyrical and experimental by turns, these poems push familiar events – commuting, telephones, babysitting, foreign travel – to open out toward unanswerable questions and elemental connections with an unstable physical world. A cast of real people observed over a year reveal momentary dramas as in a series of sketches, and the poet turns an ironic, unflinching eye on her own generation’s transition from youth to middle age. Bold, wishful, ambivalent, sometimes even grudgingly affectionate, the collection is a spiky celebration of the almost invisible revelations that insist when you only look closely enough.
Some Things is a collection of poems shaped by a diverse range of influences, including politics,gender, race, class and the many layers in-between. An adversary of oppression and discrimination worldwide and a critic of the current political landscape, Panya Banjoko’s poems speak candidly about the world we live in, highlighting the many different roles of those who hold power and how they use it,including personal and global relationships.
Dean Wilson suffers from Poetry Tourettes, a condition that affects one in every ten people in Kingston Upon Hull. But being Hull’s Fourth Best Poet is not without complications. Sometimes Dean gets overcome with the emotion of it all, and has to escape to the seaside. Sometimes Dean gets sad, but he doesn’t mind too much, because at least he’ll get a poem out of it. Most of the time, though, Dean is a happy soul. And sometimes he’s so happy he’s not safe on the streets. This is his first full length collection of poetry – and it is utterly magnificent.
“His contribution to the development of Irish satire is indisputable… Higgins’ poems embody all of the cunning and deviousness of language as it has been manipulated by his many targets… it is clear that Kevin Higgins’ voice and the force of his poetic project are gaining in confidence and authority with each new collection.” – Philip Coleman
Maura Dooley’s poetry is remarkable for embracing both lyricism and political consciousness, for its fusion of head and heart. These qualities have won her wide acclaim. Helen Dunmore (in Poetry Review) admired her ‘sharp and forceful’ intelligence. Adam Thorpe praised her ability ‘to enact and find images for complex feelings… Her poems have both great delicacy and an undeniable toughness…she manages to combine detailed domesticity with lyrical beauty, most perfectly in the metaphor of memory ’ (Literary Review).
During 2015 and 2016, two poets from opposite sides of the world, Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, exchanged poems in two cycles, Echoes and Refrains and Illuminations, that were in constant dialogue even as they remained defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives.
Kwame Dawes’ base was the flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a landscape in which he, a black man, originally from Ghana and Jamaica, felt at once alien and deeply committed to the challenges of finding “home”. John Kinsella’s base was in the violently beautiful landscape of Western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and the challenge of ecological threat and political ineptitude. In the first cycle, Echoes and Refrains, the poets sought and found a language for this conversation of various modes and moods. They were linked by the political and social upheavals in their respective spheres – Dawes contemplating the waves of violence consuming the US and the world, and Kinsella confronting the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants. These poems chart an unpredictable journey towards friendship. They reflect commonalities – love of family, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel – and in poem after poem one senses how each is hungry to hear from the other and to then treat the revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyric introspection – risky, complex, formally considered and beautiful. They stretch one another, and provoke to a poetic honesty that comes with authority and assurance. In the second cycle of poems, Illuminations, locations shift but the concerns remain and are considered in different lights. Speak from Here to There reminds us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite the peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us.
The long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams’ new collection is a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barge travelling an unnamed waterway. Some of his remarks are addressed to his talisman, the shrunken head of an African tribesman. The barge carries a sinister cargo and its captain has a preference for sadistic sex. Other poems in the book undertake joumeys – to Northern Cyprus, China medieval France, Florida – but like ‘The Barge’ they’re not exactly travel poems, more poems which travel. Welcome to the unsettling world of John Hartley Williams, whose restless, inexhaustible imagination, originality and maverick humour have enlivened contemporary poetry for years. Paranoid, erotic, disturbed and disturbing, these are bulletins from a dislocated, parallel world that excites, entertains and terrifies – and often feels more real to us than our own.
Togara Muzanenhamo’s first collection of poems evokes a number of worlds, familiar and unfamiliar. He takes us from his vivid, vanished childhood in Zimbabwe to Europe, where he lived for some years, making as he goes the stories and connections that coax a meaning out of time and change. These are less poems of memory than of creation. There exists a fractured world, partly hidden from the poet, in which dream makes a different kind of order. This unpredictable, parallel world provides an undertone, a treacherous reflection. “Spirit Brides” combines the real and the surreal, stone and steel on the one hand, and air on the other. The plains of the veldt in Zimbabwe are as tangible as the bookstore in Antwerp or the bottle-shop in Paris. There is a language here that fills some of the troubling silences of our time, that engages death, violence and, most particularly, love.
Hull’s own Mike Watts’ down-to-earth poetry is compelling and varied, covering all manner of sins in language both beautiful and harrowing. Spit & Hiss is visceral, bold, tempered with an intricacy of linguistic divide and form that may be read and re-read without encroaching mundanity, and leaves the reader thinking, “I know that feeling”.
Philip Fried’s Squaring the Circle is humorous and yet also mysterious in its evocation of esoteric physics and theology. The title poem presents a mystic/scientific quest for an impossible geometry as both a vaudevillian historical catastrophe and a way of understanding God. Throughout, Fried uses pastiche and the mashup of texts to explore historical moments and personal history. Behind its many forms and approaches, however, the book conveys the strong sense of a “persona”—the feeling, as Stanley Kunitz once said, that the poet has imagined a person who could write these poems.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize
Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling – which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending – Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip.
Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, ‘When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver’.
