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The Poetry Pharmacy is one of the bestselling (and most giftable) poetry anthologies of recent decades. Now, after huge demand for more prescriptions from readers and 'patients' alike, William Sieghart is back. This time, tried-and-true classics from his in-person pharmacies are joined by readers' favourite poems and the new conditions most requested by the public - all accompanied by his trademark meditations (warm, witty and understanding, with just a twist of the challenging) on the spiritual ailments he seeks to cure. From ageing bodies and existential crises to long-distance relationships and embracing your slovenliness, The Poetry Pharmacy Returns caters to all-new conditions while drilling further down into the universals: this time, the challenges of family life, and of living as a person among others, receive a much closer look. Perfect for the treasured friends, barely tolerated siblings, beloved aunts and revered grandparents in your life. ISBN 9780241419052 -
When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionA New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 -'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney. ISBN 9780141990026 -
A remarkable first collection by an important new poet. In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet. *SHORTLISTED for Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer of the Year 2021* ISBN 9781787332263 -
A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work-over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world's poems-and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing. ISBN 9780300255034 -
Jane Hirshfield's urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives' dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth's continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry - loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise - that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield's structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure. ISBN 9781780375120 -
Sinéad Morrissey has published six celebrated collections of poetry. This Selected Poems reveals how she has developed formally and thematically from the precocious and carefully considered first book, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), to the most recent and highly praised, On Balance (2017). There is throughout Morrissey's work a civic dimension: her imagination is dynamically peopled, as are her various landscapes and sense of history, and she is drawn to the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of all human intention and inquiry, as well as to celebrating individual women and men and the things they create or unleash. There is always a paradox which she enters and explores, making it luminous but never resolving it. For Morrissey, each poem becomes a word-space in which readers are set free on their own journey of discovery. ISBN 9781784109318 -
Keep 'Er Lit is the second volume of Van Morrison's collected lyrics containing one hundred and twenty songs from across his storied career. It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others. Then there are the songs of memory and of childhood; songs about the natural world and about the perspectives it can provide on time. Taken together with Lit Up Inside, this volume gives an overview of his fifty-year career, revealing why he is celebrated as one of the most innovative and enduring songwriters of our time. ISBN 9780571353897 -
New Selected Poems includes the key poems of Eavan Boland's career to date, from New Territory (1967) to Domestic Violence (2007), concluding with a selection of new poems. Developing her work through more than a dozen collections, Boland continues to find new dimensions in language, in history and in the body subject to passion and to time. Her critical writing, her poetry and her example have made an emancipating difference to writing in Ireland. As she remarked in an interview in 2000, 'women are now writing the Irish poem across a very big register of new tones, new subjects, new approaches...I think I was one of the poets who became convinced of the need for change.' ISBN 9781847772411 -
Poet Stephen James Smith's sympathies lie with the addicted and the convicted, often responding to what he finds on life's margins. His sharp-edged forceful language derives from his gifts as a performance poet and his fearlessness in looking into the eye of his subject matter. His poems get their charge, as well as their shape and substance, from his use of demotic rhythms, the vividness of his vernacular and his emotional directness. ISBN 9781851321445 -
Published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of acclaimed Irish poet Eavan Boland, this book brings together many of Boland's best known poems with her own striking photographs of her native city, Dublin. Through juxtaposition of text and image, place and memory, the book creates a unique portrait of the city: 'fragments', Boland says, 'can point at something accurately'. A Poet's Dublin also includes an introduction by Jody Allen Randolph and a conversation between Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan in which the two poets reflect on their shared city and the central role it has played in their lives and in their work. ISBN 9781847774477 -
*WINNER OF PULITZER PRIZE 2020* Jericho Brown's daring poetry collection The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex - a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues - testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction. ISBN 9781529020472 -
