The Best Poetry Book in the World is a collection of popular poems from published poets from the last five years. Celebrating Burning Eye’s 5th birthday, this anthology brings together all the anthems, the foot stompers, finger clickers, belly laughing crowd-pleasers under one cover. Prepare yourselves.
Roddy Lumsden’s poems eavesdrop on a half urban, half surreal world of ladies’ men and misfits, trying on roles and acting out fantasies. His second collection The Book of Love is a celebration of love in all its delightful perversity, whose characters include a randy actor, a vinegar addict and couples courting in the filing cupboard and covered with marmalade. As voyeurs sneak into one poem, naturists streak across another and there is the inevitable lurking presence of the poet’s own (rich but square) alter ago. These snappy, witty poems leave tantalising echoes and reverberations that make you want to read them again and again. Now out of print in this edition, most of the poems were included in Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (2004).
‘This is Neruda at his most, expansive, extravagant and ecstatic.’ -Andy Croft, The Morning Star
Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitan as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.
The provocative wordsmith is back: this time with her first novel, The Conquest of the Red Man. It is the story of Corinne Zed, a penniless bourgeoise who makes a meagre living from writing. She decides, at the age of 39, to add a little piquant to her life – rich people are so boring – and experience romantic passion at long last. What could be more exciting than falling in love with a leftist who, in a previous life, planted bombs? The problem is that she loves to eat. It’s not reasonable to start a revolution when it’s time to eat and drink champagne. By the way, is revolution edible?
Always on the scout for her next great meal, Corinne experiences a political-literary love story that takes her from right to left, from Stendhal to Lenin and from Brussels to New York via Turin and Paris. Even if she discovers how to make a grand entrance into Leftie-land, will her dreams be fulfilled?
This caustic novel contains a generous dose of gustatory eroticism, fabulously crunchy nuggets, and a blow-job that would make Lenin turn bright red. Politics is never far away, but nothing gets in the way of the pleasure of reading – proof that the left is dissolvable in irony. It is also a sharp chronicle of our society.
The Dark Film, Paul Farley’s first collection since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames, expands the poet’s research into ‘the art of seeing’, and all that humans project of themselves into the world. Farley’s great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, with the most apparently effortless of gear changes; he brings to our immediate attention things previously hidden – whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision, or right under our noses. The Dark Film is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding – as well as Farley’s most richly entertaining and rewarding collection to date.
The poems in Alan Jenkin’s magnificent collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age.
The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure – his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions – acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.
Virginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river’s upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers and was familiar with all aspects of the Thames and its hinterland: both the natural world and the people whose lives are intimately connected with the river. In recent years, she has returned to the Thames, working for a summer as an assistant lock-keeper, and walking its length to record and respond to its landscapes, river life and river folk as a poet and photographer. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland’s Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. The English River is her first book-length poetry collection, showing many new sides to this multi-talented artist: as poet, nature writer, storyteller and photographer. The foreword is by Pete Townshend. ‘Virginia’s story is about the river and the people who work on it, especially those who man the locks. She captures a view of the upper reaches of the River Thames that is entirely fresh. There are glimpsed moments of the claustrophobic beauty of the wooded parts that contrast with the open expanses of uplifting countryside where the river meanders through woodland and farmland. Focussing on the professionals who work on the river, and who manage the locks and the flood plains around them, Virginia suggests – as she works as a lock-keeper’s assistant – that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work. She herself becomes enchanted, that is certain. She makes herself vulnerable in the most romantic way, working and writing and evoking everything she sees and feels as both a storyteller and poet, and as photographer.’ – Pete Townshend, musician
‘My poor old heart, I’ve left its drawbridge down.’
Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father’s skeleton clocks. Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the tidy hem of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something beyond our squeaky comprehension. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up.
Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic. Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal.