Olds’ propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music – sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
Brendan Cleary’s poems have never been for the squeamish or faint hearted. They smack of the streets around us. His often manic personas confront their demons, lay bare their hearts and reveal the anguish of their personal disorder in the city’s terrain. “Stranger in the House” sees Cleary in the realm of the urban epiphany. Tragic, sad, but darkly comic, his poems speak for the dispossessed, the bedsit dwellers, the losers in love.
“It was ringing in my ears when I put down Sacrilege.” – Justin Quinn, Irish Studies review
“Brendan Cleary is renowned for performances of his poetry, but he is not a performance poet he is a poet who is a good performer… he is as clear on the page as he is on the stage.” – Milner Place
Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed.
Dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.
Tracing a line from New Cross to the ‘towers of blood’ of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.
A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism – both political and personal, witness and documentary – Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s Swims documents wild swimming in lakes, rivers and seas across the UK, starting and ending in Burnett’s home county, Devon. An evocative long poem split into chapters, Swims is interspersed with a sequence about the poet’s father. This mesmerising, lyrical debut cuts a path through Britain’s waterways, investigating the human impact on the natural world as well as nature’s unmistakable effect on us.
Dean Wilson: Hull’s fourth best and Withernsea’s second best poet, daily collector of pebbles and an enigma wrapped in rhyme. Since his relocation to a cliff-edge residence, Dean’s creative juices have been flowing faster than the Humber into the North Sea and, inspired by his Holderness surroundings, he’s been writing furiously. Take Me Up The Lighthouse is the result. Open up and enter the wonderful world of Mr Wilson.
“Some of his stuff is a bit ropey but some of it is great.” – The Scotsman
Dean Wilson: Hull’s fourth best and Withernsea’s second best poet, daily collector of pebbles and an enigma wrapped in rhyme. Since his relocation to a cliff-edge residence, Dean’s creative juices have been flowing faster than the Humber into the North Sea and, inspired by his Holderness surroundings, he’s been writing furiously. Take Me Up The Lighthouse is the result. Open up and enter the wonderful world of Mr Wilson.
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.
In Tales From the Leaking Boot we ride four travel journals of wide-eyed, sharp and humorous haiku; through the streets of Austin, Texas; on a road trip through philosophy, cheese and the unlikely role of Mister Bean in Germany; into lemon groves, fish markets and Vodaphone ring-tones through Turkey; and finally to the Amusement Arcades and the shell-strewn beach, where Jonny Donut watches the horizon, in Cleethorpes. Evocative of landscape, sometimes satirical, and occasionally hilarious, we look with a squint glance at landscape, people and the haiku form itself. These are not reflective haiku, they are the reflective haiku s wild outlaw cousin, having fun and walking the wire.
A Tenderfoot is a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. He hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him.
A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett’s first Carcanet book, Tenderfoot sounds with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body – a human transformation.
Tania Hershman’s debut poetry collection, Terms and Conditions, urges us to consider all the possibilities, and read life’s small print before signing on the dotted line. These beautifully measured poems bring their stoical approach to the uncertain business of our daily lives – and ask us to consider what could happen if we were to bend or break the rules, step outside the boundaries and challenge the narrative. In feats of imagination and leaps of probability, falling simply becomes flying, a baby collects the data and scrolls through everything it sees, and there are daring acts of vanishing and recreation. Be wary, for even the evidence here often leads us astray. And in between this, Hershman’s precise poetry elegantly balances the known, unknown and unknowable matter of existence, love and happiness, weighing the atoms of each, finding just the exact words that will draw up the perfect contract of ideas.
The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird’s speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.
Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.
With The Barbarians Arrive Today, Evan Jones has produced the classic English Cavafy for our age. Expertly translated from Modern Greek, this edition presents Cavafy’s finest poems, short creative prose and autobiographical writings, offering unique insights into his life’s work.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863-1933) was a minor civil servant who self-published and distributed his poems among friends; he is now regarded as one of the most significant poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influence on writers across generations and languages. The broad, rich world of the Mediterranean and its complex history are his domain, its days and nights of desire and melancholy, ambition and failure – with art always at the centre of life.
For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry’s most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a writer of highly musical poetry that he spun round in his fingers with the aplomb of a magician who refuted reality, he ended up stuck in free verse, impelled mainly because of the surrealism of a world in which the label and the content of any box seldom matched. After his first gratuitous exercises when he was 22 and striving to commit himself to love poetry, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker employed in a factory producing bicycle parts who, stealing a tiny wheel one day, a few nuts and bolts on another, a gear, then taking home a chain and a length of pipe, until finally realising to his amazement that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society. A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions. In 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he’d always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.
“Elizabeth Barrett has a right to melancholy but does not claim it [her poems] are full of a controlled emotion which in lesser talents too easily tips into stale rhetoric or sentimentality. In Barrett there is honesty, never self-pity.”(prop)
“This poet reassures us of her ability – her quality – as a writer, the minute we begin to read. The language is natural and easy. We are listening to a friend confiding in us, enthralling us, over a cup of coffee. All our concerns, all our common, but individual experiences of contemporary living are mirrored here in these well wrought verse-tales. After reading these poems you will feel that you are Elizabeth Barrett’s most intimate friend. Not only is it the sureness of this poetry that convinces me that it is the work of a significant voice, but also its range… Humanity, intelligence and a perceptive honesty about herself and the world are her characteristics. And while the poems have a universality they are not a-sexual – they could only have been written by a woman, and go deep into the subjective and objective preoccupations of that sexual definition, but not predictably. Female readers of this book will understand; male readers will be informed and quite probably seduced.” – Kevin Bailey, HQ Magazine
The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.