I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree: A Nature Poem For Every Day Of The Year, named after the first line of Judith Nicholls' poem 'Windsong', is a lavishly illustrated collection of 366 nature poems - one for every day of the year, including leap years. Filled with familiar favourites and new discoveries, written by a wide variety of poets, including John Agard, William Blake, Emily Bronte, Charles Causley, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Roger McGough, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, John Updike, William Wordsworth and many more, this is the perfect book for children (and grown-ups!) to share at the beginning or the end of the day, or just to dip into. ISBN 9780857637703 -
Roger Robinson's range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; the ubiquitous presence of racism; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents encountered in daily life; and reflections on the purposes and costs of making art. Not least, in the sequence of poems that reflect on the meanings of the Grenfell Tower fire, Roger Robinson finds ways to move beyond a just indignation to uncover the undertones of experience that bring us nearer to the human reality of that event. The collection's title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often just beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty, and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures. A Portable Paradise is not the emptiness of material accumulation, but joy in an openness to people, places, the sensual pleasures of food, and the rewards to be had from the arts of word, sound, and visual enticement--in short an "insatiable hunger" for life. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity, and generosity of spirit. These finely crafted poems reveal Roger Robinson's capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and to engage our thoughts. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go. ISBN9781845234331 -
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Rachel Long's much-anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, announces the arrival of a thrilling new presence in poetry. Each poem has a vivid story to tell - of family quirks, the perils of dating, the grip of religion or sexual awakening - stories that are, by turn, emotionally insightful, politically conscious, wise, funny and outrageous. Long reveals herself as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarize our current moment. But it's her refreshing commitment to the power of the individual poem that will leave the reader turning each page in eager anticipation: here is an immediate,wide-awake poetry that entertains royally, without sacrificing a note of its urgency or remarkable skill. ISBN 9781529045161 -
What happens when cultural memory becomes a commodity? Who owns the memory? In The Memory Marketplace, Emilie Pine explores how memory is performed both in Ireland and abroad by considering the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history. Analyzing examples from this realm of theatre, Pine focuses on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience. Whose memories are observed in these transactions, and how and why do performances prioritize some memories over others? What does it mean to create, rehearse, perform, and purchase the theatricalization of memory? The Memory Marketplace shows this transaction to be particularly fraught in the theatricalization of traumatic moments of cultural upheaval, such as the child sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. In these performances, the role of empathy becomes key within the marketplace dynamic, and Pine argues that this empathy shapes the kinds of witnesses created. The complexities and nuances of this exchange-subject and witness, spectator and performer, consumer and commodified-provide a deeper understanding of the crucial role theatre plays in shaping public understanding of trauma, memory, and history. ISBN 9780253049520 -
Lana Del Rey Lana's breathtaking first book solidifies her further as 'the essential writer of her times' (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana's typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator. ISBN 9781471199660 -
In Pathogens Love A Patsy, Rita Ann Higgins bears witness to a moment in Irish life unlike any seen in a century: the Covid-19 crisis. Many of these pandemic poems, broadcast on Brendan O’Connor’s RTÉ Radio 1 radio show, were composed weekly in direct response to the emerging crisis. At the centre of the collection, a devastating sequence celebrates the memory of Hanna Greally, wrongfully incarcerated in an Irish psychiatric hospital for almost two decades. Then, completing an informal triptych, a selection of work written before the emergency marks the point when everything changed. Rita Ann Higgins’s wry, conversational style serves a serious purpose: to tell it like it is. Together, the poems in Pathogens Love a Patsy form a narrative that spans eighty years, from a past that is still being addressed, to a present moment that is still unfolding. ISBN 9781912561902 -
Featuring 130 poems written by women - with poems from classic, well loved poets as well as innovative and bold modern voices, She Will Soar is a stunning collection and an essential addition to any bookshelf. From the ancient world right up to the present day, it includes poems on wanderlust, travel, daydreams, flights of fancy, escaping into books, tranquillity, courage, hope and resilience. From frustrated housewives to passionate activists, from servants and suffragettes to some of today's most gifted writers, here is a bold choir of voices demanding independence and celebrating their hard-won power. Immerse yourself in poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith, Sarah Crossan, Emily Dickinson, Salena Godden, Mary Jean Chan, Charly Cox, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Hollie McNish and Grace Nichols to name but a few. ISBN 9781529040067 -