The Glass Aisle moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence. Acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park. In the book’s title poem, a telephone engineer repairs a line that crosses the canal to the site of an old workhouse. Tormented by the voices of former “inmates”, he unwittingly connects the centuries, setting free the Victorian ghosts of poacher John Moonlight, lone parent Mary Thomas, and a host of others who haunt the poem’s present-day walker. The collection is in three parts. In the first section, a thematic poem, ‘The Hesitant Song’, “orchestrates silence” while playing “the sea’s soft pedal” to convey the loss of a mother’s songs. Familiar “visitors” from earlier books: Brown Helen, Catrin Sands et al, haunt poems where the sea and music hold a nineteen-sixties childhood in its place. The book’s closing cadence combines love poems with some raw elegies.
The Hail Mary pass is an American football term. It is used when a ball is thrown blind in the vague hope a receiver will make the catch and deliver a last minute victory.
‘Fiona Curran is a bright and fiesty northern voice. She treads the landscape of the urban and the domestic, from the smokey fug of the betting shop to the lavendar scent of the bathroom. I like Fiona’s poems because she writes about real people who truly exist and whose lives and wine-fuelled loves I can believe in. I just love this. “The Hail Mary Pass,” is spunky, sexy and brash. This is a belter of a debut and I very very much look forward to the next verse.’ – Wilton Carhoot; Editor of The Slab.
Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird’s protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird’s characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.
Angela France’s The Hill is a remarkable sequence of poems that leads us up the winding footpaths of Leckhampton Hill near Cheltenham. Under our feet are fossils and flora, bones and the relics of quarrying. France is masterful in capturing the sense of place and weaving the entrancing voices of the hill, its walkers and inhabitants, into the fabric of these formally adventurous poems that range from prose to ‘anglish’, richly worded and delighting in their shapes and sounds. Here, we encounter ghosts, foxes and ancient kings. We meet the protestors who, years before the Kinder Scout Trespassers, were standing up for their rambling rights and took the law into their own hands in 1902 when a landowner tried to enclose the hill they had walked for generations. And though history is never far from the surface, The Hill raises questions that are just as important today; who has the right to roam, whose land is it, anyway?
Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2020
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020
A Guardian Book of the Year 2020
A Sunday Independent Book of the Year 2020
An Irish Times Book of the Year 2020
A forceful and moving final volume from one of the most masterful poets of the twentieth century.
Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her ‘edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history’ ( J.D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women’s lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.
Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother’s parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: ‘Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / … Their hands are full of words.’ Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: ‘We will not leave you behind’, a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.
A stunning Penguin clothbound edition of Homer’s great epic, in E. V. Rieu’s classic translation.
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization – an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. The story centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus’ killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer’s theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background..
Seven Greek cities claim the honour of being the birthplace of Homer (c. 8th-7th century BC), the poet to whom the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey are attributed. The Iliad is the oldest surviving work of Western literature, but the identity – or even the existence – of Homer himself is a complete mystery, with no reliable biographical information having survived.
E. V. Rieu initiated Penguin Classics with Allen Lane and his famous translation of theOdyssey was the first book published in the series in 1947. The Iliad followed in 1950.
Alistair Noon’s new collection of poems, The Kerosene Singing, roams the borders and places on the edge of many things, whether that’s on the edge of nations and continents, of history or of the realms of possibility. A dynamic lyric energy enlivens everything it comes into contact with in these poems; where history, landscape and language loom large, Noon’s attentive rhythms and wit bring out the most subtle detail. These quicksilver poems invite the reader outand beyond, into new uncertain territories, subject to change without further notice.
Every week for the last five years, award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been telling the story of World Literature in The Independent on Sunday. In limericks. With scrupulous regard to the rigours of the limerick form, Rowson has endeavoured to encapsulate humankind’s fascination with the written word in all its forms, whether poetry, drama or prose – as a series of bad jokes, cheap puns, strained scansion, excruciatingly contrived rhymes and pure filth. Now collected together for the first time, The Limerickiad: Volume 1 takes us from the Sumerian classic Gilgamesh to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, with both verse and illustration displaying Rowson’s reverence for the original texts. The Limerickiad promises to do for Literature what 1066 and All That did for History.
