Weight | 0.508 kg |
---|---|
Dimensions | 224 × 140 × 28 mm |
ISBN | 9780744524864 |
Cover | Hardback |
Publication Year | 1994 |
Publisher | Walker Books |
£6.50
Billy’s Drift
This is the story of Billy Stuart. It tells of the hours he spends on the hills, catching rabbits in his bare hands or walking with his beloved dog, Drift. It tells of his troubles, his shocking accident and the mysterious events leading up to it. But it’s the story too of the narrator Theresa Thain. It tells her account of what happened eleven years before, and is interspersed with extracts from her diary of the following year, revealing her complex, often frustrating relationship with Billy. The two stories, though separate, are inextricably linked in their absorbing attempts to get to the heart of a seemingly impenetrable enigma.
5 in stock
Related products
Drysalter
£6.00Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize
Michael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.
Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.
From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.
This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.
From a Persian Kitchen
£10.00The food of Iran is a riot of tastes and aroma, and is one of the great – but least known – cuisines of the world. With an emphasis on the use of seasonal ingredients, fresh herbs and fragrant spices, Jila Dana-Haeri here presents a unique guide to quintessential Persian cooking. The varieties of beautiful jewelled rice dishes, hearty winter dishes and crisp summer salads, showcase the diversity of Iranian regional cooking, from the sweet and sour flavours of the Northern Caspian Coast to the spicy and aromatic tastes of the South and the Persian Gulf. The complimentary mix of flavours – the fresh tartness of pomegranate seeds and the subtle perfume of saffron, tarragon, dill and fenugreek – create an array of mouth-watering recipes that are now, thanks to Dana-Haeri’s contribution, accessible to cooks of all levels. This lavishly-illustrated cookbook offers an enticing selection of recipes for any occasion. It will be essential for all interested in expanding their cultural and culinary horizons.
Stag’s Leap
£7.50Winner 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.
Robert Herrick
£3.00In 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.
Michael Longley: Selected Poems
£9.50Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley’s love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms.
This is Michael Longley’s own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.