A glorious and ambitious sequel to 'I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree' this lavishly illustrated gift book treasury of 366 animal poems - one for every day of the year - ranges from unforgettable classics to contemporary works from around the world, including poetry in translation. The spectacular range of poems for children includes work by Roger McGough, William Blake, Dick King-Smith, Ted Hughes, Grace Nichols, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson. Britta Teckentrup's breathtaking illustrations bring together all the richness and wonder of the animal kingdom, making this poetry anthology a perfect gift that will be treasured by generations. With sumptuous finishes including cloth binding, full colour illustrations throughout, textured paper jacket, ribbon marker, and head and tail bands. The perfect gift for any child or adult to treasure. Great for Ages 5-99. ISBN 9781788005678 -
I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certainty.' So wrote Maria Johnston, reviewing Longley's previous book Angel Hill. Yet The Candlelight Master does not only face into shadows. The title poem sums up the chiaroscuro of this collection, named after a mysterious Baroque painter. Other poems about painters - Matisse, Bonnard - imply that age makes the quest for artistic perfection all the more vital. A poem addressed to the eighth-century Japanese poet, Otomo Yakamochi, says: 'We gaze on our soul-landscapes / More intensely with every year.' The soul-landscape of The Candlelight Master is often a landscape of memory. But if Longley looks back over formative experiences, and over the forms he has given them, he channels memory into freshly fluid structures. His new poems about war and the Holocaust speak to our own dark times. Translation brings dead poets up to date too. The bawdy of Catullus becomes Scots 'Hochmagandy'. Yakamochi and the lyric poets of Ancient Greece find themselves at home in Longley's Carrigskeewaun. ISBN 9781787332034 -
New Selected Poems includes the key poems of Eavan Boland's career to date, from New Territory (1967) to Domestic Violence (2007), concluding with a selection of new poems. Developing her work through more than a dozen collections, Boland continues to find new dimensions in language, in history and in the body subject to passion and to time. Her critical writing, her poetry and her example have made an emancipating difference to writing in Ireland. As she remarked in an interview in 2000, 'women are now writing the Irish poem across a very big register of new tones, new subjects, new approaches...I think I was one of the poets who became convinced of the need for change.' A new collection from Eavan Boland, a pioneering figure in Irish poetry who has been credited with inspiring a generation. This will be her final collection, following her passing in April 2020. ISBN 9781784109141 -
"The poems [in this collection] are rooted deep in the daily struggle for human survival. Her birds are both real and emblematic, fit carriers of this poet’s desire to celebrate and transcend." Paula Meehan, Ireland professor of poetry. "Eileen Casey’s poetry is so evocative. Readers meet orphan girls, following the promise of home, traveling to the ends of the earth. Descendants, decades later, are testament that some of these lasses lived lives filled with abundance while others fared less well in the newly-colonised land of Australia." Christina Henri, artist and activist. ISBN 9781529046151 -
"A beautiful book and an outstanding debut collection." Moyra Donaldson. "Poetry belongs to myth rather than history and it is myth making rather than documentary. However, I suppose one of the ways in which, in my poems, I am something of a historian is that I think poetry is a great way of refashioning and preserving language. Linguistically, we live in an increasingly homogenised world; many of the words and phrases I heard everyday as a child have disappeared. I tried ... to say something about the disappearance of those words and phrases and maybe to at, least pay homage to them. And I suppose every poet is a historian of their own past and the past of their families, so poems rooted in childhood or childhood memories are a version of history, but like all versions not necessarily true." Linda McKenna. ISBN 9781907682766 -
These poems bear witness to the cycles of growth and decay that make up our lives. They are the work of a poet writing with an awareness of the seasonal circle closing, for the year and for herself. They are at once fearful, fragile and fearless in announcing 'For now, we have October.../ October, lined with gold.' They are also homages to the dead and the dying, and a reaching beyond the veil of the 'now' to a place where there is 'nothing but nothing'. At times they are deeply personal, while still existing within the mythic and the impersonal, as when the recall of a room reflects the 'casual, artless grouping of all longing'. ISBN 9781780375106 -
"A profound and tender read that requires cups of tea, a sense of humour and a packet of tissues. At turns comforting and heart-breaking, the poems address life and death without sentimentality as the poet skillfully navigates relationships with loved ones, herself and the world around her with a conversational ease that left me stumped. There are few collections of poetry that have touched me so deeply." - Alvy Carragher. ISBN 9781910669792 -