Following the success of The Limerickiad volume I, Martin Rowson continues to lower the tone by reducing literary classics to a series of terrible limericks. Mixing Low Comedy and High Seriousness, awful puns and dodgy rhymes, The Limerickiad volume II takes the story forward from John Donne to Jane Austen. Along the way he takes the piss out of Jacobean Tragedy, mangles all XII books of Paradise Lost and hangs out with some like-minded Augustan satirists before ridiculing the entire European Romantic movement.
Every week since 2006, the award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been making a fool of himself in The Independent on Sunday by reducing the work of some of the world’s best-loved writers to a series of puerile and filthy limericks. Following the success of the first two volumes of The Limerickad (from Gilgamesh to Jane Austen) The Limerickiad volume III lays waste to the literary greats of the nineteenth-century. Rowson mangles Melville, puts the boot into the Brontёs and defaces the complete works of Dickens. He even finds time to write a limerick in homage to its inventor (‘When a runcible fellow called Lear…’).
‘Beneath the surface of even the seemingly safest of poems, there is something lurking, almost as in old folk tales, a danger or a disquiet which is never far away.’ Andrew McMillian, PBS Autumn Bulletin
The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while – waking or dreaming – the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems’ imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.
The Midlands is the second collection of poems by Tony Williams, following his acclaimed debut The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Beginning in the Midlands themselves, where Mercian kings sleep under wurzels near the local Asda, his poems open out into tragi-comic paeans on dog walks, photocopiers, shut shops and lunchtimes, and meditations on what it means to be a person living, wonkily, anywhere. But beneath the word-play and tomfoolery, something strange is brooding in the caverns underneath the hill. History is coming for you, and if you set out to meet it, you’ll never find your way home…
Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
A high-ranking government minister with a colourful past is sent on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul. When his trip ends up in a bar-room brawl, he becomes Europe’s most wanted man overnight. Chased by the authorities, damned by religious leaders, pursued by those looking for vengeance and head-hunted by fanatics, his odyssey begins.
Plunged into the ancient past, Odysseus must now contend with all the unworldly beings and unnatural phenomena that stand in his way. The Cyclops, the Sirens, witches, whirlpools and flesh-eating armies must all be overcome in the struggle for survival and the long voyage back home.
Simon Armitage’s The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in September 2015 then toured the UK in a co-production with English Touring Theatre.
The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
The Reater brought together challenging new British writing with the best of Southern California. It features established names alongside excellent newcomers. Interleaved among the poetry and prose are interviews, reviews, and striking illustrations. The Reater is also the best U.K. outlet for new and reprinted material by the great names of L.A./Long Beach literature: Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, Fred Voss, Joan Jobe Smith and others.
Contributors
Dean Wilson, Thomas Kretz, Andrew W. Pye, Carol Coiffait, Labi Siffre, Lisa Glatt, Seamus Curran, Peter Werner, Fred Voss, Ian Parks, Jacqueline Karp Gendre, Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin, Dorothy Cowlin, Shane Rhodes, Devereaux Baker, Graham Hamilton, Joan Jobe Smith, R. Gerry Fabian. Photographs by James Brown & Simon Rees
The shadow of the moth flicks the page I’m reading. I look up to the white blindness of a tired yellow bulb hanging heavy with temporary heat. My eyes recoil, staining the page with silverfish jizz. After blinking a couple of times, I push the button, raise the nib and I’m back to this…
Contributors
Devereaux Baker, Andrew Parker, P.D. Oliver, Maurice Rutherford, Rosemary Palmeira, Joan Jobe Smith, T. Anders Carson, Matthew Firth, Jaqueline Karp-Gendre, Ian Parks, Brian Docherty, Fred Voss, Peter Knaggs, Dean Wilson, Jules Smith, Linda K, Seamus Curran, Peter Didsbury, Joanne Pearson, Charles Bukowski, Norman Jackson, Andy Fletcher, Geoff Stevens, Gerald Locklin, Labi Siffre, Carol Coiffait. Illustrations by Kevin Rudeforth
Issue 3 contains poetry by Brendan Cleary, Geoff Hattersley, Roddy Lumsden, Labbi Siffre, Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Gerald Locklin, Greta Stoddart, Simon Armitage. Reviews of ‘On The Buses With Dostoyevsky’ by Geoff Hattersley, ‘Sacrilege’ by Brendan Cleary, ‘New Blood’ a Bloodaxe anthology, and ‘Carnegie Hall With Tin Walls’ by Fred Voss.
