The Heart's Granary marks the 50th anniversary of Enitharmon Press. Compiled by Lawrence Sail, it is a personal selection from all Enitharmon's publications. It also conveys the Press's striking range and coherence – international in reach, while true to its Blakean vision. Including prose as well as poems, with more than 120 contributors, and with full colour illustrations by some of the many well-known artists who represent another facet of Enitharmon's achievements, the anthology creates new contexts for writers, translators and artists, from Nobel Prize winners to emerging talents. The Heart's Granary is memorable not only on its own account, but...

Michael Longley’s prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked access to his aesthetic thinking. Sidelines fills the gap by assembling prose that ranges from his (often combative) youthful poetry reviews, to the lectures he gave as Ireland Professor of Poetry. Among the poets Longley discusses are Homer, Propertius, Louis MacNeice, Robert Graves, James Wright, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ruth Stone. Sidelines, which includes interviews with Longley, not only illuminates his...

In The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, written toward the end of Lorca's brief life, desire and death come together in poetic chiaroscuro. In these dark and final meditations and flashes of passion, the poet pays homage to Spanish mystics, to Italian masters of the sonnet, and to the Arab poets of his native Andalusia. Bilingual edition translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca with essays by Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo.   ‘This masterful bilingual edition from Enitharmon brings to light Federico García Lorca’s posthumously published works The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, alongside introductory essays. Suffused...

In 1806 twelve-year old Hannah embroiders the sampler of the long title poem. As the seasons pass, she works through her grief in the language of embroidery; for among the births and deaths recorded in Hannah's stitches are those of her little brother Nathan. American Sampler is about vanishing worlds and the struggle of memory, craft and imagination to hold fragments of the pass and turn them into fresh, breathing moments. Jane Duran's childhood memories of rural New England, its landscapes weather and light, permeate many of the poems. A beaded moccasin, a folk painting, a letter from a Union...

Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for best first collection The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. The final sequence, Jutland, moves the reader to the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.   Nakuarsuuvoq / The night hunter I am a poet. I am...

Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric A hundred years ago Edward Thomas was killed in the Battle of Arras (April 1917). The reputation of his poetry has never been higher. Professor Edna Longley has already edited Thomas’s poems and prose. She now adds to the growing field of Thomas studies, with this close reading of Thomas's poetry. Longley places the lyric poem at the centre of Thomas’s poetry and of his thinking about poetry. Drawing on Thomas’s own remarkable critical writings, she argues that his importance to emergent ‘modern poetry’ has yet to be fully appreciated. Thomas,...

Celebrated by his peers for an intensity of vision that spoke to a generation devastated by war, the poet, prose writer and literary critic Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was only posthumously recognised for the scale of his achievements. At the age of thirty-nine he was killed in the Arras offensive on Easter Monday 1917, leaving behind a radiant body of work that explored the natural world, honoured rural tradition, challenged modernity, and contemplated mortality. Tracing the course of Thomas's life and that of his family and friends with numerous illustrations, this visual biography features photographs, printed material, maps and original letters, many...

Since its first publication in this format in 2004, Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre has been a firm favourite with art lovers and readers devoted to Charlotte Brontë's celebrated novel who have relished Rego’s deeply imaginative responses to salient incidents in the story. Now redesigned and extended, Rego’s Jane Eyre impresses all over again with its highly dramatic lithographs and carefully chosen texts, tracing Jane’s progress from the shy bookish girl studying Bewick’s History of British Birds and dreaming of the Arctic seas to the confident young woman who survives the dramas at Thornfield Hall and captures the heart of Mr...

Christmas Poems U.A. Fanthorpe's collection gathers together the poems she wrote and sent to friends as Christmas cards from 1974 to 2002. Now readers can enjoy Fanthorpe's yearly output in its entirety. Her subject matter covers a broad range of seasonal characters, from angels to personified Christmas trees, as well as a variety of styles to match, from moments of beautiful lyricism to the comically touching Gloucestershire foxes begging baby Jesus to visit: 'Come live wi we under Westridge / Where the huntin folk be few'. Fanthorpe is witty and highly original, rethinking the Nativity from quirky angles. She creates her...

Letters Against the Firmament is a user’s report on the end of the world, a treatise against Tory terror, a proposal for a new zodiac, a defence of poetry, a hex against the devourers of planet earth. The Letters are fierce epistolary poems, a vivid account of the sheer panic and brutality of the Austerity years. They are apocalyptic screeds of black humour hammered out in an obscure corner of east London, fearful attempts to ward off the attentions of gentrifiers, bailiffs, border agents and racists. In this collection in four parts they are joined by lean versions of already well-known...

In this beautifully conceived artist’s book, the paintings and drawings of Glenn Brown referencing the meteoric career of Ian Curtis and Joy Division are brought together with specially written texts by the novelist Michael Bracewell and the poet Lavinia Greenlaw. Both writers are perfectly attuned not only to the haunting music of Joy Division but also to Brown's artwork. The book begins with Bracewell’s essay, which describes the iconic musical intensity and profound romanticism of Joy Division. His essay is entitled ‘Licht and Blindheit’ from the last Joy Division record to be released during Curtis’s lifetime. Greenlaw’s poetry reflects on the impact of...