"Given the opportunity to revisit the characters from Talking Heads I've added a couple more, both of them ordinary women whom life takes by surprise. They just about end up on top and go on, but without quite knowing how. Still, they're in good company, and at least they've made it into print." Alan Bennett's twelve Talking Heads are acknowledged masterworks by one of our most highly acclaimed writers. Some thirty years after the original six, Bennett has written Two Besides, a pair of monologues. Each, in its way, is a devastating portrait of grief. In An Ordinary Woman, a mother suffers the inevitable consequences when she makes life intolerable for herself and her family by falling for her own flesh and blood; while The Shrine tells the story behind a makeshift roadside shrine, introducing us to Lorna, bearing witness in her high-vis jacket, the bereft partner of a dedicated biker with a surprising private life. The two new Talking Heads were recorded for the BBC during the exceptional circumstances of coronavirus lockdown in the spring of 2020, directed by Nicholas Hytner and performed by Sarah Lancashire and Monica Dolan. The book contains a substantial preface by Nicholas Hytner and an introduction to each, by Alan Bennett. ISBN 9780571365852 -
From the Number One Sunday Times bestselling author of milk and honey and the sun and her flowers comes her greatly anticipated third collection of poetry. rupi kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself - reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here. i dive into the well of my body and end up in another world everything i need already exists in me there's no need to look anywhere else - home. ISBN 9781471196720 -
Clive James read, learned and recited poetry aloud for most of his life. In this book, completed before just before his death, he offers a selection of his favourite poems and a personal commentary on each. In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn't just remember them, he found them impossible to forget. The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration. Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud. In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem's construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life. Whether you're familiar with a poem or not - whether you're familiar with poetry in general or not - these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James's enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved. This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight. ISBN 9781529042108 -
This collection of poems by Paula Meehan gathers together work published between 1991 and 2016 from collections that have been lauded, awarded and widely translated. Collections that have gained a large audience and a considerable reputation, nationally and internationally, by one of Ireland's foremost poets and most distinctive voices. A great deal has changed in the world in the arc of time covered by these poems, and those changes are noted and considered by poems that are remarkable for their clear-eyed witness. Meehan's devotion to, and mastery of, her craft, has always been one of the key signatures of her work, as has been her immersion in her beloved native Dublin. In her Selected Poems we see this and more - her uncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulse to bless the creation, and to be grateful for her place in it. ISBN 9781910251775 -
In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles. Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles's track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they're suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we're born into. Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture's Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world. ISBN 9780995655089 -
Staying Human is the sequel to the Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies which have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. This fourth Bloodaxe world poetry anthology offers poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 500 more 'real poems for unreal times', with a strong focus on 21st-century poems addressing current issues. The range of poetry here complements that of the first three anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about what makes us human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder; talismanic poems which have become personal survival testaments for many. There's a strong focus on the human side of living in the 21st century in poems from the past two decades relating to migration, oppression, alienation and the individual's struggle to hold on, stay connected and find meaning in an increasingly polarised world. Staying Human also draws on poems suggested by readers because they've been so important in their own lives, as well as many poems which have gone viral after being shared on social media because they speak to our times with such great immediacy. And there are poems from around the world written just recently in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. ISBN 9781780373904 -
The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist, poet and cultural phenomenon Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Margaret Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognisable and celebrated themes, but distilled from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in flux, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment. Dearly is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour. ISBN 9781529113280 -
A beautifully illustrated collection of lyrics and never-before-seen poetry and sketches from Florence Welch. "Songs can be incredibly prophetic, like subconscious warnings or messages to myself, but I often don't know what I'm trying to say till years later. Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic." Pop's high priestess bares her soul in this candid collection of poems and lyrics. 'Generous in its honesty, by the end you feel as though you have climbed into the colourful, and sometimes tortured, world of a passionate artist' i. 'Makes the reader feel as though they're peeking into a private journal' Refinery29. ISBN 9780241983829 -
Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book, an anthem of desire against erasure. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Here, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic, and portrayed with a glowing intimacy: the alphabet of a hand in the dark, the hips' silvered percussion, a thigh's red-gold geometry, the emerald tigers that leap in a throat. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Natalie Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now - how we might learn our own cures and 'go where there is love'. ISBN 9780571359868 -
30% OFF SALE - WAS €12.90, NOW €9.00. Jane Clarke's lyrically eloquent poems bear witness to the rhythms of birth and death, celebration and mourning, endurance and regrowth. An elegiac sequence, inspired by the loss of her father, moves gracefully through this second collection. Rooted in the everyday and backlit by mystery, here are poems to savour and return to, for the pleasure of finely honed lines that powerfully evoke the depth of our connections to people, place and nature. ISBN 9781780374802 -
30% OFF SALE - WAS €12.90, NOW €9.00. 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. Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016. ISBN 9781780372532 -
This absolutely beautiful gift book anthology contains classic and modern poems to galvanize, uplift and inspire you which are brought to life with exquisite, intricate artwork. Chosen and illustrated by Chris Riddell, Poems to Save the World With -the follow-up to Poems to Live Your Life By and Poems to Fall in Love With - will ignite your inner activist and provide comfort and inspiration. These poems speak of hope, happiness, rebellion and living through a pandemic. This beautiful book features famous poems, old and new, and a few surprises. Classic verses sit alongside the modern to create the ultimate collection. Includes poems from Neil Gaiman, Nikita Gill, Maggie Smith, Brian Bilston, Raymond Antrobus, Fiona Benson, Lewis Carroll and many more. Great for Ages 9-99. ISBN 9781529040111 -
WRITING HOME: THE ‘NEW IRISH’ POETS is a major new anthology of writing from Ireland that acknowledges and celebrates the contribution of those whose roots lie outside of the country. This 200-page anthology features more than 50 poets whose places of origin range from Angola to Japan, Saudi Arabia to Poland, Italy to India, Canada to Romania, Greece to Brazil, with the UK, the US and many other places being also represented. Individually these writers bring new energy and perspectives to a subject that has long been a constant in writing from Ireland; collectively they provide readers with a fresh new portrait of a changing Ireland and, by extension, a changing world. ISBN 9781910251607 -
At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences?Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde. Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, and being together. ISBN 9780241467107 -
The award-winning poet's powerful exploration of an America ever more unable to process its own toxinsHere, available for the first time in the UK, is the book in which Claudia Rankine first developed the 'American Lyric' form which makes her Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combination of poetry, lyric essay, photography and visual art, virtuosically deployed. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's meditation on the self bewildered by race riots, terrorism, medicated depression and television's ubiquitous influence. Written in the years after 9/11, this is an unflinching and deeply felt meditation on life and death in a nation in flux. ISBN 9780141984179 -
'Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew. And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.' In this moving, critical and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence - whether linguistic or physical - which has impacted the lives of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Mark Duggan and others. Citizen weaves essays, images and poetry together to form a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in an ostensibly 'post-race' society. WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2015. WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2015. ISBN 9780141981772 -
This new collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song. ISBN 9781784107871 -
This 2015 collection reaches back into the long past, showing how traces left behind - textile fragments, buried thimbles, cave paintings - enable us to make imaginative connections with our distant ancestors, emphasising the commonalities of human lives lived many centuries apart. At the heart of the book is the vital importance of art, as the means by which we give permanence to the fleeting moments of our lives; and our need for a connection to the natural world, even in the most mechanised of modern environments. As the train conductor in the title poem asserts, '"I'm going to get a T-shirt with / Keats Lives on it. This time of year, [ - ] when everything starts coming green again, / I always think of him - "'. ISBN 9781784100605 -
In Moya Cannon's 2011 collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder. The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight. ISBN 9781847771421 -
The complete screenplays of the acclaimed Emmy-nominated television drama based on Sally Rooney's bestselling novel. "You know, I did used to think that I could read your mind at times." "In bed you mean." "Yeah. And afterwards but I dunno maybe that's normal." "It's not." Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular. Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation, something life-changing begins. With an introduction by director Lenny Abrahamson and featuring iconic images from the show, Normal People:The Scripts contains the complete screenplays of the acclaimed Emmy-nominated television drama based on Sally Rooney's bestselling novel. ISBN 9780571367863 -
