£9.99
Former Children’s Laureates Michael Rosen and Sir Quentin Blake join forces for a personal and uniquely affecting collection of poems about migration.
“What you leave behind
Won’t leave your mind.
But home is where you find it.
Home is where you find it.”
Michael Rosen and Sir Quentin Blake join forces for a landmark new collection, focusing on migration and displacement. Michael’s poems are divided into four: in the first series, he draws on his childhood as part of a first-generation Polish family living in London; in the second, on his perception of the War as a young boy; in the third, on his “missing” relatives and the Holocaust; and in the fourth, and final, on global experiences of migration. By turns charming, shocking and heart-breaking, this is an anthology with a story to tell and a powerful point to make: “You can only do something now.”
Out of stock
| Weight | 0.381 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 206 × 140 × 19 mm |
| ISBN | 9781406393705 |
| Cover | Hardback |
| Publication Year | 2020 |
“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
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.
This is the book that thoughtful readers of Charles Bukowski have been waiting for. Based on extensive research, it places Bukowski’s poetry in it’s American cultural context, and explores the key poems and collections in his development. It traces magazines, literary contacts and influences from the mid-1940’s to The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992).
Want to know about Bukowski and the movies, the Beats, Hemingway, Céline and Walt Whitman? About how and why Bukowski formed his unique style and image? And about where he fits in to West Coast and post-War American verse? Scholarly but accessible, this is the essential book to have. Also contains drawings by David Hernandez, rare photographs of C.B., and a preface by Gerald Locklin. – The Editor
“Is there a poet writing in Ireland who feels so profoundly and knows more surely love’s obsessions, its piercing chronicles, its succour and sorrows than Anne Fitzgerald? The poems in Vacant Possession char the page, leaving their imprint, imperishable, unique.” – Frank McGuinness
“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 body is the ‘bad machine’ of George Szirtes’ latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines – sources of energy and delight in their prime – go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of ‘minimenta’ after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive – and constantly reinventing – poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery.
