Books

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...

These 81 brief poems from the 5th century BCE make up a foundational text in world culture. In elegant, simple yet elusive language, the Daodejing develops its vision of humankind’s place in the world in personal, moral, social, political and cosmic terms. Martyn Crucefix’s superb new versions in English reflect – for the very first time – the radical fluidity of the original Chinese texts as well as placing the mysterious ‘dark’ feminine power at their heart. Laozi, the putative author, is said to have despaired of the world’s venality and corruption, but he was persuaded to leave the Daodejing poems...

Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters – sometime serious, sometimes whimsical – are addressed to people who, for various reasons, have been of importance in Neil Curry’s life. Ranging from Angela Carter to the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White’s tortoise, they cover topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart’s lorries on the M6. There has not been a collection of verse letters of this nature since the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace and, fittingly, it is to Horace that the final letter is...

David Jones in the Great War The great modernist artist and poet David Jones grew up in Brockley, London. He finished art school in the summer of 1913, ready to pursue a career as an artist. But then Britain declared war on Germany, and Jones joined the army. He was sent to France in 1915, serving in the same regiment as Robert Graves; unlike him, however, he was a private, a rank he kept throughout the war. Now, thanks to Thomas Dilworth's painstaking research, including scores of personal interviews, Jones's story can be told in detail. Accompanying the text are photographs of...

Derelict Air Included are more than 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry, from Dorn’s first Beat poems in 1952 to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs. The transatlantic roots of Dorn’s anti-capitalism are fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote that “No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political”. Any reader interested in post-War American modernism must have Edward Dorn’s poetry, complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr.   THE SCREWBALL There’s my guy on patrol, janglin keys, chains rings upon all his fingers studs scattered like imps Bellbottoms (Feb. 1996) He’s not pierced yet...

Centred on environments – human, insect and animal – some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past – John Donne, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, bringing them lucidly and vividly to life.  

Inspired by and devoted to absent friends, this selection of poems from 1989 onwards shows Duffy at her bravest and most colourful, a consummate performer who transits without a jolt from Venice to the Underworld, from war-torn elegy to aesthetics. Though the grand theme is that of memorial and resignation, the verse is full of Gaelic wit and linguistic trickery. Amongst many highlights, ‘Lament for the Scribblers’ is a clarion call to failing poets, while the concluding four-part masterpiece, ‘In Novia Scotia’, delicately negotiates the mingled threat and fertility of the ocean.  

For Maureen Duffy, pictures are magical creations and recreations – of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death – where artists take risks analogous to a poet’s with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence Burdsong. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.   BLACK ON...

As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence Panama Canal evokes the terrors of the Canal’s construction; a sequence on the regime of Pinochet (Invisible Ink)...

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...

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...

Berowne’s Book This book was written before Fanthorpe made her reputation as one of England’s most popular contemporary poets. "In 1974, having found that the way to get a job was to conceal my qualifications," she wrote, "I contrived to be taken on as a clerk/receptionist in a small hospital." "Poetry" she said, "struck during my first month behind the desk." Her observations are accompanied here by some of her very earliest poems. These are hilarious, tender, profound and deeply humane. This series of snapshots of hospital life in the 1970s shocks partly because so much is immediately familiar today.

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...

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...

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.  

An Epistle highlighting the relationship of Gascoyne and Ginsberg. This letter, written by David Gascoyne in 1986 as a contribution to a festschrift for his friend and fellow poet Allen Ginsberg was published in America that year. It was unknown in the UK when Roger Scott edited Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996 and for some years afterwards. Published to mark Gascoyne’s centenary in October 2016, it is an important document illuminating what was always a grey area in his biography: the visit Gascoyne made with Kathleen Raine and W. S. Graham to the USA in the autumn of 1951. Following in the footsteps of Dylan...

This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne’s friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne’s poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth-century literature, and its continuing relevance.  

David Gascoyne’s international reputation rests on his outstanding achievement as poet and translator. The publication of his Selected Prose in his 82nd year was an event of major literary significance. Reading this remarkable collection, the harvest of some sixty years, which includes long-inaccessible contributions to journals and magazines together with previously unpublished material, we can appreciate for the first time the breadth and consistent quality of Gascoyne’s elegant and eloquent prose writings. They reflect his continuing engagement with the changing context of his times, and his close involvement with and response to luminary figures in twentieth-century art and literature.  

David Gascoyne’s Paris Journal 1937/9 was acclaimed by the critics when we published it in 1978; by a remarkable coincidence an earlier long-lost journal has also come to light for the period immediately preceding the former one. For this new journal the author has written a long introduction describing among much else his involvement with Mass-Observation and an account of his visit to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Also reprinted for the first time are his only published short story Death of an Explorer, and his essay on the Russian philosopher Léon Chestov.  

David Gascoyne's classic text of 1935 was the first comprehensive work on Surrealism to be published in English. His membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them André Breton, Paul Eduard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí - placed him in the ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost writers and artists. David Gascoyne lived in France in 1937-39, 1947-8 and 1953-64, during which time he became one of the most distinguished of British poets and translators. His other Enitharmon books include Selected Poems, Selected Verse Translations, Selected...

The complete text of the pair’s only feature-length film (released in 1981). This hardback book includes all instructions, as well as 900 or so drawings visualising every scene and shot in the film. This extraordinary publication takes the reader on a picaresque voyage through the artists' world. Above all, their own vision of their immediate environment in London's East End. It is a world of extremes, taking in the beauty of nature and the urban landscape, sex and eroticism, religion and spirituality, drunkenness and degradation, fear and human aggression, raucous humour and poetry. Wide in its range of imagery, moods and...

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...

A collaboration between Antony Gormley and Colm Tóibín. For the artist Antony Gormley and novelist Colm Tóibín, the unpredictability and drama of the weather is the connecting strand in their long-anticipated collaboration. In Antony Gormley’s delicate and light-filled drawings of the ‘liminal realm of the north Norfolk coast’, published here for the first time, he evokes ‘the blurring of perception between solid, aerial, and liquid’, using Chinese brushes to apply ink to water-flooded paper. He reflects on the drawings ‘as one might look at the marks left by the receding flood: dried salt on a rock, or the tideline on a...

The Take-Over owes its origin to a dream experienced by the author some years ago. A nightmare described in his foreword as 'recognizably relevant to changes in our social and public life… when the story was written.' The setting is a capital city after a coup. The protagonist, a writer, is forbidden to write and instead is appointed court fool, answerable to the Director of the state. A Director who provides so inappropriate a role that it consequently drives our writer to the ultimate act of defiance.   Special signed editions are too valuable to send out via regular postage channels. We therefore use a courier...