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), one of the most popular of modern European poets and playwrights, wrote the Gypsy Balladsbetween 1924 and 1927. When the book was published it caused a sensation, and controversy, in the literary world. Drawing on the traditional Spanish ballad form, Lorca described his Romancero Gitano as ‘the poem of Andalucia...A book that hardly expresses visible Andalucia at all, but where hidden Andalucia trembles.’ The Romancero is a kaleidoscope of sensory images, characters and story. This translation by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca adheres closely Lorca’s original meanings and metaphors, avoiding interpretations, to bring to an English-speaking...

Stanza Stones The Stanza Stones Trail runs through the Pennine region, containing some of the most striking landscapes in England. Simon Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks. With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, he found extraordinary, secluded sites, and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Covered in decades of soot and grime, the colours released by the carvings may never return to shades of black. Hence, they become a small reminder of the changes that...

Side by Side is a unique glimpse into the mercurial world that Gilbert & George construct around themselves.  A 'contemporary sculpture novel’, Side by Side functions as a kind of manifesto of their view of life and art. We follow them 'in the Nature', in a playful celebration of the Romantic flâneur as they traverse the English countryside. Also, through 'A Glimpse into the Abstract World', brief but poetically ornate texts are teamed with hand-drawn, abstracted imagery. ‘The Reality in Our Living’ provides the gritty urban flipside to their earlier bucolic idyll and the black-and-white images flesh out the words of the...

Selected Poems by U. A. Fanthorpe U.A. Fanthorpe was that rarest of literary beings - a poet who was hugely popular with the general public and at the same time very seriously regarded by fellow poets and literary critics for her originality, wit and humanity. Since her death, much of her work has been out of print. Selected Poems is chosen from over thirty years of Fanthorpe’s distinctive and accessible writing by her partner R.V. Bailey. It will delight all her existing fans as well as those who come to her poems for the first time.  

The Door to Colour Myra Schneider’s new collection brings a fresh sense of reality to some well-known images. Colour is the keynote of the book, moving through Matisse, Hockney, Chagall; sound too, in Mahler and Beethoven. Often we find skin-deep assumptions turned around: the gold of ancient Crete is not its jewellery but olives; a postbox’s bright exterior conceals menace; a major twentieth-century artist only started painting by chance at the age of twenty; and the long poem ‘Minotaur’ makes it clear that the Minotaur is no monster, Theseus no hero.   "TEAPOT I’m warming my hands on the teapot’s yellow belly when a parakeet...

U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: ‘Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with...

Duino Elegies Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke’s Duino Elegies. These luminous new translations by Martyn Crucefix make it marvellously clear how the poem is committed to the real world observed with acute and visionary intensity. Completed in 1922, the same year as the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Elegies constitute a magnificent godless poem in their rejection of the transcendent and their passionate celebration of the here and now. Troubled by our insecure place in this world and our fractured relationship...

The Exeter Book Riddles The ninety-six Anglo-Saxon riddles in the eleventh-century Exeter Book are poems of great charm, zest, and subtlety. This volume contains Crossley-Holland’s translations of seventy-five fascinating and discursive riddles, while a further sixteen are also translated in the notes. These translations are widely anthologised in Britain and the USA. Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias set some of them to music. In addition, Ralph Steadman has illustrated them and Michael Fairfax has incorporated them in his Riddle Sculpture. They are full of sharp observation, earthy humour and above all - a sense of wonder.  

Edward Thomas’s stories formed an important stage in his imaginative development, and constitute a significant achievement. His fiction includes stories reflecting his personal quest for spiritual and social values, which have considerable psychological interest; and versions of traditional Celtic and Norse tales and English proverbs. In both original and traditional tales Thomas explores the relation between the human world and the realm of nature. His stories were, as he said, written under a ‘real impulse’, and they represent his whole effort to shape imaginative responses to fundamental questions of life and death, the self, and reality. The Ship of Swallows...

At the Yeoman's House When in 1947 the young writer Ronald Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of his writing life. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners and neighbours that were to enrich his life. At the Yeoman’s House is not merely a spellbinding fragment of autobiography, but also a fascinating picture of the history, topography, botany and folk-lore of...

Light Unlocked consists of poems sent by their authors, many of them well-known contemporary writers, as Christmas cards. It begins with Advent and ends with songs at the year's turning and Epiphany. While a good number of the poems attend to the nativity, others also encompass the natural world, weather and the time passing. Hardbound and filled with festive engravings by John Lawrence Light Unlocked is, above all, a celebration of festivity. It is therefore a fantastic choice for a Christmas gift. Edited by Lawrence Sail & Kevin Crossley-Holland. 'This is one of the most delightful anthologies to be published in years. It's beautifully illustrated...

The artist and poet David Jones (1895-1974) considered The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to be 'one of the great achievements of English poetry, and not only great but unique'. In 1929 Jones made ten copper engravings for a limited edition of Coleridge's poem, which was immediately acclaimed as the best illustrated version of the poem and 'among the most perfect partnerships between author and illustrator in modern times'. This new edition – the first in an accessible and affordable format – is prefaced by Jones's engrossing and beautifully written Introduction. Also included is an Afterword by Thomas Dilworth, with...

Winner of Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill-health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis,...