Fed up with the dreary round of life in Ballybeg, with his uncommunicative father and the humiliating job in his father's grocery shop, with his frustrated love for Kathy Doogan who married a richer, more successful young man and with the total absence of prospect and opportunity in his life at home, Gareth O'Donnell has accepted his aunt's invitation to come to Philadelphia. Now, on the eve of his departure, he is not happy to be leaving Ballybeg. With this play Brian Friel made his reputation and it is now an acknowledged classic of modern drama. ISBN 9780571085866 -
Kathleen Watkins returns to charm us all once again with a wonderful selection of poetry. These are the verses that have comforted and consoled her over the past year, that she has reached for again and again. The poems offer solace in a difficult time, bringing the reader away from our own world and into a place filled with beautiful words and images. Featuring poems by Eavan Boland, Derek Walcott, Carole Ann Duffy and W.B. Yeats, this is the perfect collection for anyone with an appreciation of the written word. ISBN 9780717190232 -
Paul Birtill’s new collection Bad News sees the poet return to his favourite themes of death, relationships and mental illness with his usual brand of dark humour, deep-veined irony and more than one poem about Coronavirus. Paul Birtill was born in Walton, Liverpool in 1960 and lives in London. He has published a number of collections with Hearing Eye, including New and Selected Poems. He is also an accomplished playwright and several of his plays have been staged at London theatres, including Squalor, which was short-listed for the prestigious Verity Bargate award. “Packed with short, sharp, witty and irreverent observations.” – John Healy This title is difficult to obtain and orders may take 3 weeks to arrive. ISBN 9781903110737 -
Poet John Wakeman told The Irish Times that he thought "it would be exciting to start a poetry magazine out of the wilds of West Cork in Ireland." Within a few years THE SHOp became one of Ireland's most highly-regarded poetry magazines, not only for its contents but for its looks. "Unquestionably the most beautiful poetry magazine now in existence," Bernard O'Donoghue said. Seamus Heaney described himself as a "confirmed SHOp-lifter." The title was inspired by W.B. Yeats' "foul rag and bone shop of the heart." The idiosyncratic lower-case 'p' was a whim of the early magazine designer, Joakim Saflund. Over the period between 1999 and 2014, THE SHOp published the work of internationally recognised poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Brendan Kennelly, Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan, John F. Deane, Derek Mahon and John Montague. Significantly, it also provided a welcome and much needed space for emerging talents. Gradually, international poets began to contribute work. Each issue contained at least one poem in Irish, by poets such as Gabriel Rosenstock and Michael Davitt, with a translation. Hilary Wakeman, with the help of her co-editor, the poet Hilary Elfick, has identified 285 poems from the 840 poets published in THE SHOp during those 15 years. The result is this collection of some of the finest Irish and international poetry ever assembled in one volume. ISBN 9781916099890 -
What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.' 'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel. 'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter. ISBN 9780141992150 -
'A cat is only ITSELF, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go'. For Charles Bukowski there was something majestic and elemental about cats. He considered them to be sentient beings, whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our being. Cats see into us; they are on to something. An illuminating portrait of one very special writer and a lifelong relationship with the animals he considered his most profound teachers, On Cats brings together Bukowski's reflections on the ruthless, resilient, indigent and endearing creatures he so admired. ISBN 9781782117278 -
A selection of Linton Kwesi Johnson's best poems over three decades. Ranging from protests against police brutality to eulogies for departed friends and playful celebrations of urban life, Johnson's use of Jamaican dialect to tackle distinctly British subjects contributed to a revolution in the notion of literary English. This Selected Poems charts the unique literary talent of one of Britain's most influential poets and social critics. ISBN 9780141025018 -
Grammy Award-nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder. In this debut collection, Halsey bares her soul. Bringing the same artistry found in her lyrics, Halsey's poems delve into the highs and lows of doomed relationships, family ties, sexuality, and mental illness. More hand grenades than confessions, these autobiographical poems explore and dismantle conventional notions of what it means to be a feminist in search of power. Masterful as it is raw, passionate, and profound, I Would Leave Me If I Could signals the arrival of an essential voice. Book cover painting, American Woman, by the author. Halsey, born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and recipient of the prestigious Songwriters Hall of Fame's Hal David Starlight Award. She lives in Los Angeles, California. ISBN 9781471189074 -
A book that will change the way you think about love, relationships, heartbreak, and self-empowerment. Breaking the rules, challenging perceptions, and exploring the secret desires we keep hidden from the world. Beautifully composed and written by international bestselling author Lang Leav, this new collection of poetry and prose will positively influence your life. September Love captures the magic of each passing season, a pearl of wisdom waiting to be discovered with every page turned. A book that will inspire you to reach for the stars. ISBN 9781524859596