Issue 3 also includes the first ever published interview with Charles Bukowski entitled ‘Charles Bukowski Speaks Out‘ by Arnold L. Kaye. – This is the first time the interview has been reprinted since its original publication in ‘The Chicago Literary Times‘, March 1963.
Contributors
Brendan Cleary, Gerald Locklin, Khan Singh Kumar, Peter Knaggs, K.M. Dersley, Roddy Lumsden, Joan Jobe Smith, Labi Siffre, Lisa Glatt, Carol Coiffait, Tricia Cherin, Charles Bukowski, Sean Burn, Devreaux Baker, Jules Smith, Rodney Wood, Fred Voss, Richard Whelan, Greta Stoddart, Maurice Rutherford, James Prue, Ben Myers, Simon Armitage, David Hernandez, Charles Bennet, B.A.J. Evans, A.A. Dodd, Dave Wright, Gordon Mason, Ian Parks, Andrew Parker, Michael Curran, Dean Wilson, Daithidh MacEochaidh, Jon Summers, Janet Oliver, Fiona Curran, Denise Duhamel, David Lyall, Raymond Robinson, Mark Mckain, Geoff Hattersley. Drawings by David Hernandez
The Reater seems to carry on a colloquial poetic conversation between the east coast of Britain and the west coast of America with readers and writers listening in from many points in the middle. Much of the work it publishes has the rare quality of language overheard, avoiding the preached at spoken to told off stuff that sometimes characterizes grander or more traditional work.” Simon Armitage
“The streetwise slab-sized Reater is streets ahead of any other magazine in giving the reader a working report on the buzzy special relationship between British and American poetry. The new writers it generously showcases in each chunky issue are often as startlingly original as the more familiar names. All are in touch with our times as well as with our selves.” Neil Astley
Contributors:
Rodney Wood, Peter Ardern, Brian Docherty, Sean Burn, Virgil Saurez, Felicity Tumpkin, Steve Timms, Steve Sneyd, Jacqueline Karp, James Prue, Andrew Parker, Mary Rudbeck Stanko, Ken Smith, Peter Carpenter, David Roberts, David Lyall, Jacqueline Sousa, Jo Pearson, Brendan Mcmahon, Dave Newman, Anna Woodford, Finella Davenport, B.Z. Niditch, Robert Nazarene, Rosemary Palmeira.
Paintings by Dee Rimbaud
The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke’s debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on.
Matthew Caley’s debut Thirst [1999] was nominated for ‘The Forward Prize For Best First Collection’ and much acclaimed: “shaped and honed to a mosaic brilliance” – Ken Smith.
‘Stunning invention and remarkable versatility’ – Sophie Hannah.
“Thirst is a joy -comic, witty, even touchingly poignant” – Time Out.
This second collection ‘The Scene Of My Former Triumph‘ extends his patrol across the liminal borders between urban myth and the myth of pastoral escape.
Jonathan Bate believes that the slow, meditative reading of poetry – absorbing ourselves in the images of a poem, slowing to its beat, allowing our minds to rest in the pause of a line-ending – can bring us tranquility as we find echoes of our own experiences on the page. Experiences of beautiful places, strong feelings and moments that lift the human spirit.
In The Shepherd’s Hut, Bate introduces us to the diet of swans, the quest for inner peace in ancient Chinese poetry, the English seaside and the summer Mediterranean, a rose garden and a snow-covered moor. He reminds us what it is like to fall in love and to say goodbye.
These are poems of memory and of mourning; quick-fire thoughts and longer meditations inspired by the great poets of the past.
